Commentary

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A new veteran opens her laptop to tune in to her online class. A Vietnam War veteran checks his insulin levels in a diabetes management app. A recently laid-off veteran applies for new jobs online and trains on new skills. In today’s world, connectivity is essential to our daily lives. For more than 750,000 veterans across the United States, this connectivity is all made possible thanks to the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) – and unless Congress funds this essential program, those veterans will be cut off by Spring.

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Like past US strategic documents, including the National Security Strategy, the new National Defense Strategy will have three fatal flaws. First, the two past NDS’s have not fully achieved their aims. Second, each was unaffordable. And, last, recruiting and retaining sufficient personnel to meet the needs of the NDS may no longer be possible.

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The US Air Force, Army, and Navy are currently debating the importance of integrating the US Space Force into the structure of the armed forces.
But the current debate belies a crucial point. For decades, those same services have starved space of required resources and talent. Making up for this deficit, and responding to the new directives of the president and Congress, will consume most of the Space Force’s efforts for years. The service is going to start small and undermanned.

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What we need is an expansion, not a homeward relocation, of reliable health care supply chains, including a focus on the critical elements of the lower tiers of the industrial base. Why spend scarce federal resources on moving home existing facilities businesses in a manner that maintains the supply and demand status quo rather than adding facilities that will expand the overall supply of needed items?

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As the USS Theodore Roosevelt saga winds down, the incentive to get back to “business as usual basis”  builds. Were that to happen, it would be a colossal error.

The TR incident comes in the wake of too many seeming errors, mistakes and scandals that have befallen the Navy. These demand that crucial questions must now be addressed about the overall condition of the Navy that have led to what some including the president and the secretary of Defense believe is a service that is badly adrift.

Fortunately, the relatively new Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Mike Gilday, has not been tainted by any of the scandals or problems and therefore is the right person at the right time to dig more deeply into resolving these symptoms of naval ill-health.

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The urgent coronavirus crisis has not eclipsed pre-existing strategic conundrums like Russian threats to Europe and NATO and the urgency of adapting the alliance to meet them. Moscow shows no sign of negotiating on Ukraine or reducing its information warfare and other threats to European security, quite the opposite.

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