Word: pentagonal
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...shadow of these giant alliance shifts, Southeast Asian nations, too, are scrambling. Vietnam, for one, is fortifying its outposts in the Spratly Islands and wooing its old enemy, the Pentagon. Singapore has become a de facto base for the U.S., and the Philippines has welcomed back American forces after booting them out in the early 1990s - mainly to fight local terror groups, but also possibly as a bulwark against China. Nations from Singapore to Malaysia have upgraded their submarine fleets, and Indonesia just signed a $1 billion weapons deal with Russia...
...homefront remains on alert, but in a leisurely, one-eye-open kind of way. Police at the Pentagon scrape the air for signs of radiation or chemical attack, track the wind direction to guide escaping employees. But 9/11 Commission chairs Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton used the anniversary to remind people that security remains a shield with holes. Most air cargo is still not screened, the high-tech bomb detectors are indefinitely delayed, and Congress demands tighter standards for drivers' licenses but won't fund them. The broadcast industry has until 2009 to turn over the spectrum that rescuers need...
...remain constant at around 160,000 soldiers and Marines until April 2008, when a gradual redeployment will begin. The drawdown process will seem agonizingly slow, and that's because it will be - one 3,500-strong brigade and its supporting personnel a month. The timing is strategic and political. Pentagon personnel predict a massive drop in recruiting and retention in April if troops overseas aren't given long-promised breaks to go home. The political clock is ticking too. A partial springtime withdrawal would permit the White House to signal six months before the 2008 election that it is bringing...
...would follow - means that the U.S. cannot afford to reduce its presence in Iraq much below 130,000 troops for the next year and probably beyond that. And so it could turn out that just six months after the long-awaited drawdowns begin, they stop again. The remaining forces, Pentagon officials report, will give the Army some badly needed margin to rest and retrain its brigades, but only a little. Some officers at the Pentagon want deeper cuts - and want them sooner - believing that the surge will keep the Army stretched too thin for too long. Virginia Senator John Warner...
...Welcome to Diego Garcia - 6,720 acres of restricted military base on a low-lying, depopulated atoll 1,000 miles from the nearest continent. Back in 1966, the U.S. signed a secret agreement with Great Britain allowing the Pentagon to use the Indian Ocean territory as an airbase in exchange for a big discount on Polaris nuclear missiles. Three years later, hundreds of Navy seabees arrived by ship and began pouring out the 12,000-foot runway that would become a bulwark of American Cold War strategy in the region, and a key launching pad for the first and second...