Winslow T. Wheeler is the Director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information in Washington, DC. He has authored two books: "The Wastrels of Defense" (US Naval Institute Press) about Congress and national security, and "Military Reform" (Greenwood Publishers) on the serious, fundamental problems that currently face America's defenses. He released a new anthology ("America's Defense Meltdown") after the presidential elections to help guide the new president out of the national security mess that Republicans and Democrats have jointly created in Washington.
From 1971 to 2002, Wheeler worked on national security issues for members of the U.S. Senate and for the US Government Accountability Office (GAO). In the Senate, Wheeler advised Jacob K. Javits (R. NY), Nancy L. Kassebaum (R, KS), David Pryor (D, AR), and Pete V. Domenici (R, NM). He was the first, and according to Senate records the last, Senate staffer to work simultaneously on the personal staffs of a Republican and a Democrat (Pryor and Kassebaum).
In the Senate staff, Wheeler was heavily involved in legislating the War Powers Act, Pentagon reform legislation, arms control and foreign policy, and oversight of the defense budget and weapons programs.
At GAO, he directed comprehensive studies on the 1991 Gulf War air campaign, the U.S. strategic nuclear triad, and Pentagon weapons testing. Each of these studies found prevailing conventional wisdom about weapons to be badly misinformed.
In 2002 when he worked on the Republican staff of the Senate Budget Committee, Wheeler authored an essay, under the pseudonym "Spartacus," addressing Congress' reaction to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks ("Mr. Smith Is Dead: No One Stands in the Way as Congress Lards Post-September 11 Defense Bills with Pork"). When senators criticized in the essay attempted to have Wheeler fired, he resigned his position.
Wheeler joined the Center for Defense Information immediately after leaving Capitol Hill.
He has periodically appeared in interviews on national TV and radio and has written articles and commentaries for national, local, and professional publications. These venues include "60 Minutes," C-SPAN's "Book Notes," National Public Radio, the PBS News Hour, the Washington Post, the Politico, Mother Jones, Barron's, Defense News, and Armed Forces Journal.
He lives with his wife, Judy, and son, Matthew, in Maryland. Another son, Winslow B., lives in Florida with his wife and their three sons.
I know of no better response to the problem of constructing a coherent national strategy than a piece written by retired Air Force colonel Chet Richards. It appeared in Defense News last December; it is at http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=3844074. As Col. Richards says far better than I can, we need to do a lot better than to find a politic way out of the mess left on the table by the neo-conservatives and their mouthpieces at the top of the George W. Bush administration. This piece by Col. Richards is a summary of his chapter in the new anthology "America's Defense Meltdown: Pentagon… Read more
The Senate system, political and otherwise, is not designed to stop producing much of anything -- let alone weapons -- especially in a lousy economy. The 58-40 vote to put the F-22 out of it misery offers a ray of hope that intelligent defense decisions can be made in Congress, even if it takes a massive effort by a determined secretary of defense, the president, and arm twisting by Rahm Emanuel. Perhaps the single individual to credit most for this important success is John McCain. Without him, and even with Gates, the vote would have been purely partisan, supplemented by… Read more
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's attempts to re-groom her non-oversight of the intelligence community and torture in 2002 are as pathetic as the Republicans' pretense at outrage that any respectable Member of Congress would accuse the CIA of misleading Congress, let alone lying. An executive branch agency misleading Congress? Why, how shocking. In fact, it's a long honored tradition, started not decades but centuries ago. That's why the Founding Fathers crafted the Constitution as they did - empowering Congress to perform effective oversight - a function that historian Arthur M. Schlesinger deemed at least as important as the power to legislate.… Read more
Just as it did the press, Secretary of Defense Gates decisions on hardware will completely preoccupy Congress. A major food fight is sure to break out over the end of F-22 production at 187 very expensive, not particularly impressive fighters, no new presidential or search and rescue helicopters (for now), no more C-17s, and a very few other clean cut terminations. While Washington DC hisses and spits over the secretary’s hardware recommendations, it is probably more important to ask, what has changed, and if anything has, where are we now going? It does not appear that the basic… Read more
We do not yet know if Secretary of Defense Gates can fix our defense problems because we do not yet know if he wants to. After piles of rhetoric in his “Foreign Affairs” article last fall and his statements to Congress and the public about “big” changes, we are about to see if the rubber is really going to meet the road. The initial signs are not encouraging; in reacting to an already hopelessly cosmetic and riddled-with-loopholes bill in Congress to “reform” DOD procurement – the Levin/McCain legislation – Secretary Gates permitted his Deputy, William Lynn, to successfully lobby to… Read more
America is diminished by the stepping down of Charles (“Chas”) Freeman as the Director of the National Intelligence Council, a senior staff position for the Director of National Intelligence. We are even more diminished by the process that brought us to Freeman’s resignation. I do not know Ambassador Freeman, but I have had the privilege to hear him and read him. I have benefited immensely, I believe, from his insights based on years of experience as an American diplomat. To listen to what he actually has to say is to expand your mind beyond the normal clap-trap that passes for foreign… Read more
Continuity at the Pentagon would be a good idea if it were in good shape. It's not; the Pentagon is a mess. Change is needed, not more of the same, and it is very unclear if the new team at the Pentagon, now being assembled, will do anything about it. America now spends more on defense than at any time since the end of World War II. However, our military forces are smaller than they have been since 1946. Our major weapons are – on average – older than at any point in recent history, and we are sending Soldiers, Marines, and Air-men… Read more
Well, I am glad so many of the participants in this operation have applied themselves to such elevated and elevating reading. Between my own reading of assembly instructions for three grandsons' Christmas presents, reviewing the directions for the annual cherry pies I bake, the morning tour through the newspaper, and other predictable holiday behaviors, I have not been reading anything out of the ordinary for the holidays. Which gets me to the point: most of my ordinary reading - I suspect like everyone else - is on a computer screen, and it's news and journal articles from the internet. This technology… Read more
It is far more important that President Obama understand why he should lead America out of its occupation of Iraq than what schedule he puts the withdrawal on. Today, it is unclear whether he has as clear a view of the reasons as he did before he became a United States Senator, and his statements during the presidential campaign bring on added fog. Recall the basics: the American contractor and military presence in Iraq is an occupation of a culturally, religiously, ethnically alien land with a long history of deep aniimosity to Westerners. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of… Read more
I must disagree with the comments here that President Obama will face his first crisis the day he is inaugurated or soon thereafter. I also disagree that it will come from some alien culture or some erstwhile foreign ally, such as Israel. President-elect Obama already faces his first national security crisis; the gauntlet was thrown down to him before the election, and it was hurdled by his selection for Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates. The crisis is the Pentagon's budget, including the additional bloat and blunting of the sharp end added by Secretary Gates in the draft 2010 DOD budget he… Read more
Related Link: http://www.cdi.org/smrp
