Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) introduced a bill on Monday that would pressure the Obama administration to sell new F-16 fighters to Taiwan, weeks ahead of the administration's plan to announce a decision on the sale.

The bill expresses the sense of the Senate that because Taiwan needs the new fighters for its self-defense, the United States is required to sell them due to commitments made in the Taiwan Relations Act. It also expresses the view that the fighter sale would boost the U.S. economy by extending thousands of jobs related to F-16 production, a majority of which just happen to be found in Cornyn's home state of Texas.

"The president shall carry out the sale of no fewer than 66 F16 C/D multirole fighter aircraft to Taiwan," the bill specifies.

The path ahead for Cornyn's bill is unclear. He could try to add it to the fiscal 2012 defense authorization or push for a floor vote on the bill itself. By itself, the bill has no chance of being signed by President Obama. As part of the defense authorization bill, which is considered a "must pass" bill, it could be veto bait.

Foreign military sales are the responsibility of the executive branch, but Cornyn's office believes that Congress has the Constitutional and legal authority to compel a foreign military sale. There is no precedent; to date, Congress has never authorized a military sale that wasn't submitted to them by the president. 

Taiwan has been asking the administration for permission to buy the new fighters, but reports suggest that the administration is planning to deny that request and offer Taiwan upgrades to their existing fleet of older F16 A/B models instead.

"This sale is a win-win, in strengthening the national security of our friend Taiwan as well as our own, and supporting tens of thousands of jobs in the U.S.," Cornyn said in a statement. "Saying no here would mean granting Communist China substantial sway over American foreign policy, putting us on a very slippery slope."

"Providing the military resources Taiwan needs is in the vital security interest of Taiwan, the national security interest of the United States, and is compelled by the Taiwan Relations Act," Sen. Robert Menendez (R-NJ) said in a statement. "Taiwanese pilots flying Taiwanese fighter aircraft manufactured in the United States represent the best first line of defense for our democratic ally, and delaying the decision to sell F-16s to Taiwan could result in the closure of the F-16 production line, which would cost New Jersey 750 manufacturing jobs."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised Cornyn that the administration would announce its decision on Taiwan arms sales by Oct. 1. That agreement was part of a deal reached between Clinton and Cornyn to move forward with the confirmation of Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns.

When the Obama administration moved forward with $6.4 billion worth of arms sales to Taiwan in January 2010, the Chinese reacted by cutting off U.S.-China military to military cooperation for more than a year.

On August 1, 181 House members sent a letter to President Obama calling on him to approve the sale of F-16 C/Ds to Taiwan.  A May 26 letter to Obama calling on him to quickly notify Congress of the sale of 66 F-16 C/Ds to Taiwan was signed by 45 Senators.

In a small, windowless office with barren walls in the Pentagon's E-ring, four-star Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright sits behind an empty desk. He's spent the month of August on "terminal leave," tying up the loose ends of his 40-year military career, in which he rose to become the second-highest-ranking uniformed military man in the nation, before losing his chance at one final promotion.

"Hoss," as he's known to his friends, was always a controversial figure within the military aristocracy: a Marine with a penchant for technology, an iconoclast who made his reputation bucking the conventional wisdom, an insider who was always trying to force the Defense Department to think outside the box. He was often impolitic and caught up in controversy, but his determination to drive the discussion on things like missile defense, cyberwarfare, and military strategy made him stand out as the general who talked straight and wasn't afraid to ruffle feathers.

It was these very qualities that made him "Obama's favorite general," according to Bob Woodward's book Obama's Wars. When asked whether that was true, Cartwright said he believed it was -- once upon a time. He also acknowledged that Obama promised to promote him to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but then reneged on that pledge after a whisper campaign against Cartwright, reportedly coming from within the Pentagon, made his appointment politically difficult for the White House.

But looking back he has no regrets.

"I wouldn't change anything. I wouldn't do it any different," Cartwright told The Cable, in the first interview he's given since stepping down. His retirement became official this week.

The break between Cartwright and his two bosses, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen, came after the contentious debate in late 2009 over the surge of troops in Afghanistan. Cartwright worked with Vice President Joseph Biden on a plan that placed a greater emphasis on counterterrorism than counterinsurgency, and included a smaller footprint with fewer additional troops. They presented that plan to Obama without the prior approval of Gates and Mullen.

Gates has publicly denied that this episode cost Cartwright the chairman's job and said in June that "Hoss Cartwright is one of the finest officers I've ever worked with."

But Cartwright acknowledged in his interview with The Cable that his insistence on giving options for alternative policies in Afghanistan, alternatives Gates and Mullen didn't like, caused a falling-out that along with the whisper campaign in which critics accused him of insubordination and leaked details of an inspector general's investigation into a possible relationship he had with a female aide (he was later cleared of any wrongdoing), scuttled his chances to take the chairman's seat.

"Yeah, they did make it personal," Cartwright said, though careful not to name Gates or Mullen in particular as being behind the effort to smear him. "But at the end of the day, that's their choice. I can live with this skin very easily."

"At the end of the day, the measure of merit was not necessarily whether the relationships were strong," he said. "The measure of merit was: All the things that I needed to do as vice chairman, all the things that Chairman Mullen and Secretary Gates needed to do, none of that stuff ever suffered as a result of this.… The department never suffered. The war fighter never suffered."

Regardless, the Biden-Cartwright plan, known as "counterterrorism plus," eventually lost out to a plan much closer to the counterinsurgency heavy approach that Gates and Mullen were advocating. Cartwright said he never thought he was breaking the chain of command or committing insubordination by dealing directly with Biden or Obama.

"Well, you know, in someone's eyes, maybe I broke the chain of command. But from the standpoint of the law, no. And so I'm very comfortable with where I was," he said. "My job is not to come up with a strategy and say, 'This is the answer.' My job is to give the president and the administration a broad enough range of choices that are credible choices and let them find in it the broader strategy as they look across all the other elements of power that they have."

Within those choices for how to proceed in Afghanistan, Cartwright was in favor of a "counterterrorism plus" approach that would have required fewer surge troops.

"Actually, I was arguing more about balance," he said. "In other words, I believe that if you weren't going to put enough force in to control the entire country, then the tied-down force had to have its flanks protected. And therefore you had to have a mobile force that was more counterterror-type force than you did."

Many in the war-fighting community believe that Cartwright just didn't get it because he never led troops in battle. He rose through the ranks as a Marine aviator and then spent most of the last decade as the head of U.S. Strategic Command or as a top Pentagon official. For the soldier on the field in Afghanistan, Cartwright's idea for fewer troops just placed the troops in battle in greater danger. For many in the military, the choice was to go big or go home.

But Cartwright says he just didn't see it that way -- and when the president asked him for his own opinion, he was bound to give it to him. And he still stands by the advice he gave. Cartwright's view is the emphasis should be on finding ways to wind down the war more quickly and leave Afghanistan in the hands of the Afghans.

"At the end of the day, from a grand strategy standpoint, this is a very cost-imposing strategy on us and, not having a clear idea of how long we're going to stay other than until the cash runs out, is important to understand," he said. "You can't kill your way or buy your way to success in those activities. It's got to be diplomatic. And Afghans have to be convinced that it's time for them to do their own thing."

At his retirement ceremony on Aug. 3, which Mullen and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta attended, Cartwright quoted Teddy Roosevelt's famous speech, "In the Arena," which begins, "It's not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena."

This week, he said the pushback he received was the unavoidable consequence of doing his duty.

"If getting criticized was my worry, if that was the merit of the job, then I wouldn't be there anyway. You do what you think is right," he said. "At the end of the day, you do your own self-reflection. You look in the mirror and you say: Is the integrity where it belongs? Is anything you provided in the way of advice so far off the base as to be reprehensible? I never came to the conclusion in either case that either the integrity had suffered or that the advice was bad advice."

As he sits in his uniform at his empty office, Cartwright thinks about what he wants to do next. He said he might enter a think tank or academia while he decides how to contribute to military policy from the civilian side of the discussion. He leaves the Pentagon with a sense of accomplishment and without remorse.

"My advice wasn't always taken, but it always at least informed the debate, which was my measure of merit," said Cartwright. "That people were so strongly against it at times, well shoot … these are big decisions."

The Political-Military (PM) bureau at the State Department has a host of new leaders this week, including a new principal deputy, another new deputy, and two new senior advisors.

Andrew Shapiro is the assistant secretary for PM and reports up to Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Ellen Tauscher. Shapiro and Tauscher aren't going anywhere, but below them there are a lot of new faces. Thomas Kelly replaces Kurt Amend as principal deputy assistant secretary for PM. Amend retired from the State Department and will now join the private sector after 22 years in the Foreign Service, though after only about a year as the No. 2 official at PM.

Kelly's most recent post was as consul general at the U.S. embassy in Sao Paolo, Brazil, where he worked directly for Ambassador Tom Shannon. Kelly's return to Washington is something a reunion for him and Shannon, because Shannon is filling in as acting undersecretary of state for political affairs while the State Department awaits the confirmation of President Barack Obama's nominee, Wendy Sherman.  

Before Brazil, Kelly served as deputy chief of mission for three years (2004-2007) in Vilnius, Lithuania, under current State Department Executive Secretary Steve Mull, and then in Buenos Aires, Argentina, under current Ambassador to Mexico Tony Wayne. His job will be to run the bureau when Shapiro is on the road and manage the counter piracy, political advisors, and congressional and public affairs offices.

Amend was actually dual-hatted as principal deputy assistant secretary and as the official in charge of PM's negotiations and agreements team, so Shapiro brought on Tom Daughton as a senior advisor to handle the latter part of Amend's portfolio. Daughton's most recent positions were as deputy chief of mission in Lebanon and Algeria.

His main responsibilities are to handle security negotiations for status of forces agreements, such as the negotiations to reposition U.S. forces in Japan that Amend handled, and issues related to navigation and overflight rights for U.S. forces abroad. Importantly, this includes the  Northern Distribution Network, which speed goods from Russia and Central Asia to U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Daughton reports up to Kelly.

Maj. General Walter Givhan has also joined the PM bureau as a deputy assistant secretary, replacing Maj. Gen. Tom Masiello, who was a brigadier general when he joined PM but who just was awarded his second star and has now returned to the Pentagon as the director of special programs in the office of the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.

Givhan is now the highest ranking military officer at the State Department, and his appointment is meant to cement the presence of a high-ranking active duty officer in PM, a State Department official told The Cable. Before Masiello, an active-duty military general hadn't served in a high ranking PM position since the 1980s, although retired officers have played roles, including former assistant secretary Mark Kimmitt, who retired as a brigadier general before coming to State.

The State Department official also said that Deputy Secretary Bill Burns' father was an active duty military officer and a deputy assistant secretary in the PM bureau, and that Burns recommended returning a high-ranking active-duty military man to the management tier of the PM bureau.

Givhan has responsibility for overseeing policy and plans, global peacekeeping issues, DOD force posture issues, and weapons removal and abatements. He is currently State's point person in the effort to secure the thousands of MANPADS currently floating around Libya. Givhan also is in charge of the international security operations office, a 24/7 military action support team.

Last but not least, Shapiro has hired Max Bergmann as a senior advisor in the PM front office. Bergmann was most recently working with the Ploughshares Fund and the Center for American Progress, where he blogged a lot about New START on CAP's Think Progress site. He's also the editor of an American soccer blog called "Association Football."

The recent debt ceiling debacle and Congress's threat to force a default has hurt America's standing and credibility as a world leader, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said today.

Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta appeared at a joint event this morning at the National Defense University, moderated by the George Washington University's Frank Sesno. Their discussion focused on the future of the national security budget, but also touched on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, and the fight inside Washington over America's fiscal future.

When asked directly about the recent debt debate, Clinton referred to her recent trip to Hong Kong, where she assured world leaders that the United States always eventually deal with its internal challenges -- after exhausting all other options. But she said the episode had a negative effect on U.S. international leadership.

"It does cast a pall over our ability to project the kind of security interests that are in America's interests," she said. "This is not about the Defense Department or the State Department or USAID. This is about the United States of America. And we need to have a responsible conversation about how we are going to prepare ourselves for the future."

She then went on to defend national security spending, particularly as it relates to diplomacy and development, linking it to the U.S. rivalry with China.

"We can't be abruptly pulling back or pulling out when we know we face some long-term challenges about how we're going to cope with what the rise of China means," Clinton argued.

Vice President Joe Biden is on his way to China this week and officials previewing the trip said he will  defend the debt deal during his visit there.

Clinton and Panetta's event seemed designed to project a unified front between the Obama administration's top foreign policy officials ahead of the looming budget battle, where caps in discretionary spending mandated in the debt deal could result in huge cuts for the State Department and USAID.

"We know we are going to have to put everything on the table. I'm not saying we should be exempt ... I'm just saying that as we look at everything that is on the table, we have to try to do a reasonable analysis of what our needs and interests are," Clinton said.

"If you go out to the American public and you say ‘what's the easiest thing to cut?' it's always foreign aid," Clinton said. "We understand that we have a case to make and there is a new way of looking at it."

Panetta expressed general support for a holistic approach toward a national security budget that includes defense, diplomacy, and development. But he didn't go as far as his predecessor, Robert Gates, in advocating a rebalancing of budget priorities away from the Pentagon and toward the State Department.

"Our national security is our Defense Department and our military power and also our State Department and our diplomatic power," Panetta said. "We all know we are going to have to be able to exercise some fiscal restraint as we go through our budgets.... What I hope this committee doesn't do is walk away from its responsibility to look at the entire federal budget."

Panetta also repeated the administration's claim that the debt deal would cut $350 billion from the defense budget, a claim disputed by experts and top lawmakers. Panetta then warned that if the 12-person "supercommittee" fails to strike a deal to cut $1.5 trillion in spending by Thanksgiving, triggering an automatic $600 billion in addition defense cuts, it "would have devastating effects on our national defense."

"It would result in hollowing out the force. It would terribly weaken our ability to respond to the threats in the world. But more importantly, it would break faith with the troops and with their families," Panetta said. "And a volunteer army is absolutely essential to our national defense. Any kind of cut like that would literally undercut our ability to put together the kind of strong national defense we have today."

Regarding the State Department's budget, Panetta didn't advocate increases, but he did say it was "absolutely essential to our national security."

Panetta refused to comment on reports that the Pakistani military gave the Chinese military access to a downed U.S. helicopter that was used in the mission to kill Osama bin Laden. He did say that they United States has no choice but to continue to work with Pakistan.

"They have relations with the Haqqanis... there's a relationship with the LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba].  And yet, there is no choice but to maintain a relationship with Pakistan. Why? Because we are fighting a war there, we are fighting al Qaeda there, and they do give us some cooperation in that effort," he said.

Clinton referred to the last scene of the movie Charlie Wilson's War, in which lawmakers decided not to fund civilian programs for Afghanistan after supporting the Afghan military resistance to the Soviet invasion. She said the Pakistanis have a similar view of the United States "that needs to be respected."

"They are partners, but they don't always see the world the way we see the world, and they don't always cooperate with us on what we think -- and I'll be very blunt about this -- is in their interests.," she said.

Clinton also said it was not important whether the Obama administration actually insists that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad leaves power. There have been several reports that the administration was planning on announcing explicitly that the Syrian leader should leave, but then decided not to at the last minute.

"I'm not a big believer in arbitrary deadlines when you're dealing with a complicated situation," Clinton said. "It's not going to be any news if the United States says Assad needs to go... If Turkey says it, if King Abdullah says it, if other people say it, there is no way the Assad regime can ignore it."

The Cable has learned that Herbert Richardson, the acting special inspector general
for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR) is stepping down after only six months on the job, leaving that troubled office without a leader for the second time this year.

Richardson has been running the SIGAR office since the January firing of Arnie Fields, who was finally removed from his position after more than a year of complaints by senior senators including Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Tom Coburn (R-OK), and Susan Collins (R-ME). Fields was criticized for running an oversight office that failed to produce results in the effort to find waste, fraud, and abuse in the tens of billions of dollars in contracts for Afghanistan reconstruction.

Richardson was never nominated to be permanent SIGAR and was leading the office as acting chief. But he will return to the private sector this month, according to four sources with direct knowledge of his decision. The SIGAR office declined requests for comment and said that Richardson was unavailable, in meetings all day. There's no word yet on who will take over as SIGAR.

On Capitol Hill, concerned lawmakers and staffers were actually hopeful that Richardson was improving the performance of the SIGAR office. Today, those congressional offices are back to voicing their usual disappointment and skepticism.

"He stopped some of the suck that was going on there, but it was only six months," one GOP senate aide told The Cable. "At this point they are supposed to be firing on all cylinders. And now that he's leaving, who knows."

"He came in with such fanfare and their team said there would be a ‘culture change' with his arrival," said a House Democratic staffer. "So much for culture change if it was dependent upon leadership."

Coincidentally, SIGAR officials were on the Hill this morning to brief staffers on their quarterly report. Richardson was expected to attend but did not show up. One staffer who attended the briefing said that SIGAR officials failed to mention that Richardson is leaving and the briefing itself left a lot to be desired.

"It was a weak briefing because they have a weak product," this House staffer said. "They just aren't producing convictions at a pace comparable to the results being produced by their counterparts at [the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction] SIGIR in terms of Iraq."

SIGIR, which was established first and is led by the well respected Stuart Bowen, has a shrinking mission as the U.S. presence in Iraq winds down. Some lawmakers, such as Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA) are calling for SIGIR and SIGAR to be combined into something called the office of the Special Inspector General for Overseas Contingency Operations (SIGOCO), an idea that SIGAR has lobbied hard against.

"Rather than a piecemeal and reactive approach to the oversight of billions of dollars in these situations, we need a dedicated shop run by a proven investigator who can report to the National Security Council, and the Defense and State departments, without being cowed by political pressure," Honda told The Cable. "A permanent Office for Contingency Operations, whose mandate would transcend political timetables, would send the message that transparency, efficiency and efficacy are institutional priorities, and waste and corruption will not be tolerated."

One Senate staffer noted that the law that established SIGAR actually gives the president the authority to combine that office with its Iraq counterpart, placing them both under the control of Bowen.

"Everyone is looking for cuts of agencies that are not performing or duplicative," this staffer said. "We could shut down SIGAR, give some of that money to the DOD Inspector General's office, some for debt reduction, and call it a day."

The United States has committed $51 billion to Afghanistan reconstruction since 2001; that endowment will reach $71 billion by the end of 2011, according to the AP.

UPDATE: Late Thursday afternoon, Richardson put out a statement confirming our report.  "After more than 37 years of public service, I've decided to accept an opportunity in the private sector, at a time when I'm convinced SIGAR has changed course, is producing results, and is being led effectively by the new leadership team that I've put in place," he said.

Despite the White House's claim that the new debt deal would cut $350 billion from defense spending over the next ten years, there are no specifics in the bill on defense cuts  -- and no way to tell what the final cuts will be.

"The deal puts us on track to cut $350 billion from the defense budget over 10 years," the White House said in a fact sheet today. "These reductions will be implemented based on the outcome of a review of our missions, roles, and capabilities that will reflect the President's commitment to protecting our national security."

But if you look at the text of the bill, there is simply no language on how much the defense budget will actually be cut. What the bill does is set spending caps for "security" spending, which the administration defines as defense, homeland security, intelligence, nuclear weapons, diplomacy, and foreign aid. There's no breakdown that defines which of these agencies get what, so there's no way to be sure that all the cuts would come from "defense."

Moreover, the spending caps are split between "security" and "non-security" discretionary spending only for fiscal 2012 and fiscal 2013. After that, the spending caps don't make any distinctions between budget accounts. In the end, the actual fiscal 2012 spending numbers will be set by congressional appropriators in the House and the Senate, hopefully before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.

So how does the White House claim that it is cutting $350 billion from defense?

"From the discretionary caps in first tranche of the bill, there is approximately $420 billion in security savings. Of that, $350 billion is from defense (function 050) savings," an administration official told The Cable today.

But former officials and budget experts said that those details are not in the actual bill and are subject to the whim of future Congresses.

"There's actually no way to tell. It's not possible to calculate," Gordon Adams, former OMB national security chief in the Clinton administration, told The Cable today. "The whole deal is designed to be opaque about the things you really want to know, such as how much defense will be cut.... This is classic Washington Kabuki theater."

The defense budget was $529 billion for fiscal 2011 and the entire "security" budget was $688.5 billion. The debt deal caps fiscal 2012 security spending at $684 billion, which means a cut of about $4.5 billion compared to fiscal 2011 levels. That money could come from defense, or it could come from the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Nuclear Safety Administration, or another department. Nobody knows.

The fiscal 2013 security cap is $686 billion.

The caps will prevent security spending from going up, but the details are still in lawmakers' hands and therefore anything could happen, said Gordon.

"It's more disciplined because now there's a cap. Now they have to duke it out at the [committee] chairmen's level," he said.

And those committee chairmen are already working on it. We're told that defense hawks, including House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA), huddled with House GOP leadership this afternoon to demand answers to exactly how much the deal would impact defense.

"I will support this proposal with deep reservations. Our senior military commanders have been unanimous in their concerns that deeper cuts could break the force. I take their position seriously and the funding levels in this bill won't make their job easier. Still, this is the least bad proposal before us," McKeon said in a late afternoon statement. 

McKeon may have secured some assurances from the House leadership about the specifics of the security cuts, Gordon speculated. A spokesperson for McKeon did not respond to queries by deadline.

What McKeon and other defense hawks are really worried about is the trigger mechanism, which would automatically cut $600 billion from the base defense budgets over 10 years if the new joint committee can't make a deal on $1.2 trillion of additional cuts. After "mechanical adjustments," which are ways to predict the real value of the cuts considering other factors, that $600 billion cut is estimated by the administration to actually be about $534 billion.

While it's unclear whether McKeon got assurances on today's deal, it is clear that his primary concern is about the joint committee and the trigger mechanism, not the security spending caps that he is voting for today.

"What is clear is we have cut what we can from the Department of Defense, and given what's at stake it is essential that the joint committee include strong national security voices. There is no scenario in the second phase of this proposal that does not turn a debt crisis into a national security crisis," he said. "Defense cannot sustain any additional cuts either from the joint committee or the sequestration trigger."

By the way, the White House didn't mention today that it had already promised to cut $400 billion from security spending, although there are no details on that plan either.

Interestingly, if you add the $350 billion in defense cuts announced by the White House as part of today's deal with the $534 billion in defense cuts in the trigger mechanism, it totals $884 billion. That number is suspiciously close to the $886 billion in defense cuts proposed in the plan put forth by theSenate's bipartisan budget group the Gang of Six, which President Barack Obama has already endorsed.

"It just happens to lead you to [Gang of Six leader Sen. Kent] Conrad's number," said Gordon. "I suspect it's not a coincidence."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-NV) newest plan to cut the deficit includes $1 trillion in "savings" from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the numbers just don't add up.

Reid's plan, unveiled in a press conference today, claims to save $2.7 trillion over 10 years, including $1.2 billion in cuts to discretionary spending, $400 million in "interest savings," and over $1 trillion from "winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."

The $1 trillion in defense "savings" that Reid is claiming his plan provides is based against a projection the Congressional Budget Office put out last March that said war costs would top $1.67 trillion over the next ten years. However, that projection was never meant to accurately forecast the costs of the wars over the next decade. The report just took this year's costs for Iraq and Afghanistan ($159 billion) and added inflation for every year in the future.

The CBO made its projection based on simple math and it never had any connection to policy realities, as the Congressional Research Service explained in a new report today.

"The CBO baseline reflects CBO's March 2011 estimate of FY2011 overseas funding with increases at the rate of inflation in subsequent years," said the new report, which was crafted for congressional offices but obtained by The Cable. "It is important to note that the administration projection is not really a policy-based estimate -- CBO takes the most recent number and that becomes their baseline."

In other words, the CBO number, which puts the cost of the wars at $1.7 trillion over the next ten years, was the projection if the U.S. kept the current number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan until 2020. However, nobody ever thought that was the plan. The CBO was required to do the math that way, as they do with all such projections.

The reality is that it is impossible to estimate the costs of the wars, because fundamental questions about U.S. policy toward both countries remain unanswered. For example, will the Afghanistan drawdown be complete by 2014, and what will be the pace of the drawdown? Will all U.S. troops be out of Iraq by the end of the year?

The CBO also put out numbers for war costs that assumed a gradual drawdown of troops. In fact, they put out two numbers, based on two different possible policy options. If U.S. policymakers decided to drawdown to 45,000 troops in both countries by 2015, the CBO projected that the cost of the wars would be $624 billion over 10 years. A steeper drawdown to 30,000 troops by 2013 would make the projection $422 billion over the next decade.

Reid appears to be counting the difference between the CBO's $1.7 trillion projection and its estimates of the cost of the wars after a steep drawdown as "savings." But that's problematic, because the base figure is simply a very high projection that has no connection to policy. Either way, the actual future drawdown plan is unknown.

A fact sheet issued by Reid's office only said, "Winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will save $1 trillion. Paul Ryan's budget also included this savings in its deficit reduction calculation, which was supported by 235 House Republicans and 40 Senate Republicans."

It's ironic that Reid defends his $1 trillion figure by pointing to the Ryan budget, because that document took its projections of future war costs from the Obama administration's February budget.  In that report, OMB budgeted an annual sum of $50 billion for the both wars. But that estimate was also made without knowing future U.S. policies toward Iraq and Afghanistan, and it's doubtful that the wars will cost $50 billion each year until 2020.

Gordon Adams, who led OMB's national security division during President Bill Clinton's administration, wrote that the $50 billion estimate was "what budget folks (like me) call a ‘plug' -- we know something will go there, but we don't know what it is."

By comparing fake numbers to each other, politicians can appear to be saving money, he claimed, without having to make actual defense cuts. Meanwhile, there's no real impact on the deficit.

"It abuses the budget process because the savings are mythological, not real, so they enforce no discipline on the Defense Department," Adams wrote. "And they are a fraud on the public, who will think a budget deal has cut the defense budget, when it has done no such thing."

In an interview today, Adams told The Cable that the whole episode is just another example of our leaders focusing on optics rather than getting down to the hard work of actually fixing our fiscal situation.

"Because it's too hard to really tackle the defense budget, first Ryan and now Reid have reached for these pseudo savings," he said. "The bottom line here is these are not budget savings. It doesn't make any sense."

The State Department is engaged in an intensive effort to convince Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) to lift his hold on the nomination of Bill Burns as deputy secretary of state, but Cornyn is demanding the administration clarify its policy on Taiwan arms sales before he'll do so.

Cornyn's hold on Burns's nomination has been in place since June 23, and it doesn't look like he will remove it any time soon. Cornyn likes Burns personally, his staff told The Cable, and he thinks Burns is right for the job, but Cornyn is using his power to hold up the nomination as leverage to force the Obama administration to do two things: release a long overdue report on Taiwan's air power capabilities to Congress, and finally acknowledge the Taiwan government's letter of request to buy 66 F-16 fighter planes from the United States.

"My primary concern is that the Obama Administration has allowed China to basically wield a veto over a U.S. arms sale that is in our national security interests, and I am troubled by the precedent this might set for the future of U.S.-China relations," Cornyn told The Cable. "It is outrageous, but not surprising that they are blocking a trade deal that supports many high-skilled jobs across the nation and would give our stalled economy a much-needed boost."

The F-16 is built by Lockheed Martin and related jobs are spread out over 44 states, but the bulk of the manufacturing and assembly takes place in Texas.

The State Department has been working hard behind the scenes to convince Cornyn to lift his hold. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has personally engaged Cornyn twice on the issue, once in a phone call and once by approaching him in person at an unrelated event. What's more, the State Department has been calling defense firms to ask them to find projects that could deliver jobs to Texas as a way to compensate Cornyn if the F-16 production line closes due to a lack of orders, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the interactions. One of the options the administration is considering is to offer Taiwan a package of upgrades for their existing fleet of older F-16s, the A and B models, which would provide Texas with a lower amount of jobs.

But Cornyn is not about to lift his hold on Burns in exchange for some Texas defense jobs, his staffer told The Cable in an interview.

"They seem to think we can be bought off with jobs on unrelated issues, but this is not a Texas parochial issue. This is about allowing the Chinese to have a veto over U.S. arms sales to anybody," the staffer said. "That's just unacceptable to let them do that, and that's exactly what's happening."

Congress mandated that the Obama administration issue a report on Taiwan's air power capabilities in the fiscal 2010 defense authorization bill, but that report is now several months late. Cornyn's staffer said that the Pentagon completed the report months ago but that the State Department is holding it up, and the report was last seen sitting on the desk of former Deputy Secretary James Steinberg.

"The State Department refuses to sign off on it," the staffer said. "It's in final form, it's been sitting there since February at the State Department, and they don't intend to sign it any time soon."

At an event at the Heritage Foundation, Cornyn said that Clinton told him she needed three more months before releasing the report, but the secretary didn't explain why. It's possible the administration wants to wait until after Vice President Joe Biden travels to China to meet Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, who is likely the next leader of the country, next month.

Our administration sources tell us that the State Department is not holding up the report unilaterally. Rather, they say that the administration is waiting to release parts of the report in order to have it be accompanied by a new overall approach to the issue, which they are still finalizing.

These sources also say there is some worry inside the administration that Cornyn will not be satisfied until or unless the administration actually agrees to sell Taiwan the planes.

As for Taiwan's letter of request to buy F-16s, the administration has been playing a game with the Taiwanese -- telling them privately not to submit the letter so the administration wouldn't have to formally reject it and can continue to claim that no official request has been made.

But senators and lobbyists working on the F-16 issue have been pressing the Taiwanese to just go ahead and make the request public in order to place pressure on the administration and force them to declare their position on the arms sales, one way or the other.

"We've been encouraging the Taiwanese to tape it to the front door and walk away, like getting served a subpoena," said a Washington lobbyist who works on the F-16 issue. He said the Taiwanese have been trying to get the United States to accept the letter since 2006.

Cornyn also wants the administration to acknowledge publicly that the Taiwanese want to buy the F-16s, and then make clear either that the United States is willing or unwilling to fulfill that request.

"If you think that selling Taiwan new F-16s is not in our interest, then say it. Stop hiding behind this ‘we haven't received an LOR from Taiwan' argument. We know they have just intimidated them out of submitting it. It's just a farce," the staffer said. "Come clean and stop playing this game."

There's very little chance the Obama administration would move forward with selling F-16s to Taiwan in the first place. The White House delayed the delivery of a $6.2 billion arms package to Taiwan that was left over from the Bush administration until after President Obama visited Beijing in November 2009. But when the delivery finally went through in January 2010, the Chinese went ballistic and cut off military-to-military relations with Washington.

The U.S. government is required by law to provide for the defense of Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act, but for years the United States has failed to provide Taiwan with the types of high-end systems that would allow the country to maintain parity with China. Meanwhile, the Chinese continue to stockpile missiles and other weapons on the coast opposite Taiwan.

"We have de facto ceased abiding by the TRA," said Bush administration Pentagon China official Dan Blumenthal. "We are supposed to sell arms to Taiwan based on their objective defense needs. Does Taiwan not need an air force? This started under Bush and has continued under Obama."

Heading into the 2012 presidential election season, Taiwan's friends in Washington, both on the Hill and on K Street, are preparing a new push to elevate the F-16 debate from an insider's policy discussion into a political issue. Their argument will be as much about jobs as U.S. national security: They plan to make the case that if Taiwan doesn't get to buy the F-16, the production line will close and thousands of U.S. workers will be out of a job.

"In the absence of the Taiwan order for 66 F-16s, the coming closing of the F-16 line in Fort Worth, Texas heralds a double hit for the interests of the United States that encompasses the strategic tool that the line represents for US national security interests as well as the essential job skills and manufacturing prowess that the F-16 supply chain and production facility represent for the US economy," said Rupert J. Hammond-Chambers, the president of the U.S. Taiwan Business Council.

The advocates say that without new orders, the F-16 production line will close in October 2013, and new orders for parts will start to peter out as early as the end of this year. They point to a report produced by Lockheed Martin, which makes the F-16, showing a state-by-state breakdown of the thousands of jobs that would be lost if the jet fighter's production line is closed.

"Particularly hard hit are states such as Texas, Florida and Ohio with in excess of 1,000 high paying aerospace jobs per state lost. This will be devastating for communities in these states indeed for all of the 40 plus states in the country whose communities contribute to the production of F-16s," Hammond-Chambers said.

Meanwhile, the Burns nomination remains stalled and the path to a compromise between Cornyn and Clinton remains unclear.

"They want the issue to go away, but we're not going to let it go away," the Cornyn staffer said.

What's more, if Cornyn does lift his hold, that doesn't mean it will be smooth sailing for Burns's nomination. We have confirmed that there is at least one more GOP Senate hold on the Burns nomination due to a separate issue.

The Senate indefinitely delayed its plan to debate the war in Libya on Tuesday, with Republicans decrying the very fact that the topic was on the table in the first place.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) cancelled the Senate's July 4 recess after President Barack Obama taunted lawmakers for leaving town while the country careens toward a fiscal crisis due to the lack of a deal over how to raise the debt ceiling. But since there's no progress on that front, Reid brought up the Kerry-McCain resolution to authorize Obama's military intervention in Libya.

But several senior Republicans took to the floor on Tuesday afternoon to object to debating the Libya mission at all and pledged to vote no on moving to debate the war -- arguing that the budget crisis was more pressing. Sensing that the vote was doomed to fail, Reid pulled the measure off the floor.

"Just to speak to how dysfunctional the U.S. senate is, we're here over the debt ceiling, but instead of focusing on the issue at hand, we're going to focus on something that's irrelevant possibly and has nothing to do with why we're here," Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), said on the Senate floor on Tuesday afternoon. "Let's not take up an issue that will have no effect on and has nothing to do with the debt ceiling, and take on those issues that will."

Corker is a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Several other key Republicans, such as Senate Armed Services Committee members Robert Wicker (R-MS) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL), promised to vote no on cloture, arguing not the merits of the war but rather the need to move immediately to budget matters.

The Senate has avoided a full vote on the Libya war for over three months and the complicated politics of the issue have placed both Republicans and Democrats in an uncomfortable position. For Democrats, they are being pressed by the administration to back the president's decision. Voting no risks the ire of the White House. But if they vote yes, their constituencies may fault them for supporting yet another war with an uncertain timeframe and costs.

For Republicans, voting no would risk ceding the national security high ground to a Democratic president; voting yes would put them on record pledging more American treasure to yet another unpopular and expensive foreign intervention.

Before Reid pulled the measure, several other senators were also set to vote no on debating the Libya war tonight based on their opposition to the mission or their anger at the president for not properly consulting Congress before attacking. Senators opposed to the Libya war overall include Sens. Jim Webb (D-VA), Ron Paul (R-KY), and Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking Republican Richard Lugar (R-IN).

In his own floor speech on Thursday, Lugar objected to authorizing the Libya mission based on the cost and his dissatisfaction with the administration's justifications.

"American intervention in Libya did not come as a result of a disciplined assessment of our vital interests or an authorization debate in Congress," Lugar said. "A civil war in Libya is not a priority that required American military and economic investments. It is an expensive diversion that leaves the United States and our European allies with fewer assets to respond to other contingencies."

Lugar maintains that the War Powers Resolution does apply to the mission in Libya, despite the administration's claim there are no "hostilities" going on there, and he continues to demand clearer explanations of the mission's objectives, timelines, and costs.

"Even if one believes that the president somehow had the legal authority to initiate and continue U.S. military operations in Libya, it does not mean that going to war without Congress was either wise or helpful to the operation," Lugar said. "There was no good reason why President Obama should have failed to seek congressional authorization to go to war in Libya."

The House already rejected a similar measure to authorize the Libya war by a 123 to 295 vote on June 24. The House also narrowly rejected a motion to largely defund the mission, but that measure would have passed if not for some lawmakers' belief that it constituted a backdoor authorization for the war.

If today's vote had passed with 60 yes votes, a full debate over the war would have immediately followed, setting up a final vote on the Kerry-McCain resolution on Thursday afternoon.

But now, the Libya war debate will be shelved in the Senate until Reid brings it up again, probably after the debt ceiling deadline of Aug. 2, and perhaps much later. Our Hill sources tell us they expect the any further senate debate over Libya to be postponed until after the August congressional recess.

Obama administration officials are claiming a partial victory today because the House rejected a measure to defund the Libya war, even after rejecting a separate measure that would have authorized the war. But the numbers don't tell the whole story.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to put lipstick on the pig of today's admonishment of the administration by Congress,  saying that she was "gratified that the House has decisively rejected efforts to limit funding" for the intervention. She was referring to the House's rejection of a bill put forth by Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL) that would have shut off the spigot of funds for most, but not all, U.S. military operations in Libya.

The vote failed 180-238 - but, in fact, there were more than enough lawmakers to pass the measure. Of the 149 Democrats who stuck with the president, up to 70 of them are totally opposed to the Libya intervention and want to see it completely defunded as soon as possible. They voted "no" on the Rooney's bill because they thought it was too weak, did not cut off all funds, and implicitly authorized the intervention.  

These 70 Democrats make up the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), the largest caucus within the House Democratic Caucus, whose leadership includes Reps. Mike Honda (D-CA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ).

"Members of Congress voted no because the bill provided funding and legal authority for everything we're currently doing. It was back door authorization. Members didn't support authorizing what we're doing now in Libya," Michael Shank, Honda's spokesman, told The Cable. "The majority of the CPC voted no on the Rooney vote because of this."

In other words, if the GOP had put forth a stronger anti-Libya resolution, the progressive Democrats would have joined them and it would have passed. Despite what Clinton or other administration officials may say, the bill's failure cannot be seen as an endorsement of the Libya war.

The argument that the Rooney bill indirectly authorized the Libya war was made Friday on the House floor by many, including Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), who said:

"This bill purports to cut off funding for combat in Libya. In doing so it simply forbids what the constitution already forbids, the waging of war without explicit congressional authorization. But then it specifically grants to the president what up until now he has completely lacked: Congressional authority to engage in every conceivable belligerent act short of actually pulling the trigger."

"Refueling bombers on their way to targets, identifying and selecting targets, guiding munitions to their targets, logistical support, operational planning... these are all acts of war in direct support of belligerence at war and this bill authorizes them," he said. "Let's not enter a war through the backdoor when we have already decided not to enter it through the front."

And in case there was any doubt on the CPC's position, their leaders issued the following statement:

The Co-Chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus Peace and Security Taskforce call on Congress and the President to immediately end our war in Libya.  The US has been engaged in hostilities for over 90 days without congressional approval, which undermines not only the powers of the legislative branch but also the legal checks and balances put in place nearly 40 years ago to avoid abuse by any single branch of government.

We call on our colleagues in Congress to exercise their legitimate authority and oversight and immediately block any funding for this war. Before the Executive branch further weakens the War Powers Resolution, and before we attack another country in the name of our "responsibility to protect," we must recommit ourselves to our Constitutional duty and obligation to hold the purse strings and the right to declare war.  For decades, the House recognized the need for appropriate checks and balances before another war was waged. We must do the same. We call on Congress to exhibit similar foresight by promptly ending this war and pledging to uphold the laws that characterize America's commitment to democratic governance.    

The House of Representatives, in a culmination of over three months of Congressional frustration with the Obama administration's handling of the Libya intervention, voted against authorizing the war 123-295 and is set to vote for cutting off most of the funding for the mission.

The resolution to authorize the President Obama's intervention in Libya, sponsored by Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), garnered only 8 GOP votes.

But all of this could have been avoided if overworked top Obama administration officials had not been too physically exhausted to pay a little more attention to Capitol Hill, according to the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

"It's crazy that we're fighting over this the way we are," Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA) said in a roundtable with reporters just now.

The scene here at the Capitol on this sunny, summer Friday morning is surreal, as the three-hour debate continues. Lawmakers, who must still vote a resolution to cut off all funds for the war sponsored by Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL), are continuously unleashing statements on why the Libya war represents a threat to the Constitution, a plundering of the Treasury, or an overreach of U.S. power.

The arguments against the war are all over the map. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) actually said the votes were the best way to prevent a decades-long slide into "monarchy." Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) launched into a diatribe about the abuse of wartime contractors.

Democrats like Howard Berman (D-CA) and Jim McDermott (D-WA) tried to defend the president's policy by making the humanitarian argument and focusing on the limited nature of U.S. involvement. But they were shouted down by the war's opponents, many even from within their own party. "What, we don't have enough wars going on?" said Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), sarcastically.

To be clear, the votes today won't actually force President Barack Obama to terminate the U.S. military intervention in Libya. But though the votes are largely symbolic, that doesn't mean they aren't hugely important. The Obama administration realizes the negative impact of a rebuke by the House, and is even resorting to rhetoric that implies the GOP might actually be helping Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi.

"Who's side are you on?" Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said earlier this week, showing her deep frustration with Congressional opposition to the Libya war.

McKeon said this was exactly the kind of unhelpful statement that showed the administration's lack of respect for Congress and its fumbling of the politics of the Libya war.

"She is one of the ones that caused us to be where we are," McKeon shot back, in response to a question from The Cable.

So how did we get here? On March 17 -- the same day that Obama was pursuing the authorization for war at the United Nations and two days after he decided he wanted to attack Libya -- the president had a 90-minute lunch with House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) but never mentioned Libya once, McKeon said. McKeon left Washington that night, only to receive a phone call 10 a.m. Friday morning, saying, "The president wants you in the White House in an hour for a meeting."

"It's like at the last minute somebody thought ‘here's something we should check off, talk to the Congress,'" McKeon said.

When Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates eventually did come to Capitol Hill to brief Congress a week later, someone asked Clinton directly to address the issue of Congressional authorization and the War Powers Resolution.

"[Clinton] said, paraphrase, ‘It doesn't matter what you think, we're doing what we're doing.'" McKeon said. "I heard from a lot of people on both sides of the aisle that that really bothered them."

"Somebody else told me Secretary Clinton was living on about 3 or 4 hours sleep a night. So I just gave her the benefit of the doubt on that, I figured she was just tired and stressed when she made that comment," McKeon added.

McKeon then asked Gates to brief his committee for 3 hours, but Gates negotiated down the amount of time, telling McKeon, "I am exhausted... just physically," McKeon said.

Communication with Congress did not improve from then on, leaving lawmakers to come up with their own views on the war, McKeon said.

"There are a lot of people in the conference that feel the president has violated the constitution. And yet, some of those same people, they're not opposed to the mission in Libya," McKeon said." They think if he had met with Congress or in some way done a better job of setting up what he was going to do, they would feel much more comfortable and we wouldn't even be at the point where we are at."

McKeon is the quintessential GOP defense hawk in Congress. He is for steadily increasing defense budgets. He thinks Obama made a mistake by announcing the drawdown of troops in Afghanistan. He is concerned that the GOP is risking its credibility on national security.

"Conservative Republicans have a three legged stool: defense, fiscal responsibility, and social issues. Right now the stool is out of balance because fiscal matters are dominating everything," he said.

But when it comes to Libya, even he just doesn't see the logic of the endeavor.

"Why aren't we in Syria, why aren't we in Yemen," McKeon said.  [Obama's] argument, you could drive a tank through it. It doesn't make sense."

He doesn't believe President Obama's contention that the United States has taken itself out of the lead role in Libya. And he doesn't buy that a NATO-led mission that's dependent on the U.S. military is much different than any other international mission where the U.S. military is involved.

"The President is in a box because he's getting hit from the left as far as anything he does with the military, so he used [NATO] as cover," McKeon said. "NATO is us. So I think that was just a thing the president kind of used to say ‘hey it's not us.' They can't do it without us."

McKeon believes that the Libya war is currently in a stalemate, hindered by a mission plan that is meant to protect Libyan civilians, but does not permit the targeting of the despot who is killing those civilians.

So what does McKeon think we should do now? Kill Qaddafi. "We should get him, whatever it takes."

Does that include ground troops, we asked? "No."

The Senate Armed Services Committee unveiled a new bill on Friday that includes provisions to halt the Obama administration's plans to reshape the U.S. military presence in Okinawa, Guam, and South Korea.

Committee chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) and ranking Republican John McCain (R-AZ), along with Jim Webb (D-VA), called for an entirely new plan for basing U.S. troops in East Asia on May 11, arguing that the current plans were no longer feasible or cost effective. They proposed halting the realignment of U.S. troops in South Korea, scaling back the plan to drastically increase the U.S.  military presence on Guam, and changing the plan to relocate the controversial Futenma Air Base on Okinawa to a new facility elsewhere on the island.

Today, the committee's bill put many of those ideas in play by including them in its annual policy bill. If the bill is approved by the Senate, and if these ideas then survive negotiations with the House, the administration's already troubled plan would be placed on hold.

"The current plans for maintaining our troops there are unsustainable. They are incredibly expensive," Levin told reporters on a Friday conference call. "The costs... are out of sight and can no longer be sustained."

Specifically, the bill does four things. First, it prohibits funding the realignment of U.S. Marine Corps forces from Okinawa to Guam until the commandant of the Marine Corps provides an updated plan, and requires the defense secretary to submit a master plan to Congress detailing construction costs and schedules. Second, the bill requires the Department of Defense to study the feasibility of relocating some of the Air Force assets at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa to other bases in Japan or to Guam, and moving Marine Corps aviation assets currently at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma to Kadena Air Base rather than building an expensive replacement facility at Camp Schwab, another base located on Okinawa. This idea is extremely unpopular in Japan.

Third, the bill would cut approximately $150 million in military construction projects requested for the realignment of U.S. Marine Corps forces from Okinawa to Guam. And fourth, the bill would prevent the obligation of any funds for "tour normalization" on the Korean Peninsula until the secretary of the Army provides Congress with a master plan to complete the program. Tour normalization is the term for allowing service members to bring their families to South Korea to create a more "normal" long-term lifestyle for them there.

In total, these moves are all a part of the senators' goal to scale back the ambitious Okinawa-Guam relocation plan and cut costs by preventing the build up of more military infrastructure in South Korea.

"These recommendations are workable, cost-effective, will reduce the burden on the Okinawan people, and will strengthen the American contribution to the security of the region," Webb said in a statement.

President Barack Obama and members of the National Security Staff rejected the senators' ideas when Obama met Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan on the sidelines of the G8 last month in France.

"The two leaders agreed that it's important for Japan to continue its efforts to follow through on the agreement of last May to implement the realignment road map on Okinawa in order to ensure that the U.S.-Japan alliance and the basing arrangements are on a solid footing as we continue to work to enhance, revitalize and modernize our alliance," NSC Senior Director Dan Russel said after the meeting.

But Levin said there was no point pretending that the current plans were either implementable or sustainable and that he was determined to use the Congress's power of the purse to force the administration to explain its plans in more detail and then change them if necessary.

"We are basically putting these changes on hold in all three places, Korea, Guam, Okinawa, while this major review is taking place," he said. "We are not withdrawing or reducing our presence, we are trying to streamline it... we do this is a way which is honest and which is sustainable."

For Levin, the move is part of his overall effort to show that his committee is budget conscious. "The problem is the current plan isn't affordable, not workable. And on the Okinawa part with Camp Schwab, it is so expensive, so massive, so unachievable, and so unwise."

Overall, the Senate bill, which was negotiated behind closed doors, would provide $682.5 billion for national defense in fiscal 2012, including $117.8 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan  and $18.1 billion for national security programs in the Energy Department. The funding would be $5.9 billion less than requested for the base defense budget.

You can also read a very long summary sheet on the bill compiled by the committee.

SINGAPORE - The U.S. will increase its military involvement and commitment to Asia, especially Southeast Asia, despite having a cash-strapped, worn out military machine, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a conference of major Asian military leaders Saturday morning.

"History's dustbin is littered with dictators and aggressors who underestimated America's resilience, will, and underlying strength," he declared.

Gates, speaking at the 10^th annual IISS Shangri-La Security Dialogue, laid out several ways in which the U.S. will ramp up its military presence in the region, adding attention and resources to the military relationships with countries such as Singapore and Australia, in order to maintain America's position as the guarantor of regional peace and security. The moves are not directed specifically at China, Gates' aides claimed.

"[W]e meet today at a time when the United States faces a daunting set of challenges at home and abroad, when questions are being raised about the sustainability and credibility of our commitments around the world. These questions are serious and legitimate," Gates told the audience of defense and military officials from 35 Asian and Pacific countries.

He acknowledged that the U.S. military is strained from 10 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan and that the U.S. economy is forcing unprecedented downward pressure on defense budgets. 

"But at the same time, it is important, in this place, before this audience, to recognize an equally compelling set of facts with respect to America's position in Asia. A record demonstrating that, irrespective of the tough times the U.S. faces today, or the tough budget choices we confront in the coming years, that America's core interests as a Pacific nation - as a country that conducts much of its trade in the region - will endure," he said.

Gates laid out several ways in which the U.S. was preparing to increase its military presence and infrastructure in Southeast Asia. In Australia, he talked about increasing the U.S. Naval presence "to respond more rapidly to humanitarian disasters," upgrading military facilities on the Indian Ocean, and ramping up military training exercises, "activities that could involve other partners in the region," he said. 

For Singapore, Gates said the U.S. would deploy more ships there, including the new Littoral Combat Ship, move more U.S. military supplies to Singapore to "improve disaster response," and upgrade command and control capabilities there.

"Taken together, all of these developments demonstrate the commitment of the United States to sustaining a robust military presence in Asia - one that underwrites stability by supporting and reassuring allies while deterring, and if necessary defeating, potential adversaries," Gates said. 

Gates talked in his speech about the new U.S. military focus on what's called "Air-Sea Battle," which is meant to overcome anti-access and area denial scenarios "to ensure that America's military will continue to be able to deploy, move, and strike over great distances in defense of our allies and vital interests."

But don't think of China when thinking about those "potential adversaries," three senior defense officials told reporter in a background briefing before the speech. 

"A lot of this seems to be aimed at reassuring allies, but that seems to have beneath it more of an adversarial relationship with China, as opposed to the today message of ‘chummy, chummy,'" one reporter pointed out to the officials.

"You assume all those things are directed at China... they aren't exclusively China related, but it obviously does apply to them as well," a senior defense official said. 

"The anti-access capabilities investments, there's only one country that worries us, and that's China," another reporter pointed out.

"That's only one part of talking about our interests and our continuing engagement in the region," another senior defense official insisted. 

So how is the U.S. going to pay for all this? Well, that's not exactly clear. The Pentagon is doing a top to bottom review now in order to help find the $400 billion of cuts in security spending that President Obama ordered over the next 12 years.

Gates said that the review isn't complete but certain types of modernization programs would be protected, including air superiority and mobility, long-range strike, nuclear deterrence, maritime access, space and cyber, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.   

"Though the review is not complete, I am confident that these key remaining modernization programs - systems that are of particular importance to our military strategy in Asia - will rank at or near the top of our defense budget priorities in the future," he said.

Gates' speech contained none of the criticisms of China's People's Liberation Army that he laid out in his speech to the same conference last year. "We are also now working together with China to build a positive, cooperative, and comprehensive relationship," he said. 

Gates steps down July 1 and CIA Director Leon Panetta has been nominated to replace him. Gates met with Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Liang Guanglie Friday. Liang addresses the conference Sunday.

President Barack Obama's favorite general , Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman James Cartwright, appears to be successfully fighting off a whisper campaign about his suspect personal behavior, as several senators offered praise this week for his service. In the event that Cartwright is nominated to succeed Adm. Mike Mullen as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this bipartisan support bodes well for his eventual confirmation.

Cartwright, who was identified as Obama's favorite in Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars, is seen as the frontrunner for the position of Joint Chiefs chairman when Mullen steps down this autumn. However, unidentified enemies in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill have launched a campaign to undermine his chances to be nominated. According to Pentagon sources, many top brass have never forgiven Cartwright for going around Mullen and providing Obama with an alternative plan for Afghanistan during the debate over the Afghanistan surge that included recommendations for a smaller U.S. footprint in the country.

Cartwright was also the subject of a classified Inspector General's report that looked into anonymous allegations that he acted inappropriately with a young, female aide on an overseas trip in 2009. Cartwright was cleared of those charges, but Pentagon sources also report that Cartwright's treatment of his wife, including that he asked her to leave his house, has irked other senior officers' wives, including Mullen's wife.

Nevertheless, the whisper campaign against him continues. The latest salvo came Thursday in a thinly sourced report in the Washington Times, which stated that Cartwright "is said to be under scrutiny by three senators who were alerted to character issues," and repeated the rumor that his wife, Sandee Cartwright, "is planning to go public with her feelings about her husband."

The Washington Times identified the three women senators who supposedly are upset with Cartwright as Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Barbara Boxer (D-CA). Collins is on the Armed Services Committee, which would need to approve Cartwright's nomination.

The Cable caught up with Collins, who denied she had ever expressed any concerns about Cartwright to the White House, the Pentagon, or anybody else.

"I have worked with Gen. Cartwright. I think very highly of Gen. Cartwright. I haven't taken a position [on him becoming Joint Chiefs chairman] because he hasn't been nominated," Collins told The Cable. "But I think highly of him and I've worked closely with him over the past few years, so that information is completely wrong."

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the second-ranking Republican on the committee, told The Cable that he also had no reservations about Cartwright's possible nomination and would support Cartwright if Obama chooses him.

The committee's chairman, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), said he wasn't aware there were any senators who had expressed concerns about Cartwright's extracurricular activities as alleged in the IG report.

"I don't know that there's any senator upset about it. I've delved into it and I think, no problems there," Levin told The Cable. Levin said he would strongly support Cartwright if he were nominated, "because I think he's extraordinarily competent."

If Cartwright doesn't get the nod, however, there are several top military officers waiting in the wings. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the list includes: Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the current Army chief of staff; Army Gen. Ray Odierno, who is now in charge of closing down Joint Forces Command; Adm. Eric Olson, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command; and Adm. James Stavridis, NATO's supreme commander in Europe.