Looking beyond the wars he inherited, President Barack Obama on Thursday launched a reshaping and shrinking of the military. He vowed to preserve U.S. pre-eminence even as the Army and Marine Corps shed troops and the administration considers reducing its arsenal of nuclear weapons.

The changes won’t come without risk, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said. But he called it acceptable and, because of budget restraints, inevitable.

In a presentation at the Pentagon, Obama said the U.S. is “turning a page” after having killed Osama bin Laden, withdrawn troops from Iraq and begun to wind down the war in Afghanistan. He outlined a vision for the future that some Republican lawmakers quickly dubbed wrong-headed. [Read more...]

Iran threatened on Tuesday to take action if the U.S. Navy moves an aircraft carrier into the Gulf, Tehran’s most aggressive statement yet after weeks of saber-rattling as new U.S. and EU financial sanctions take a toll on its economy.

The United States dismissed the Iranian threat, saying it was proof that sanctions imposed over Iran’s nuclear program were working. The Pentagon said it would keep sending carrier strike groups through the Gulf regardless.

The prospect of sanctions targeting the oil sector in a serious way for the first time has hit Iran’s rial currency, which reached a record low on Tuesday and has fallen by 40 percent against the dollar in the past month. [Read more...]

The world immediately becomes a far more dangerous place.

The International Atomic Energy Agency this week released its most detailed assessment to date about Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, and if “Paranormal Activity 3″ wasn’t enough to keep you awake at night, the report’s 14-page annex detailing the state of Iran’s weapons work should do the trick. It lays to rest the fantasies that an Iranian bomb is many years off, or that the intelligence is riddled with holes and doubts, or that the regime’s intentions can’t be guessed by their activities.

So much, then, for the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which asserted “with high confidence” that Iran had abandoned its nuclear-weapons work in 2003 and ended any chance that the Bush Administration would take action against Iran. So much, too, for the Obama Administration’s attempts to move Iran away from its nuclear course, first with diplomatic offers and then with sanctions and covert operations. [Read more...]