Stevenson’s army, May 7

– The best case I’ve seen for Commandant Berger’s radical restructuring of the US Marine Corps is this WOTR piece by a Chief Warrant Officer.

– Peter Baker has newer, more disheartening statistics on our hyperpartisanship: the number of Americans who don’t want their kids to marry outside their party has grown.

– In FT, Simon Schama summarizes Ukraine’s history.

– Taliban are reimposing the burqa.

– TPM has more from the Esper memoir.

– WSJ sees careful distinctions in US intelligence sharing with Ukraine.

– Study in FP shows where foreign aid goes.. According to our calculations, of the $51 billion in U.S. aid tracked by ForeignAssistance.gov in fiscal 2020, about 40 percent was spent by the U.S. government itself to buy goods and pay salaries, for example. Another 20 percent was administered by U.S.-based firms and nonprofits. A little more than 30 percent went to international organizations—the United Nations and other multilateral bodies—and international NGOs. Of the small remainder, foreign firms and nonprofits, mostly based in recipient countries, received just above 5 percent. That leaves partner country governments in the developing world the recipients of just 3.9 percent of U.S. aid spending. Take out Jordan, which receives a large part of U.S. bilateral development aid, and that drops to a mere 0.7 percent.

My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I 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).