President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Sept. 5 to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War, a move that has heightened the ongoing debate over the White House’s legal authorities and the role of the military in the world and ...
Adam Smith
By the time the 2026 defense budget request arrived on Capitol Hill in June, Congress was closing in on passage of the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, a massive tax-and-spending bill that included some $150 billion for defense. The budget reconciliation measure narrowly passed the ...
Top lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee indicated they will make pay for junior enlisted service members a key part of their work on the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act—echoing and strengthening a push from service enlisted leaders like Chief Master Sergeant of the ...
A visit to China as a one-star solidified 20th Air Force Commander Maj. Gen. Michael J. Lutton’s belief that waiting to modernize America’s nuclear arsenal won’t work. That’s because, in his view, the Chinese see treaties as a sign of weakness, Lutton said during a ...
Sanctions are crushing Russia’s efforts to counter American space superiority, but analysts have a rising concern that Russian President Vladimir Putin may link up with China’s wealth to develop the weapons that could stop American war fighters in their tracks. Commercial cooperation between two of ...
Even with a 3 percent to 5 percent increase in the defense budget, losing a conflict with China still becomes a “distinct possibility" without both aircraft cuts and a fundamental change in how the Air Force structures itself for war, Chief of Staff Gen. Charles ...
The U.S. military needs to wake up to the fact that global dominance is no longer a viable strategy for national defense, because pursuing that unrealizable goal is making the country less safe, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said April 22. Emerging ...
Narrow majorities in both houses mean smaller changes in policy ahead.
News that the US killed Iranian Quds Force commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a targeted strike early Jan. 3 reverberated across Capitol Hill, as lawmakers acknowledged the threat one of Iran’s top military officials posed to American assets but were publicly cautious about the possible ...
After a heated partisan fight over the Pentagon's nuclear modernization efforts, House and Senate authorizers agreed to let the Air Force's key strategic programs move forward relatively unscathed.
The Air Force has a “war room” of space experts that have been preparing for the go ahead from lawmakers, which could come as early as Dec. 11, to create the new Space Force.
The chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees are still hashing out differences between their chambers’ versions of the fiscal 2020 defense policy bill, offering conflicting opinions on when that work may end as their days in session dwindle.
