The Pentagon is deciding what to cut from its budget. Defense officials want to push many of the planned cuts onto the National Guard and Reserves. This is already leading to a campaign by Guard-backers to keep their forces strong. But active-duty military say cuts in recent years have taken too much from them, so it's the Guard's turn.

President Obama laid out his proposed federal budget for 2013 at a community college in Virginia on Monday. The $ 3.8 trillion plan calls for new government spending, including stimulus-style spending on roads. It also seeks to achieve $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade

The federal budget was released Monday. In it, the Pentagon is expected to cut $259 billion from what it had planned to spend over the next five years. NPR's Tom Bowman talks with Melissa Block about where the cuts will hit in 2013.

The Pentagon announced last week that the military would now allow women to serve in jobs that would bring them closer to combat. Host Rachel Martin speaks with former Army sergeant Kayla Williams about the ramifications of the change.

The process by which the Justice Department will decide whether a terrorism case goes to a regular federal court or to a military commission has been something of a mystery. The big difference is how it will be done: The people making those decisions won't just be lawyers; intelligence agents and spies will be there, too. NPR's Dina Temple-Raston reports.

A top State Department official wants to unleash the power of Twitter, Facebook and other services to crowdsource the fight to control the world's nuclear weapons.

According to a University of North Carolina researcher, "20 Muslim-Americans were indicted for violent terrorist plots in 2011, down from 26 the year before, bringing the total since 9/11 to 193, or just under 20 per year."