After this column first disclosed the large number of pro-China officials and holdovers from the Obama administration sitting on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, the board has been belatedly purged and new advisers will be named in the coming days.
President Donald Trump will sharply reduce the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan from 4,500 to 2,500 by mid-January, the Pentagon announced on Tuesday, stopping short of a threatened full withdrawal from America’s longest war after fierce opposition from allies at home and abroad.
The speculation has a number of catalysts. First was the firing of Mark Esper as secretary of defense this past week and the replacement of him and other top Pentagon officials with Trump ideologues. Some media outlets in the US have raised the possibility that Trump wanted to get Esper out of the way, so he could more easily carry out controversial military moves.
While pursuing a legal challenge to the November 3 election results, President Donald Trump has nominated three loyalist officials to senior Defense Ministry posts, the Voice of America reports. The nominations were made Wednesday, a day after the President fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
The Pentagon continued its recent shake-up on Tuesday with reports that President Trump has appointed Kash Patel to be the new Defense secretary’s chief of staff.
Cooperation between Israel and America saw an important milestone in September, as the Americans took possession of their first Israeli-produced, US-funded, Iron Dome missile defense battery, Defense News reports. In a full published interview with Defense News last month, the head of Israel’s Missile Defense Organization (MDO), Moshe Patel, discussed the current and future cooperation between his organization and the US Missile Defense Agency.
The Pentagon announced Monday that the US State Department has approved a further potential sale of 100 Boeing-made Harpoon Coastal Defense Systems to Taiwan in an arms deal which could be worth up to $2.37 billion, Reuters reports.
Defense Minister Benny Gantz met U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper at the Pentagon on Thursday where they signed a joint declaration confirming Washington’s strategic commitment to maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge in the Middle East.
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the remaining American troops in Afghanistan “should” be home in the US by Christmas, Politico reports. In February this year, the US and the Taliban agreed that American soldiers would withdraw from Afghanistan in spring 2021.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has had talks with Greek Prime Minister Kyrias Mitsotakis about possibly transferring its highly strategic US airbase from Turkey to Greece, DEBKAfile sources have revealed. The US is also reportedly in talks with Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates about moving the Turkish base to the Gulf state.
China is on track to double the size of its nuclear warhead stockpile while expanding foreign military bases capable of attacking the United States — worrying signs that Beijing is seeking global superpower status, the Pentagon warned in its annual survey of the Chinese military released Tuesday.
The Chinese military fired four midrange missiles into the contested waters of the South China Sea on Wednesday, a US defense official told Insider Thursday.
The Pentagon’s top general in the Middle East warned Wednesday that the U.S. is “going to have huge problems” with a massive Islamic State resurgence over the coming decade without a sweeping new international plan to de-radicalize young men and women across the Middle East.
The Democrat-led House on Friday approved its version of a major Pentagon spending bill that would reverse President Trump’s ban on transgender troops serving in the military, part of a massive, six-bill $1.3 trillion appropriations package.
Last week, the head of the U.S.’s newest military branch, the Space Force, cautioned publicly for the first time that Moscow had undertaken at least two concerning anti-satellite weapon tests in recent months, in a potential bid to develop on-orbit efficiency that could dangerously hinder the U.S.’s heavy dependency on space-based systems.
The US Defense Department has published a list of twenty major companies, including Huawei, that it has determined are owned or backed by the Chinese military, BBC News reported Thursday. A result of this determination, the US may apply new sanctions against the companies listed.
A federal appeals court in California on Friday ruled that the Trump administration’s use of Pentagon funding to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border was illegal.
U.S. prosecutors have charged a white Minneapolis police officer with the more serious charge of second-degree murder for allegedly pressing his knee on the neck of unarmed black man George Floyd, who later died.
If war is coming to outer space, then the United States is late to the battlefield. But, its recently unveiled Space Force is already changing the ground rules in the Middle East.
The Pentagon is spending billions of dollars on developing two main types of ultra-fast hypersonic missiles in order to “dominate future battlefields,” the Times of Israel reports. Referring to Russia and China in an explanation for the move, President Trump told reporters on Friday: “We have no choice, we have to do it, with the adversaries we have out there.”