Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen is going on the offensive once more, this time in pursuit of cuts to military spending.

Mullen, who has previously called the national debt the “most significant threat to our national security,” is heading the new Coalition for Fiscal and National Security along with several other foreign policy luminaries. The group, operating out of the Peter G Peterson Foundation, is seeking to influence the debate surrounding the fiscal cliff by lending their gravitas in support of military cuts that are currently unpopular on the Hill.

In one of their first acts, the Coalition has put out a full-page ad in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and other newspapers today, calling attention to the lessened need for overwhelming superiority in military spending:

“In previous eras, increased defense spending may have been required to maintain security,” the group wrote in a joint statement. “That is no longer the case. In our judgment, advances in technological capabilities and the changing nature of threats make it possible, if properly done, to spend less on a more intelligent, efficient and contemporary defense strategy that maintains our military superiority and national security.”

Areas that the Coalition believes could be targeted for savings include pension, health-care, and procurement costs. That spending would then be channeled into facets of national security that are under-funded, such as diplomacy and international organizations. As a comparison, in Fiscal Year 2012 the Pentagon requested $553 billion in funding; the State Department requested a paltry $47 billion in comparison.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2011 the U.S. spends about as much on supporting its military as the next ten countries’ expenditures combined. Just last night, the Senate unanimously passed a $630 billion bill to fund the Pentagon, the war in Afghanistan and nuclear weapons for FY 2013.

The Coalition’s recommendations echo several of those put forward by the Center for American Progress Task Force on a Unified Security Budget’s recently published report calling for balancing the U.S. security budget, including providing more funding to non-military areas of national security.

In the confrontational, climactic scene of the the classic 1964 Cold War film Seven Days in May, President Jordan Lyman barks a question in frustration at Gen. James Mattoon Scott, the leader of a right-wing military conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government. “Why in the name of God don’t you have any faith in the system of government you’re so hell-bent to protect?” says the president, slamming his hand on the table. A much toned down version of this drama plays out today, too. Only now it’s the generals — the top brass, no less — using strong language to remind politicians of the delicacies of the American republic.

Perhaps taking their cues from Congress or neocon websites, GOP presidential candidates long ago settled on a battle cry against President Obama’s national security record: the almost universal theme that the President should do to what the generals tell him. Texas governor Rick Perry said it about Afghanistan and Iraq. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said it about reinstating Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (many generals were for the repeal). Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said he would do what the generals want on Afghanistan, before backing down. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich went the other way, reversing his support for civilian control in favor of wondering why Obama “overrule(d) all his generals.”

But during a press availability while traveling in Saudia Arabia, the top U.S. military officer sang a different tune, using harsh language to describe the talking point about deferring national security and war decisions to the generals. Asked about the line, Gen. Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said:

I’ll probably make news with this but I find some of those articles about divergence or control of the generals to be kind of offensive to me.

And here’s why. One of the things that makes us as a military profession in a democracy is civilian rule. Our civilian leaders are under no obligation to accept our advice; and that’s what it is. Its advice. It’s military judgments, it’s alternatives, it’s options. And at the end of the day, our system is built on the fact that it will be our civilian leaders who make that decision and I don’t find that in any way to challenge my manhood, nor my position. In fact, if it were the opposite, I think we should all be concerned.

Dempsey isn’t the first top military officer to tell politicians about the chain-of-command recently. This summer, the last two Joint Chiefs chairmen, Gen. David Petraeus, since retired and leading the CIA, and the now-retired Admiral Michael Mullen, explained the concept in hearings on Capitol Hill.

Last month, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker said the only way to get the Taliban to the negotiating table for real peace negotiations is apply more military pressure. “The Taliban needs to feel more pain before you get to a real readiness to reconcile,” Crocker said.

In an interview that aired yesterday on CNN, host Fareed Zakaria asked outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen if the withdrawal President Obama ordered this year would in any way impede this fight to the negotiating table. Mullen, in what was his last interview as JCS chairman, said it would not:

ZAKARIA: Why has it not been possible to draw some of the Taliban back into the fold? Ryan Crocker, the ambassador, says it’s because we haven’t yet hit them hard enough or they haven’t – they don’t feel beaten down enough. Do you think that’s true?

MULLEN: I do agree with that. I think that reconciliation takes place. You get them to the table when they’re in a much weaker position. And there’s no question that at some point in time there’s got to be ail political solution here and reconciliation is key to that.

ZAKARIA: But is that compatible, that desire to hammer them more? Is that compatible with this drawdown?

MULLEN: Absolutely.

Watch the clip:

But since Crocker’s comment, peace negotiations with the Taliban are now virtually non-existent after Taliban operatives killed former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, the leader of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council. Former presidential candidate and Northern Alliance leader Abdullah Abdullah said the lesson of the attack should be that “we shouldn’t fool ourselves” that the Taliban “are willing to make peace.” Indeed, President Hamid Karzai announced today that he would instead turn his attention to cutting a deal with the Pakistanis.

But Mullen’s comment pretty much puts to rest claims by critics of Obama’s Afghanistan withdrawal plan that it wouldn’t leave enough troops there to force the Taliban to the negotiating table. “I don’t think there will be serious negotiations with the Taliban until they are convinced that they cannot succeed” in attaining their goals, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said in July, “through the force of arms on the battlefield.” Yet Mullen — the outgoing top military official — disagrees.

Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton took to Fox News this morning to blast the idea of a “hotline” between Iran and the United States. Bolton is quick to dismiss the concept as cheap political ploy to heighten Iran’s “prestige”:

Well it’s not always the best course to assume the Ahmadinejad’s being entirely logical in what I will call the “Western” sense of that word. But it’s possible on the hotline, what he has in mind, is a mechanism that he thinks will enhance Iran’s prestige. After all, how many countries does the U.S. have that kind of hotline with. I think this is part of his charm offensive. It’s hard to use that phrase when he’s also accusing us of masterminding the 9/11 attacks but again, in his rather strange way, this is a signal as well to us as inside Iran to try and enhance his position in the political infighting that’s going on there.

Watch it:

While Bolton is dismissive of establishing a hotline, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen, speaking at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace last week, said:

We haven’t had a connection with Iran since 1979. Even in the darkest days of the Cold War, we had links to the Soviet Union. We are not talking to Iran, so we don’t understand each other. If something happens, it’s virtually assured that we won’t get it right — that there will be miscalculation which would be extremely dangerous in that part of the world. [...]

And one day before Mullen delivered his remarks, The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. officials were examining the establishment of a hotline following a series of “near miss” encounters between American and Iranian forces in the Persian Gulf.

Bolton dismisses the hotline as a ploy by Ahmadinejad to increase his “prestige.” But the U.S. military is increasingly voicing concern that a misunderstanding with Tehran could lead to a wider conflict in an already tense region.

Last week, Texas governor and GOP presidential hopeful Rick Perry attacked President Obama’s record on the Middle East. Perry, in a possibly ghost-written op-ed where he distorted a Texas historian to link Israel and Texas, wrote that it was a “mistake for President Obama to distance himself from Israel and seek engagement with the hostile regimes in Syria and Iran.”

But sending an ambassador to Syria, despite Republican opposition, has yielded some results. In early July, Ambassador Robert Ford joined embattled anti-government protesters in the restive city of Hama in a show of “solidarity.” Activists there said they “felt protected.” Today, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration is leaving Ford in Damascus “so he can maintain contact with opposition leaders and the leaders of the country’s myriad sects and religious groups” in order to avoid chaos in the event of the fall of dictator Bashar Al-Assad.

And today, the top U.S. military officer, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen, supported the notion of opening up channels of communication with Iran. Speaking at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace ahead of his retirement, Mullen said having no communications with adversaries made it more likely that mistakes could be made that would lead to an escalation of tensions and possibly a conflict:

MULLEN: We haven’t had a connection with Iran since 1979. Even in the darkest days of the Cold War, we had links to the Soviet Union. We are not talking to Iran, so we don’t understand each other. If something happens, it’s virtually assured that we won’t get it right — that there will be miscalculation which would be extremely dangerous in that part of the world. [...]

QUESTION: Are you specifically talking about military to military contact, or a broader set of engagement between the two countries?

MULLEN: I’m talking about any channel that’s open. We’ve not had a direct link of communication with Iran since 1979. And I think that has planted many seeds for miscalculation. When you miscalculate, you can escalate and misunderstand. This isn’t about agreeing or disagreeing. [...]

My own experience is, it sort of depends on the country what the most effective channels are. Some of them are diplomatic. Some of them are political. Some of them are mil-to-mil. Some of them are economic. But we have not had a clear channel to Iran since 1979.

[...] Any channel would be terrific and I don’t have a preferred one based on what the hopes would be.

Mullen’s comments come a day after the Wall Street Journal reported that the military was considering establishing a direct hot line to Iran in order to communicate should there be an incident between the countries, especially in the Persian Gulf between U.S. ships and Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats. Several encounters in the past resulted in what the Journal described as “near-altercations.” The Bush Administration, which rejected talking to Iran, refused to give military commanders the power to negotiate an “incidents at sea” agreement with the Iranians.

Jeffrey Goldberg’s report on a meeting of National Security Council Principals Committee (NSC/PC), in which Secretary of Defense Robert Gates expressed frustration with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intransigence on the peace process and the fact that “the U.S. has received nothing in return” for its security guarantees, might raise more questions than it answers.

What Goldberg didn’t mention is the historical and conceptual context for Gates’ remarks. Indeed, Gates is not the first senior American official to express concern that the protraction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and the perception of U.S. favoritism toward Israel on this issue — was offering few, if any, dividends for U.S. security or its own regional interests.

Back in March, 2010, Gen. David Petraeus made waves when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had immediate implications for the U.S.’s ability to pursue its interests in the Middle East. He named some of these problems:

Insufficient progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace. The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR. Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.

Israel hawks quickly denounced Petraeus’ comments and have continued to attack a straw man argument that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict wouldn’t solve all challenges facing the U.S. in the Middle East.

But Petraeus wasn’t the only senior U.S. official to endorse the concept of “linkage” between resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the longer-term strategic interests of the U.S. in the Middle East. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, CENTCOM commander Gen. James Mattis, and Adm. Michael Mullen — via a WikiLeaks cable — have voiced endorsements of this concept.

While Jeffrey Goldberg — who has a history of rejecting linkage — carefully reports on Gates’ anger with Netanyahu for delivering “nothing in return” for security guarantees, access to weapons, and intelligence sharing, he is careful to sidestep the obvious next question. Why does Gates feel strongly about Netanyahu refusing to “grapple with Israel’s growing isolation and with the demographic challenges it faces if it keeps control of the West Bank”?

Goldberg doesn’t engage that topic. It might be because Gates shares the emerging consensus of the U.S.’s top military and political leadership that Israel’s continued settlement expansion and intransigence at the negotiating table is doing real damage to the Obama administration’s attempts to pursue a wide range of military and political interests in the Middle East.

In a recent interview with Defense News editor Vago Muradian, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen expressed his concern for military families if Congress does not raise the debt limit:

MULLEN: Well we went through a period of time where I know everyone was aware we almost shut the government down and that – the preparation that we had for that certainly was instructive on what we had to do. I certainly hope we don’t get to that point again.

One of the first questions that a spouse asked me I was out at a trip out on the West coast it was a National Guard spouse that asked me if she was going to get paid and her husband’s deployed. And that becomes a fundamental question. Some of our troops and some of our families they really are living paycheck to paycheck so I think we have to be very careful with that.

Watch it:

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner recently warned Congress that the military may not get paid if the debt ceiling isn’t raised:

“If Congress failed to increase the debt limit, a broad range of government payments would have to be stopped, limited or delayed, including military salaries and retirement benefits, Social Security and Medicare payments, interest on the debt, unemployment benefits and tax refunds,” Geithner said. “This would cause severe hardship to American families and raise questions about our ability to defend our national security interests.”

Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-CA) introduced legislation in April providing for continued payment to the Armed Forces in the event that the debt ceiling is reached.