President Donald Trump delivered his fiscal year 2019 budget request to Congress on Monday, officially kicking off the 2019 budget season. Congress must now do its job and build off the president’s budget and craft its own budget resolution.
The House is expected to vote later this week on H.R. 7608, a “minibus” bill that covers fiscal year 2021 spending for the departments of Agriculture, Interior, State, Veterans Affairs, and more. That covers four of the 12 spending bills that fund the federal government. The bill’s text produced on July 16 is a staggering 689 pages long, meaning that no representative’s office has had the time to properly vet it before the vote.
The Pentagon's McNamara-era philosophy is woefully insufficient to a world that changes daily. U.S. Special Operations Command is working to craft a bet.
As the U.S. national security establishment grapples with the change of the global environment from the post-Cold War U.S.-led unipolar world to a multipolar one, much of the investment of capital – fiscal and intellectual – has been on large scale combat operations between peer nations. Yet, if the past is prologue, much of the competition, and even conflict, between great powers will likely fall into the category of Irregular Warfare. How to approach the Irregular Warfare problem today presents significant challenges and great opportunities. In the DOD, the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has much of the responsibility for the preparation of forces to conduct and execute Irregular Warfare (IW); its forces are purpose-built for this environment.