Lawmakers say they have serious questions about whether the nation can afford the new intelligence agency being proposed by the Pentagon.

Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Mike Vickers and Defense Intelligence Agency chief Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess unveiled their budget plan for the new Defense Clandestine Service (DCS) during a closed-door hearing Tuesday of the Senate Armed Services Committee. 

The new office is designed to work with its counterparts at the CIA and across the U.S. intelligence community to gather information on national-security threats beyond the battlefield, according to defense officials. 

The department claims the new agency can be fully funded within the five-year budget plan for the Pentagon that Congress is already reviewing.

But lawmakers who attended Tuesday’s session seemed skeptical about the costs of the venture. 

The poll found just 27 percent of the public supports the war, a drop of 10 points from May 2011.

Democrats accuse the GOP of pushing the idea to undercut President Obama’s national-security credentials.

The double agent also provided information for the drone strike that killed the terrorist suspected of the USS Cole bombing.

The heads of the Senate Armed Services Committee say that a report finding the military failed to protect whistleblowers was a “grave concern” and have asked Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to explain what steps have been taken to fix the problem.

The senators cite a story from the Center for Public Integrity about an internal May 2011 Pentagon report that found the Defense Department inadequately protected whistleblowers from reprisals.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said that the latest briefing he received Tuesday from the military on the Colombian prostitution scandal was a “dramatic improvement” from his first briefing two weeks ago.

McCain, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services committee, slammed the Pentagon twice in April over the lack of information given to Congress about the military side of the prostitution scandal, where 12 service members are under investigation.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al Qaeda chieftain who took control of the group after last year's death of Osama Bin Laden, continues to run operations from sanctuaries inside Pakistan, according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 

Rep. Judy Chu and several Democrats introduced legislation Monday that would call for a new hazing definition in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and create a national database to track incidents of military hazing.

Chu has pushed Congress and the military to do more to stop military hazing after her nephew, Lance Cpl. Harry Lew, committed suicide in Afghanistan last year after a hazing incident.

American and Chinese defense officials tried to quell an increasingly adversarial relationship in the realm of cyberwarfare this week, in an attempt to keep U.S.-Sino tensions from boiling over.