President Trump said Sunday that Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan will become acting Pentagon chief on Jan. 1, greatly accelerating the exit of current Defense Secretary James Mattis who had promised to stay on the job until the end of February.
Jim Mattis has resigned on principle as Pentagon chief after President Trump decided to slash U.S. troop presence in Syria and Afghanistan, citing in a letter the need for ‘a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned’ with the president’s.
The Pentagon’s decision to draw down 10 percent of its counterterrorism operations in Africa comes as Russia and China are aggressively ramping up efforts to expand their influence on the continent.
President Trump said Tuesday he would be “proud” to shut the government down unless he gets a massive infusion of cash to build his border wall, and suggested if Congress doesn’t concede, he would use the military to erect more fencing anyway.
U.S. President Donald Trump has backed plans to request $750 billion from Congress for defense spending next year, a U.S. official said on Sunday, signaling a Pentagon spending hike at a time of potential belt-tightening elsewhere in the government.
Blasting Russia’s ‘dangerous escalation’ in the region, U.S. planes on Thursday conducted an ‘extraordinary flight’ over Ukraine in what Pentagon officials cast as a blunt warning to Moscow.
Secretary of State Jim Mattis has called for a 30-day cease-fire in Yemen’s civil war and the start of peace talks, within a month’s time.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis says the United States and South Korea will scale back a major military exercise next spring to avoid setting back diplomacy over North Korea’s nuclear weapons.
Defense Secretary James Mattis on Tuesday voiced his implicit support for a so-called ‘Arab NATO’ that would include the small, oil-rich nation of Qatar, despite Doha’s ongoing diplomatic conflicts with Saudi Arabia and its Middle East allies.
The Islamic State has lost the vast majority of physical territory it once held, but fully defeating the terrorist group and rooting out sleeper cells that have spread across the Middle East and Africa ‘could take years,’ the Defense Department inspector general said in a sweeping report Monday that suggests final victory remains far off.
President Trump said Wednesday his administration could deploy up to 15,000 service members to help stop a caravan of migrants from entering the United States.
Defense Secretary James Mattis made a forceful call for all parties involved in the brutal war in Yemen to come to the negotiation table within the next month, to bring to an end to a conflict pushed by a Saudi Arabian-led coalition that has devolved into a military stalemate that has produced one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
US military officials have voiced their concerns that the ‘aggressive military campaign’ Israel is waging in Syria against Iran-backed militia groups might cause the Islamic republic to attack American targets in Syria and Iraq in retaliation, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The administration will send about 800 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border ahead of the illegal immigrant caravan, a defense official confirmed Thursday, following through on President Trump’s pledge.
The Islamic State remains ‘far from defeated,’ one of the nation’s top generals warned Tuesday, seeming to break with President Trump’s assertion that the terrorist group was ’99 percent’ beaten after four years of U.S.-led military action in Syria and Iraq.
Islamic State fighters trapped in Syria are putting up fierce resistance, using civilians as human shields, setting deadly booby traps, and hiding in underground tunnels, all the while frustrating efforts by U.S.-backed Syrian fighters to deal a final blow to the terrorist caliphate.
The United States is pulling some of its anti-aircraft and missile batteries out of the Middle East, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing US military officials.
The Trump administration is now pledging the US will remain in Syria until the ‘enduring defeat’ of the Islamic State group, a move that could signal open-ended American involvement in the war-torn country.
The Pentagon is studying the deployment of space-based missiles and new sensors to counter the growing threat of high-speed missile attacks from China and Russia, senior defense officials said Tuesday.
The US military says it is canceling $300 million in aid to Pakistan over what it calls Islamabad’s failure to take action against militant groups.