Tom Bowman

A congressional committee on Wednesday heard testimony from three witnesses about the events that led to deaths of four Americans at Benghazi in September, 2012. The Benghazi attack has become a political controversy — Republicans accuse the Obama administration of mishandling security there and of misleading the American public after the attack. One new allegation: that a four-person team set to deploy to Benghazi the night of the attack was told not to go.

A suspected drug kingpin from the tiny West African nation of Guinea-Bissau was captured on the high seas by agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency earlier this month, brought to Manhattan and is now awaiting trial.

The dramatic sting operation sheds light on what officials say is a growing national security threat: criminal networks teaming up with extremist organizations.

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And I'm Audie Cornish. The White House tried to clarify its message on Syria today, saying it is still studying evidence that the government there has used chemical weapons. Here's press secretary Jay Carney.

JAY CARNEY: We are continuing to work to build on the assessments made by the intelligence community. The degrees of confidence here are varying, this is not an airtight case.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, in his first major policy speech, laid out Wednesday how to deal with threats in an era of tight defense budgets.

Hagel has ordered the Pentagon to take a hard look at how many soldiers and sailors it needs and what types of weapons it buys. He says the Pentagon is at war with itself: There are competing and spiraling costs within the military — for aging weapons, and for health and pension benefits for military personnel and retirees.

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The Pentagon announced plans on Friday to beef up missile defense along the West Coast, in part to defend against the threat from North Korea. The Pentagon plans on adding 14 interceptor missiles to a base in Alaska, supplementing the 30 that are already there.

Several weeks ago, Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said the U.S. is planning what to do about Syria's vast chemical weapons program once Bashar Assad's regime falls. The Syrians are believed to have hundreds of tons of chemical agents, including sarin, one of the deadliest chemical agents. A few drops can be lethal.

So the central question is this: How can those sites be secured so they don't fall into the wrong hands?

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$46 billion: That's the amount the Pentagon must cut from its budget by the end of September under the new regime of austerity that kicks in today. This afternoon, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel warned about the impact of that.

SECRETARY CHUCK HAGEL: Let me make it clear that this uncertainty puts at risk our ability to effectively fulfill all of our missions.

Pentagon officials notified Congress on Wednesday that they will furlough some 800,000 defense civilians for one day per week should automatic budget cuts, known as sequestration, kick in next month.

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This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block. The Marine general poised to lead all NATO forces has decided to resign. General John Allen served 38 years in the military, including as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. But his long career will also be remembered for his peripheral role in a recent scandal. Here's NPR's Tom Bowman.

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The U.S. will bring home 34,000 troops from Afghanistan by this time next year. President Obama is expected to announce the news tonight in his State of the Union address. That will cut the force in half and set the stage for the pullout of most of the remaining U.S. troops by the end of 2014. The drawdown from Afghanistan is just one of several developments today on Capitol Hill that will have a big impact on the Pentagon.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta testified before a Senate committee Thursday about the September attack in Benghazi that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans. Panetta was questioned about whether the U.S. response was fast enough and about why the U.S. military had not been better prepared for the possibility of an attack.

More than four months after a deadly attack at a sprawling allied base in Afghanistan that killed two U.S. Marines, there are lingering questions about how it happened.

The economy shrunk in the fourth quarter — for the first time in three years — and one of the critical reasons was a drop in defense spending. Apparently, contractors took precautionary steps and held onto money in case the federal government failed to avert the fiscal and tax crisis known as the fiscal cliff.

But there's now a new deadline — automatic budget cuts, known as sequestration, which may hit at the beginning of March.

The Effect On Contractors

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President Obama's nominee to lead the Pentagon spent the day getting grilled by his former colleagues in the Senate. Chuck Hagel is a Republican and President Obama picked him in part as a gesture to the GOP. But today's hearing did not feature a lot of bipartisan warmth. As NPR's Tom Bowman reports, it was Hagel's stellar Republicans who gave him the toughest time and forced him to defend his record.

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Those decisions about U.S. troop levels will have an impact on the lives of people in Afghanistan, especially in places where the Taliban insurgency remains active, like Kandahar. Kandahar is, of course, the birthplace of the Taliban movement. And to find out more about what Afghans are thinking about the U.S. drawdown, we reached Ehsan Ullah Ehsan, who is the director of a school in Kandahar, the Kandahar Institute of Modern Studies, which has offered, for several years, instruction to girls in computers, English and business management.

Robert Siegel talks to Ofeibea Quist-Arcton and Tom Bowman about the U.S. fight against terrorism in Africa, where the number of Islamist militant groups is on the rise — some with close ties to al-Qaida.

U.S. and allied officials say the forces of embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad have prepared several dozen bombs and shells loaded with the lethal chemical sarin.

The number is a larger estimate than has previously been reported. The Syrians loaded the weapons with the chemical agents in the past several weeks, the officials say.

Those preparations raise fears that the fighting against rebel forces could enter a new and more troubling phase, according to the officials, who requested anonymity.

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More now on those warnings to President Assad that Kelly mentioned about chemical weapons. Here's President Obama speaking yesterday.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Today I want to make it absolutely clear to Assad and those under his command, the world is watching. The use of chemical weapons is and would be totally unacceptable. And if you make the tragic mistake of using these weapons, there will be consequences and you will be held accountable.

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That resignation of David Petraeus, a retired four-star general, has raised a fundamental question: Is something wrong with the top leadership of the military? For months now, one high-ranking officer after another has gotten into trouble on charges ranging from sexual misconduct to the misuse of government funds. So today, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called for an ethics review of the senior officer corps. NPR's Tom Bowman has that story.

The scandal that forced CIA Director David Petraeus to resign last week just got more complicated. The Pentagon revealed on Tuesday that the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, had email communications with a woman connected to the Petraeus case. The FBI referred the Allen emails to the Defense Department's Inspector General. Melissa Block talks to Tom Bowman.

The Defense Department inspector general found that Adm. James Stavridis, the commander of all U.S. forces in Europe and the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces, violated travel regulations and accepted gifts from foreign governments without reporting them in a timely manner.

The AP reports that the IG found that "Stavridis never attempted to use his public office for private gain nor did he commit personal misconduct"

Once a mob began attacking the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on the night of Sept. 11, officials in Washington, D.C., watched with alarm. Now, new details are emerging about their response to the deadly attack.

President Obama and his entire national security team monitored what was going on half a world away. Army Gen. Carter Ham, who was the regional commander for Africa, happened to be in Washington that day.

America's exit strategy in Afghanistan is to have Afghan forces take the lead in fighting for their country. But too often these days, the job still falls to U.S. troops.

A senior officer in Afghanistan tells NPR that Americans continue to coddle Afghan forces and that this must stop. Tough love is in, the officer says. He says the Afghan forces are far more capable than the U.S. estimates and have simply grown accustomed to the U.S. doing everything for them.

That pretty much sums up the situation in southern Afghanistan earlier this year.