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Military

About Those Bone Spurs…

Steve Eder asks Did a Queens Podiatrist Help Donald Trump Avoid Vietnam?: In the fall of 1968, Donald J. Trump received a timely diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels that led to his medical exemption from the military during Vietnam. For 50 years, the details of how the exemption came about, and who made the…

Gingrich’s Defense of a Self-Pardoning Administration: From Bad (12.19) to Much Worse (12.21)

On the Diane Rehm Show of 12.19.16, former Speaker of the House Gingrich offered that a Trump Administration could simply pardon its own advisors to remove those advisors’ unlawful conflicts of interest: I think in the case of the president, he has a broad ability to organize the White House the way he wants to. He…

How Much, and What Kind, of Military Spending?

Analysts from five Washington policy institutes[1] have published a joint report asking (1) what should American defense strategy be? (2) what capabilities, investments, and force structure might that strategy require? and (3) what would such a military cost?  (The five institutes are not of the same views, with the Cato Institute’s Benjamin H. Friedman notable…

The Rise of the Robo-Cheetahs

Well, we knew it had to happen someday. A DARPA-funded robotic cheetah has been released into the wild, so to speak. A new algorithm developed by MIT researchers now allows their quadruped to run and jump — while untethered — across a field of grass. The Pentagon, in an effort to investigate technologies that allow…

Memorial Day 2014

Correspondent Mike Boettcher reported from, and later produced a documentary, The Hornet’s Nest, about American soldiers fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. The VOA reports about his film, and below in this post I’ve embedded the documentary film’s trailer. Remember. That is the message delivered by war correspondent Mike Boettcher in his gritty documentary ‘The Hornet’s…