Bryan Whitman was “one of the Pentagon’s top spokesmen” during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to The Washington Post. These days, as one of the highest ranking civilians in the DOD’s public affairs office, he “personally advises the Secretary of Defense.” In his downtime, though, Bryan Whitman has apparently taken it upon himself to be the neighborhood parking pass vigilante that no one asked for.

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter announced earlier this month that by April 1, the U.S. military will open up all combat roles to women. A new study from the Rand National Defense Research Institute reveals how our nation’s elite Special Operations Forces feel about welcoming women into their ranks: HAVE YOU MET MY WIFE?

The gas station you’re looking at, built as part of the Pentagon’s reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, should have cost half a million dollars. Instead, it cost $43 million, and the U.S. government can’t even explain why.

The Department of Defense recently posted a call for proposals—due by September 25—to combat “the national security threat posed by public data available either for purchase or through open sources.” For its only example, the DoD pointed to a 2009 lawsuit against Netflix for allegedly outing a lesbian after programmers reverse-engineered the site’s famously robust recommendation engine:

Jill Kelley, the financially troubled Tampa woman who inadvertently tipped off authorities to David Petraeus' affair, is suing the FBI and Dept. of Defense for defamation and loss of privacy. But if her privacy was so compromised, how come we still don't know what a "Tampa socialite" is?

According to the leaked results of a Department of Defense survey, a majority of service members wouldn't oppose serving or living alongside gays and lesbians. "Some" (not a majority) said they'd quit if "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" were repealed.

From a Craigslist roommate ad originating from a Department of Defense researcher: "On our bathroom door is a checklist. I like to keep a record of my bowel movements and I expect you to do the same." Wait—really?

After a hue and cry from defense contractors who were buying chipmaker PA Semi's core product in bulk, Apple has agreed to continue supplying merchants of death arms manufacturers with the newly acquired company's Pwrficient chips. [News.com]

Apple has long served as a haven in the Valley for engineers with a taste for hallucinogens and pacifism. The same can not be said of PA Semi, which Apple recently acquired. The PWRficient processor was an instant hit among defense contractors building the latest in hyper-efficient killing technology, such as Curtiss-Wright Controls. As the EE Times reports:

The Stars and Stripes, also known in the Army as the "Stars and Lies," is in a losing fight for their credibility with their owners, the Department of Defense. Man, every newspaper complains about their owner—but at least yours probably doesn't have the title "deputy assistant secretary of defense" on her door. That's gotta be a treat. The paper's beef is that money from the government's ham-handed "America Supports You" propaganda campaign has been administered by the paper's business department. The result? "Kuwait Gets Blizzard of Holiday Cheer"! "Vet Receives Hero's Welcome, New Home"! The "America Supports You" website is like a real-world "The Onion" but with actual agony. What the Department of Defense refuses to understand is that the paper is already distrusted—solely because of its government ownership. Having it mixed up with programs like "Operation Straight Up," the Stephen Baldwin-starring Christian crusade that distributed to soldiers videogames about killing U.N. troops in a post-Rapture New York City? Not helping!

In a typically misguided display of bureaucratic ineptitude, the Department of Defense is blocking 13 popular social networking and media sites as of today, according to a memo sent Friday by Gen. B.B. Bell, the U.S. Forces Korea commander. The sites include video-sharing sites YouTube, Metacafe, iFilm, StupidVideos, FileCabi; social networks Myspace, BlackPlanet and Hi5; music sites Pandora, MTV, 1.fm and live365; and the photo-sharing site Photobucket. The "reasons" cited: bandwidth and security: "This recreational traffic impacts our official DoD network and bandwidth ability, while posing a significant operational security challenge." This rationale is absurd and will be met with criticism in the media and anger within the ranks of the military.