Pentagon

Jeffrey Nugent is the former president and chief executive of Revlon. I'm a member of the National Rifle Association and a former Army officer with assignments in the military police, artillery, and operations research and intelligence at the Pentagon. I'm also Ted Nugent's older brother. Ted and I recently attended the NRA convention in Houston, where he delivered the gathering's final speech and continued his ardent defense of the Second Amendment. Ted and I have hunted together for...

WASHINGTON — An Army general who served as a top official on U.S. joint military staffs in Afghanistan and at the Pentagon is the choice to command U.S. troops in South Korea. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced the promotion of Lt. Gen. Curtis "Mike" Scaparrotti at a Pentagon news conference Friday. The moves comes at a tense time on the Korean Peninsula. The North has stepped up missile launches in the region and increased its threats against the U.S. in recent months.

Military recruiters across the country have been caught in a string of sex-crime scandals over the past year, exposing another long-standing problem for the Defense Department as it grapples with a crisis of sexual assault in the ranks. In Alaska, law enforcement officials are fuming after a military jury this month convicted a ­Marine Corps recruiter of ­first-degree sexual assault in the rape of a 23-year-old female civilian but did not sentence him to prison. In Texas, an Air Force recruiter will face a...

The leaders of a congressional committee investigating the Dover Air Force Base mortuary said Thursday that they would broaden their probe to include all military burial practices over the past decade, including reports that partial remains of hundreds of war dead were incinerated and dumped in a Virginia landfill. Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.) and Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the top Republican and Democrat, respectively, on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said they found "appalling"...

Pentagon contracts tumbled 52 percent in April from a month earlier as across-the-board federal budget cuts took hold. The Defense Department announced awards with a maximum value of $19 billion in April, about 22 percent lower than a year earlier, according to procurement data. The biggest contract, a $6.9 billion network equipment deal, was won by a group of eight companies led by General Dynamics. The military is scheduled to absorb $37 billion in cuts this year under the reductions known...

Ninth in a series . "You want to play in the back yard, son?" April Gallop says to the lanky 10-year-old tailing her on the front walk of a neat frame house in a Richmond suburb. "You go around; I'll be right there. " Elisha Gallop wears a straw hat and flip-flops in the heat of a July afternoon. He gives his mom a smile and runs to lift a heavy padlock from a side gate. The half-finished fence, being built by volunteers, remains open at the rear; anyone could walk in. But she still craves...

The Pentagon is likely to face steep, across-the-board budget cuts beyond the end of this fiscal year, the two top lawmakers on the Senate Armed Services Committee warned on Friday, as they asked the secretary of defense to lay out in detail the consequences of slashing $52 billion from its budget next year. In a letter to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, the chairman and ranking member of the committee said that a compromise on deficit reduction between the White House and members of...

Russell Murray II, 83, a weapons analyst and assistant secretary of defense who played a role in long-range military planning and was known for raising concerns about the high cost of many weapons systems, died of cancer Jan. 26 at his home in Alexandria. Mr. Murray trained as an aeronautical engineer and worked for the Grumman aircraft company in New York before joining the Defense Department in 1962 as a military weapons systems analyst. He spent seven years at the Pentagon, where he played a key role in...

WASHINGTON — As senior military leaders and government officials grapple with how to reduce sexual assaults in the military, a Pentagon report provides details of the problem. The numbers may not add up in all cases due to rounding or smaller categories that were not included. Key findings: —Overall, there were 3,374 reports of sexual assault during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. —Based on that number and anonymous surveys of service members, the Pentagon estimates that as...

WASHINGTON — Congress is rethinking the broad authority it gave the president to wage a war on terror after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in light of how President Barack Obama has used the power to target suspected terrorists with lethal drone strikes. Senior Pentagon officials insisted on Thursday that the law should remain unchanged as the nation remains locked in armed conflict with al-Qaida and its affiliates, a fight that will rage for another...

WASHINGTON — The United States remains in armed conflict with al-Qaida and its affiliates, a fight likely to last a decade or two, senior Pentagon officials told Congress on Thursday in arguing against changes to the 2001 military force law used in the war on terror. Acting General Counsel Robert Taylor and Michael Sheehan, an assistant secretary of defense for special operations, said the authorization for the use of military force is an effective law and expressed...

A list of some recent military directives and actions related to the Defense Department's sexual assault prevention program: ONGOING/FUTURE: The Pentagon is developing policy for responding to victims that will include training and certification standards for special victim investigators. MARCH 2013: The Pentagon published a revised "sexual assault program" policy that enhances procedures and standardizes sexual assault prevention efforts. JANUARY 2013: The Pentagon published a new policy on sexual...

After lengthy investigations, the Pentagon has determined that three Army generals committed misconduct in separate incidents, adding to an unusually long list of senior military commanders who have been censured over the past year. On Friday, defense officials confirmed that Army Maj. Gen. Ralph O. Baker, the commander of a strategic counterterrorism force on the Horn of Africa, was fired March 28 on charges of sexual misconduct. Two officials familiar with the case said Baker was investigated for...

When President Obama called on the U.S. military to shift its focus to Asia earlier this year, Andrew Marshall, a 91-year-old futurist, had a vision of what to do. Marshall's small office in the Pentagon has spent the past two decades planning for a war against an angry, aggressive and heavily armed China. No one had any idea how the war would start. But the American response, laid out in a concept that one of Marshall's longtime proteges dubbed "Air-Sea Battle," was clear.

WASHINGTON — Government information leaks and collisions with the media date back decades and decades. Think back to the Pentagon Papers. In the early 1970s, the Justice Department went to court to prevent further publication in The New York Times of portions of a top-secret study, dubbed the Pentagon Papers, which was packed with damaging details about America's conduct of the Vietnam War. It led to a landmark First Amendment case before the...