Word: pentagonal
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Conventional wisdom in Washington holds that President-elect Barack Obama will soon invite current Defense Secretary Robert Gates to extend his stay in the Pentagon. Conventional it may be, but not necessarily wise, says Lawrence Korb, who served as a senior Pentagon official in the Reagan Administration and is currently a defense expert at the Center for American Progress. "It has more minuses than pluses," says Korb about the idea to keep Gates in place. "If President Obama wants to make any dramatic changes in the Pentagon, he's going to have to do them in his first year...
...push to focus the military's efforts on insurgencies of the type it's facing in Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than on the hypothetical conventional wars for which it would prefer to plan - and for which it continues to order up costly weapons. (But continuity would also keep Pentagon spending, already at World War II levels, climbing into the stratosphere on autopilot...
...Department of Defense Review Team continues his tradition of security-oriented public service: White served as deputy secretary of defense from 1995 to 1997 during the Clinton administration, and as assistant secretary of defense from 1977 to 1978 during the Carter administration. As an adviser on the Pentagon review team, White will help to select candidates for positions within the department and prepare them for confirmation process. Prior to his appointment, White conducted defense-policy research as a board member of the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and chaired the school?...
...Hort said some of his forces in Baghdad would "probably have to push more out towards the perimeter of the city, but I think that we can work through all of that." Still, Pentagon officials continue to express concern about the ability of the Iraqi military to keep the peace as the Americans pull out. Deep historical animosities among Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish groups remain, and local troops loyal to a specific sect won't be as capable of defusing tensions, U.S. officials fear. But Hort said that the Iraqi military "has got a tremendous amount of confidence...
...election of Barack Obama was one of the factors that pushed the SOFA process along, Pentagon officials say. The President-elect had proposed on the campaign trail to withdraw U.S. combat forces from Iraq within 16 months of taking office, a position closer to the Iraqi government's than to that taken by the Bush Administration. The intra-Iraqi squabbling over the pact, partly fueled by Iran's concerns, evaporated following Obama's election two weeks ago. "I am hopeful that conditions will continue to improve, so we can continue" to withdraw U.S. troops, Mullen said. But if ordered...