Stevenson’s army, January 24
-WaPo notes that the Senate is still stymied by a failure to agree on new organizing resolution.
-NPR interviewed former Senate staffer Adam Jentleson about his new book condemning the filibuster. [Many of you know that I support the filibuster for strategic and tactical reasons, but I want to keep it safe, legal, and rare — by making it harder to start and prolong. I suggest filibuster opponents, now mostly Democrats, consider that the loss of just one Democratic Senator could, overnight, permit majoritarian rule by the GOP.]
WSJ now confirms what NYT and WaPo also learned — that Trump was narrowly stopped from using Justice to overturn the election results.
Vanity Fair reports Trump’s pressure on the acting SecDef in the final days.
TR does a FONOP.
I’ve long viewed Sen. Tom Cotton [R-Ark.] as Dean Acheson did Sen. Robert Taft [GOP leader in early 1950s]: “He has a brilliant mind, until he makes it up.” It seems that Cotton gilded his military resume.
NYT notes we have a serious GPS vulnerability problem.
Good read: I’ve just finished Peter Westwick’s fascinating study of the history of stealth technology. Like Paul Kennedy’s book on the problem-solving engineers of WW2, Westwick shows how middle-level technicians brainstormed, bargained, and compromised over issues and largely succeeded. I’ve also never seen a better case for funding alternate R&D programs instead of settling on a sole source.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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