Word: pentagon
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...Pentagon took a giant step toward integrating openly gay men and women into the U.S. military on Thursday. No, it didn't repeal 1993's "Don't ask, don't tell" law - only Congress can do that. But it did something that could be almost as important: it eased the enforcement of that law by loosening the regulations that have been used to snare 13,500 gays - and boot them out of uniform - since 1994. "These changes will allow us to execute the law in a fair and more appropriate manner," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said. The revised regs "provide...
...perversion of post-Cold War thinking, the $1 trillion push to build and fly the F-35 isn't driven by huge fleets of hot new warplanes being built by - well, new perpetual bogeyman China or former perpetual bogeyman Russia. Rather, the haste is being driven by Pentagon concerns over looming shortages of F-16 and F-18 jet fighters. And what's causing those shortages? Gates made it clear that the current planes must be retired in order to save money so the military can pay for the F-35. "The Air Force, in order to be able...
Unfortunately, that was last year's logic. Gates said on Wednesday that Pentagon officials had bamboozled him with "overly rosy forecasts" that were more thorn than flower. After burrowing into the F-35's cost and schedule, President Obama's Pentagon team - including Bush Administration holdover Gates - recently discovered deep-rooted problems. "Things are more complicated than people imagined they were going to be," Ashton Carter, the Pentagon's top weapons buyer, told reporters earlier this month. "You can't control costs, you can't control schedule if you're being unrealistic about costs and schedule...
...There was a lot of concurrency built in," Air Force Secretary Michael Donley recently acknowledged, using the military's buzzword for the way the Pentagon builds weapons at the same time it drafts blueprints for them (just like the way you order work on your kitchen addition to begin when the architect is only halfway through her drawings). Carter has conceded that the overlap of design and manufacture on the F-35 is "unprecedented" and - even after Gates' latest changes - "worrying...
...Gates himself told the House panel. When it comes to the most modern category of fighters, in 10 years the U.S. is expected to have 20 times more than the Chinese, and 15 times more than the Russians. And that doesn't include the punch provided by the Pentagon's fast-growing fleet of armed drones...