http://www.cnn.com/

WASHINGTON (CNN) — President Barack Obama has approved a significant troop increase for Afghanistan, Pentagon officials said Tuesday.

The new troop deployment is expected to include 8,000 Marines from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, as well as 4,000 additional Army troops from Fort Lewis, Washington.

“This increase is necessary to stabilize a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, which has not received the strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires,” Obama said in a written statement.

“The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and al Qaeda supports the insurgency and threatens America from its safe haven along the Pakistani border.”

Another 5,000 troops will be deployed at a later date to support combat troops, bringing the total to 17,000 the Defense Department said. A senior administration official confirmed the total.

The Obama administration has been conducting several reviews of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, including a review by Gen. David Petraeus, the commander in the region. The president and the Pentagon have been considering a request from the top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, to send as many as 30,000 additional troops.

Obama said the troop increase in Afghanistan would be made possible in part by the impending troop drawdown in Iraq.

All 17,000 troops announced Tuesday will go to the southern region of the country where Afghanistan borders Pakistan, with the goal mainly being to stop the flow of foreign fighters, according to a U.S. military official with direct knowledge of the deployment and military plans for Afghanistan.

The troops will also train Afghan army units.

The military operations will set up a string of bases and smaller combat outposts, allowing the troops to move around and engage in counterterrorism against foreign fighters and counterinsurgency operations against the Taliban and other local enemies, the official said.

The goal is to have enough troops to “seize and hold” territory and maintain basic security, which hasn’t been possible under current troop levels, the official said. The Taliban continues to maintain at least half a dozen safe areas inside Afghanistan, which are prime targets for the U.S. military.

About 38,000 U.S. troops are currently serving in Afghanistan.

The increased troop levels are expected to last three to four years, the military official said.

However, the administration official said there was no clear timeline. “That would prejudge the outcome of the strategic review,” the senior administration official said.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said the original mission in Afghanistan was “too broad” and needs to be more “realistic and focused” for the United States to succeed.

“If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money,” Gates said during a recent Senate hearing.

WOW! This certainly is change we can believe in. I’m so glad the new chief is different from the old chief.

http://online.wsj.com/…

AP/USAF We could use some more F-22s

The Department of Defense is preparing budget cuts in response to the decline in national income. The DOD budgeteers and their counterparts in the White House Office of Management and Budget apparently reason that a smaller GDP requires belt-tightening by everyone.
That logic is exactly backwards. As President-elect Barack Obama and his economic advisers recognize, countering a deep economic recession requires an increase in government spending to offset the sharp decline in consumer outlays and business investment that is now under way. Without that rise in government spending, the economic downturn would be deeper and longer. Although tax cuts for individuals and businesses can help, government spending will have to do the heavy lifting. That’s why the Obama team will propose a package of about $300 billion a year in additional federal government outlays and grants to states and local governments.

A temporary rise in DOD spending on supplies, equipment and manpower should be a significant part of that increase in overall government outlays. The same applies to the Department of Homeland Security, to the FBI, and to other parts of the national intelligence community.

The increase in government spending needs to be a short-term surge with greater outlays in 2009 and 2010 but then tailing off sharply in 2011 when the economy should be almost back to its prerecession level of activity. Buying military supplies and equipment, including a variety of off-the-shelf dual use items, can easily fit this surge pattern.

For the military, the increased spending will require an expanded supplemental budget for 2009 and an increased budget for 2010. A 10% increase in defense outlays for procurement and for research would contribute about $20 billion a year to the overall stimulus budget. A 5% rise in spending on operations and maintenance would add an additional $10 billion. That spending could create about 300,000 additional jobs. And raising the military’s annual recruitment goal by 15% would provide jobs for an additional 30,000 young men and women in the first year.

So building death machines and expanding the military industry complex will make things better? Ignoring the MIC component completely it’d seem to me that opportunity cost alone would show this to be false. By definition the free market is the most efficient use of resources at any particular time. The further you get away from someone’s top priority the worse you make things. Throwing money at multimillion dollar flying death machines is pretty low on most people’s list. People want defense from possible harm but F-22s and the American MIC don’t provide that. They make us less safe. These Keynesians are destroying us from within and pissing off others without.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…

The D.C. police department’s decision to arm patrol officers with semiautomatic rifles is promoted by commanders as a way to stay ahead of criminals. But it is raising concerns among civil rights groups and others, who question whether the weapons are necessary.Hundreds of officers will be issued AR-15 rifles starting this summer, and police say the guns will be a better match for criminals. Although Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier was unable to provide an example of when such firepower would have been needed in the recent past, she said police should not be caught off guard.

Police have about 500 of the weapons, and 352 officers have been trained to use them. Special units have used high-power guns for years, but officials said they wanted more officers to have access to the weapons. This is the first time AR-15s will be available for routine street patrols.

“We want to be prepared,” Lanier said. “I want officers to have what they need to be safe.”

Funny. These officers need bigger guns so as to keep them safer yet DC has what amounts to gun prohibition laws for the general public. There seems to be a bit of a disconnect here. Why is it that Joe Q. Public isn’t allowed “to have what they need to be safe?” And why should the police need to be safer? Wasn’t the point of the gun control legislation to reduce gun crime? If it’s so effective what’s with all the gun crime they need to match? If it’s not working why fight at the Supreme Court to keep it?

Perhaps because what they want is more power? A police state as it were.

The city got the AR-15 rifles from the Department of Defense for free as military surplus items.

Other police departments nationwide equip officers with semiautomatic rifles, including in Dallas, Los Angeles and Miami.

Although the overwhelming majority of D.C. homicides are committed with handguns, criminals have used powerful guns in recent years in some high-profile cases in the Washington area. A team of commando-style robbers carried out a string of bank heists in the District and Maryland in 2004, armed with assault rifles and handguns. At the time, police feared the crimes could be fatal, but the robbers were caught before anyone was seriously hurt.

Lanier referenced a 1997 bank robbery in Los Angeles, in which two men armed with AK-47 assault rifles engaged in a shootout with police. Seventeen officers and civilians were injured in the incident, which was captured on videotape. The case set off a debate about the need to better arm police.

Yes, because that kind of thing happens every day so they need to be carrying these AR-15s on their person during patrol. As for the 1997 robbery I’ve never understood how it is that there was no openings in their body armor. A hunter with a half way decent rifle should have been able to hit them at some junction in the armor. The foot or face/neck.

Assistant Police Chief Patrick Burke, who is in charge of special operations and homeland security, said protocols are being put in place to cover the use of the rifles and promised that officers will be “accountable for every shot.”

Just like they are held accountable now? Tell that to the Bell family,  Mark McCullaugh Jr.’s family, Tracy Ingle, and the hundreds of others who are attacked and fail to find justice.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…

Government auditors issued a scathing review yesterday of dozens of the Pentagon’s biggest weapons systems, saying ships, aircraft and satellites are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.The Government Accountability Office found that 95 major systems have exceeded their original budgets by a total of $295 billion, bringing their total cost to $1.6 trillion, and are delivered almost two years late on average. In addition, none of the systems that the GAO looked at had met all of the standards for best management practices during their development stages.

Auditors said the Defense Department showed few signs of improvement since the GAO began issuing its annual assessments of selected weapons systems six years ago. “It’s not getting any better by any means,” said Michael Sullivan, director of the GAO’s acquisition and sourcing team. “It’s taking longer and costing more.”

Chris Isleib, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a written statement, “We’d like to look at what GAO has said, and then at the appropriate time make an informed comment.”

What do you expect from a system without real competition or limit on spending? Besides not needing the weapons to kill more brown people at all, I’m sure that $295m could have been better spent by the taxpayers who are currently having a hard time paying for inflated subsidized food and war induced high gasoline prices.