With Congress in recess until after next week, the battle over the defense budget remains in stasis. In the meantime though, here are a few articles and essays on defense policy for your weekend reading pleasure:
– In a lengthy review of Bret Stephens’ new book America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder, retired Marine Corps’ officer Peter J. Munson excoriates the Pulitzer Prize winner for crafting a partisan screed on U.S. foreign policy that misdiagnoses most of the world’s ills and calls for a flawed defense policy underpinned by a defense budget pegged to five percent of GDP in response.
– Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments explains in Forbes why acquisition reform that increases competition among defense contractors might cause far more problems than it solves.
– Finally, writing in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, Representative Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) took his Republican colleagues to task for the budget resolution they recently passed that inflated spending in the Overseas Contingency Operations account as a way around Budget Control Act spending limits.