There is common ground between President Trump and leading House Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee on an important but somewhat obscure issue: the Postal Regulatory Commission has demonstrated it should receive $19.2 million in funding for fiscal year 2021. In fact, the $19.2 million will not come directly from taxpayers. Rather, the funds will be provided by the Postal Service, from its operations, to the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC). The mission of the PRC is to hold [ Read More…]

The Army is developing a successor to its Bradley infantry fighting vehicle called the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV). The winning design will prioritize survivability, mobility, growth and lethality. That shouldn’t come as any surprise. But the way the Army is getting to that winning design is a bit different from what came before. It is using digital modeling and simulation tools to elicit an array of new ideas and assess how they might work in an operational setting. Eventually [ Read More…]

Thomas Jefferson was 33 years old when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, so it is probably too late for you and me to achieve such a notable level of fame. He also attempted, in his draft, to blast the British for bringing slavery to America, but the Southern delegates insisted on excising that language from our most important founding document. Seven years later in the Northwest Ordinance Jefferson successfully barred slavery from what was then called the Northwest Territories, [ Read More…]

Congress should enact comprehensive postal reform in lieu of providing any further bailout or pandemic-related assistance to the U.S. Postal Service. This should be done within the next 12 months. The Postal Service will have sufficient cash until then. Eliminating payments to the Retiree Health Benefits fund is not the cure-all for the Postal Service’s problems. These benefits should be pre-funded on a new actuarial schedule. It is also important to define a new mission – or Universal Service Obligation [ Read More…]

The U.S. Marine Corps has spent $7 billion developing a helicopter that can lift more cargo than any other military rotorcraft in the world. Called the CH-53K King Stallion, it will allow marines to quickly move armored trucks and field artillery from ship to shore in future amphibious operations. King Stallion is an obvious candidate to meet the Army’s requirement for a next-generation heavy lifter. It can satisfy almost all of the key performance criteria for the Army-led Future Vertical [ Read More…]

The coronavirus has precipitated border shutdowns and scapegoating between countries, but it has not done much to erode the sturdy foundations of international alliances. Even with the U.S. pulling away from the WHO, its NATO partnerships, for now, remain cohesive. In particular, the mutual support between the U.S. and Italy—a critical ally in the Mediterranean theater—and Italy’s own commitment to NATO, appear to have provided a new perspective on its importance in the aftermath of the pandemic’s worst devastation in Italy. Both [ Read More…]

The coronavirus pandemic may be with us in one form or another for years to come. If an effective vaccine is not developed promptly, the air travel industry will have to find other ways of making aircraft use safe for passengers. Boeing has launched an effort aimed at that goal, which it calls the Confident Travel Initiative. The basic idea is to create a multilayer defense that (1) keeps pathogens off planes, (2) keeps plane interiors sanitized, and (3) exploits [ Read More…]

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has unleashed a vicious and unfair attack on Louis DeJoy, the new Postmaster General and Chief Executive Officer of the Postal Service, while also implying that the U.S. Postal Service’s Board of Governors was derelict in its duties when hiring Mr. DeJoy. While this has the classic markings of being a political stunt that will likely soon pass, the Senator’s actions are reckless and could spin out of control, becoming problematic to the public. First, [ Read More…]

Protecting the electric distribution grid from cyberattacks is vitally important, and largely overlooked. That needs to quickly change and a good place for some answers is New Jersey. After Superstorm Sandy pummeled the state in 2012, there was a concerted effort to protect the state from power outages. This culminated in the first statewide standards for cyber protection in 2016. Unfortunately, those efforts seem to have languished and other states have done much less. This presents a dangerous and unacceptable [ Read More…]

The U.S. defense industry has incurred costs of $20 billion or more coping with the coronavirus pandemic. Many of these costs are traceable to a government determination early in the crisis that defense production is an essential activity. As the only customer for military goods, the federal government is prepared to make “equitable adjustments” that reimburse industry for its pandemic-related costs. The problem is that while the authority to make such reimbursements already exists in law, there is no appropriation [ Read More…]