Pentagon

WASHINGTON - The Department of Defense says the Pentagon entrance that was the scene of a shooting last week will resume normal operations today. Washington's Metro transit agency, meanwhile, says both entrances of the Pentagon Metrorail station and both levels off the Pentagon Transit Center reopened Saturday evening after the FBI finished a portion of its investigation. A California man, John Patrick Bedell, opened fire at the Pentagon entrance Thursday - wounding two police officers before he was fatally wounded.

John Patrick Bedell, whose cross-country odyssey ended in a brief gun battle outside the Pentagon on Thursday night, was a well-educated but troubled student of science, economy and society who "had gone off the deep end" and believed that the United States was controlled by a sinister organization leading it toward a new dark age, according to friends and Internet postings attributed to him. Bedell, 36, who was shot and killed by Pentagon security...

A gunman shot two police officers at the main entrance to the Pentagon on Thursday night, calmly pulling a gun from his coat pocket and shooting without saying a word before he was seriously wounded in a flurry of return fire, said Chief Richard Keevill of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency. The shooting occurred at 6:40 p.m. near the end of rush hour at the public entrance of the Defense Department headquarters, near where commuters pick up Metro trains and buses. No bystanders were hit. Injuries to the officers, who work for the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, did not appear life-threatening, said Chris Layman, a spokesman for the agency.

The University of Maryland Medical Center has earned international recognition for its shock trauma center, which treats patients with severe injuries. Now the medical center is becoming home to the National Trauma and Emergency Medicine Training Center, which will prepare military and civilian health care workers to deliver Shock Trauma's caliber of care. The training center, the first in the country, will be part of a $160 million expansion that the medical center's leaders plan to build in downtown Baltimore starting this spring and open in 2013.

President Barack Obama's ambitious plan to begin phasing out nuclear weapons has run up against powerful resistance from officials in the Pentagon and other U.S. agencies, posing a threat to one of his most important foreign policy initiatives. Obama laid out his vision of a nuclear-free world in a speech in Prague in April, vowing the U.S. would take major steps of its own to lead the way. Eight months later, the administration is locked in internal debate over a top-secret policy blueprint for shrinking the United States' nuclear arsenal and reducing the role of such weapons in military strategy and foreign policy.

Senior Airman Ashton Goodman of Indianapolis was killed in May when a suicide car bomber detonated beside her convoy north of Kabul. The same attack also killed Lt. Col. Mark E. Stratton II of Houston and 1st Sgt. Blue C. Rowe of Summers, Ark. In June, Pfc. Matthew D. Ogden of Corpus Christi, Texas, was killed along with three other soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division by a roadside bomb in Wardak Province. In July, Lance Cpl. Charles S. Sharp of Adairsville, Ga., was fatally wounded by Taliban in Helmand Province.

WASHINGTON - -U.S. officials are planning to add up to 14,000 combat troops to the American force in Afghanistan by sending home support staff and underutilized soldiers and replacing them with infantry units, Pentagon officials said. The plan represents a key step in a drive to beef up U.S.-led forces as the Obama administration presses to counter Taliban gains and demonstrate progress in Afghanistan amid crumbling American public support for the war effort. Forces that could be swapped out include units assigned to noncombat roles, such as guards or lookouts or those on clerical and support duty.

The radical reshuffling of America's military priorities proposed by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates this week makes an important turn away from the wasteful spending on the kinds of wars we used to fight to better prepare for the nontraditional conflicts we are likely to face. Maryland would gain because billions in Pentagon spending would be shifted toward intelligence, surveillance and research programs headquartered here, most importantly, at the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, which intercepts and decrypts secret communications around the world.

While Washington prepares to inject Maryland with billions in new stimulus projects on one hand, it's contemplating turning off a Maryland job machine with another. The clock strikes midnight on March 1 for Lockheed Martin's F-22 Raptor, a "stealth" jet fighter that has been in development for more than a decade and in production since 2003. President Barack Obama has to decide by then whether to extend Raptor purchases beyond the 183 already built or under contract. A "no" would mean work would start to wind down next year and the last F-22 would roll out of Lockheed's Marietta, Ga., plant in 2011.