Pentagon to brief Obama team on key decisions

[unhappycamper]

Pentagon to brief Obama team on key decisions
By Robert Burns - The Associated Press
Posted : Thursday Nov 13, 2008 13:22:36 EST

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon will give President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team a rundown of “key decision points” it will face in his first 90 days as commander in chief, a senior official said Thursday.

Eric Edelman, the policy chief for Defense Secretary Robert Gates, told a group of reporters that briefings for Obama’s defense transition team will be intentionally “non-prescriptive,” avoiding trying to sell the Defense Department’s current policies and instead laying out a timeline to prepare the incoming team.

“We’ve tried to sketch out a timeline for the department as a whole” and for individual agencies within the department, “by issue, of the key decision points that the new administration is going to face in the first 90 days of its term,” Edelman said.

“We’ve tried to be non-prescriptive, which is to say, look, here’s the timeline, here’s the decision points you will face, here are the choices that you will face,” without recommending policy choices, he said.

Edelman declined to list the decision points, saying they had not yet been briefed to the Obama transition team. But in general, he said, they include such things as NATO defense ministers meetings and defense budget deadlines. He singled out the budget as one of the major issues facing the new administration, given the current global financial crisis and its likely impact not only on Pentagon funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but also for war-related resources at the State Department.


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/11/ap_pentagon_transition_111308/%2e



uhc comment: I'd say a trillion dollars (that's twelve zeros after the 1) in the 2009 military budget could be a problem.