Weekend wrap: Expeditionary links

Here were some of the stories we didn't get a chance to write about this week:

• As John reports over at DefenseTech, America's leading naval-gazer, Christopher P. Cavas of Defense News, says DoD could mothball the aircraft carrier USS George Washington with half its life left as a concession to budget pressures.

• Speaking of the Navy, Boeing's new P-8 Poseidon did its first exercises at sea last month with a destroyer, the service announced.

• A lot of these numbers and predictions you've been hearing about the unemployment consequences of a defense build-down are just scare tactics, wrote William D. Hartung in The Hill.

• At Time's Battleland, Mark Thompson sarcastically writes that the self-licking ice cream cone of China fearmongering "never tasted so good," and cited a list by AEI's Dan Blumenthal of "China unicorns" -- views "underpinned by belief in the fantastical."

• Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a sort of national security and foreign policy debut on Friday, vowing an aggressive defense policy if he's elected. Romney wants to beef up the Navy and commit at least 4 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product every year to defense spending.