WASHINGTON — Few issues have focused Washington’s contentious energies in recent weeks more than the nomination of former Nebraska senator and maverick Republican Chuck Hagel to the post of defense secretary.

Republican senators have delayed, chastised and publicly humiliated the nominee at every opportunity. Democrats, while quietly toeing the line for the president, have expressed their own reservations and even, discreetly, asked the White House if there wasn’t a better candidate
available.

What’s surprising is not the level of opposition to Hagel’s candidacy, but that it surprised anyone when it surfaced. Hagel has been an outspoken critic of many of the signature Republican foreign policy positions of recent years, vociferously opposing Bush’s Iraq policy, openly calling for diplomatic contact with terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and speculating with apparent equanimity that the ayatollahs of Iran would responsibly wield a nuclear weapon.

Considering the gap between many of his positions and those of even Democratic senators, it should also not surprise anyone that the fight over Hagel has not been a clean one. His detractors suffered a blow this week when one of the growing number of circumstantial claims against him — that he once received money from a nonexistent group called “Friends of Hamas” — turned out to be either an honest misunderstanding of a joke, or a dishonest one.

Hagel’s supporters, meanwhile, have been forced to tread carefully around the fairly obvious point that the former senator has spent the past few months disavowing — with suspiciously convenient timing — the very positions that have come to define him politically.

In the end, nearly everyone in Washington concedes that Hagel will be the next secretary of defense. The president has stood by his choice, and the arithmetic, at least in the Senate, is heavily tilted in favor of the president.

Why, then, have Hagel’s opponents clung so stubbornly to their doomed campaign? In the proIsrael camp, most centrist groups, including the camp’s 900-pound gorilla AIPAC, have pointedly sat out the fight, in no small measure because they didn’t want to be seen to lose it.

What do groups such as the Emergency Committee for Israel, Christians United for Israel or ZOA, not to mention senators Lindsey Graham, Kelly Ayotte, John McCain, Ted Cruz, and others, gain from continuing to challenge the confirmation?

Simply put: while they will no doubt lose the confirmation battle, in an important sense they have already won the policy war.

Since Obama’s reelection victory in November, the parties in Washington have jostled for position in an attempt to determine the political significance of the reelection. Obama has signaled a more aggressive commitment to pursuing progressive domestic policies while Republicans have tried to show they still have some power to hinder their implementation.

By opposing Hagel’s nomination so stridently, his opponents have already forced the former senator to publicly retract and apologize for past statements and views. And by continuing the fight, they have almost guaranteed that Hagel’s tenure as secretary of defense will be hopelessly politicized. Both Republicans who dislike him and Democrats who grudgingly backed him will be watching the new secretary closely for signs of weakness or a return to his unpopular past views.

It’s an especially inauspicious start following the widely celebrated and largely apolitical tenures of the past and current defense secretaries, Bob Gates and Leon Panetta. Hagel will begin his tenure with a level of partisan suspicion and dislike unknown since the end of Donald Rumsfeld’s term in 2006.

As one astute Republican observer told the Times of Israel this week, “the relationship is totally poisoned. I can’t imagine that Chuck Hagel can be a successful secretary of defense. Here’s a guy who over half of the Senate gave a vote of ‘no confidence’ to last week. The feeling was his personal heroism would enable him to go into the Pentagon with the political capital to cut the budget. He may in fact be confirmed, but it’s hard to see how he will be able to work. He’s going to be limping into the Pentagon.”

And a veteran Democratic activist: “Hagel’s already lost. Democrats will be relieved if he’s gone; they don’t like him on Israel, on Iran and because he’s a Republican.”

As several observers have noted, Obama’s very insistence on Hagel as his defense chief suggests that Hagel’s opponents are right to be worried, that the nomination means something. When it comes to foreign and defense policy, Obama’s first term was marked by continuity with the Bush policy. The timetables for withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan largely followed those established before Bush left office. They were driven by the professional planning staff rather  any change in thinking in the Oval Office.

Hagel’s nomination matters because it signals to many in Washington, and around the world, that Obama is looking to dramatically reshape US foreign policy.

The fight over Hagel won’t end before the the formal vote on Tuesday — and not even then. The forces opposing him, like those who have come out in his favor, including J Street and a handful of “realist” former ambassadors and foreign policy officials, are engaged in a battle over policy, not personality. Republican senators, together with a few Democratic colleagues who will grudgingly vote for his confirmation, will be watching him closely for any perceived missteps in the years to come.

All in all, not an ideal starting point for a defense secretary, especially one whose chief responsibility will be the unenviable task of drastically reducing the budget and size of the department he has been asked to run.

Hopes of a reprieve for the Pentagon from $55 billion a year in cuts are fading.

The automatic cuts imposed by Congress’s “sequester” on America’s budget fall heavily on defence, which accounts for at least half of discretionary spending. Faced with 9% across-the-board reductions, Leon Panetta, the outgoing secretary of defence, stalled for time.

Thanks to the “fiscal cliff” deal done on January 1st, the administration bought the Pentagon a couple of months for his successor to prepare for the worst. But little else has changed. Add to this the similarly sized cuts in the defence budget already agreed on in 2011, and Pentagon planners who two years ago thought they would have $600 billion to spend this year will now have to make do with about $486 billion.

Service chiefs are already wailing about a “readiness crisis” and a “hollowing out” of the force.

The reality is even worse than the figures suggest. Military personnel costs, which absorb 34% of the Pentagon’s spending, count against the overall budget cap but are exempt from the cuts. Overseas operations are not exempt, but will be given priority. All other programmes and commitments will therefore have to be cut by around 15%, with little discretion over how and where the cleaver will fall. Another problem is that “continuing resolution” (CR) funding at 2012 levels could well be extended for six more months on March 27th. Just as the Pentagon rashly hoped that something would turn up to avert sequestration, it also gambled that CR would last for only half the fiscal year.

The short-term consequences of all this are draconian. Up to 800,000 Pentagon civilian employees will be put on a four-day week and reduced pay; almost every contract will have to be renegotiated to cover the next six months and possibly the next nine years (the sequester’s $55 billion-a-year defence cuts do not end until 2021). There will be heavier spending this year on things that are not wanted (for example, main battle tanks) while other programmes (such as the new aerial tanker) will be delayed. Senior officers in all three services are most worried about cuts in training and readiness that might jeopardise the availability of forces in possible crises next year and the year after.

The longer-term consequences are harder to judge. After this year, assuming that Congress can agree on a budget and the sequester remains in effect, the cuts can at least start to get a bit more astute. Todd Harrison of the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments says: “Large acquisition programmes are large targets.” They don’t come any larger than the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, reckons that the Pentagon’s current order for 2,500 or so aircraft could be reduced by half. Mr Harrison thinks that given the rebalancing of forces to the Pacific, the army’s main programmes for new ground vehicles will also be “in trouble”.

Given that pay and benefits are absorbing an ever-greater proportion of the Pentagon’s budget (up from 30% in 2001 to 34% today) it would make sense, as the administration has argued, to try to curb rising costs. But Congress has shown no appetite for such restraint. The result will be a much smaller army, perhaps down to 400,000 from today’s 500,000, and a Marine Corps reduced from 182,000 to about 160,000.

That would place in doubt the so-called “two-war standard” that has been the bedrock of American strategy for decades.

Although congressional hawks on both sides of the aisle are disturbed by what all this may mean for America’s standing in the world, so far they seem to be losing the battle with their colleagues to mitigate the sequester. For the Pentagon, lean years may lie ahead.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly declared that “a world without America is not only desirable, it is achievable.” While that sentiment won’t be embraced in President Obama’s inaugural address next week, all other things being equal, it seems likely to be the practical effect of his second term.

Of course, Iran’s regime seeks a world literally without America. More to the point, Mr. Ahmadinejad and the mullahs in Tehran are working tirelessly to secure the means by which to accomplish that goal. Specifically, they have or are developing the ability to engage in devastating electromagnetic pulse attacks, biological warfare and other asymmetric terrorist strikes.

For his part, President Obama seems to have in mind bringing about a world without America in a geostrategic sense. As Mark Steyn notes in a characteristically brilliant essay in National Review Online, that would be “Obamacare’s other shoe.” It would amount to a “fundamental transformation” of America’s place in the world, evidently intended to be the president’s second-act counterpart to the socialist transformation of this country that dominated his first term.

This agenda is strongly evident in Mr. Obama’s choices for key national security positions: John F. Kerry at the State Department, Chuck Hagel at Defense and John O. Brennan at the CIA. The three are, like the president, imbued with a postAmerican, post-sovereignty, post-constitutional, transnationalist outlook. In his administration, it would appear that their mission would be, as the American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka puts it, to manage the United States’ decline.

Having addressed previously in this space the serious problems with the judgment, records and policy proclivities of Mr. Hagel and Mr. Kerry, let’s consider those of John Brennan to further illustrate the syndrome.

Mr. Brennan is a textbook example of a U.S. official who has “gone native.” He speaks Arabic and was formerly the top CIA officer in Saudi Arabia. He has shown himself to be deeply sympathetic to Islamists — for example, excusing and dissembling about their commitment to jihad and the necessity of not offending them.

After President Obama himself, Mr. Brennan is, arguably, the single most important enabler of the Islamic supremacists’ agenda in government today. In his role as homeland security adviser to the president — a position that does not require Senate confirmation and that he was given as a consolation prize when it became clear that he might not be confirmable as CIA director back in 2009 — Mr. Brennan has helped legitimate, empower, fund, arm and embolden them abroad, and embraced and appeased them here at home.

Of particular concern is the fact that Mr. Brennan has presided over the policy of engaging the Muslim Brotherhood, which has consequently been portrayed by a politicized intelligence community as “largely secular” and “eschewing violence”; the shredding of training briefings and the proscribing of trainers that might upset Muslims by telling the truth about Shariah and the jihad it commands; the penetration of U.S. agencies by Muslim Brotherhood-associated individuals as employees or senior advisers; and misrepresentations to Congress about the true, jihadist character of the attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi this past Sept. 11.

Also of great concern is the prospect that Mr. Obama’s second-term team will, if confirmed, be even more insistent than its predecessors on engaging Iran. Make no mistake about it: The practical effect will be to buy the regime in Tehran the last few months it evidently needs to achieve what it has sought for decades: the means to have the world not only bereft of America’s leadership and stabilizing force, but to neutralize and perhaps eliminate the United States as a 21st century society.

Ordinarily, a president should be given wide latitude by the Senate to appoint those he wants to staff his administration. This is no ordinary time, though, and this is no ordinary president or administration. The circumstances are such that a Team Obama that is pursuing so dangerous a policy course must be challenged and impeded, not encouraged and abetted.

The Senate’s constitutional responsibility to confirm senior executive branch appointees is one of the few it hasn’t compromised or allowed the president to expropriate. It must exercise its authority to assure “quality control” with respect to his picks for top national security Cabinet posts.

Indeed, the fact that Mr. Obama seeks not one or two but three individuals who share his determination to achieve the radical and dangerous national security transformation he seeks in his second term demands that senators defy him. After all, should the Senate fail to object to this trajectory by rigorously debating and defeating any — and preferably all — of these problematic choices, its members risk not only allowing but becoming party to the realization of a world without America.

by Bob Beauprez

[Editor's note:  This January 13th article is reposted from Townhall.com Finance. CLICK HERE to read the original.]

The Defense Department “Sequester” – a budget gimmick originally described as “ridiculous” by Harry  Reid and the President’s Chief of Staff – has become a Gordian Knot that the White House and  Congress have so far failed to unravel. Originally scheduled to be force implemented on January 1,  2013, it escaped solution during the New Year’s Eve fiscal cliff fiasco. Instead, the problem was just  kicked down the road a few more weeks with a new drop-dead date of March 1.

Rather than providing relief, the legislative inaction accentuates uncertainty and compresses even  further the time frame in which the Pentagon would be forced to implement $45 billion of immediate  cuts and $500 billion over the longer term.

It’s no way to run an Army…or Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard for that matter.  Last May, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned that the $500 billion of DoD cuts would be  “disastrous” to national security, hoping to get the attention of Congress and the White House for a  timely solution. Eight months later, the Pentagon is still waiting.

On Thursday, Panetta and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey  provided an ominous assessment of the consequences of inaction. Below are some key excerpts  from the briefing and a link to an expanded Politico.com report.

No one seems to like or be willing to take responsibility for the sequester. But neither has anyone  figured out how to avoid it.

During the third Presidential debate on October 22, 2012 Barack Obama lied when he said, “The  sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed.” But, as  Bob Woodward documented in “The Price of Politics” the idea came right out of the White House.

Further, Jack Lew, President Obama’s Chief-of-Staff who yesterday was nominated to be the next  Treasury Secretary, is “credited” with selling the sequester idea to Harry Reid on behalf of the White  House. Reid originally called the idea “ridiculous” when Lew and White House Legislative Affairs  Director Rob Nabors first introduced it to him. “That’s the beauty of a sequester, they (Lew and  Nabors) said, it’s so ridiculous that no one ever wants it to happen,” according to the account of  events in Woodward’s book. Reid then said, “I get it.”

Now the ridiculous is threatening military preparedness and national security to the point that Obama’s  own Sec-Def says “we have no idea what in the hell is going to happen.”

Apparently, when you’re responsible for selling a really bad idea to Congress on behalf of the Obama  Administration you get promoted instead of fired.

Following are key excerpts from Politico.com. Full report available here.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Thursday he has ordered the Pentagon to begin planning  now for the triple crisis facing the government this March, telling reporters it was a “perfect storm”  that could leave the military with a worst-case outcome: a “hollow force.”

Panetta and the nation’s top uniformed officer, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, said in  a briefing that March’s potential across-the-board budget cuts, the expiration of the continuing  spending resolution that now pays for the government and the potential that the U.S. could default  on its debt all were too serious not to begin immediate preparations.

“The fact is, looking at all three of those, we have no idea what the hell’s going to happen,” Panetta  told reporters at the Pentagon. “All told this uncertainty, if left unresolved by the Congress, will  seriously harm our military readiness.”….

“I’d like to believe that ultimately, Congress will do the right thing,” Panetta said. Now, however, “my  fear in talking to members of Congress is that this issue may now be in a very difficult place in terms  of their willingness to confront what needs to be done to de-trigger sequester. So all those reasons,  plus the uncertainty about what happen on the CR, the debt ceiling, put all that together, and we  simply cannot sit back now and not be prepared for the worst.”….

(Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said,) “If we’re required to do these cuts, suddenly  we’ve got to achieve these levels of savings, how do you protect the war-fighters, those involved in  Afghanistan, those areas that are critical to our national defense? So where do you go? You go to  readiness, you go to maintenance, training, this is where the cuts are ultimately made, and when  that happens, it make us less ready.”

The MOAA is the nation’s largest and most influential association of military officers and is a powerful force speaking for a strong national defense and representing the interests of military officers and their families at every stage of their careers. While focused on interests to officers, their concerns are applicable across the ranks to include enlisted personnel as well.

This year, more than 150 members of the Military Officers Association of America (MOAA) participated in the annual “Storming the Hill” campaign in Washington D.C. to urge their legislators against imposing stiff new budgetary penalties on members of the uniformed services community. Participants included leaders of MOAA Councils and Chapters from every state and Puerto Rico, as well as MOAA Board and staff members, and members of the Auxiliary Member, Currently Serving Member, and Currently Serving Spouse Advisory Committees.

“Our annual MOAA Hill-storming effort is grass-roots activism at its best,” MOAA President and CEO Vice Adm. Norb Ryan, Jr., USN-Ret. said. “There is probably nothing more representative of how democracy works that to see this large group of responsible Americans conveying their concerns to the elected representatives whose actions and votes have a huge effect on our lives.”

MOAA started Storming the Hill in 1996 and has been recognized as one of the most effective lobbying organizations in the country.

“The reality is that people must organize to have their voices heard in politics,” Ryan stated. “This year, defense leaders have talked of their commitment to keeping faith with our troops, but the proposals in the defense budget for major military benefit cuts simply don’t match their words of support. Our group is made up of current and former military members and their spouses who will make their voices heard directly.”

This year, MOAA highlights three major concerns:

     • Military Force Levels: the Fiscal year 2013 budget assumes a cut of 31,000 troops, with 124,000 more to be cut by fiscal year 2017. MOAA is concerned that budget pressures may lead to accelerated force cuts that will only worsen conditions for military families already overstressed by excessive deployments.

     • Health Care: The budget proposal envisions raising healthcare fees by $1,000 to $2,000 per year for retired military families. MOAA contends this is an unfair “bait and switch” rule change after promises of current benefits induced generations of servicemembers to pursue arduous careers in uniform.

     • Military Retirement: The budget proposes establishing a commission to recommend changes to military retirement, with special “fast-track” legislative rules that would force Congress into a “yes or no” vote without any option for changes and only limited debate. MOAA believes this ignores the lessons of past, more modest retirement changes that had to be repealed after they undermined retention and readiness.

“We appreciate the response from MOAA’s national and state leaders to help ensure Congress does right by our troops and their families, who have devoted their lives to serving their nation through their service and sacrifice,” Ryan said. “These events have proven highly successful in the past in bringing to legislators’ attention the issues that are essential to ensure America will continue to attract and sustain a top-quality career force over the long term. Our hope is to have the same impact again this year.”

For a full report on the MOAA’s “Storm the Hill,” visit their website (Click Here). The SATP will continue to watch, speak out, and report on actions which impact the national defense, and honoring promises made to those who have served.

The first is by Dick Morris, entitled “Obama Assumes Dictatorial Powers.”  It appeared on March 23rd on Dick Morris.com.

The second is by Joe Wolverton II, entitled “Obama’s Executive Order Authorizes Peacetime Martial Law.”  The article appeared March 18th in The New American.

With two presidential signatures- one on New Year’s Day and the other issued last week – President Barack Obama has assumed the right to assert dictatorial powers over almost all aspects of the U.S. economy and to hold American citizens indefinitely without trial! (This is not some “Space Aliens Invade” story. It is really happening).

On New Year’s Day, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to fund the Pentagon. But smuggled into its language is an explicit authority “allowing him to indefinitely detain [US] citizens” according to Jonathan Turley writing in the U.K. Guardian newspaper. While the story was buried in the American media, Turley notes that it is “one of the greatest rollbacks of civil liberties” in American history.

At first, Obama “insisted that he signed the bill simply to keep funding for the troops.” But, Turley reports, “that spin ended after sponsor Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) disclosed that it was the White House that insisted that there be no exception for [US] citizens in the indefinite detention provision.”

Turley is critical of “reporters [who] continue to mouth the claim that this law only codifies what is already the law. That is not true. The administration has fought any challenges to indefinite detention to prevent a true court review.”

Read the full text of Turley’s article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/02/ndaa-historic-assault-american-liberty

Perhaps even more terrifying is the executive order President Obama signed on Friday, March 16 giving him vast powers to control every aspect of the U.S. economy in the event of war or even during a peacetime “emergency.” Edwin Black, writing for the liberal-oriented Huffington Post, says that the order “may have quietly placed the United States on a war preparedness footing” possibly in anticipation of “an outbreak of war between Israel, the West, and Iran.”

Read the full text of Black’s article at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/edwin-black/obama-national-defense-resources-preparedness_b_1359715.html

The Order entitled “National Defense Resources Preparedness” gives the president the power “to take control of all civil energy supplies, including oil and natural gas, control and restrict all civil transportation,” according to Black. It also even allows a draft “in order to achieve both the military and non-military demands of the country.”

Obama’s order would be effective both during times of war and times of other emergencies. It says the purpose of the order is to assure that “the United States [has] an industrial and technological base capable of meeting national defense requirements and capable of contributing to the technological superiority of its national defense equipment in peacetime and in times of national emergency.” (Emphasis added)

The far reaching order authorizes the president “in the event of a potential threat to the security of the United States, to take actions necessary to ensure the availability of adequate resources and production capability, including services and critical technology, for national defense requirements.”

Likely the president already has most of the enumerated powers as part of his role as commander in chief. So, why the order right now?

Black speculates that it is related to the tensions over Iran’s nuclear program. Is the president reminding big oil that he would take over their industry in the event of war? Or is Obama equipping himself with vast powers to be used even in peacetime as a result of whatever he decides is a “national emergency.” Could the rise in gas prices constitute such an “emergency?” Is the issuance of this order right now a shot across the bow of oil companies to get them to go easy on oil prices? Where are we? Stalinist Russia?

In any case, these two presidential signatures – one on a law and the other on an order – together constitute a massive power grab totally unsuited to a democracy. The idea that he would be preparing to assume dictatorial powers seems so remote that the mainstream media has not even reported on these initiatives. But they should give all of us pause.