Adam Weinstein

Reporter

I'm Mother Jones' national security reporter, specializing in civil-military relations, budgeting, and nuclear policy. As a Navy vet and ex-Iraq contractor, I'm committed to articulating all things martial—good, bad, and weird—to new audiences.

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Adam Weinstein is Mother Jones' national security reporter, having previously served the magazine as its copy editor. Before that, he worked at the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice, and the Tallahassee Democrat. He's written for the New York Times, New York magazine, GQ, and Newsweek. A Navy veteran, two-day Jeopardy champion and ex-political scientist, he also did a recession-fueled stint as a military contractor in Iraq. For more about Adam and his writing, click here.

Marines Sport Nazi SS Flag in Afghanistan

—By Adam Weinstein

| Thu Feb. 9, 2012 12:37 PM PST

Marine unit's SS flag in Afghanistan: Tayler Jerome

The Marine Corps' scout snipers in Afghanistan could probably use a safety stand-down. Just weeks after news broke that one elite unit of the forward-deployed Marines urinated on the corpses of dead Afghans, a photo has surfaced of another unit posing proudly beside a flag of the Nazi's killer SS troops. The Marine Corps Times reports:

The stylized "SS" logo appeared in a photograph of the platoon taken in September 2010 in Sangin district, Afghanistan, a hotly contested area in Helmand province. The Marines were with 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, out of Camp Pendleton, Calif.

The I Marine Expeditionary Force inspector general based at Pendleton was made aware of the "SS" flag photo in November of last year, said Capt. Gregory Wolf, a spokesman at Marine Corps headquarters. The issue has been addressed with the Marines involved, Wolf said. He did not say what specific action was taken beyond ordering Marines to stop using the logo.

The photo in question is not the only one documenting usage of the logo: A second image (embedded below) shows the SS logo emblazoned on a Marine's rifle. The Marines' story is that the unit used the flag "to identify the Marines as scout snipers, not Nazis." The symbolic appropriation may indeed be unwitting, but witlessness is no more desirable a trait in downrange warriors than malice is.

Why is this making news now? Several Marines who were concerned about the photos contacted Mikey Weinstein (no relation), president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit that watchdogs religious intolerance in the armed services. Their behavior, Weinstein told me, "eviscerates good order, morale, and discipline," in addition to angering non-Americans and alienating survivors of the Nazis' atrocities. He published the photos on the foundation's website and sent a letter to Gen. John Amos, the Marine Corps commandant, demanding punishment for the Marines involved. "That flag symbolizes the vile ideology of Hitlerian fascism and sends a menacing signal to religious minorities within the United States armed forces," Weinstein said.

Walter Plywaski, a survivor of the Lodz ghetto and Auschwitz concentration camp in World War II who later became a US citizen and Air Force veteran, expressed disgust at the Marines' behavior. "The photographs below roil my intestines and break my heart beyond words to express," he wrote in an email to Weinstein. "I wish I could really believe that these sniper teams innocently combined the view of the United States flag with the central symbol of the murderous SS!"

The Corps says the matter has already been handled internally. "Certainly, the use of the 'SS runes' is not acceptable and Scout Snipers have been addressed concerning this issue," Marine Capt. Brian Block told Politico in a statement today.

But that's not good enough for Weinstein. "We're hearing that they may have moved Marines from one unit to another, they may have reprimanded them, they may have given them nonjudicial punishment," he said, referring to the military's most lenient administrative form of punishment. "That's unacceptable. If this is not a court-martial offense, there are no court-martial offenses."

A Marine sniper's rifle-stock sporting the Nazi SS symbol: Military Religious Freedom Foundation

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Pentagon to Let Women in Combat, Kinda Sorta

—By Adam Weinstein

| Thu Feb. 9, 2012 9:30 AM PST

Female Marines on foot patrol in Marjah, Afghanistan: Marine Corps PhotoThe Department of Defense is expected to release a report on Thursday urging Congress to let women serve in more frontline combat-related jobs, signaling a possible death knell for male-only military units.

The recommendations are part of a department-wide "Women in Service" review that was scheduled to be released last April but has been held up for nearly a year by DOD officials. Military representatives will hold a Pentagon press conference Thursday afternoon to announce the changes.

Although the new rules aren't expected to allow women into all combat roles currently held by men, such as infantry, artillery, and special operations, they will certainly boost the case for full equality in the ranks. According to DOD officials who have briefed journalists on the report, it will recommend that women be allowed to fill essential non-combat roles—medics, cops, intelligence and communications specialists—in small, frontline combat units where they were previously forbidden.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

$6 Billion for a Nuke-Building Shed?

American taxpayers are getting fleeced for a New Mexico bomb facility we don't need.

—By Adam Weinstein

| Wed Feb. 8, 2012 3:00 AM PST

How I stopped worrying and learned to fund the bomb: Project on Government Oversight

As the president prepares to unveil his federal budget plan next week, it's a good time to remember that there are boondoggles, and then there are boondoggles. Under the latter, see the multi-billion-dollar "Chemical and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility," a single unfinished building in a New Mexico nuclear complex whose cost has ballooned since its approval a decade ago, and whose main purpose is to build stuff we don't need: plutonium components for new atomic bombs.

As you can see from the Project on Government Oversight's infographic below, the entire CMRR complex, located at Los Alamos National Laboratory, was slated to cost US taxpayers $375 million in 2001. But now, just one half of that two-building plant is expected to cost between $3.7 and $5.9 billion. "[S]everal major changes have occurred that have fundamentally affected the basis of the cost estimate," a Los Alamos talking points memo states. Basically, construction costs rose and mistakes were made, since nobody's built anything like this before. Here's the result:

What does that buy America? According to a 2008 congressional report, the facility and its surrounding complex have "no coherent mission to justify it unless the decision is made to begin an aggressive new nuclear warhead design and pit production mission at Los Alamos National Laboratory." In other words, its purpose is to build new nukes—and at a time when we're supposed to be cutting our nuclear arsenal, not expanding it.

[Read the full article]

The Army's Gold-Plated Guns: $200 Million-Plus

—By Adam Weinstein

| Tue Feb. 7, 2012 3:14 AM PST

Your tax dollars at work: US Army photoMark Thompson of Time's Battleland blog flagged a funny-looking item Monday from the Pentagon's daily contracting announcements—click to embiggen:

As Thompson points out, a $77.4 million contract for 900 machine guns would come out to $86,000 a pop. That's a deal even Blackwater and KBR would envy!

But not so fast: After calling up the Army's public affairs folks, Thompson learned that the multi-million-dollar pricetag is the cost ceiling for several years' worth of orders on the guns; once future shipments are factored in, the max cost of each weapon should be closer to $8,600—which still is quite a bit more than that Colt .45 your dad takes to his tea party rallies. (Of course, you get a lot more firepower at the higher price point, which is why you should talk your dad out of joining the Oathkeepers and going Rambo on the government anytime soon.)

Three lessons from this affair:

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Obama's Golden Nuclear Option

—By Adam Weinstein

| Mon Feb. 6, 2012 3:00 AM PST

Todd Lopez/US Army

Sometime this month, after receiving a year's worth of research and analysis from the Pentagon and his national security advisers, President Obama will get to decide for the first time in his term what the United States' nuclear war strategy should look like. Every four years, the strategy comes up for review and revision; Obama could determine its scope, where it's aimed, and whether the US could use nukes for a first strike.

In light of the deficit cold war gripping Washington and the post-Iraq move toward a more conventional military strategy, Obama has an unprecedented opportunity to reduce the world's danger of nuclear attack, security expert Joseph Cirincione wrote in Foreign Affairs on Thursday. (Full disclosure: Cirincione is president of the anti-proliferation Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation which has provided funding to Mother Jones.)

Since early in his presidency, Obama has insisted that the US should work to reduce and eventually eliminate its stockpile of nukes. He re-emphasized that point last month when announcing his new overall military strategy at the Pentagon. "It is possible that our deterrence goals can be achieved with a smaller nuclear force," he said, "which would reduce the number of nuclear weapons in our inventory as well as their role in U.S. national security strategy."

Current conditions certainly seem ripe for nuclear reductions. Politicians from both parties have been looking for cuts in the federal budget. Some of America's nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and subs are reaching the end of their operational lives and could either be replaced at great expense, or allowed to "sunset." But most important, according to Cirincione, the president now has his once-in-a-lifetime (or, at least, once-in-an-elected-term) shot to change the nation's nuclear policy guidance, with potentially huge benefit to US fiscal strength and military posture alike.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Allen West to Obama, Reid, and Pelosi: "Get the Hell Out of the United States" (Video)

—By Adam Weinstein

| Mon Jan. 30, 2012 1:14 PM PST

Markn3tel/Flickr

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), the firebrand tea party House freshman, told a crowd of Palm Beach Republicans on Saturday night that Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz should leave the country. But West may be the one sent packing soon: His own fellow Republicans in Florida, possibly fed up with his fiery rhetoric, are close to redistricting him out of a job.

Holding forth at the GOP's Lincoln Day Dinner in Palm Beach's tony Kravis Center, the ex-lieutenant colonel who resigned his Army commission under less than honorable circumstances, gave the crowd a militarist stemwinder to remember. "This is a battlefield that we must stand upon," he said, referring to Florida's status as a contested electoral state:

And we need to let President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and my dear friend the chairman of the Democrat National Committee [Debbie Wasserman Schultz], we need to let them know Florida ain't on the table. Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America."

After a standing ovation, West added, "Yeah, I said 'hell'...I will not allow President Obama to take the United States of America and destroy it." Here's the video:

With his latest full frontal charge, West seems to have misidentified the enemy. In Tallahassee, the state's establishment Republicans are quietly working on a redistricting plan that would leave the tea party bomb-lobber without a constituency. When Floridians elected West to Congress in 2010, they also approved two ballot measures that ensured fair "compact" redrawing of political districts: Basically, the Republican-dominated Legislature would be able to redraw the political map, but they could no longer gerrymander districts that were 100 miles long and 1 mile wide. The state picked up two congressional seats in the latest census; in order to maximize benefit to the party, they'd have to sacrifice a few seats in Democratic strongholds—and that includes West's South Florida district.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

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A-10 vs. F-35: The Air Force's Latest Budget Bungle

—By Adam Weinstein

| Mon Jan. 30, 2012 10:50 AM PST

The A-10 Warthog, an endangered species US Air Force

Military traditionalists and aviation fan boys, you might need to sit down for this: In its zeal to stay relevant and (sort of) save bucks, America's flying corps is ridding itself of some of its cheapest, most reliable attack jets in favor of an overpriced, underperforming boondoggle of an aircraft.

The Air Force announced plans on Friday to cut five squadrons of A-10 attack jets (as well as a number of cargo aircraft) in the hopes that they'll ultimately be replaced by the notoriously expensive F-35 fighter program.

The plan is bound to be controversial. Imagine an unstoppable commercial Learjet with a full-automatic cannon in its nose and an iron bathtub surrounding the cockpit. That gives you some idea of the A-10's appearance and performance. Nicknamed the Thunderbolt (though most salty service members call it a Warthog, since that nose cannon kind of looks like a snout), the A-10 was developed in the Cold War to fly low and slow and destroy Soviet tanks. After 9/11, war planners realized the A-10's close-air support capabilities made it an ideal tool to defeat insurgents, too; by 2010, 60 of the planes had fired more than 300,000 rounds of ammunition in combat over Iraq (as well as flown a handful of propaganda-leaflet drops), with an 85 percent success rate [PDF]. The plane has done equally well in Afghanistan and Libya.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

The Florida Debate: There Is No Spoon

—By Adam Weinstein

| Fri Jan. 27, 2012 10:40 AM PST

Screenshot: YouTube

The last time I covered televised campaign events, four years ago, there was plenty of action outside the frame, even if it was tightly controlled by spinsters. This year, there is not. As Patrick Bateman might say, there is an idea of a Republican Party, some kind of abstraction. The idea has its ciphers, and occasionally they gather together and talk at each other on a screen, and if you like the Republican idea, you have a choice to make between the ciphers. And that's all there is.

On the University of North Florida's campus, site of the state's final, pivotal, critical, do-or-die, nothing-will-ever-be-as-vital-as-the-next-two-hours-of-stage-acting GOP debate, there was little evidence of a pitched battle for the country's soul. The student union and the road that ringed it were dotted sparsely with signage from four groups. The most dominant group was UNF's "spring rush" committee. The second-most was CNN, the keeper of the debate, which had taken pains to brand the campus. Third was Ron Paul. Fourth was "WE BUY HOMES."

That was all. No protesters, no supportive crowds. Occupy Jacksonville was otherwise occupied, and the tea party was over. Finding no "color" to cover, scores of journalists, from The New Yorker to the Tampa Bay Times, checked in with CNN. We were not permitted in the ballroom where the GOP's four candidates and cherry-picked crowd gathered for the pageant. Instead we queued through a metal detector and were whisked to a top-floor "filing room" in the student union, a wifi cavern with tables full of plastic sandwiches and wall screens that would project the debate as it occurred elsewhere. We could have been watching TV at home, or shadows on a cave wall.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Florida Debate Wrap-Up: Newt vs. Mitt, Part Deux

Our coverage of Thursday night's gloves-off presidential debate in Jacksonville.

—By the Mother Jones news team

| Thu Jan. 26, 2012 4:55 PM PST

Jason Moore/ZUMA; James Colburn/ZUMA

Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich faced off on Thursday night in a final Florida debate before Tuesday's primary. Read on for Kevin Drum's roundup and more of best blog reactions to Thursday night's CNN debate, or jump down to the top tweets of the night from MoJo's news team and our other favorite tweeting political junkies. For more, also follow reporter @adamweinstein, who was on the scene in Jacksonville; Washington bureau chief @davidcorndc; and the rest of our DC bureau in the mix below.

Jacksonville Debate Roundup

—Kevin Drum

You know those basketball rematches where a team that got pummeled last time suddenly comes out totally on fire and wins by a mile? It's never clear quite why that happens, but it happened in the Republican debate tonight. I don't know what Romney ate for breakfast this morning, but he came alive and wiped the floor with Newt Gingrich in this debate. He went after Gingrich for his Freddie Mac connections and made it stick. He was outraged when Newt said he was anti-immigrant, and for once he actually sounded outraged. And when Newt tried to buy some anti-media cred by attacking Wolf Blitzer, he got pwned by both Blitzer and Romney:

BLITZER: Earlier this week, you said Governor Romney, after he released his taxes, you said that you were satisfied with the level of transparency of his personal finances when it comes to this. And I just want to reiterate and ask you, are you satisfied right now with the level of transparency as far as his personal finances?

GINGRICH: Wolf, you and I have a great relationship, it goes back a long way. I'm with him. This is a nonsense question. Look, how about if the four of us agree for the rest of the evening, we'll actually talk about issues that relate to governing America?

BLITZER: But, Mr. Speaker, you made an issue of this, this week, when you said that, "He lives in a world of Swiss bank and Cayman Island bank accounts." I didn't say that. You did.

GINGRICH: I did. And I'm perfectly happy to say that on an interview on some TV show. But this is a national debate, where you have a chance to get the four of us to talk about a whole range of issues.

....ROMNEY: Wouldn't it be nice if people didn't make accusations somewhere else that they weren't willing to defend here?

Ouch. Gingrich has tried that bit about nasty attacks being OK when you're on some radio show or something but not when you're on national TV, and for some reason he's gotten away with it even though it's transparently self-serving and ridiculous. Tonight he didn't.

This was all in the first half hour, but by then the debate was over. Romney lost a bit of his mojo later on and reverted to the stuttering, stumbling Mitt that we've seen in the last two debates, but not enough to hurt him, especially after Newt was forced to endure ten minutes of attacks over his support for a lunar colony during the second hour. This attack from Romney was both brutal and effective:

ROMNEY: I spent 25 years in business. If I had a business executive come to me and say they wanted to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I'd say, "You're fired."

The idea that corporate America wants to go off to the moon and build a colony there, it may be a big idea, but it's not a good idea. And we have seen in politics -- we've seen politicians -- and Newt, you've been part of this -- go from state to state and promise exactly what that state wants to hear. The Speaker comes here to Florida, wants to spend untold amount of money having a colony on the moon. I know it's very exciting on the Space Coast.

In South Carolina, it was a new interstate highway, and dredging the port in Charleston. In New Hampshire, it was burying a power line coming in from Canada and building a new VHA hospital in New Hampshire so that people don't have to go to Boston.

Look, this idea of going state to state and promising what people want to hear, promising billions, hundreds of billions of dollars to make people happy, that's what got us into the trouble we're in now. We've got to say no to this kind of spending.

[Read the full article]

Santorum Trashes Public Colleges, Then Stumps at One

—By Adam Weinstein

| Thu Jan. 26, 2012 11:35 AM PST

Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Between a morning prayer breakfast with state Republican leaders in Tallahassee and tonight's primary debate in Jacksonville, dark-horse presidential candidate Rick Santorum stopped at a half-full auditorium at Florida State University to deliver his anti-Obama message to young conservatives. But at this hard-hit public college in a capital racked with budget woes, Santorum sidestepped the biggest issues facing the school's students.

A small grouping of sign-carrying protesters gathered outside the student union, while even more students circulated unawares through the nearby campus Chili's, as Santorum told the crowd of aboout 200 that the "foundational premise of America" is "the belief in God."

After a brief exposition on the differences between France, with its guillotines, and the United States, with its freedom and vest-pocket-sized copies of the Constitution (one of which he brandished), Santorum knocked Newt Gingrich's latest space-colonization plan and said the former House speaker "wants to spend money like Obama." He added: "The idea that anybody's going out and talking about grand new very expensive schemes to spend more money at a time when we do not have our fiscal house in order, in my opinion, is plain crass politics."

[Read more in the MoJo blog]