President Barack Obama announced today that he has nominated his top counterterrorism adviser John Brennan as the next CIA director and former Republican senator from Nebraska Chuck Hagel for the position of Secretary of Defense, ignoring weeks of neoconservative criticism of Hagel’s record.

“Chuck Hagel is the leader that our troops deserve,” Obama said in the East Room of the White House during the announcement. “He is a champion of our troops, and our values, and our military families.” Outgoing Secretary Leon Panetta said that Hagel is “a patriot, a decorated combat veteran…and I believe his experience and judgment makes him an excellent choice for Secretary of Defense.”

In taking over at the Pentagon from Secretary Panetta, Hagel is tasked with implementing a time of change that began in Obama’s first term. Hagel — who served in the Senate from 1997 to 2009 — was an early supporter of the Iraq War, but quickly became an extremely vocal thorn in the side of the Bush administration as an outspoken critic of the war’s prosecution. That war has now ended under President Obama, with the war in Afghanistan due to come to a close during Hagel’s service in Obama’s Cabinet.

Despite his credentials, and the strong likelihood that he will be confirmed, the path to the Pentagon will be one littered with false attacks and cheap shots that ignore the nuance of Hagel’s past statements. The smear machine has been gearing up for weeks as President Obama weighed his final decision and the White House sent out trial balloons. In response, an avalanche of bipartisan and high-level support has come out in defense of Hagel’s strong record, a few selections of which are listed here:

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According to yesterday’s U.S. Army press release, up to 20 active-duty soldiers committed suicide during the month of October. The army includes confirmed suicides and cases of death in which suicide is suspected in its total. October’s numbers are slightly higher than the numbers for the previous month, during which 15 active-duty members of the army are suspected to have committed suicide.

So far this year, 166 active-duty soldiers may have committed suicide. If all 166 cases are confirmed, then the number has already surpassed last year’s total of 165 confirmed active-duty army suicides. The news indicates that the army’s long-running struggle with suicide is tragically escalating.

Earlier this year, the army attempted to combat the epidemic through the use of social media outlets like Facebook to reach out to army members. They’ve also created an app aimed at army members who have contemplated suicide. The app, according to its creator Dr. Nigel Bush, “has the photos, it might have sound messages from loved ones, it might have videos of family trips and so on.”

More conventional strategies like presentations, which the army has also utilized, have been criticized. One Dartmouth professor and expert on suicide told NPR earlier this year, “They call this kind of training ‘death by PowerPoint’…what they might not be as informed about are some individual strategies that they can take to maybe cope better with the situation at hand.” According to the New York Times, “nearly half of all suicides in the military having been committed with privately owned firearms.” Strategies like encouraging “friends and families of potentially suicidal service members to safely store or voluntarily remove personal firearms from their homes” have also been suggested.

TIME magazine detailed the rise of suicides in the army in August:

“Suicides have spiked since 2005, even as the war in Iraq has ended, and the conflict in Afghanistan begins to wind down. The drip-drip-drip of statistics tells the story: mental-health problems were the top reason troops were hospitalized last year, according to a May Pentagon report. Nearly 22,000 troops were hospitalized with mental disorders last year, 54% more than in 2007.”

Earlier this year, a high-ranking army official wrote, “Suicide is the toughest enemy I have faced in my 37 years in the Army.” Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has described suicide in the army as “one of the most frustrating problems.”

Today John Bolton, former U.N. ambassador under George W. Bush, said that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s trip to Australia is “very important” and necessary, undercutting attacks from conservative news outlets such as Fox News and Drudge that Clinton is vacationing Australia rather than testifying in front of a congressional committee about the Benghazi attacks.

Speaking on Fox News today, Bolton said:

Let me first say a word in defense of Secretary Clinton and Secretary Panetta being in Australia. This is for an annual meeting called the AUSMIN that we have and I think it is very important that we demonstrate solidarity with the Australians so the fact that they’re out of town shouldn’t be concerning.

Watch the clip:

Specifically, Fox Nation propagated a myth that Clinton skipped a hearing on Benghazi to drink wine in Australia. The Drudge Report picked up the story as well, going even further with its headline: “Hillary can’t make House hearing on Benghazi; busy visiting friends, wine tasting in Australia.” Drudge and Fox link to an article in the Herald Sun, a newspaper, as Media Matters pointed out, that is owned by conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Indeed, the Australia meeting is crucial. At the meeting today, Clinton and Panetta announced that the military “will station a powerful radar and a space telescope in Australia as part of its strategic shift toward Asia.” Other key topics including Afghanistan will be covered as well, the Voice of America notes, “The two countries will also discuss plans to wind down the war in Afghanistan. Australia, which has 1,550 troops in Afghanistan, is the biggest military contributor to the campaign outside NATO.”

The federal government faces a shortage of cyber security experts. That’s according to an article published in FCW, a technology-focused publication. FCW interviewed federal officials regarding the government’s ability to effectively beef up its cyber security program and found a unsettling trend: the government needs more tech experts. In some cases, according to a Department of Defense official, the government hasn’t even figured out what to hire for:

“We don’t have all the capacity and the right sets of skills that we need to do all that’s required. In the department we are still struggling to fully define and empower the cyber workforce. It’s a big challenge, just to define the techniques.”

In July, a State Department official gave an estimate of the shortage to Reuters: “The numbers I’ve seen look like shortages in the 20,000s to 40,000s for years to come.”

Why is there a shortage? According to Cynthia Dion-Schwarz from the National Science Foundation, it’s a “pipeline” problem. In short, the government can’t find the “people with the right skills sets to just have the entry-level skills needed in order to make progress in cybersecurity,” Schwarz told FCW. Others, like John Arguila, a U.S. Naval Postgraduate School professor and cyber security expert, say it’s time to think outside the box when it comes to recruiting, telling the Guardian that “most of these sorts of guys can’t be vetted in the traditional way. We need a new institutional culture that allows us to reach out to them.”

The shortage is especially relevant now that the president is likely to sign an executive order on cyber security, putting, according to a copy of the report, “the Department of Homeland Security in charge of organizing an information-sharing network that rapidly distributes sanitized summaries of top-secret intelligence reports about known cyberthreats that identify a specific target.”

For months, federal officials and cyber security experts have been warning about this. In April, Janet Napolitano, the head of Homeland Security, said:

“There is a lack of expertise and there are a lot of people clamoring for people who know the internet well…We need analysts. We need people who are engineers. We need people who are experienced in intelligence as it relates to the cyber-universe.”

It’s not just federal officials who have connected the shortage to national security; Enrique Salem, an executive at Symantec, a cyber security organization and software maker, told Reuters in June: “What I would tell you is it’s going to be a bigger issue from a national security perspective than people realize.”

Earlier this month, Leon Panetta, the secretary of defense, said cyber security was at a “pre-9/11 moment.”

On Friday, the FBI announced a new initiative to track down and identify hackers. The program is an attempt to respond to hacking that had led to “malicious software in two million computers” in early 2011. The FBI describes the program as a way to “uncover and investigate web-based intrusion attacks and develop a cadre of specially trained computer scientists able to extract hackers’ digital signatures from mountains of malicious code.” Besides its relevance to individual computer users, hacking and the need for cybersecurity is becoming increasingly relevant to national security.

Word of the FBI’s new initiative comes on the heels of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s strong call for action earlier this month, when he said that cybersecurity is at a “pre-9/11 moment.” The FBI will share the information it gathers with the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and the National Security Agency.

Earlier this month the military announced similar efforts to counter cyber attacks directed at the U.S. But Panetta said there should be more emphasis on cybersecurity. “We know of specific instances where intruders have successfully gained access to these control systems,” he said. “We also know they are seeking to create advanced tools to attack those systems and cause panic, destruction and even loss of life.” Panetta added that the private sector and government should share information about cyber threats.

In the past year alone there have been several reports of international hackers targeting and attacking U.S.-based agencies and organizations like NASA and the Chamber of Commerce.

In July, John Arguila, a defense expert and professor, told the Guardian that the U.S. needed to recruit more hackers to join its side, adding that finding them through traditional means probably wouldn’t work because “most of these sorts of guys can’t be vetted in the traditional way. We need a new institutional culture that allows us to reach out to them.”

The Obama administration, hoping to circumvent a stalled Congress, is finalizing its draft executive cybersecurity order. The Associated Press, which received a copy of it last week, said the order “would put the Department of Homeland Security in charge of organizing an information-sharing network that rapidly distributes sanitized summaries of top-secret intelligence reports about known cyberthreats that identify a specific target.”

An impassioned plea to halt the politicization of the attack in Benghazi came from surprising quarters this morning. Fox News’s Geraldo Rivera, appearing on Fox and Friends, rattled through several right-wing talking points about what the Obama administration could have and didn’t do during the Sept. 11 assault, debunking each of them.

Rivera was primarily responding to statements just minutes before by Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA), who sits on the House Government and Oversight Committee. In his remarks, Kelly claimed that the Pentagon was unable or unwilling to respond to the attack, which wound up killing four Americans, despite “real-time” information coming in. Rivera pushed back on Kelly’s claims and the idea that military assets could have made it to Libya in time:

RIVERA: I think we need to stop this politicizing, we’re getting away from the real issue, which is why wasn’t there security before it happened. But these preposterous allegations, reckless allegations, that somebody — They paint a picture of some fat bureaucrat watching TV. You heard him describe it, Congressman Kelly. I think that’s really beyond the pale.

Watch it:

“In terms of the military, stop these politicians” from telling the military what they could have done, Rivera went on. Kelly’s claims centered around a recent idea that the U.S. could have launched a military assault from a base in Europe to counter the attack. Rivera pointed to statements from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that indicated that information on the ground was not clear enough to warrant sending U.S. forces into harms way.

Rivera also took flack for agreeing with various Republican Senators that the current political climate was not conducive to holding an investigation into Libya. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has instead scheduled hearings into possible intelligence failures prior to and during the attack for after the election.

The hosts of Fox and Friends were not as willing to acknowledge these facts as Rivera, repeatedly attempting to bring him back on the narrative. At one point Brian Kilmead insisted that the State Department is wrong in not immediately issuing a judgement on precisely what happened in the incident, as “al Qaeda isn’t waiting.” This isn’t the first time that Rivera has gone off the conservative narrative on Libya, with Fox News hosts failing to rein him in.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta painted a bleak picture of American preparedness for cyber attacks on critical infrastructure in a speech yesterday, warning that America is open to the threat of a “cyber-Pearl Harbor” that could “be just as destructive as the terrorist attack of 9/11.” Panetta described the threats to U.S. critical infrastructure as dire:

“An aggressor nation or extremist group could use these kinds of cyber tools to gain control of critical switches… They could derail passenger trains, or even more dangerous, derail passenger trains loaded with lethal chemicals. They could contaminate the water supply in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country.”

Panetta’s comments come after a string of cyber attacks targeting the private banking industry and his doomsday scenario of critical infrastructure security failures is backed by the twenty-fold increase in deployments for Department of Homeland Security’s Industrial Control Systems Computer Emergency Readiness Team (ICS-CERT) since its creation in 2009.

However, the U.S. forays into cybersecurity have not always been on the defensive side, with researchers uncovering three new malware programs possibly developed by the U.S. this summer in addition to the widely reported Stuxnet virus. Commentators have noted Panetta’s heated rhetoric on cybersecurity comes while the administration is reaching out to the Hill to build support for an impending cybersecurity executive order.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano confirmed in September that the administration was nearing completion of a draft cybersecurity order following the failure of multiple cybersecurity legislative efforts in Congress. Online outlets have expressed concern that the order may take policy guidance from defeated bills that were maligned for lax privacy protections similar to those in the SOPA and PIPA copyright enforcement proposals that resulted in numerous online protests in early 2012.

A new report out this week by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projects that if the Budget Control Act’s automatic spending cuts take effect, the Pentagon’s budget, in 2013 dollars, will still be larger than what it was in 2006, a finding that undermines claims that sequestration will be “devastating” to the military and the defense industry:

Accommodating those reductions, in particular, could be difficult for the department to manage because it would have to be done over only nine months. Even with that cut, however, DoD’s base budget in 2013 would still be larger than it was in 2006 (in 2013 dollars) and larger than the average base budget during the 1980s.

The automatic spending cuts would amount to about a $500 billion reduction in military spending over the next decade. Much of the hyperbole about the cuts has come from Republicans on Capitol Hill, the defense industry and even Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who once said the cut “invites aggression.”

“We’re moving dangerously close to not being able to guarantee the security of the United States of America,” said Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) about the cuts. And big military contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman overhype the cuts as well, warning of massive job losses (despite the fact that military spending is not meant to be a jobs program) and a severe downturn in the economy if the cuts are allowed to take place (experts have pushed back on those claims). Republicans even proposed cutting 25 percent from programs directly benefiting the poor in order to stave off the military spending cuts.

But the new CBO study undermines all the fearmongering. “The comments from many — but not all– Republicans, most defense manufacturers and the secretary of defense that they regard a budget well above Cold War averages to be a catastrophe is consciously constructed, misinforming hysteria,” said defense budget expert Winslow Wheeler of the CBO’s calculation.

Bloomberg News notes that the CBO’s new finding “buttresses the view of some independent budget analysts.” Indeed, one such analyst is CAP’s Lawrence Korb, who has been saying for many months what the CBO report concluded this week. Referring to the $500 billion in military spending reductions President Obama instituted and the sequester’s $500 billion cut, Korb wrote nearly a year ago: “Even if the defense budget were reduced by the entire $1 trillion, or about $100 billion a year over the next decade, it would amount to a reduction of about 15 percent. This would, in real terms, allow the Pentagon to spend at its 2007 level for the next decade.”