Seeing through change of this magnitude—from a military standpoint, let alone a social, economic, and political one—would be exceedingly difficult in normal times. And these are hardly normal times. We need leadership in Washington that can manage the political risks and fallouts associated with nothing less than a generational change of America’s national defense. What Washington is providing instead is a level of political dysfunction that is unique in modern American history and that is bleeding into national defense in a way that makes everything harder. This problem is bigger than Donald
Seeing through change of this magnitude—from a military standpoint, let alone a social, economic, and political one—would be exceedingly difficult in normal times. And these are hardly normal times. We need leadership in Washington that can manage the political risks and fallouts associated with nothing less than a generational change of America’s national defense. What Washington is providing instead is a level of political dysfunction that is unique in modern American history and that is bleeding into national defense in a way that makes everything harder. This problem is bigger than Donald Trump, but he is at the center of it. This is not to say that the Trump presidency has been uniformly bad for our military. It has not. But in a broader sense, the past four years have been tumultuous ones for national defense. Trump has routinely dragged the US military into his broader political agenda, sending troops to the southern border largely for symbolic reasons and raiding billions of dollars of military funding to pay for the border wall. After prioritizing strategic competition with China, Trump then proceeded to heighten tensions with Iran and Venezuela in ways that diverted military funding and focus. His personal attacks on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos have hindered the Pentagon’s attempt to procure enterprise cloud computing services, which are a prerequisite for any serious development of artificial intelligence. These and other present burdens all come at the expense of our...
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