Her approval rating remains at 60 percent at home, so post-election stories on her extended family and relatives are apparently not making a dent, reports Hattie Kauffman.
Defense cuts: F-22, Marine One and more
by Julian E. Barnes
The Pentagon unveiled perhaps the most sweeping changes in spending priorities in decades, as Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates today outlined a long list of programs that he hopes to eliminate, and proposed new spending for programs that he hopes will improve the military's ability to fight irregular wars.
Gates outlined a huge reordering of spending priorities. Getting less money are programs primarily used to fight conventional foes, other nations that would potentially field technologically advanced weapons.
Programs across the military are cut back, including many big-budget programs that military analysts had predicted were on the chopping blockincluding the Army's next generation of armored vehicles, the Air Force's F-22 fighter plane and the Navy's next generation of destroyers and cruisers.
Gates also decided to terminate the new presidential helicopter (President Barack Obama has said he can make do with the old Marine One fleet, as pictured here) and the Air Force's combat search and rescue helicopter
As important as the cuts, Gates said, are the areas where he is putting additional money. Many of those initiatives fall into the category of intelligence gathering and surveillance.
Gates said he is recommending putting more money into armed unmanned aerial vehicles -- to boost U.S. capability by more than 127 percent.
He also is adding $500 million to deploy more helicopters, speeding the purchase of a new Navy ship designed to fight in coastal waters, and growing U.S. special operations forces by 2,800 troops, a 5 percent increase.
How important the changes recommended by Gates ultimately will be depends on if his proposal is accepted or rejected by Congress. Gates' recommendations will next go to the White House Office of Management and Budget and then be presented to Capitol Hill.
In a series of speeches since he took office in late 2006, Gates has criticized Pentagon spending, saying that the Defense Department suffers from "nextwar-itis," spending too much time worrying about unlikely threats.
Gates said 50 percent of the money in the budget should go to programs meant to counter conventional threats, about 10 percent to programs useful only in irregular war and 40 percent to programs that are useful to both.
"I am just trying to get the irregular warfare guys a seat at the table," Gates said.
The overall size of the budget, $534 billion, was announced earlier, but Gates had not outlined what weapons programs he intended to cut. The budget marks the end of a long run-up in defense spending that began in 2001.
Eliminating defense programs has proven difficult for previous defense secretaries-- Dick Cheney famously tried to kill the Marine Corps tilt-rotor V-22 only to see the aircraft resurrected.
And Gates likely will face his own challenges getting his budget through Congress, as members jockey to save home state programs.
Indeed, minutes after Gates finished his statement Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe condemned the proposal.
"I cannot believe what I heard today," Inhofe said in a statement. "President Obama is disarming America. Never before has a president so ravaged the military at a time of war."
Gates said he knew his recommendations would be controversial, but said he did not take politics into account.
"My hope is that, as we have tried to do here in this building, that the members of Congress will rise above parochial interests and consider what is in the best interest of the nation as a whole," Gates said.
Gates said he is shifting money from areas where the U.S. had more capabilities than it needed to places where the military does not have enough resources.
Aides to Gates said that he felt that the U.S. was not adequately preparing itself for the real threats it might face
"He came here to fix the war, but in the process of trying to fix the wars he ran into institutional hurdles," one Defense official said. "He realized to fix the war he had to fix the institution."
The military spending cuts at the end of the Cold War were far larger than the cuts that Gates outlined Monday. While those cuts left the military smaller, they did not lead to dramatic changes in its priorities.
Although dramatic, Gates changes' are far less deep than those made by President Dwight Eisenhower, who cut dramatically from the Army as he built up the Air Force and U.S. strategic nuclear forces.
Gates' predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, spoke about transforming the military, making it into a lighter, more deployable force. But the realities of the war in Iraq put a halt to many of Rumsfeld's initiatives.
And while Rumsfeld succeeded in killing some programs--such as the Comanche helicopter--other systems like a new artillery cannon simply shifted to become parts of other weapons programs.
There were some surprises in the budget. Missile defense spending is reduced by $1.4 billion, but those cuts are not as deep as some expected.
Gates said he was reorienting the program to focus more on deployable theater missile defense systems. Cut back are the Airborne laser program and spending on the interceptor missiles stationed in Alaska.
Many of the terminated programs will be examined in the next Quadrennial Defense Review, and the Pentagon will begin looking at what kind of alternative programs should be developed.
Accused Nazi Guard Edges Toward Deportation
A U.S. immigration judge in Virginia on Monday revoked John Demjanjuk's stay of deportation to Germany, clearing the way for the retired autoworker to be sent to Germany to face charges of being a Nazi death camp guard.
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