Seasonal links for the Thanksgiving holiday.

There was a time when the military services made a case directly to Americans — could it come again?

A new report finds the antiwar movement has mostly disappeared from the nation’s mainstream newspapers and TV broadcasts. Does that matter?

Former Air Force ISR chief, Lt. Gen. David Deptula, just isn’t buying the explanation given by Air Force leaders last week that distance is what kept the F-22 Raptor out of Operation Odyssey Dawn. Instead, political reasons likely kept the most advanced jet on Earth out of the fight, according to Deptula, an early advocate of using the jet to enforce the no-fly zone in Libya.

Libya, Bahrain, Egypt, North Korea, Haqqani Network, al Qaeda, Rwanda, Bosnia: the list of unpredictable and largely unforeseen threats goes on and on. Should the US build a military largely predicated on these threats, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates has argued. Or will we return to the primary model of the last 60 years or so, where we built a military focused on defeating one dominant threat anywhere on the globe. Nathan Freier of the Center for Strategic and International Security examines the choices and says the Pentagon better be ready to respond to small wars and other disorders.

With the UN-sanctioned operations over Libya growing more complex by the day, with allied jets crashing, pilots being rescued, cruise missiles slamming into air defenses and aircraft taking out Libyan tanks and the costs to American taxpayers soaring, it’s a good time to have some of our experts examine the basic question: is this a good idea? Doug Macgregor, retired Army colonel and pungent national security analyst, argues below that the Libyan operations are exactly the wrong sort of operations for America’s military to engage in.

American forces — seven warships — are on their way to offer help to the Japanese to help them cope with the devastating earthquake. American forces are considered to set up a no-fly zone over Libya and. maybe, to help the opposition in its struggle against Gadaffi. American forces are fighting in Afghanistan. American forces are operating in Iraq. American forces operate from Djibouti, watching Yemen and Somalia. How much more can we handle in these days of tightening budgets? The Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano offers his view, titled “Stretching the Rubber Band:”

Recent upheavals in the Middle East — including the overthrow of the governments in Tunisia and Egypt, riots in Bahrain, and near civil war in Libya — raise the question of what lessons the People’s Republic of China, and especially the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), are likely to have learned.

Anthony Cordesman looms as one of the wisest and best informed experts on those crucial places that stretch from Morocco to Afghanistan, especially in terms of their strategic and military issues. In the following commentary, he offers a trenchant analysis of the Egyptian military and security forces, what they may have to gain or lose and who among them to watch.

Over the last half year, China’s military has carefully unveiled its J-20 stealth airplane, threatened US ships and hosed them down, discussed plans for an aircraft carrier and boasted of their being equals with the US on the global stage. In light of all this, we asked the Heritage Foundation’s Dean Cheng to give us some idea of what actually happened during the recent visit of President Hu Jintao and what it means for them and for us. His title says it all: Hu Came and All I Got Was a Joint Statement.

It’s not often that a nation does something as dramatic as rescuing 21 of its citizens from pirates on board a freighter, and also marks the occasion with the significant milestone of conducting its first-ever operation in international waters. South Korea did just that on Friday. Bruce Klingner of the Heritage Foundation offers this telling commentary about some of the larger stakes that may have driven South Korea’s president to action.

As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates prepares to go to China and President Obama prepares to host Chinese leader Hu Jintao, it is important that they recognize that the Chinese leadership has an increasingly capable military at its disposal. Worse, the factors shaping that military remain opaque.

Earlier in the week we gave you our rundown of the top DoD policy and procurement stories of the last year. Now, it’s time to look ahead at what may be in store for defense programs to see who will win and who will likely feel the sting of budget cuts.

Winslow Wheeler, former congressional defense budget guru, has penned a provocative memo to the new Tea Party senators. His main message: the Pentagon budget needs to be frozen. Defense Secretary Robert Gates may already be readying one of the biggest cuts to the defense budget by changing the Tricare contribution of veterans, raising the prospect of a true budget battle royal.

Senior Republicans have voiced concern about whether Tea Party supporters will join Democrats in cutting the defense budget. Their isolationist and protectionist sentiments may, Sen. John McCain said earlier this week, lead to weaker support for the war in Afghanistan. Given what certainly seemed like quite a bit of sturm und drang we asked some of the most prominent keepers of the GOP flame — at the Heritage Foundation — to explain just how deep the split might be on defense issues between GOP stalwarts and the new kids on the Hill. Heritage’s James Carafano says the media is making a mountain out of a molehill. — Colin Clark

The tidal wave is coming for defense budgets. Promising $100 billion in savings over five years, but hoping to keep the funds is not going to hold it back. The wave is coming, first, from a growing sentiment that America’s debts and deficits are our number one security problem, as Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen has said, and that defense must play a part in solving the problem.

Satellites are very expensive. The sensors on them are very expensive. Launching satellites is very expensive. One way the government has considered saving some of those costs is by piggybacking its sensors on commercial satellites. Known as hosted payloads, such packages have attracted considerable interest from the government. Josh Hartman, who was one of the Pentagon’s top space acquisition officials and is now with the Center for Strategic Space Studies, offers a step-by-step approach to get both sides closer to their goal.

The battle of the budget has been fully joined by the ideologues of the Democrats and Republicans this week. On the right, we have Monday’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Arthur Brooks, Edwin Feulner and the redoubtable William Kristol in which they argue that the defense budget must not pay for the deficit. Now, on the left, we bring you the views of William Hartung of the New America Foundation. He has aimed high, for almost $1 trillion in cuts. We’ll see if this debate spreads beyond the Beltway and into the conversations of decent people over the dinner table and in bars.

With the Senate likely to vote on the new START treaty this week, activists are eager to ensure every senator has what they think is the right information. John Bolton, former Bush administration honcho on arms controls, fired another salvo in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that the Obama administration is wrong to count converted boomers as nuclear assets. Dennis M. Gormley, who teaches at the University of Pittsburg’s Ridgway Center, strikes back at Bolton here. arguing that the Joint Chiefs actually know what they are doing.

The United States has spent $2 trillion since 1998 on wars and regular defense spending and has been left “with a smaller Navy and Air Force and a tiny increase in the size of the Army,” argues Winslow Wheeler, defense analyst at the Center for Defense Information. If Defense Secretary Robert Gates is serious about restructuring the military and what it buys, then he better get going or he’ll be a “wasted asset,” Wheeler says.