PRESS ROOM

As the $135 billion proposed merger between United Technologies Corp. and Raytheon Co. draws closer, the future of Collins Aerospace’s military GPS business in the Corridor is unclear.

It’s no secret that the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan is unpopular with the American public, with surveys indicating that well over half of Americans support withdrawal and a large majority think the war was not worth fighting, including the troops who fought in the war. The question shouldn’t be whether to get out of Afghanistan, but how, and on what timeline.

Sunjeev Bery, director of the anti-autocrat campaign group Freedom Forward, said that despite the headlines from Pensacola, lawmakers from both parties were pushing ahead with a defence spending bill that permitted ongoing arms sales for Saudi to use in Yemen.

For the first time in decades, passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has been delayed due to disagreements between Democrats and Republicans. The disagreements at the center of the delay in Congress are, as usual, partisan in nature: funding for the President’s border wall with Mexico, a Space Force the Pentagon doesn’t want, the impeachment hearings, and other domestic political issues. This delay in passage of a reconciled NDAA between the two houses of Congress, however offers an opportunity, because buried within the NDAA are possibilities to repeal the pieces of legislation that have brought mass human, financial and moral consequences to the US, have wrecked entire nations and societies abroad, and have made the United States less safe.

In charges unsealed this week, the Justice Department laid out new elements of an effort by an American ally to buy access in Washington.

President Trump is doing a victory lap over his successful effort to reduce U.S. support for a small NATO investment fund, but it is a minor part of the billions the U.S. contributes to the alliance. The time is ripe for a rethinking of the purpose of the alliance and the division of responsibilities among NATO members. But Donald Trump is the wrong messenger. If real progress is to be made, insulting allies and making false claims about the current state of affairs, as the president has done repeatedly, is not the way to get the job done.

It’s no secret that the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan is unpopular with the American public, with surveys indicating that well over half of Americans support withdrawal and a large majority think the war was not worth fighting, including the troops who fought in the war. The question shouldn’t be whether to get out of Afghanistan, but how, and on what timeline.

“They‘re selling amazing amounts of weaponry at a time where the Pentagon budget is leveling off a bit,” explained William D. Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project and the Center for International Policy. “Obama has made a ton of agreements and there is a chance that will be a delivery increase under Trump based on deals that Obama made.”

The Washington Post on Monday published “The Afghanistan Papers: A secret history of the war” based on the U.S. government’s own documents. The main piece is titled “At War with the Truth: U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.”

A Kuwaiti firm and an armed Iranian opposition group are some of the latest examples of lobbyists paying for positive press coverage.

The Veterans Administration’s Veterans Crisis Line fields, on average, just under one thousand distress calls a day from veterans thinking about suicide. Add to that about one thousand online chats or text conversations aimed at avoiding suicide every week.

President Trump is doing a victory lap over his successful effort to reduce U.S. support for a small NATO investment fund, but it is a minor part of the billions the U.S. contributes to the alliance. The time is ripe for a rethinking of the purpose of the alliance and the division of responsibilities among NATO members. But Donald Trump is the wrong messenger. If real progress is to be made, insulting allies and making false claims about the current state of affairs, as the president has done repeatedly, is not the way to get the job done.