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The Bunker

A cheat sheet for what you need to know about the Department of Defense, how we’re waging our wars, and how the Pentagon spends our taxpayer dollars. The Bunker is both pro-troop and pro-taxpayer. 

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The Bunker logo, done in military stencil, in front of the Pentagon building

The Bunker: Hiding-and-Seeking Beneath the Waves

This week in The Bunker: More U.S. national security Trumpfoolery; just how stealthy are submarines; drone-killing boom times; misplaced U.S. defense spending priorities; and more.

The Bunker: Pentagon Press Persists

This week in The Bunker: Getting kicked out of the Pentagon hasn’t dulled reporters’ appetite for news; the Defense Department’s ever-changing flow charts; scrutiny of new weapons dives as spending soars; and more.

The Bunker: Profiles in poltroonery

This week in The Bunker: the world’s “greatest deliberative body” is little more than pusillanimity on parade when it comes to checking President Trump’s Caribbean combat; the F-35 paperweight; the Pentagon wages war on the press; and more.

The Bunker: A Petulantly Performative Pentagon

This week in The Bunker: The Defense Department’s civilian leader and his boss muster hundreds of top U.S. military officers so the pair could decant their favorite old whines into new bottles; rising costs of silo-based ICBMs resurrect a still-madcap scheme to put them on trucks; and more.

The Bunker: Unitary Unilateral War

This week in The Bunker: A one-man war, a pox on independent Pentagon reporting, a close shave; and more. No Bunker next week!

The Bunker: Air Sickness

This week in The Bunker: As flashing red lights increasingly make clear that the future of war involves drones without pilots, the Pentagon continues to spend trillions on crewed aircraft; one way to save money on the next ICBM; the Air Force’s rose-colored glasses; and more.

The Bunker: Department of Rhetoric

This week in The Bunker: Trump unilaterally tries to change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War because it sounds cooler to him; nonetheless, war contractors push for more spending on defense; the F-35’s bogus bonuses; and more. 

The Bunker: Anything Happen While we Were Away?

This week in The Bunker: The changes now underway at the Pentagon and in the broader national-security arena risk politicizing what for 250 years has been an ironclad commitment to a military impervious to partisan machinations; what happens when shiny hardware distracts the military from doing simple things right, and more.

The Bunker: Mixed Messaging

This week in The Bunker: Clashes over whether a $1 trillion defense budget is enough; a new transactional U.S. policy to arm Ukraine; Pentagon R&D budget offers clues to future warfighting; and more; TEN-shun! The Bunker is now starting its summer break and will return September 3. 

The Bunker: Money, Money, Money

This week in The Bunker: The share of the defense budget going to contractors has soared since the 1990s; Pentagon wish lists return to Capitol Hill; the Army continues stonewalling when faced with unpleasant news; and more. 

The Bunker: Bombers Astray

This week in The Bunker: B-2 bombers buzz the White House; a purported defense-reform bill is anything but; the deadly cost of honing the U.S. military’s combat edge; and more. 

The Bunker: Double Feature

This week in The Bunker: Contrasting a pair of Defense Department announcements highlights this Pentagon’s emphasis on style over substance; weighing whether the Department of Defense should return to its original name as the Department of War; intruders invade an atomic U.S. base; and more. 

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