The House on Friday authorized $638 billion in military spending for the coming fiscal year, including $86 billion for the war in Afghanistan, while attempting to address reports of the rising number of sexual assaults in the military.
Lawmakers on Wednesday defeated a Democratic-sponsored amendment that would have created chaplains for atheists who are serving in the nation's military.
Congress is set to intervene for the first time in how the Army is developing its prized battlefield intelligence processor, which soldiers and the Pentagon's top operational tester have deemed ineffective.
In the months before President Obama declared al Qaeda was "on a path to defeat," his aides were telling Congress that the terrorist network was expanding and was capable of inflicting mass casualties in the U.S.
The senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee says Republican obsession over the White House's handling of the inquiry into last year's deadly attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, is hurting the investigation.
The Army's chief of staff and a Marine veteran congressman clashed publicly Thursday in a long-simmering dispute over the service's battlefield intelligence processor.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry strongly admonished North Korea on Friday for threatening to attack U.S. allies and interests, but also downplayed reports that Pyongyang has developed a nuclear weapon small enough to fit on the head of a ballistic missile.
Lawmakers greeted the White House's $526.6 billion defense budget request with skepticism Thursday, as top Pentagon officials defended proposals previously rejected by Congress, such as base closures and increasing health care enrollment fees.
Heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula have led the United States to postpone congressional testimony by the top U.S. military commander in South Korea and delay a U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile test from a West Coast base.
The Pentagon is mulling a $150 million overhaul of the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, including building a new dining hall, hospital and barracks for the guards.
President Obama's decision to deploy additional missile interceptors at Alaska's Fort Greely reverses a decision he made in 2009 to scale back the number of active silos approved by President George W. Bush to blunt long-range nukes.
National security officials in the military and at the Pentagon are voicing growing worries that the second Obama administration is preparing to jettison the new policy focus on Asia known as the "pivot" or rebalancing.
The commander of the U.S. nuclear arsenal told lawmakers that the big across-the-board cuts to military spending mean that his forces might not be able to defend the United States in six months' time.
Two weeks ago, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey appeared before the House Armed Services Committee to discuss sequestration and the impact it will have upon the armed forces. Amid the bleak details, he posed a critical question to the committee: "What do you want your military to do?"
