The Obama administration’s preferred option for a potential strike on Syria is likely to leave Bashar al-Assad’s government with significant chemical weapons and military infrastructure, according to military analysts/…/
The U.S. military is in the final stages of preparation for missile strikes on Syria, but experts say any military operations there will likely be short-lived and have minimal impact on the Pentagon’s plans for the future.
Iskander Rehman, Research Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, has been awarded the Hugh G. Nott prize (third place) for Drowning Stability: The Perils of Naval Nuclearization in the Indian Ocean, published in the Fall 2012 issue of the Naval War College Review.
Chuck Hagel, who’s had some experience avoiding dumb wars, was strikingly confident about U.S. military plans against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in an interview Tuesday with the BBC. “We are ready to go, like that,” the Defense secretary said.
Last March Congress let the budget axe fall and with it federal agencies lost more $80 billion in funding. For federal employees budget cuts translated into furloughs. Agencies decreed a summer full of unpaid leave. In many cases that meant a week of no pay. As federal workers take their final furlough days for the year, many are bracing for what’s next. 2014 is set to bring another year of heavy cuts meaning more furloughs, more reductions and possibly layoffs. Once again it all depends on Congress and whether lawmakers turn off the automatic spending cuts known as the sequester.
Even during sequestration the Defense Department doesn’t plan to sacrifice its global presence. But it is considering new ways to administer the bureaucracy that global reach requires. Some of the military’s combatant commands might disappear altogether, and some might have their geographical boundaries redrawn. For now, it’s all speculation, and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel says it’ll only be necessary if sequestration stays in place for the full ten years. Yet, it is one of the ideas DoD is examining in the wake of Hagel’s recent Strategic Choices and Management Review.
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