Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said on Wednesday that he is more reluctant to support arming Syria’s rebels than he had been previously, saying that the situation in Syria is “more confusing on the opposition side today than it was six months ago.”

Back in February, Dempsey said that he had supported a plan put forth several months prior by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus to arm the rebels.

But during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday, Dempsey, in an exchange with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), said that he has since changed his view:

DEMPSEY: Well, at the time the … we felt like we had a clear enough understanding of the moderate opposition. And we felt as though it was in the long-term interest of Syria as a nation-state that the institutions wouldn’t fail and that the time was proper at that moment to intervene that way. … My military judgment is that now that we have seen the emergence of Al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham notably, and now that we have seen photographs of some of the weapons that is have been flowing into Syria in the hands of those groups, now I am more concerned than I was before.

“If we made the decision then to supply them with weapons, it would have been less complicated than now?” McCain asked. “That is a potential solution — a potential conclusion, yes, sir,” Dempsey replied.

The Joint Chiefs chairman, however, added that he would support arming the rebels “if we could clearly identify the right people,” a position that is in line with a recommendation of a recent report from the Center for American Progress. Watch the clip:

Calls for greater Western military intervention in Syria have grown louder in recent months but the Obama administration is holding the line with supplying so-called non-lethal and humanitarian aid.

At the same time, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said during the same hearing on Wednesday that the U.S is sending 200 U.S. troops to Jordan, which the Los Angeles Times describes as “the vanguard of a potential U.S. military force of 20,000 or more that could be deployed if the Obama administration decides to intervene in Syria to secure chemical weapons arsenals or to prevent the 2-year-old civil war from spilling into neighboring nations.”

And Secretary of State John Kerry said in a House hearing also on Wednesday that the U.S. is working “very, very closely” with those who are suppling arms to moderate Syrian rebels.

Senate Republicans appear to believe that the U.S. military has the ability to respond to any crisis, at any time, anywhere in the world, as evidenced by frequent questioning during a Senate hearing today why U.S. assets weren’t deployed to stop the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic missions in Benghazi Libya — despite repeated confirmation from top defense officials that there were none to be deployed in a timely manner.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee to give their long-awaited testimony on Benghazi. Republicans have been attacking the Obama administration for the inability of U.S. troops to reach Benghazi in the seven-hour window of the two waves of attacks. Panetta insisted that “time and distance” were the factors most to blame, strongly quelling ideas of military omnipresence:

PANETTA: The United States military, as I’ve said, is not and frankly should not be a 911 service, arriving on the scene within minutes to every possible contingency around the world.

Despite this, Senate Republicans repeatedly asked why the U.S. military never swooped in to save the Ambassador Chris Stevens and his colleagues seeming to understand neither the process in which troops are deployed or the vastness of Northern Africa. The Republican Senators berated Panetta and Dempsey for alternately for providing satisfactory answers or outright lying. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) in particular hit Dempsey for providing “simply false” testimony on the time it took to move troops:

McCAIN: We didn’t take into account threats to that consulate. [...] We could have placed forces there. We could have had aircraft and other capabilities as short a distance away as Soudah Bay, Crete [in Greece].

Watch a small sample of the GOP’s off-base questions here:

If the Republicans had done their homework, or listened to the testimony given, they would have saved themselves a lot of time. For example, the air base McCain referenced is actually used primarily for NATO operations, and did not house forces that could have been used in response to attacks in Benghazi, requiring military personnel to be flown in from Central Europe and Spain to Sigonalla Air Base in Italy. Likewise the time and difficulty in moving those troops has been discussed by Panetta before.

The argument of Senate Republicans that the military ignored glaring warnings Benghazi has likewise been disproved. As Panetta said in his testimony, in the months leading up to Benghazi the National Counterterrorism Center logged 281 threats against embassies and their personnel. At no time was there an explicit threat flagged in the intelligence gathered that indicated that Benghazi was more threatened than other diplomatic locations in Yemen, Sudan, or Egypt.

Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Martin Dempsey said on Thursday that they supported a plan put forth by Obama administration officials to arm the rebels in Syria fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s regime forces.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that last summer, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus “were joining forces on a plan to arm the Syrian resistance.” But, the Times added, “Wary of becoming entangled in the Syria crisis, the White House pushed back, and Mrs. Clinton backed off.”

Today during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) asked Panetta and Dempsey if they supported the Clinton/Petraeus plan. “We did,” Dempsey said:

MCCAIN: I would ask again both of you what I asked you last March when 7,500 citizens of Syria had been killed. It’s now up to 60,000. How many more have to die before you recommend military action and did you support the recommendation by then-Secretary of State Clinton and then head of CIA Gen. Petraeus that we provide weapons to the resistance in Syria. Do you support that?

PANETTA: We do.

MCCAIN: You did support that?

DEMPSEY: We did.

Watch the clip:

The news is quite significant, seeing that much of President Obama’s national security team supports arming the Syrian rebels, a move that — despite providing non-lethal aid and training — the Obama administration has been reluctant to do.

In an interview with the New Republic last month, Obama explained his thinking on how to handle the civil war in Syria. “Would a military intervention have an impact?” he asked, “And how do I weigh tens of thousands who’ve been killed in Syria versus the tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo?” Obama continued: “You make the decisions you think balance all these equities, and you hope that, at the end of your presidency, you can look back and say, I made more right calls than not and that I saved lives where I could, and that America, as best it could in a difficult, dangerous world, was, net, a force for good.”

If you watched Chuck Hagel’s Senate confirmation hearing to become Secretary of Defense, you’d assume that Iran is at most days away from obtaining a nuclear weapon, requiring an immediate decision on the use of force. “If your position is truly prevention and not containment, Chuck, what is the redline [on Iran], what is the point?” asked Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA). “We know there’s some things happening over there right now that are very serious.”

But on Sunday morning, during an appearance on Meet The Press, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, alongside Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, reiterated that Iran has not decided to pursue nuclear weapons, dispelling the narrative being put forward by Senate Republicans.

Speaking to guest host Chuck Todd, Panetta and Dempsey both made clear that they believe that Hagel will be confirmed and said that previous analysis about Iran still holds true:

PANETTA: What I’ve said, and I will say today, is that the intelligence we have is they have not made the decision to proceed with the development a nuclear weapon. They are developing and enriching uranium, they continue to do that —

TODD: Why do you believe they’re doing that?

PANETTA: I think it’s a clear indication — They say they’re doing that to be able to do their own energy source. I think it is suspect that they continue to enrich uranium because that is dangerous and that violates international rules.

TODD: You believe that they are probably developing nuclear weapons, but you don’t, the intelligence doesn’t —

PANETTA: No, I can’t — I can’t tell you they are in fact pursuing a weapon, because that’s what not intelligence say they’re doing right now.

Watch Panetta’s statements here:

Panetta also lamented the inability of Congress to ask a range questions about matters that the next head of the Pentagon will face, instead concentrating on Hagel’s past comments. The focus on Iran and Israel, according to Panetta, crowded out discussion on military budget, combating terrorism, and the still ongoing war in Afghanistan. “We just did not see enough time spent on discussing those issues. And in the end, that’s what counts,” Panetta said.

To illustrate the disparity in questioning, the Washington Post’s Max Fischer conducted a word count of Hagel’s hearing’s transcript. Throughout the three rounds of questions, “Iran” was brought up 169 times and “Israel” mentioned 178 times. Meanwhile, “Al Qaeda” was only mentioned twice.

Despite the opposition put forward by the Senate GOP, it seems unlikely that Hagel’s nomination will be filibustered. Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) on Friday indicated that a majority vote alone should be able to move Hagel to the Pentagon, while Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) threat to hold Hagel’s confirmation fizzled with the announcement of a coming Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Benghazi.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey today expressed his hope that allowing women into combat roles would bring down sexual assault rates in the military.

As of today, the Department of Defense has fully rescinded the 1994 Direct Combat Definition and Assignment Rule that first closed off billets in combat units to women. Speaking at the official announcement of the change, which will open thousands of positions to women for the first time, Dempsey pressed back particularly strongly when challenged on the notion that adding women to these new roles would be a hindrance to the development of the military.

Recalling his days at West Point, Dempsey told reporters that the military academy had become a much higher quality institution after the admission of women. The same transformative property would hopefully be seen in changing the culture of the military regarding sexual assault, according to Dempsey:

DEMPSEY: We’ve had this ongoing issue with sexual harassment, sexual assault. I believe its because we’ve had separate classes of military personnel at some level. Now, its far more complicated than that. But when you have one part of the population that is designated as ‘warriors’ and one part that is designated as something else, that disparity begins to establish a psychology that — in some cases — led to that environment. I have to believe the more we treat people equally, the more likely they are to treat each other equally.

Instead of taking the stance of some commentators that adding women to combat units would diminish their effectiveness or “humiliate” the men serving alongside them, Dempsey rightly focused on the risk of assault that women in the armed services face. Approximately one in three military women have been sexually assaulted, about double the rate of those in civilian life.

In the rest of their conference, Dempsey and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta clarified many of the details of the shift. New positions are not opening immediately for women, as the military departments now have until May 15 to submit plans on how they’ll implement the changes, with the process of integration to be completed by Jan. 1, 2016.

The new policy also doesn’t mark a change in the Selective Service process, where young males must register for the draft upon reaching the age of eighteen, according to Panetta. Regarding infantry and other ground combat positions, Panetta made clear that the onus is now on the service branches to justify to the Pentagon reasons why women should be barred from certain billets. The move to integrate women will also allow women more options in terms of advancing their career, as combat roles offer officers and enlisted soldiers alike greater ease in obtaining promotions.

“If they can do the job, if they can meet the standards, if they can meet the qualifications that are involved here, there is no reason why they shouldn’t have a chance,” Panetta said. “That’s just a fundamental belief of mine and I think it’s a fundamental belief of the American people.”

Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey told reporters in London on Thursday that an Israeli attack on Iran would “clearly delay but probably not destroy Iran’s nuclear programme.” Dempsey — America’s highest ranking military officer — also sought to distance the U.S. from any premature attack, adding, “I don’t want to be complicit if they [Israel] choose to do it.”

Dempsey explained that he did not know whether Iran intends to build nuclear weapons — the IAEA and U.S. and Israeli intelligence all agree that Iran has not made that decision — but that a premature attack could dismantle the international coalition President Obama has assembled to confront and isolate Iran over its disputed nuclear program, the Guardian reports:

Dempsey said he did not know Iran’s nuclear intentions, as intelligence did not reveal intentions. What was clear, he said, was that the “international coalition” applying pressure on Iran “could be undone if [Iran] was attacked prematurely”. Sanctions against Iran were having an effect, and they should be given a reasonable opportunity to succeed.

Dempsey’s assessment is shared by numerous American and Israeli officials, including former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who has also warned that a premature attack would “accelerate the procurement of the bomb” and “galvanize Iranian society behind the leadership and create unity around the nuclear issue.”

The comments come on the heals of the IAEA’s new report on Iran’s nuclear program, which found the Islamic Republic has increased its stockpile of enriched uranium and its production capacity. Yet the Obama administration and outside experts still believe there is “time and space” for a diplomatic solution. “The president has made clear frequently he is determined to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said when asked about the IAEA report.

“They can’t do it right without us,” a former adviser to Obama told the New York Times recently, referring to a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran. “And we’re trying to persuade them that a strike that just drives the program more underground isn’t a solution; it’s a bigger problem.”

Indeed, the Obama administration is aware, not only of the threat an Iranian nuclear weapon poses, but also the potential negative consequences of a military attack on Iran. And that, coupled with U.N., U.S. and Israeli assessments that Iran has not yet decided on whether to build a nuclear weapon, leads the administration to pursue a diplomatic solution with Iran, a track the it deems the “best and most permanent way” to solve the nuclear crisis.

The country’s top military officer condemned members of swift boat groups that have cropped up this election season attacking President Obama on national security grounds. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey would not comment on the substance of the groups’ attacks but told reporters on a plane back to the U.S. from Afghanistan that they’re “not useful”:

“And one of the things that marks us as a profession in a democracy, in our form of democracy, that’s most important is that we remain apolitical.

“That’s how we maintain our bond and trust with the American people,” the general said.

A group of former intelligence and special operations officers called “OPSEC” released a video last week accusing Obama of jeopardizing sensitive information in taking credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden. The lead spokesperson for that group, as Foreign Policy reported yesterday, “has a long record of questioning the president’s birthplace and religion, and calling him names like ‘Commander-in-Chief Hussein Mao-bama,’ trumpeting conspiracy theories, and insulting Muslims.”

Another group attacking Obama called “Special Operations Speaks” or SOS, pledges to remove the president from office because of “what they see as unforgivably security leaks by President Obama and his team.” The leader of that group — which actually featured the current special operations commander calling Obama a “fantastic” commander-in-chief — admitted that he does not believe Obama was born in the United States.

But Dempsey isn’t the only one criticizing the groups. The AP reports today that other special ops officers “say the activist veterans are breaking a sacred military creed: respect for the commander in chief”:

“This is an unprofessional, shameful action on the part of the operators that appear in the video, period,” U.S. Army Special Forces Maj. Fernando Lujan wrote on his Facebook page, to a chorus of approval from colleagues.

A Green Beret who returned last year from Afghanistan, Lujan says that attaching the title of special operator with any political campaign is “in violation of everything we’ve been taught, and the opposite of what we should be doing, which is being quiet professionals.” [...]

“They have a good point. I wish there was better OPSEC (operational security), and fewer leaks,” said retired Navy SEAL Capt. Rick Woolard, who commanded several SEAL units. “But I would prefer that SEALs and other special operators would sit down and shut the hell up.”

Obama said he doesn’t pay much attention to the attacks. “I don’t take these folks too seriously,” the president said. “One of their members is a birther who denies I was born here, despite evidence to the contrary. You’ve got another who was a tea party candidate in a recent election. This kind of stuff springs up before election time.”

House Republicans have passed their plan to avoid cuts to the defense budget. And the House Armed Services Committee, under Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon’s (R-CA) leadership, even boosted the budget by $8 billion. Neither Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey nor Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta had requested the larger budget and new polling data shows that 65 percent of Americans think defense spending is already too high.

But while the military’s leadership and the American public are all opposed to the House Republicans’ ballooned defense budget — which includes a $5 billion missile defense project described by Dempsey as totally unnecessary — Armed Services Committee member Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) took to CNN this morning to pushback against the critics of the proposed budget. Forbes was asked about the polling data and responded:

Do [the American public] really want a reduction in capacity? I think when they hear the president and many people over in the Senate talking about the fact that they can have some of these cuts but still maintain the security of the United States I think any of us would want those reductions. But I think when you ask the American people ‘Do they really want to reduce the security of the United States of America?’ I think the answer comes back they don’t. They want to make sure that we’re maintaining and guaranteeing that security.

Watch him:

But Forbes’ questions were answered yesterday. Panetta warned that ignoring the spending blueprint submitted by himself and Dempsey, as the Congressional Republicans have done, could actually hurt national security. He told reporters:

If members try to restore their favorite programs without regard to an overall strategy, the cuts will have to come from areas that could impact overall readiness. There is no free lunch here. Every dollar that is added will have to be offset by cuts in national security.

And the polling data showed that Americans are surprised by the size of discretionary defense spending when viewed alongside discretionary spending for other budget items. “This suggests that Americans generally underestimate the size of the defense budget and that when they receive balanced information about its size they are more likely to cut it to reduce the deficit,” said Steven Kull, director of the Program for Public Consultation.

The U.S.’s top military officer today delivered an extraordinary repudiation of a class taught as the U.S. military’s Joint Forces Staff College. The course, “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism,” used apocalyptic rhetoric and cast Islam as a “barbaric ideology,” employing numerous anti-Muslim tropes. For example, the class taught the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary” in a “total war” against Muslims.

At a press conference today, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey explained how the materials taught in the class were brought to his attention and expressed a harsh criticism of them. He said:

DEMPSEY: As you know, I’ve made an inquiry into a particular course that was brought to my attention by one of the students because he was concerned that it was objectionable and that it was counter to our values — you know, our appreciation for religious freedom and cultural awareness. And the young man who brought it to my attention was absolutely right. It’s totally objectionable.

And so we are looking at how that course was approved, what motivated the individual to adopt that — it was an elective, but what motivated that elective for being part of the curriculum. And we are looking across the institutions that provide our professional military education to make sure there’s nothing like that out there.

It was just totally objectionable, against our values, and it wasn’t academically sound. This wasn’t about pushing back on liberal thought; this was objectionable, academically irresponsible.

Watch the video:

As Dempsey mentioned, he ordered an investigation of the class upon recognizing just how “objectionable” the material therein was. The examination of other teaching materials might find a good place to start by looking into Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley, who facilitated the class, remains, for the moment, in his position at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.