Even under the Fiscal 2015 budget, which sharply reduces manpower, force structure, and overall spending, the US military will for the most part still be able to fight two wars at once, the nation’s No. 2 military man said last week. “We believe we’ll be able to execute the defense strategic guidance that we put out in 2012. We will be able to simultaneously defend the homeland, conduct sustained counterterrorism operations, and deter aggression in multiple regions,” Adm. James Winnefeld, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told attendees at a Bloomberg budget conference in Washington, D.C. If deterrence fails, “We will be capable of defeating one adversary in a large-scale regional campaign, while at the same time denying the objectives of, or imposing unacceptable costs on, a second aggressor in another region.” All that, however, will be done at far less speed and with little excess margin, he said.
A provision in the fiscal 2025 defense policy bill will require the Defense Department to include the military occupational specialty of service members who die by suicide in its annual report on suicide deaths, though it remains to be seen how much data the department will actually disclose.