Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned Wednesday that the Pentagon may have to mothball up to three Navy aircraft carriers and order additional sharp reductions in the size of the Army and Marine Corps if Congress doesn't act to avoid massive budget cuts beginning in 2014.
Speaking to Pentagon reporters, and indirectly to Congress, Hagel said that the full result of the sweeping budget cuts over the next 10 years could leave the nation with an ill-prepared, under-equipped military doomed to face more technologically advanced enemies.
In his starkest terms to date, Hagel laid out a worst-case scenario for the U.S. military if the Pentagon is forced to slash more than $50 billion from the 2014 budget and $500 billion over the next 10 years as a result of Congressionally-mandated automatic spending cuts.
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Furloughs hit American defense workers
The Pentagon has been ratcheting up a persistent drumbeat about the dire effects of the budget cuts on national defense, and as Congress continues to wrangle over spending bills on Capitol Hill.
Going from 11 to eight or nine carrier strike groups would bring the Navy to its lowest number since World War II. And the troop cuts would shear the Army back to levels not seen since at least 1950, eroding the military's ability to keep forces deployed and combat ready overseas.
Detailing options, Hagel said America may have to choose between having a highly capable but significantly smaller military and having a larger force while reducing special operations forces, limiting research and cutting or curtailing plans to upgrade weapons systems.
That second option, he said, would likely result in the U.S. military using older, less effective equipment against more technologically advanced adversaries. And it would have a greater impact on private defense companies around the country.
The U.S., said Hagel, risks fielding a military force that in the next few years would be unprepared due to a lack of training, maintenance and upgraded equipment.
And, even if the Pentagon chooses the most dramatic cuts, Hagel said it would still "fall well short" of meeting the reductions required by the automatic budget cuts, particularly during the first five years.
While noting that no final decisions have been made, Hagel laid out a few specific ideas under consideration.
He said that to achieve the savings by shrinking the force, the Pentagon might have to cut more than 100,000 additional soldiers from the Army - which is already planning to go from a wartime high of about 570,000 to 490,000 by 2017. And the current plan to reduce the size of the Marine Corp to 182,000 from a high of about 205,000 could also be changed - cutting it to as few as 150,000 Marines.
He added that the Air Force could lose as many as five combat air squadrons as well as a number of other bomber and cargo aircraft.
"This strategic choice would result in a force that would be technologically dominant, but would be much smaller and able to go fewer places and do fewer things, especially if crises occurred at the same time in different regions of the world," said Hagel.
Another option, he said, would be to make fewer cuts in the size of the force, and instead cancel or curtail many modernization programs.
In addition he said that the Pentagon is taking a close look at cuts to health care benefits, military housing allowances, cost-of-living adjustments and civilian pay raises.
Hagel repeated his plans - announced two weeks ago - to cut top Pentagon and military staff and spending by 20 percent. The savings, which will apply to his office, that of the Joint Chief's chairman and also the Pentagon headquarters offices of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps., could total between $1.5 billion and $2 billion over the next five years and will target personnel, including civilians and contractors.
The details Hagel described Wednesday are the result of a lengthy review by top Pentagon and military leaders that looked at the impact of budget cuts on the department and developed a series of options to deal with them.
The budget cuts stem from a law enacted two years ago that ordered the government to come up with $1.2 trillion in savings over a decade. The law included the threat of annual automatic cuts as a way of forcing lawmakers to reach a deal, but they have been unable to do so.
As a result, come January, the Pentagon faces a cut of $54 billion from current spending if Congress fails to reverse the automatic cuts, according to calculations by Capitol Hill budget aides. The base budget must be trimmed to $498 billion, with cuts of about 4 percent hitting already reduced spending on defense, nuclear weapons and military construction.
Congress has shown little inclination to undo the so-called sequester cuts, though talks between the White House and a handful of Senate Republicans have intensified in recent weeks.
Some lawmakers and staff aides say the new, deeper reductions in the Pentagon's budget to could be the jolt that prompts lawmakers to step back from the automatic cuts.
There is no mistaking the leader of the University of Wisconsin football team?s offensive line this season.
Ryan Groy is the only projected senior starter, as well as the leader in games played (41) and starts (20) among the linemen. He?s also in the mold of past leaders in the line, a guy who isn?t afraid to speak his mind, to teammates or the media.
The Badgers are coming off a remarkable three-year run on the line: Seven players have been drafted in that span, including three in the first round and one in the second.
Gabe Carimi won the 2010 Outland Trophy, four linemen were named first-team All-Americans and seven different linemen earned first-team All-Big Ten Conference.
Groy, from Middleton, could serve as a bridge from a glorious past to an uncertain future, due mostly to a shrinkage in scholarship numbers that has left depth as a major concern.
?To me, the key is the offensive line staying healthy, because the numbers are thin,? UW coach Gary Andersen said. ?They?re good players, but those numbers are thin.?
New offensive line coach T.J. Woods said in the spring that he would like to be at 16 scholarship linemen. The Badgers had 10 in the spring ? and frequently had only eight healthy linemen practicing ? and should have 12 scholarship players and six walk-ons when preseason camp opens.
Woods acknowledged the depth won?t be replenished
in one recruiting cycle.
?You try to build the walk-on program,? he said of one remedy. ?That?s one of my big goals. This place has a long tradition of walk-on players ? not just O-linemen. ? It?s awesome for me to be a part of it and I want to try and build that walk-on program back up.?
Until the numbers improve, Woods will plug the holes with versatile players such as Groy, who will fill a vital spot by moving from left guard to left tackle.
One reason Woods didn?t mind being shorthanded in the spring is because it forced players to get comfortable playing multiple spots. In addition to Groy, junior Dallas Lewallen played left tackle and center before settling in at left guard.
?I don?t look at it as a hindrance or a liability that we don?t have a lot of guys,? Woods said. ?We?re just preparing ourselves for week eight of the Big Ten season.?
No matter where he lines up, Groy is taking ownership of the group, which is what Woods wanted.
?A position group is only as good as its leaders,? Woods said. ?It?s their group. Ryan has his senior year one time; that?s it.?
It?s especially important on the offensive line, where all five players must work together ? and successes and failures are shared.
?I think that?s the biggest difference with the offensive line. More than any other position, your fate is tied to four other guys? performances,? Woods said.
The other returning starters, besides Groy, are junior right guard Kyle Costigan, who missed all of the spring following offseason knee surgery, and junior Rob Havenstein, who started every game last season at right tackle.
Redshirt freshman Dan Voltz, who enrolled early and has gone through two springs, is the projected starter at center.
Lewallen, who has overcome knee problems and made it all the way through the spring, will likely get the first crack at left guard. He could be pushed by sophomore Ray Ball, or possibly senior Zac Matthias, the backup right guard.
Groy smiled when it was suggested to him over the summer that some people think this line may not be as good as recent seasons.
?Oh, yeah?? he said. ?I think we?ll be fine. The Wisconsin O-line is not changing any time soon. So we?ll be fine.?
A flexible, customizable operating system that's farmed out to third-party hardware makers and dominates market share but not profits? You're not the only one experiencing d?j? vu. The parallels of Android and Windows are striking. But can that which is unique about Android save it from the fate befalling Microsoft's stumbling OS?
He then led cops on a car chase until he crashed and was arrested.
Brian McGhee, 29, who wrestled under the names DT Porter and Donovan ?The Future? Ruddick, stabbed girlfriend Bianca McGaughey, 25, several times outside her Tampa home at around 8:30 p.m. [Thursday]?Around the same time, he posted a photo of a bloody body part on Facebook, cops said.
He then led police on a chase through Tampa in a Pontiac Grand Prix before he crashed into a guardrail and was captured, the Times reported.
Bangalore, July 26 (IANS): India's advanced weather satellite Insat-3D was launched early Friday onboard Ariane-5 rocket from Kourou in French Guiana off the Pacific coast.
"After a perfect lift-off at 01:24 a.m. from the European Arianespace spaceport at Kourou, the two-tonne advanced weather satellite was placed in the geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO) 32 minutes later, about 36,000 km above from earth," the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said in a statement here.
The sophisticated spacecraft is orbiting at perigee (closer to earth) 249.9 km and apogee of 35,880 km in the orbit.
"The satellite's solar panel was automatically deployed soon after it was separated from the rocket's upper cryogenic stage and our master control facility at Hassan took over its control for further manoeuvres," the statement said. Hassan is about 200km from Bangalore.
Preliminary checks of the subsystems showed the health of the spacecraft was satisfactory.
"The MCT will perform the orbit-raising manoeuvres over the next few days using the satellite's propulsion system to place it in the intended geostationary orbit," the statement pointed out.
The satellite's observational instruments will be switched on during the second week of August after it reaches the orbital slot at 82 degrees east to the equatorial plane for extensive tests by the MCF.
The four instruments onboard the spacecraft are Imager, Sounder, Data Relay Transponder and Satellite Aided Search & Rescue. The six channel imager can take weather pictures of the earth and has improved features compared to the instrument in (Kalpana-1) and Insat-3A, the two Indian geostationary satellites, which have been providing weather services over the past decade.
"The 19-channel sounder payload adds a new dimension to monitor weather through its atmospheric sounding system, and provides vertical profiles of temperature, humidity and integrated ozone," the statement noted.
Data relay transponder receives meteorological, hydrological, oceanographic parameters sent by the automatic data collection platforms located at remote uninhabited places and relays them to a processing centre for generating accurate weather forecasts.
The search and rescue instrument picks up and relays alert signals originating from the distress beacons of maritime, aviation and land-based users and relays them to the mission control centre to facilitate speedy search and rescue operations.
The state-run space agency will process the satellite's data and the derivation of meteorological parameters with the Indian meteorological department in New Delhi.
An indigenously designed and developed meteorological data processing system has been commissioned at IMD, with a mirror site at the space agency's space applications centre at Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh and Ahmedabad in Gujarat.
Did you know that the US government's third-largest agency is ramping up a 20-year, $4.5 billion construction project that will turn the grounds of a former mental hospital into an "elaborate" headquarters for its sprawling network of agencies? It's already a decade behind schedule and $1 billion over budget.
A flexible, customizable operating system that's farmed out to third-party hardware makers and dominates market share but not profits? You're not the only one experiencing d?j? vu. The parallels of Android and Windows are striking. But can that which is unique about Android save it from the fate befalling Microsoft's stumbling OS?
