* SASC Ranking Member Senator McCain [R-AZ] wrote to SecDef Panetta that by his calculations (which he did not provide), it could cost DoD $4B to comply with Labor/OMB guidance relative to WARN Act liabilities. On the White House’s position that contractors don’t have to draw the logical conclusion from the Budget Control Act because that law might be repelled in the future, Senator Lindsey Graham [R-SC] said: “It’s crazy legal analysis. We are in danger of being no longer a rule of law nation. It’s a mini-coup.”
* CSIS takes the gloves off in a slidedeck [PDF] that denounces a “growing strategy-reality gap.” First on budget constraints, a perspective similar to the Heritage Foundation’s stance: “The underlying problem is not federal spending but the national cost of medical Treatment and the lack of savings for retirement.” But DoD gets spanked too for its lack of serious spending growth control and a strategy dressed down as “good intentions and fortune cookie prose.”
* NATO Defense College paper: Romney vs. Obama, what the alliance can expect from the next US president [PDF].
* NATO will keep Anders Fogh Rasmussen as its secretary general for another year, until the end of July 2014.
* EADS CEO Tom Enders questions the need for Germany to own shares in a post-merger EADS/BAE, in an interview with Bild [in German].
* Taiwan grounded its Mirage fighters after one of its pilots died in a crash [in French] during a test flight in France yesterday.
* This one gets the “uh, you’re welcome, I guess” award for the day. Iran appears thankful for the US-led war in Iraq last decade, per its FARS news agency: “Iran and Iraq have enjoyed growing ties ever since the overthrow of the former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, in 2003.”