Walter Pincus

OPINION -- Those of us old enough to remember the 1980s scandal of the Defense Department paying $640 for a toilet seat for the C-5 Air Force transport plane will see a more modern version in the activities of TransDigm Group, Inc., as disclosed at a House Committee on Oversight ...

OPINION -- There was a flurry of arms control talk after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the Trump administration is “at the very beginning of conversations about renewing” the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START).  He made the comments during testimony April 10, before the Senate ...

OPINION -- While the media and Congress have kept the public focused on the Mueller report and the next election, there are national security budgetary issues that are piling up that require attention. For example, a lack of spare parts has kept some 350 F-35 Lightning Joint Strike Fighters, already ...

The U.S. is trying to quickly gear up the nation’s ability to fight in space and our best clues into just how they're planning to do it, are coming from congressional testimony. “Space is a warfighting environment just as is air, land and sea,” Air Force Gen. John W. Raymond, ...

OPINION -- Set aside for a moment how you feel about building the wall. There is a more immediate issue in controlling the flow of illegal traffic and drugs on the southwest border, and that is the hiring and retaining of Customs and Border Patrol Officers. With all of the recent ...

OPINION -- One result from the Hanoi Summit: North Korea continues to be a member of the elite nuclear weapons club, and probably will remain so for years to come. National Security Advisor John Bolton, on CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday, acknowledged that North Korea kept producing weapons grade ...

OPINION -- Prior to President Trump, only two Presidents have initiated use of the special emergency authority [U.S. Code Title 10, Section 2808] to transfer un-obligated military construction money to new projects without Congressional approval. The original legislation, passed in 1981, at the height of the Cold War, was titled ...

OPINION -- The “tremendous progress” with North Korea that President Trump has repeatedly claimed does not approach the success that Kim Jong Un has achieved, based on the status of negotiations as described by Trump’s own Special Representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun. Biegun said his meeting this week with ...

OPINION -- Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer last week joined the very public chorus of defense experts in questioning whether President Trump’s call for reducing fiscal 2020 DoD spending to $700 billion will actually take place. With the deficit soaring, Trump back in mid-October, told his cabinet members, with TV ...

OPINION -- U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials have treated WikiLeaks as a hostile, foreign intelligence service and Julian Assange, its director, as a potential target for criminal prosecution, since the Obama administration. Last week’s inadvertent disclosure of a sealed federal indictment against Assange in Federal District Court in Eastern ...

OPINION -- Democrats controlling the House next January should see an Armed Services Committee that supports some reduced defense spending in fiscal 2020, and an Intelligence Committee that protects, rather-than-attacks, the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Both committees will open aggressive inquiries into Trump activities in ...

OPINION -- While President Trump’s claimed $110 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia remains “fake,” and shouldn’t be even considered “news,” there are deliveries of past sales in the pipeline to the Saudis that should be held up in response to the murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. ...

OPINION -- Brett M. Kavanaugh ought to be questioned on how a President, alleged to have violated a federal criminal law - say conspiring to violate the Federal Election Laws - could be investigated based on the views he promoted in his 2009 article, “Separation of Powers During the Forty-Fourth Presidency ...

OPINION -- The Senate last week added $1.2 billion to the fiscal 2019 Defense Appropriations Bill to increase the Pentagon’s offensive and defensive hypersonic capabilities. It was done as a direct response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s March 1, speech in which he claimed Russia was working on hypersonic weapons ...

OPINION -- Don’t believe that President Trump’s retaliatory act of revoking former-CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance “will have a potentially chilling effect on the United States’ law enforcement and intelligence officers,” as the New York Times wrote in its Friday front page story. In my view, it will have ...

OPINION -- Congress has to take a serious, long, hard, public look at President Trump’s June off-the-cuff idea of a Space Corps, and turn down, rather than blindly approve, the idea for a fourth separate military service, with its own Secretary of Space.  It’s clear that the Trump administration has ...

OPINION -- It’s time to put Paul J. Manafort into the chronology of the Russian intelligence hacking program, as described in Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller III’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers, released last Friday. The indictment provides a clear reminder that the hacking effort went into full swing during the ...

OPINION -- Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tried Sunday to use current U.S. relations with an old wartime enemy, the Communist government in Vietnam, as a prod for Kim Jong-un to move forward on the June 12 Singapore Agreement that is supposed to lead to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. ...

Journalists need to find a way to pin down President Trump, and his June 10 press conference in Singapore provided a clear example of one way to do it. The subject was whether Trump had brought up human rights in his meeting with North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un. When first asked about ...