The Bunker

Last year, there were 53,000 U.S. contractors working for the Pentagon in the Middle East, 50% more than the 35,000 U.S. troops they were there to support.

So did the Russians pay its allies in Afghanistan to kill U.S. troops there, as The New York Times reported June 26? It’s amazing how quickly such shadowy intelligence can cleave opinion into two warring camps.

There used to be a saying in the national-security community that “politics stops at the water’s edge.” Back in those days, that referred to the pounding waves of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

“I have never seen the Pentagon so chaotic”

Whether you’re trying to sell Patriot missiles to the U.S. military—or yourself to the commander-in-chief—sometimes you get caught trying a little too hard.

The intense focus on spending more to win the peace, or at least an uneasy truce, suggests that the U.S. is playing the wrong game, and has been for quite a while.

We’re up in arms here at The Bunker this week: arms spending, arms control and arms sales. So let the arms race begin!

The bigger a bureaucracy gets, the less inclined it is to take chances. And the Pentagon is among the world’s biggest bureaucracies.

Only inside the Pentagon is “legacy” a bad word. For the rest of us, it suggests something good that someone did, usually before leaving this realm. But at the Defense Department, it has long been the code word for “aging,” as in “aging weapons.”

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