The sanctions involve an immediate ban on all new oil contracts with Iran, while existing contracts will be honored until July 1.

Tehran denies that it is trying to develop nuclear weapons and says talks and not sanctions are the only way to resolve the dispute.

The EU currently buys about 20 percent of Iran’s oil exports.

(Graphic: BBC)

Meanwhile, the Pentagon said the US aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, as well as a British Royal Navy frigate and a French warship, have passed through the Straits of Hormuz at the entrance to the Gulf without incident in the wake of Iranian threats to block the trade route.

Under the new deal, EU governments are expected to stop signing new contracts with Iran when the ban comes into place – which could be as soon as this week, Reuters news agency reports.

All existing contracts will have to be phased out by July 1.

More from the BBC

(Map: BBC)

President Obama at the Pentagon (Photo: White House Live Stream)

President Obama made a rare appearance at the Pentagon on Thursday to unnveil a new military strategy, one driven by shrinking budgets.

The president spoke about “turning the page on a decade of war.” He said we’ve succeeded in defending our nation and taking the fight to our enemies, and said we are safer and stronger. Then the president said, we have the opportunity and responsibility to look ahead to the force that we will need in the future.

“That’s why I called for this comprehensive defense review to clarify our strategic interests in a fast-changing world and to guide our defense priorities and spending over the coming decade. Because the size and the structure of our military and defense budgets have to be driven by a strategy, not the other way around.”

That strategy will likely include a smaller Army and Marine Corps, with a greater emphasis on Asia and the Middle East.

The president gave few specifics. He said concrete details will come in the next few weeks with the release of the Pentagon budget. But he did give a preview of sorts.

“We’ll be able to ensure our security with smaller conventional ground forces. We’ll continue to get rid of outdated cold war era systems so that we can invest in the capabilities that we need for the future including intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, counter terrorism, countering weapons of mass destruction, and the ability to operate in environments where adversaries try to deny us access.”

These changes are driven, in large part, by nearly $500 billion in defense cuts set to take place over the next 10 years.

The president tried to pre-empt his critics today, saying the military budget will still be larger than the next 10 countries combined, even larger than during the last years of the Bush Administration.

“Some will no doubt say the spending reductions are too big. Others will say that they’re too small. It will be easy to take issue with a particular change in a particular program. But I encourage all of us to remember what President Eisenhower once said, that each proposal must be weighed in light of a broader consideration, the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.”

After the president spoke, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta took the podium. He reiterated the president’s words, that a smaller military doesn’t mean a weaker military.

“I do not believe, and I’ve said this before, that we have to choose between our national security and fiscal responsibility.”

Panetta said America’s rising debt is also a national security risk, and that the US has to maintain its economic strength, to support its military might.

Panetta said the Army and Marine Corps will no longer need to be sized to support large-scale, long-term security operations.

“The United States will emphasize building the capacity of our partners and allies to more effectively defend their own territory, their own interests, through a better use of diplomacy, development, and security force assistance.”

But Panetta warned, as he has before, that further cuts to the Pentagon budget would severely weaken military capabilities. It’s already facing the $500 billion cut, and the Pentagon could lose another $500 billion because the so-called “Congressional Supercommittee” failed to come up with a debt reduction agreement last fall. That triggered additional cuts to the military budget.

“That would force us to shed missions and commitments and capabilities that we believe our necessary to protect core US national security interests,” Panetta said. “And it would result in what we think would be a demoralized and hollow force.”

Many in Congress, particularly Republicans, are vowing to undo new cuts to the military budget. President Obama has promised to veto any legislation that would do that, unless Congress comes up with a way to also trim the deficit.

A soldier briefs US Marine Corps General John Allen in Afghanistan. (Photo: Sgt. April Campbell/US Army)

Anchor Marco Werman discusses what the defense cuts will mean for foreign policy with Peter Feaver, former member of the National Security Council, and Juliette Kayyem, former Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: Since the end of the Cold War the United States has kept it armed forces strong enough to fight and win two ground wars at once. In theory that means the US can realistically deter say North Korea while still preoccupied in Afghanistan. According to The New York Times that ability to fight two wars at once may soon be a thing of the past. This week Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is due to outline a new strategy that will guide the Pentagon through some very painful budget cuts, and the Times says that two-war doctrine will be a victim. Lawrence Korb isn’t so sure. He’s a former Assistant Secretary of Defense and is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington. He says cuts are inevitable though the extent is not yet known.

Lawrence Korb: They’re talking about anywhere from an 8% cut in real terms over the next decade, and as sequestration kicks in it could be up to 17%, but I think it’ll be probably closer to 10% when all is said and done.

Werman: So the exact nature of the cuts not yet known, but the military will inevitably be smaller. Do you believe the doctrine of being able to fight and win two wars at once is now over?

Korb: No, I don’t think so because if you take the ground forces, which were the ones that grew during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, if you take them back to where they were before you know, 9/11, you’ll be able to take 100,000 people off the payroll and save $15 billion a year. And before 9/11 we had a two war doctrine. What we can’t do is win two wars and do nation building again. That was the problem. It wasn’t winning. We were very successful in Afghanistan and Iraq in a matter of weeks. Our problem was we stayed and tried to reengineer those societies.

Werman: But with all the talk of building democracy around the world won’t something get lost?

Korb: Well, you could never no matter how much you spend on defense, you can’t prepare for every contingency. But the fact of the matter is right now we’re spending more on defense than the next 17 nations in the world combined. And even if you take you know, a 17 percent real reduction it would bring you back to 2007, well above where you were for example, back in 1998. What people forget is the baseline budget. I’m not talking about the war-funding budget, but the baseline budget over the last 13 years has grown in real terms by about 70%. And so if you took the 17% cut again, in real terms controlling for inflation, we’d be above average of what we spent during the Cold War. I mean right now in real terms if you count war funding we’re spending more than at any time since the end of WWII. So defense if you need to cut it, this is a very, very good time to do it without jeopardizing security.

Werman: Lawrence Korb, you sound pretty optimistic that the Pentagon can weather even a 17% base cut as you say. Is there any area where you are worried?

Korb: Well, I’m worried that if they don’t do it correctly. I think from everything I’ve seen they ought to get the army and the marines back to where they were before 9/11 because as former Secretary Gates said, we’re not gonna be doing nation building anymore. I think another area they ought to take a look at is nuclear weapons. We’re about to embark on a program to modernize all three legs of the triad — the submarine launch, ballistic missiles, the bombers and the ground base missiles. I don’t think we need to modernize all three because we don’t need 5,000 nuclear weapons anymore. We could easily for example, instead of building 12 new ballistic submarines, build 7 or 8, put more tubes on them.

Werman: What about the cost of dealing with psychologically troubled veterans who if you look at the news headlines they’re already slipping through the cracks. Just this week we saw the tragedy of the park ranger getting killed by an Iraq veteran. How will these cuts affect people with PTSD?

Korb: Not in the least, those are taken care of by the Veteran’s Administration budget, which you know, since 9/11 has gone from about $40 billion to over $100 billion. No, nobody is talking about making those cuts. We’re talking about the core or the baseline defense budget, not war costs, not veteran’s costs, it’s basically the defense department, which throughout its history has gotten along even if you control inflation, on much less than even if you took the most Draconian cuts that are there.

Werman: Lawrence Korb, former Assistant Secretary of Defense and currently with the Center for American Progress in Washington, thank you.

Korb: Thank you for having me.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

The World’s Jason Margolis reports from Crystal City, Virginia, a neighborhood in the shadow of the Pentagon.

Hamburger Hamlet has been grilling up burgers and steaks in Crystal City for 27 years. District manager Steven Korbett knows who pays the bills.

Steven Korbett: “It’s probably 80 percent contractors, defense contractors, military, and government employees.”

When I asked Korbett if he was worried about the Pentagon losing another 10 percent from its budget, his answer, well, not exactly surprising.

Steven Korbett: “Absolutely.”

What else would he say?

At this point, I thought I knew this tale already: Another story about local businesses getting hurt by government cuts.

Then I started to encounter people like David Anderson. He’s the general manager of Jaleo, a trendy tapas restaurant. I asked Anderson if he was worried about cuts to the military budget.

David Anderson: “I mean it’s great. We have a great story to tell here in Jaleo. And we are really excited for the opportunity of new companies and people to come to the area. And it’s actually kind of exciting.”

I repeated the question, thinking maybe he’d misunderstood me.

David Anderson: “Like I said, we have a great story and we’re optimistic so it’s exciting to have new people, fresh faces and new companies come to the area.”

Outdoor Movie Night (Photo: Crystal City Business Improvement District)

I thought Anderson was just putting on a positive face even when confronted by the bleakest of economic news. But then I spent some time walking around Crystal City with Angie Fox. She’s president of the Crystal City Business Improvement District. Her job is to be optimistic. And she is.

Angie Fox: “We are changing the way people see, perceive, and experience Crystal City. A lot of repositioning, a reinvention, a transformation, those are words that we like to use.”

Crystal City has been dealing with a shrinking military presence for a while now. In 2005, the Base Realignment and Closure Commission, better known as BRAC, decided to move 13,000 jobs away from the area. It’s been a long, slow departure that’s still ongoing. The bright side is that it’s given civic leaders a long time to rethink Crystal City.

We stopped in front of a 1960’s-era government building. I saw ugly architecture. So did Fox, but also mixed with potential.

Angie Fox: “So it still feels very much like that old concrete brutalist architecture; it is a phenomenal place for a farmers market.”

Crystal City Farmers Market (Photo: Crystal City Business Improvement District)

And now, there’s a weekly farmers market right in front. They also have a new performing arts theatre, outdoor movie night, and lots of public art. It’s all part of a bigger plan to make Crystal City a neighborhood where people live and play, and not just work.

Angie Fox: “In the winter, we are doing a 1k wine walk and a 1k beer walk, so basically you have seven or eight stations, almost 30 different wines. And people literally get race numbers and they kind of walk from station to station, we call it a sip and stumble.”

Community leaders are hoping their strategy works. But defense analyst Loren Thompson with the nearby Lexington Institute says there’s no way around it. This is a military town.

Loren Thompson: “If there was a substantial cut in weapons spending, there would be a major local impact, it wouldn’t make the people here poorer then the rest of America, but it would make them a good deal less affluent.”

Still, Thompson says it’s hard to feel too bad for the people in Crystal City, and the Virginia and Maryland counties that neighbor Washington. It’s been a good run. The defense budget has basically doubled in the past 10 years.

Loren Thompson: “If there is one good thing, one benefit that could come out of a defense downturn in Washington DC is that maybe the people who live here could have a little more empathy for the rest of the country. This really is like a bubble here. People don’t understand what it’s like in most of the country because it is so affluent here and so much money comes here from other places.”

Maybe so. But that’s cold comfort to some. The walls of the Crystal City Sports Pub are plastered with decades of sports memorabilia. I asked owner Art Dougherty if he followed the deliberations of the Congressional Super Committee.

Art Dougherty: “I’ve been listening in, but to be honest with you, you’re already so disgusted with the whole economy as is, and everything. I don’t know. I think a lot of people are very turned off by this government. Like I said, there are definitely going to be businesses going to be failing because of this. There’s no question about it. You just hope you’re not the one.”

The big loser would be the Pentagon. It’s slated to be hit with an additional $500 billion in cuts. How that might affect military readiness is one debate. But there’s also the question of how defense cuts would affect the wider economy.

The World’s Jason Margolis takes a look.

800,000 jobs lost. That’s what many Republicans estimate would happen if the current military budget is cut by $500 billion.

I asked Michael O’Hanlon if that sounds about right. He’s author of the new book “The Wounded Giant: America’s Armed Forces in an Age of Austerity.” He started working thru the numbers.

Michael O’Hanlon: “We have about a million and a half people in uniform in the active force. We have about another million in the national guard and reserve. So that’s two-and-a-half million total.”

Michael O’Hanlon: “Roughly another 3 million who are in defense industry or the contractor workforce…”

Michael O’Hanlon: “And then on top of that of course you have all the people locally who near a military base run a hot dog stand or a sandwich shop…”

So when you add it all up….

Michael O’Hanlon: “You’ve got 10 million jobs that depend on the department of defense in one way or another at this moment.”

And if the Pentagon’s budget is cut by 10 percent, roughly what the automatic cuts would amount to…

Michael O’Hanlon: “So yes, you could in theory, in the short term at least, lose a million jobs or more.”

That’s a scary number, especially in a down economy. But that doesn’t necessarily mean a million jobs would be erased from the overall economy.

The money saved on military spending could be spent elsewhere. Stephen Biddle at the Council on Foreign Relations says consider the sandwich maker near a military base who loses his job.

Stephen Biddle: “If you spend less on defense and in exchange you spend more on, let’s say, education. And the result of that increase in education expenditure downstream is some well-educated person who otherwise wouldn’t have been, opens a successful software company in New Jersey, hires a bunch of people, those people will eat sandwiches at lunch.”

Of course that’s down the line a few years.

And Biddle says it’s hard for policymakers to think this way. After all, the sandwich maker near a military base is a real person, with a real story. The hypothetical sandwich shop in New Jersey is an economic statistic.

And further, what if that dollar saved on defense spending isn’t put toward the education budget?

Stephen Biddle: “Maybe they take that defense cut and they use it to reduce deficits. It’s generally believed that the higher the federal deficit, the more disadvantageous interest rates are in the economy.”

So, cutting defense spending could lead to easier borrowing for small businesses and potential homebuyers.

Point being, there are clear economic losers if military spending is cut. But there are also winners. They’re just harder to see.

Overall, Biddle says, military spending isn’t the best way to stimulate the economy.

For instance, a great deal of military spending goes toward buying capital equipment, things like tanks, guns and fighter planes. Now compare an Air Force purchase with a commercial airliner.

Stephen Biddle: “When United Airlines buys an airliner, they’re making an investment in a piece of capital equipment that’s going to generate more income and more economic activity in the United States when they sell tickets to fly people from point to point in the airliner. When the Air Force buys an F-35 – unless they’re going to sell joyrides in the cockpit, which they’re probably not going to – that’s not a purchase of capital equipment that’s going to generate more income and more economic activity within the United States.”

That’s not to say military spending doesn’t help the economy in many ways. Loren Thompson with the Lexington Institute says it all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.

Loren Thompson: “If you’re trying to stimulate technological innovation, defense spending is very important.”

Things like satellites, jet engines, and the Internet – drivers of the modern economy – all got started by the military. But…

Loren Thompson: “If you’re trying to create jobs, large numbers of jobs, it’s not as efficient because the money tends to go into a relatively small number of high-paying jobs, rather than a larger number of jobs in areas like construction or education.”

Michael O’Hanlon agrees that military spending is not the best job creator… in the long term.

Michael O’Hanlon: “But in the short term, when we’re in this kind of a fix, and we’re almost looking for excuses to stimulate the economy – and of course the 2009 stimulus bill did just that – it makes sense to be attentive to the fact that any kind of cut in government spending could have a negative effect right now. So you’ve got to balance these two concerns.”

Of course, these are all economic arguments. And at the end of the day, policymakers are most vocal about what it takes to keep the nation safe. In recent years, however, there’s been little acknowledgment of the costs.

Even now, some members of Congress who want to lower the deficit are, at the same time, talking about repealing the automatic cuts to the military before they’ve even happened.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Lisa Mullins: Global economic gyrations are having plenty of effects in Washington. The Pentagon and the State Department are among many US agencies bracing for big cutbacks. Some analysts argue that the $700 billion defense budget can afford to be squeezed. They include author Stephen Glain. He says that even with major cuts the Pentagon would still have enough money to do its job.

Stephen Glain: Its budget has doubled just in the last 10 years, so my guess is they’ll be able to manage. Now, if you look at the State Department’s budget they’re looking at cuts of $8 billion for a $50 billion total budget, so that’s gonna make it very difficult for them to do what diplomats do.

Mullins: And what about in terms of our involvement in US foreign policy in Iraq, Afghanistan and in fact, around the world? Are the civilian voices more dominant than the military voices and we should say you’re talking for the most part within the military itself right now?

Glain: I hear a lot about soft power and about we’re going to return, we’re going to revive our diplomatic tradition after seared by Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 10 years. But just look at what the Pentagon is doing. It is not withdrawing troops in the Middle East at least, it’s simply redeploying them. Once you’ve militarized a foreign policy it’s very difficult to demilitarize it, it’s just difficult as it is trying, bringing the troops home.

Mullins: But why is it binary? Why is it one or the other?

Glain: You have you know, the political imperative. President Obama campaigned on a promise to prosecute the war in Afghanistan because he said it was the good war. He may have believed that, but he certainly must’ve known there was no way he could’ve been elected if he did not talk tough on Afghanistan. And there is this very compelling burden of using the troops that you have every 10 years or so just to show that they’re necessary. So there are all these things that conspire to drive the process forward.

Mullins: Let me ask you this, if the US military represents the foreign policy face of the United States, if the military is also doing much of the diplomacy, which it seems to be doing like it or not in some cases, do we have to look at state versus Pentagon as this kind of competition? I mean maybe we need to rethink exactly how we conduct our foreign policy because the average America soldier knows that he or she is basically the face of a diplomat as well.

Glain: That’s true and I have to say the Pentagon has taken this mission, what it costs to build the operations, whether it’s diplomatic or aid driven, very seriously and they’re training their people to do jobs that most people do not enlist in the military to do. Having said that, I think a majority of them or plurality would much rather go back to their core mission. I keep getting back to the magnitude of the mission itself, so long as they are asked to assume this global burden of patrolling what they call the global commons, which is the seaways, the air corridors, the land bridges, every one in the world, then they’re going to be the go-to agency. You talked about how we militarized our policy elsewhere in the world, there’s a reason why we still maintain alliances that are legacies of the Cold War, with Korea, with Japan, with Europe, even though these countries are now rich and more than capable of assuming their nationals security responsibilities on their own. It’s because the Pentagon does not want to lose control. They want to maintain this global presence. So long as we have that global presence, it will be the Pentagon at the fore and the State Department running a lamentable second, third or fourth place.

Mullins: And that has not changed you think under President Obama, despite his campaigning on needing something different?

Glain: Just look at the budget, the budget debate. The Pentagon will suffer a haircut, there’s no doubt about it, but the State Department is looking at cuts that would really eviscerate America’s diplomatic capabilities.

Mullins: Okay, Stephen Glain, his new book is called State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America’s Empire. Nice to have you on the program.

Glain: Thank you, Lisa, thanks for having me.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

US Infantryman Colin Kilcoyne in Iraq (Photo courtesy of the Kilcoyne family)

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH in Boston. A new report out this week focuses on a very serious problem facing the U.S. military: suicide. The report is titled “Losing the Battle”. It highlights not only the personal costs to families, but also the risks for the military and the nation. We’re going to speak with one of the report’s authors in a few minutes. First, though, we’re going to hear one soldier’s story. Colin Kilcoyne from Northborough, Massachusetts joined the military when he was 17 years old; he volunteered for the infantry, and in 2007 he was deployed to Iraq as part of President Bush’s surge. But when Colin returned 15 months later, he was a changed man. He was troubled by what he had seen and done. In January of this year Colin took his life. He was just 25 years old. Colin’s mother Kathy is in the studio with us now. Thank you for coming in. And I am eager to hear what Colin was like when he was young before he went to Iraq. It sounds like he was a pretty ambitious guy to join the military at age 17.

Kathy Kilcoyne: He always liked the military and he was always fascinated by history and he constantly read about. You know, we’d have to tell him to turn off the History Channel. He was one of those kids who was never in front of other programs. It was like, œJust turn off the History Channel for a while. But the thing is, he loved history, he loved reenacting, it was a big part of his life.

Mullins: Reenacting being?

Kilcoyne: Actually, he was a British footguard, one of her Majesty’s first footguards. He started that when he was 12 years old. He used to reenact living history. He had a wonderful time with it and he made great friends in it and a lot of them ended up in the military with him. He continued on to National Guards with a member Chris Cunningham. They ended up in Iraq together, too. They ended up going full military.

Mullins: I’ve got to say that it sounds like he was a pretty serious guy, but I’ve seen the pictures. He was pretty funny.

Kilcoyne: Oh, he had a wonderful sense of humor. He was a character. I mean, he was your normal kid, I mean, he was not a saint. You know, he was a good person, had a wonderful heart.

Mullins: Not a saint meaning?

Kilcoyne: He would get in trouble; he was a devil at times, and he would joke. He was an all-around boy. He loved life. He had a wonderful time.

Mullins: One of the things that guys and women that go over there want immediately is the Combat Medal.

Kilcoyne: Yes.

Mullins: Especially for infantry. And he and his comrades got it after the first night. They first landed¦

Kilcoyne: They landed in a firefight. Yes, a direct fire. And he was very proud of that medal. In fact, to tell you the truth, that’s the only military item we buried him with, was his Combat Infantry Badge.

Mullins: Tell us what happened that night?

Kilcoyne: You mean the first night when they landed? They were in a firefight and he was a machine gunner at that point, and what he did was he saw was explosive devices were being planted, and so he was actually in a battle and he did fire and kill the man that was planting the explosives. And the next day they had to go off base and justify why it was done. He actually said he went and got the shovel and brought it back and said this is why he was killing them. But one of the things that Colin told me at the time was, later when he was home, was he felt very badly because when he went out the first man he killed he said, “Mom, I felt so bad. It wasn’t a clean shot.” He said, “That poor guy didn’t die right away.” He felt so badly about that thinking he must have suffered that night. And he said to me later that it was a big regret of his. He said, “ wish I got a clean hit.” And I never understood what he meant at the time and then he just said to me, “Mom, he bled to death.” You know, and even though it was enemy forces that were shooting at him, he still felt bad about thinking the other way. What this man went through. And one of the other great things he talked about later was he felt terrible about the children of the parents he had killed. He said, in terms of how they survive in that dark, poor country.

Mullins: Colin came back to Fort Stewart on July 4th of 2008. How about in terms of the help they needed psychiatrically, mental health counseling? Was any available there?

Kilcoyne: Not at the time. What they did was they brought these kids home and guys that had a place or had family off base were allowed to go off base, and these kids were left here to sort of unstructured, no schedule for a few days, and unfortunately, what I think it was was self-medicating with beer, booze, whatever, in terms of they were supposed to take classes the following week and they referred to them all jokingly as ‘Don’t Beat Your Wife Classes’. And what it was is it was just supposed to be post-traumatic stress, guidance counseling, and they spoke about things, but the one thing that they were told was “Don’t forget, if you want to stay in the army and you want to be an officer and be promoted, these things don’t look good on your record, so don’t”

Mullins: You mean getting counseling?

Kilcoyne: Getting counseling.

Mullins: Before the day that Colin took his life this past January was there any kind of spiral down or did this seem to come out of nowhere for you?

Kilcoyne: The cycles were off and on. I mean, in terms of, at one point, a few months before, what he had said was, he worked as a mechanic days, and what he said was, “My days are great. I just can’t stand the nights. I can’t take the nightmares.” So as far as when he was busy and working, things were better, and when he kept focused. But he had moments where he’d get a thing on his Facebook or whatever, and he’d go into a spiral and you’d see, “Oh, my God. It was the anniversary of when the four guys got killed. I can’t believe I forgot it was today. How could I ever forget? It was the worst day!” And when he was with my son in law at that point he mentioned, “Well, I think that’s a sign of improvement, Coll, that you didn’t think about it right away today. That shows improvement.” And he said, “No, no one ever should forget a day like that.” So that went into a spiral at that point, when he remembered the four friends that were killed.

Mullins: Where – do you mind if I ask how he died?

Kilcoyne: He shot himself in the lower level of Caitlin’s home. She went out that night with her husband and he had been living with his sister. She was wonderful to him, and he lived there, had a great time. He loved them. He stayed there basically for the last year, a full year. He just moved in with her and they sort of joked about it. They gave my husband a surprise birthday party, sort of told her that day when it was a year ago that summer, “Oh, by the way, Cate, I think I’m going to give my formal notice. I’m moving into your basement today.” And she had a living room downstairs and a bedroom and things like that, and that’s where he stayed.

Mullins: How are you and your husband doing now?

Kilcoyne: You have good days and you have bad days. I mean, in terms of we have a lot of wonderful memories, and like I said, the last two years were a blessing; we were lucky to have them. And that gives us strength. But the frustration level when the President’s speaking on TV and talking about different things and I just think, “Oh, you don’t have a clue. You know, they don’t understand.” Or they talk about look at these vets, these poor guys. Even when I go down the street and see the homeless now, I keep looking and thinking we have a whole new generation of homeless vets coming up. We’re looking at our friends that were in Vietnam still struggling. Or at Colin’s wake we had soldiers come that were Green Berets in Vietnam, men that we really respect, and they said, “We’ve been getting counseling for the last few years,” and these were guys that served 30 years ago.

Mullins: Does it get you upset that you make the sacrifice he made the sacrifice? Your family has and others don’t?

Kilcoyne: Well, I don’t think it has upset me as much as the fact that I think we’ve gotten to realize that it was a privilege in some ways. That he was that good, and that we really didn’t quite understand the depth of his loyalty at times. But I think in terms of that’s what makes this country continue. It’s the boys just like him. All of his friends were the same way. They all volunteered for the infantry. This is not a draft army. They all knew what they were walking into and they accepted it. At times they were angry at how things were going, but it was their choice. And I’m sure if we could do it all over again, it would be the exact same path.

Mullins: Okay. Kathy Kilcoyne whose son Colin served 15 months in Iraq from 2007 to 2008. He took his life in January of this year. It was very good to have you here and talk to you. Thank you.

Kilcoyne: Oh, thank you for listening. Thank you, Lisa.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

You can listen to our interview with Dr. Margaret Harrell, one of the authors of “Losing the Battle: The Challenge of Military Suicide” here.

Bruce Hoffman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University, was working at the Rand Corporation across from the Pentagon, and was at his offices when the hijacked plane crashed on 9/11.

The World spoke to Hoffman just hours after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Listen to Bruce Hoffman’s September 11, 2001 interview
| Download

And he has closely followed and thought about how this country and the world have changed since that day.

If no agreement is reached, automatic cuts kick in: $600 billion from the military and $600 billion from domestic programs. Both Democrats and Republicans shudder at this arrangement. But how does the Tea Party feel about steep cuts to national defense?

The Tea Party doesn’t have a central spokesman or organizing body; it’s a loose coalition of people united by beliefs in spending cuts, lower taxes, and smaller government. To try and gauge the mood of Tea Party supporters, I spoke with three people, in different parts of the country, who subscribe to their uniting principles.

“We really need across the board cuts. And nothing can be a sacred cow, nothing can be off limits. And that’s going to include defense,” said Chris Littleton of Cincinnati, co-founder of the group The Ohio Liberty Council.

Littleton said the defense budget has become bloated. (It’s come close to doubling since September 11th, 2001.) Littleton argued that’s because the military has lost sight of its Constitutional mission.

“It does not include being the world’s police, being the world’s peacemaker, or trying to advance our culture or causes around the world as a singular purpose. It’s for common defense,” said Litleton. “And so if we are not directly threatened, and we are not involved in an altercation, that we need to defend ourselves (from), then we can absolutely scale back our operations from throughout the world. So I’d be for both domestic and foreign military installations brought back, trimmed down, and hopefully many of them even eliminated.”

Support for a smaller military runs counter to what many conservative Republicans espouse. But Tea Party supporter Jason Rink – executive director of The Foundation for a Free Society in Austin, Texas – argued that’s because Republicans haven’t been acting like real conservatives.

“Traditional conservatives, they believed we should have a humble foreign policy, they believed that we shouldn’t police the world, they believed that we shouldn’t get into foreign wars, and that our defense spending needed to be something that we addressed and we were modest about,” said Rink.

The new push to reduce the debt could result in cuts to the Pentagon’s budget of up to $1 trillion dollars over a decade. That would be about 14 percent of its operating budget. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said cuts that large would imperil the nation’s security. And such cuts would impact tens of thousands of people who work in the defense industry.

But many Tea Party sympathizers say that $1 trillion in cuts being steep… that’s an exaggeration.

“I mean I guess steep is really all just perspective,” said Michael Boldin, executive director of an activist organization called the 10th Amendment Center in Los Angeles. “I don’t know think anyone is really proposing steep cuts and there should be.”

Boldin opposed the war in Iraq and the military campaign in Libya. He called them unconstitutional acts. He not only wants to cut the US military budget, he also wants to cut funds for foreign military assistance. Dramatically. The US distributes $14 billion annually in military assistance, most of which goes to Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Egypt and Pakistan.

“I think they (foreign military funds) should be eliminated completely, 100 percent,” said Boldin. “Funding one side or another overseas has led to far more problems than it has benefits, and it’s time for it to end: morally, economically, and then also constitutionally… I think it’s naïve to think that we should be so arrogant as to think that we can determine what side is the good side in very complex overseas issues. And I think the historical record, if it hasn’t already shown, is that the US has many times taken the wrong side.”

But military experts point out that the US government isn’t really in the business of picking “the good side.” Washington provides military assistance to foreign governments because it perceives such aid to be in the national interest. For example, the US gives aid to Pakistan not necessarily because the leaders are the good guys, but because it’s not in America’s interest for Pakistan’s nuclear-armed government to collapse.

There’s another element to foreign assistance: non-military economic aid. That comes out to $34 billion annually for things like food, agricultural development, and AIDS prevention in Africa. Overall, it’s about 1 percent of the U.S. budget.

No big surprise: Foreign aid is not very popular among Tea Party supporters.

“We cannot possibly think about trying to help out other countries before we have our own backyards in order. It’s not about politics or picking one cause or one country, it needs to be cut across the board,” said Chris Littleton of Cincinnati. “This isn’t a personal decision, it’s a mathematical one. This is a financial decision that has to be made.”

I asked Littleton if denying food to starving people or medicine to the sick might be considered heartless?

Littleton responded, “Is it more heartless to keep them dependent on another nation for something? Doesn’t that perpetuate the suffering? Doesn’t that perpetuate the problems?”

Michael Boldin said, “I support helping people, absolutely support helping people. But I am not under the belief that the US government is a responsible organization to help people. I think that should be left to private individuals, to private organizations.”

Foreign aid has generally had the support of Democrats and Republicans. Microsoft founder Bill Gates puts it this way: The small amount we spend helping the world’s poorest not only saves millions of lives, it also has an enormous impact on developing economies, which in turn, impacts our economy.

The international relief organization, Oxfam, points out that the main reasons that the US assists poor countries are to enhance national security, promote our economic interests, and provide moral leadership.

But Tea Party members and followers say the best way to enhance national security, promote our economic interests and provide moral leadership is to get our own economic house in order. And that means cut spending by however much you can, wherever you can.

Do you think the US should cut spending by however much it can, wherever it can?

Post your comments below:

Here’s a great blog post on Language Log on how 9/11 changed The Pentagon’s language priorities. Which transitions nicely into the next item…

The Big Show’s Alex Gallafent tries out a couple of instant translation devices. This comes as The Pentagon’s research arm, DARPA, prepares to decide on one or more devices to equip military personnel in combat and other field situations. (This is the second of a two-part series on The Pentagon’s history of language training and interpretation. Part One is here).

Finally, a quixotic attempt by a retired government accountant to lighten up the lyrics to Peru’s national anthem. And these are some truly grim lyrics. Translated into English, the first verse –the only verse that’s usually sung– goes like this:

For a long time the opressed Peruvian

the ominous chain he dragged

Condemned to a cruel servitude

for a long time, for a long time

for a long time he quietly whimpered

But then the sacret shout

Liberty! in its coasts has been heard

the slave’s indolence beats

the humiliated, the humiliated,

the humiliated neck raised up,

the humiliated neck raised up, neck raised up.

• The World in Words Podcast on iTunes
• The World in Words Podcast via RSS
• The World in Words on Facebook
• Patrick Cox on Twitter

As far as tedium goes, nothing competes with filling out a government form. How best to relieve the tedium? Invent stuff. Not out-and-out lie, just get a bit creative (OK, sometimes out-an-out lie: if I were to identify myself as a 90-year-old Azerbaijani woman or a Jedi knight, I would not be telling the truth).

Take the case of the Very Reverend Dr Peter Scrimshire Wood, late of Middleton in the English county of Norfolk. Wood was responsible for listing the job titles of his parishioners. In 1819, he described one of them as a “chopper of chips”, another as a “lamb gelder”, and a third as a “good workman”. He was back a year later with “cut throat of pigs”, “farmer and fortune hunter” and “cabbage gelder”. More are listed here, along with other details of the census research done by the University of Cambridge’s Peter Kitson.

Wood is my kind of man of the cloth– someone who makes the dull exciting, the drab colorful. Just think what he’d had done with the Bible, had he ever been entrusted to translate the Good Book. He even came up with a wildly unconventional name for his daugher, born in 1815. She was christened Amelia Congress Vienna Wood, presumably after the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna, which redrew the boundaries of Europe. Kitson, incidentally, thinks that a “cabbage gelder” probably plied his trade as a market gardener or a greengrocer.

For more than 200 years, the Pentagon has been trying to gets its personnel to learn the languages spoken by friends and foes alike. For most that time, it’s been an uphill struggle, complicated by changes in geo-politics and exactly which languages are considered “critical”. During World War Two, GIs were given foreign language phrase books with pronunciation transcriptions of key phrases. So you might find yourself in the company of, say, a Portuguese fisherman. You might wish to ask him: “Where have the anti-submarine nets been placed?” Here’s how you should do it, according to the Portuguese phrasebook: “On-deh seh lan-sah-rahn uhs reh-dehs ahn-tee-soob-mah-ree-nahs?” Could be a long conversation.

After the war, many new language programs were established, taught primarily at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif. There are some magnificent archival films made by the Pentagon about this. Check out two of them here.

More on this subject — and the future of language-learning in the military — next week.

After Alex Gallafent’s report on the languages at the Pentagon aired on The Big Show, Stephen Payne, who goes by the title of Command Historian at the Defense Language Institute, sent us this note: “I misspoke. We taught Pashto during the 1980s and stopped teaching it when the Soviet Union withdrew its forces from Afghanistan in 1989. We started teaching Pashto again after the September 11, 2001 attacks.” In the report, Payne had said that it was Persian/Farsi, not Pashto, that had been suspended. In fact, Persian has been taught continuously for decades.

Also in the pod this week, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is not amused at a Colombian telenovela which has named a badly-behaved dog after him. And the word “princess” gets a workout, and not all for the good.

• The World in Words Podcast on iTunes
• The World in Words Podcast via RSS
• The World in Words on Facebook
• Patrick Cox on Twitter

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Lisa Mullins: The families of the 9/11 victims are reacting to the news from Pakistan. Ted Olson served as Solicitor General under President George W. Bush. His wife Barbara died aboard American Airlines Flight-77 that was the one that was flown into the Pentagon. She was one of 3000 people killed that day. Ted Olson says he’s experienced many feelings after hearing about Bin Laden’s death.

Ted Olson: One of those feelings is tremendous sense of relief, as long as he was alive and all that he stood for, having been personally involved in the planning and the execution of the mass murder of so many American citizens, including my late wife Barbara. As long as he was alive, we all had the feeling, I think everyone, including people who had family and relatives  and friends and co-workers who may have died on September 11. But everybody in this country could not rest easily, not that we can now, of course, because there are still terrorists out there, but as long as he was alive, that was a presence in the world, he stood for all of the things that are evil and black and dark and vicious and venomous about, al-Qaeda and the movement that he led.

Mullins: So, for you, even though al-Qaeda is considered greatly diminished, since the events of 9/11, it still is around. But for you, Osama Bin Laden is more than a symbol, a face of al-Qaeda?

Olson: He’s actually more than a symbol on a face of the – he is the personification of the hate that exists in this world for people who are living the lives that reflect the values that we have in this country; the values of equality, of decency, of freedom, of liberty, of education, of women, the equality of women, right of self-determination; all of those things are alien and foreign to the people that subscribe to the views of Bin Laden and al-Qaeda and bringing this to an end is a tremendous, tremendous relief.

Mullins: You’re a former Solicitor General under President George W. Bush, a man who respects the rule of law and justice. Do you think it would’ve been better that you apprehend and bring to trial Bin Laden vs killing him outright?

Olson: No, I don’t think so at all, I think that the courageous individuals that went in there – in this operation, they had to move quickly and execute quickly. Secondly, this isn’t a matter of criminal trial, this was a matter of a declaration of war against the United States and United States citizens. And, you bring that war to a conclusion as quickly as you possibly can and there wasn’t any doubt about what Osama Bin Laden had done. There was never any doubt about his goals for continuing to inflict that kind of devastation and misery upon, not just the American people, but people all over the world. It had to be brought to an end.

Mullins: Do you mind if I ask you what’s going on in your own mind today in terms of sorting things out, especially with regard to your wife. I don’t know if you’re making the direct line between Bin Laden and your wife Barbara, or not?

Olson: Well many of the things that go through your mind on a day like today, not that there is ever anything like today, is that it brings back more fresh in your memory all of the things that you lived through that day and vivid memories of my late wife Barbara, who is such a passionate and colorful and alive person. And I reflect upon all of the things that my wife Barbara and the others who died that day stood for.

Mullins: Former Solicitor General Ted Olson, his wife Barbara was among those killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• Tom Rick’s blog at ForeignPolicy.com

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World.  President Obama today announced a reshuffling of his national security team.  He nominated CIA Chief, Leon Panetta to replace outgoing Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, at the Pentagon; and General David Petraeus is Obama’s pick to take over at the CIA.

Barack Obama: These are the leaders that I’ve chosen to help guide us through the difficult days ahead.  I will look to them and my entire national security team for their counsel, continuity, and unity of effort that this moment in history demands.

Werman: The U.S. military and diplomatic leadership in Afghanistan is also changing.  All these appointments will need to be confirmed by Congress.  Tom Ricks is Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, and author of several books on defense issues, including The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq.  He says the move sheds some light on President Obama’s goals going forward.

Tom Ricks: I think the Panetta move, sending him to the Pentagon, is a signal that he is quite determined to bring down the defense budget.  Panetta’s background in Congress was as a pugnacious guy.  He was at one point chairman of the budget committee.  So, I think at the Pentagon what you’re seeing is Obama wants a guy who’s gonna manage a sharp decline in the defense budget and keep the lid on the place. Petraeus I know pretty well and I think it’s a bit of a puzzlement why they’re sending him over to CIA.  It’s not a natural fit, but he is a smart, hardworking guy.  I think it was time to get him out of Afghanistan.  They’ve been working him hard for years. Most people wouldn’t think of the CIA as a rest and relaxation post, but for Petraeus I think it kind of will be.  It also maybe a signal that what they want to do is bring down the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, and as they do, increase the CIA’s percentage of operations there.  So, it would be a natural fit in that way.

Werman: I mean the appointment of Petraeus is one of the most interesting ones of this shift.  He’s of course, Mr. Counter Insurgency, having helped design and implement huge changes to the way America fights its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Whereas the CIA is supposed to be about spying and intelligence.  Are we seeing a blurring of the lines here?

Ricks: We kind of are.  I think there’s a legitimate worry on the part of people like Andrew Bacevich at Boston University, that we’ve seen a militarization of foreign policy and this is then a corollary, the militarization of intelligence operations.  That said, the parallel between the two and the sense in this is what Patreaus realized is that counter insurgency is much more about intelligence than it is actually about going out and shooting military weapons. I remember what one smart company commander said to me on day in Iraq, he said, ‘I have 150 guys who pull triggers and 2 guys who to intelligence.  What I really need is the opposite — 150 guys who gather intelligence and then 2 guys who act on it and go out and pull triggers.’  So I think in that sense Petraeus understands the centrality of intelligence and I think the CIA will be very receptive to that.

Werman: As head of Central Command, General Petraeus has reportedly authorized U.S. special operations troops to collect intelligence in places like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran, and Yemen.  All are non-war zones and outside the military’s traditional purview.  In many ways this would seem to be in competition with the CIA.  Has that won Petraeus many friends in the agency?

Ricks: Well, I’m not sure it’s so much competition as the CIA, like a lot of the U.S. military, is probably getting pretty tired for having operated at high speed for 10 years since 9/11.  A lot of people are looking for some help here.  And I think what you saw with special operators pulled in, to augment and complement and to even protect CIA operations. Don’t forget also that in Afghanistan Patraeus has played a role in overseeing the drone strikes that are being conducted frequently in Pakistan against suspected Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders.  So, he’s been working pretty closely with them in Afghanistan, and before that in Iraq for several years now.

Werman: Tom Ricks, Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security helping us get a handle on the significance of the leadership changes announced today in the President’s national security team.  Tom Ricks, thanks so much.

Ricks: You’re welcome.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

by Alex Gallafent

The US military has been producing specialist interpreters for decades — people who spend years learning Arabic, Chinese and other challenging languages.

They’re the kind of people Rye Barcott depended on. He’s a former Marine captain who served in Iraq. For Barcott, there’s no substitute for having a flesh-and-blood interpreter by your side when you’re gathering intelligence, specifically, a trusted linguist who can translate all aspects of a conversation — the verbal and the non-verbal.

But as Barcott points out, few units, especially in the infantry, have access to human interpreters. Machine translation could help, with basic information at least.

“When a Marine or Army unit’s out patrolling and they need to ask a person for permission to enter their property for example, it’s far better to have a machine than to not have anything,” Barcott said.

In recent years, the US military has adopted a policy of trying to give everyone who deploys some knowledge, something to hang their hat on.

Apps

“Hello. And thank you for your interest in learning more about V Communicator Mobile — the first deployed and fielded mobile military application.”

This is one of a growing range of products out there designed to bridge the military language gap. Ernie Bright is the product manager for V Communicator Mobile, which runs on a modified iPod Touch. Bright said the focus was on assisting soldiers, not distracting them.

“We knew that they were needing a more mobile easy-to-use product that would allow them to learn key tactical phrases, and also be able to just pick it up and use it,” Bright said.

It’s impressive, quickly translating a phrase such as ‘do you have any weapons?’ into the equivalent language in, say, Pashto.

But it’s not the only translation device out there vying for a potentially lucrative military contract. Another mobile app is called SpeechTrans.

According to the company’s co-founder, Yan Auerbach, “It allows you to speak into the device in your native language; it will translate and speak aloud the translation instantly.”

Dialects

It’s equally impressive. SpeechTrans draws on an archive of voice samples, but it doesn’t yet cover every language or — crucially with languages such as Arabic — every dialect.

Yan Auerbach tells me his company is now in the running for a Pentagon project called BOLT (Boundless Operational Language Translation). The goal for BOLT is lofty: technology that would recognize not just dialects but localized slang too.

That still leaves a lot of missing information: gestures and body language. It’s something Ernie Bright and the V Communicator Mobile team have been thinking about.

On their device, attention is paid to non-verbal communication too. For every piece of language you get an animated video, demonstrating the appropriate gesture. It’s meant to help soldiers learn the language too.

“They can remember that this phrase coincides with this gesture or this body language,” said Bright.

Interpreting gestures

That’s fine for stock phrases at checkpoints and the like. But soldiers have to interpret gestures as much as they have to reproduce them. And they have to do it in the blink of an eye.

Could a machine ever do that work too?

When it comes to translation technology, no-one yet knows where the lines will be drawn. All languages — all communications — are built on ever-shifting sands of meaning. That meaning can’t ever be fully, totally captured by technology.

But as translation tech accelerates it might fool us into believing otherwise. And so for the military the dream of a universal translating machine will be ever-more tantalizing.

The trick will be knowing when to use the gadgets. And when to put them aside.

• Part I: The history of America’s multilingual military
• Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center
• USMA West Point’s Department of Foreign Languages
• The World in Words podcast
• Rye Barcott’s book, It Happened On The Way To War
• Article from Wired on Pentagon translation projects
• SpeechTrans
• V Communicator Mobile