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1. Obama and his generals
This election year, Democrats finally owned national security for the
first time in decades. It began with the 2011 Osama bin Laden raid, sure, but
the cement began to set after President Obama rewrote the national security
strategy and built a new defense budget to heed the Budget Control Act with
close buy-in from top brass. Obama delivered the plan at the Pentagon in
January, flanked by the joint chiefs. The result: Republican attacks from Mitt
Romney, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-OH), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
trying to put daylight between the president and the Pentagon fell flat. If
there was any doubt before, Obama is commander in chief.
2. Iran and red lines
Another year of threats, warnings, rhetoric, bombast, and ... well, little has changed
in the stand off between Tehran and the West. The war of words -- and timelines
-- over "red lines" in Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapon grew heated among Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minster Ehud Barak, GOP candidate
Mitt Romney, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta,
and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey. It made for much tension, but little
needle moving.
3. The sequester
Doomsday. Shooting oneself in the head. Catastrophic. For more than a year,
every national security official in the Iron Triangle has begged Congress and
the White House to make a budget deal. Nothing worked, from threats of job
losses to having to shut down nuclear missiles. Even when Republican and
Democratic members of Congress pushed their leaders to talk, silence reigned.
Now, the stalemate has reached a second Christmas, proving that in America
today politics trumps everything -- even national security.
4. The Petraeus affair
The fall of the legend came quickly and suddenly after Election Day,
when nobody was looking. Sure, Gen. David Petraeus's brazen public rise to
celebrity power had detractors (not everyone drank the Kool-Aid), but few
outside his inner circle predicted the good general's day would come via an
extramarital affair with his own biographer. CIA directors are supposed to be
able to keep secrets. Instead, that post and several major military command
leadership postings have been undermined as Gen. John Allen's emails remain
under investigation by the Pentagon inspector general. And the book on Petraeus
will be a whole different read.
5. What to make of Leon Panetta?
For at least six months, arguably more water cooler time in the Pentagon has
been spent talking about Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's successor than his
legacy. That should tell you something. Panetta came to DoD as a defense hawk
and budget guru, bolstered by the successful Bin Laden raid and his resume as
White House budget chief and House Budget Committee chairman. In his first few months,
Panetta helped forge the civilian-military partnership that wrote the Pentagon
budget. But he also proved unable to move Congress one inch on sequester. Maybe
that game is above his paygrade, but by the end of summer, Panetta was a lame
duck in many Washington eyes. The jury is out on what, exactly, Panetta will be
remembered for at the Pentagon when he heads back to his California walnut farm
next year.
6. Staying out of Syria
Early and often, the Pentagon's message to the rebels fighting
President Bashar al-Assad's forces was clear: Good luck. General Dempsey has
repeated that the U.S. military is perfectly happy staying out of the morass in
Iraq -- uh, we mean Syria. The fact is, the United States has been stretched
from Afghanistan to Libya, and few in Washington or Europe have moved to create
and enforce no-fly zones or arm rebels (inviting retaliatory attacks across on
U.S. installations or allies). But when the fighting does stop, the United
States will want to fill the security vacuum with friendly faces, somehow. The
only certainty: The Syrian war looks to continue well into 2013.
7. Afghanistan and the forgotten exit
Remember the war? Few do. Commanders over there say that thanks to the
surge of 30,000 troops that ended in September, they made headway against the
insurgency, al Qaeda and "Haqqani network" leaders, held territory from the
enemy, while Afghan security forces steadily own more responsibilities
nationwide. But the war polled below 7 percent as the most important issue
facing the country in this election season. Fully 98 percent of Democrats said that
President Obama's plan to end combat and pull troops by 2014 was not fast
enough. With little public attention on the war, Obama got NATO in May to
commit to his timeline, even if his own White House is waffling. And he flipped
his support for the war against Romney, who had no Plan B to offer. D.C. hawks may
argue in their echo chamber over the pace of the timeline -- but nobody outside
of the Beltway is playing along. Voters just want out.
8. Al Qaeda: dead or alive?
The United States has beaten the "core" of al Qaeda that attacked the
U.S. homeland on Sept. 11, 2001, officials like to say. But they also warn that
its tentacles continue to spread across the Middle East and North Africa. Maybe
both can be true, but the question for 2013 is how much the U.S. military will stay
in pursuit, as Obama surrogates like top Pentagon lawyer Jeh Johnson float to
key allies a phrase considered taboo for conservatives: "law enforcement."
9. China and the pivot
While the United States races to build stronger alliances with China's
neighbors, the Pentagon and the People's Liberation Army have reached new
levels of cooperation thanks to Obama's active open hand policy with Beijing.
U.S. senior military leaders want Beijing to be a partner in global security. Naïve?
Mabye. Worth the try? Definitely. It's early, it's tense, but so far, it's getting
better, not worse.
10. Women in combat
The Pentagon finally opened tens of thousands of combat jobs to women
earlier this year, a decade after many of them saw plenty of combat in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Not good enough, say some combat veterans who have seen their
careers and paychecks limited and endured gender-based harassment. This year,
veterans began suing the U.S. government for full equality and access to combat
jobs they argue is long overdue. Two cases are before federal courts that could
change one of the last restrictive service rules in the U.S. military, forever.
11. Not top
10: gays in the military
The repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" endured enormous Pentagon and public
debate, study, concern, nervous hand-wringing, and even outright warnings that
openly gay service members could lead directly to distracted troops in foxholes
suffering battlefield injuries. But the conservative movement barely up put a
fight to stop the repeal, and in the year since its September 2011 repeal, the
blowback has been nonexistent. Gays in the military? Sounds as archaic as all
the worry over blacks in the military, or women on ships, or ... women in combat.
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