No one is talking at DoD, State or the White House about today’s delivery of the Russian weapon system. Is the president considering looking the other way?

“For far too long, Russia has violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with impunity,” a statement from the White House said. Moscow has refused to admit that it has for years been “covertly developing and fielding a prohibited missile system that poses a direct threat to our allies and troops abroad.”

Republican Senators erupted in outrage, and there are some indications that Turkey pushed Trump to withdraw support from its traditional foes, the Kurds. The British government issued an equivocal statement, while the Kremlin applauded the move.

WASHINGTON: President Trump’s top advisor on trade and manufacturing policy railed against “globalist billionaires” and Wall Street executives during a forceful, hour-long speech in Washington on Friday. Peter Navarro accused US business leaders of being “unregistered foreign agents” working for Beijing trying to pressure President Donald Trump into a trade deal with China. “When these… Keep reading →

The White House surprised DoD with a last-minute $33 billion budget trim last week. But it’s far from certain that the cuts will outlive months of haggling between the Trump administration, the Pentagon and Congress.

The Pentagon’s No. 2 civilian said Wednesday that the final figure for a Space Force is unclear and is far from a done deal, even though the Air Force recently threw out a figure of $13 billion.

“The final answer won’t happen this month or next month,” Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan told a small group of reporters.

Congress and China have emerged as the primary culprits for the weakening the US defense industrial base. Those are the most striking findings of a new White House report that takes a deep-dive into the state of defense manufacturing in the United States, sounding alarm bells over the decline in capability and the rise of China’s industrial might.

Fast doesn’t meant out of control. Brig. Gen. Grynkewich took pains to emphasize that civilian oversight remains intact and the Pentagon’s role will be rigorously defined under the new National Security Presidential Memorandum NSPM-13.

These single points of failure already limit military modernization and potentially could disrupt operations in a crisis. That’s especially true if production needed to ramp up urgently for a major war, a subject the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, has publicly angsted about.

As the president prepares to head to Europe to meet both NATO and Putin, his administration is taking pains to keep expectations low, and portray a ‘steady as she goes’ attitude to both summits.