The Marine Corp is looking to transform itself. In his Planning Guidance, the Commandant, General David Berger, lays out a vision for his Service to make it more relevant to meeting the military challenges associated with great power competition. Making this vision a reality will require changing how the Marine Corps and its supporting naval forces are trained, equipped and organized. Much of the public discussion of the new plan has focused on the desire to acquire new classes of [ Read More…]

As Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was testifying to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Oversight and Reform Committee on Monday, August 24, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) reported whopping losses for the month of July to the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC). First, the good news. The filing is in sync with previous statements from USPS that it has more than enough cash to operate through the election and until at least August 2021. Even so, the financials are brutal. For the [ Read More…]

The biggest industrial employer in Southeastern Pennsylvania is facing an uncertain future thanks to the Trump Pentagon. The two top rotorcraft programs at Boeing Vertical’s headquarters in suburban Philadelphia are both likely to see declining demand in the near future as the Army and Marine Corps pursue other priorities. In the case of the Marine Corps, its third multiyear contract for the V-22 Osprey, which also produces airframes for other services, will begin winding down after 2023. In the case [ Read More…]

President Trump’s wall has received the overwhelming amount of public attention in discussions of security on the Southwest border. The focus has been on the idea of a physical wall. However, the responsible federal agency, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), has always invested in a range of technologies to supplement and even replace physical barriers. Border security is a challenging problem. There clearly is a role for walls and other physical barriers on some parts of the southwest border [ Read More…]

  For mail-in voting to work, it is critical that the U.S. Postal Service not prioritize package delivery over letters, which it is already required to do by law. First-class mail volume and revenues are collapsing, while package volume and revenues are skyrocketing. At the same time, the Postal Service is failing to meet acceptable thresholds for first-class letters, despite the lower volume and excess capacity. Congress must scrutinize the Postal Service’s operations to ensure it is prioritizing mail delivery. [ Read More…]

There has been media commentary of late suggesting that Joe Biden might slow modernization of U.S. ICBMs if he is elected president. That is not going to happen. The plan to replace 50-year-old Minuteman III missiles originated in the Obama administration, and that same administration made a strong case for preserving the ICBM force in its 2010 nuclear posture review. Joe Biden is a common-sense centrist who respects the views of experts; there probably aren’t any experts in the nation’s [ Read More…]

For years, the U.S. Postal Service has failed to meet its first-class mail delivery standards and the problem is getting worse. The U.S. House of Representatives will convene an extraordinary session on Saturday to discuss the Postal Service and the policies of the new Postmaster General. The Postal Service’s first-class mail problems won’t be solved by Election Day and require a rigorous examination of how the influx of packages impacts mail delivery, as part of holistic postal reform. Lexington Institute [ Read More…]

The normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a big deal. There are reports that other Persian Gulf and Arab nations may soon follow. Could this political shift be followed by a major change in U.S. arms sales policy to the region? Might there be a future in which the U.S. sells Arab allies advanced weapons systems, including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter ? But the threat posed by Iran to the Gulf, Israel, and [ Read More…]

As the Postal Service already has $23 billion in cash and available cash, there are three things that Congress could do to better serve it and the American people than doling out more taxpayer funds. They are: (1) revise Postal Service payments to the Retiree Health Benefits Fund, (2) institute a modern system to determine the cost of each postal product so that they are priced appropriately, and (3) invest some of the Postal Service’s $277 billion in pension funds [ Read More…]

For more than two centuries, the U.S. military has practiced a particular style in warfare, which some have called the American Way of War. This method tends to focus on attrition and annihilation. It depends on the creation of material superiority on the battlefield which, in turn, relied on economic advantages relative to adversaries. Today, the return of great power competition centered on the proliferation of advanced military technologies has put in doubt the ability of the U.S. to execute [ Read More…]