On October 24, at the Warren Air Force base in Wyoming, the United States Air Force lost communication with a sizeable portion of America’s nuclear deterrent: a squadron of 50 nuclear-armed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). In the past, this type of disruption was rare and limited to individual missiles. The broad scale of this incident, however, resulted in one of the most serious and sizable ruptures in nuclear command and control in history. The incident comes in the midst of the Obama Administration’s effort to push the U.S. …
Earlier this week, we reported on The New York Times’s “deficit puzzle,” which allows you to close both the short-term and long-term budget gaps for the years 2015 and 2030 using cuts to domestic and defense spending, Medicare and Social Security reform, or tax increases. We used the puzzle to close the long-term budget gap completely while also extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts—using only the available spending cuts. Though deficit reduction must occur immediately, long-term deficits are the real crux of the matter. In 2030, the federal deficit …
In sharp contrast to this year’s Pentagon report on Chinese military power, this year’s report from Congress’s U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission includes a number of startling revelations. Perhaps the most notable is the report that the Chinese diverted 15 percent of global Internet traffic to Chinese servers at one point. This incident, which occurred on April 8 of this year, involved a Chinese Internet service provider that redirected traffic from 37,000 networks around the world to China. Intriguingly, the report notes that rerouted traffic included information from the …
“The Greatest Generation … stormed beaches in places like Normandy and Okinawa,” says today’s lead editorial in USA Today. “Their children, by contrast, stormed places like Woodstock. For the Baby Boomers — people born from 1946 to 1964 — the prosperity their parents built was never good enough. In later years, they embraced the materialism they ridiculed as youths and failed to save adequately for the retirement that they now face. That’s reaped some bitter consequences for America, says Heritage Senior Research Fellow Chuck Donovan in this morning’s USA Today …
Following the shocking inability of U.S. and South Korean trade negotiators to reach agreement on changes to a proposed Korea–U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS), the biggest question was whether the failure was due to a conscious decision by President Obama or to stunning incompetence. However, if negotiators had managed to reach an agreement on President Obama’s terms, the long-run results would have been even worse. If South Korean negotiators had caved in to U.S. demands without receiving any concessions in return, they might have inadvertently undermined the ability of the …
Our long national nightmare is over. Phusion Projects, the makers of Four Loko brand caffeinated malt beverages, announced yesterday that it will remove the caffeine from its products. Phusion’s decisions came just one day after Senator Chuck Schumer (D–NY) pushed the Food and Drug Administration to ban “these dangerous and toxic drinks.” Unfortunately Schumer never explained what exactly makes these drinks “dangerous and toxic.” For now, Americans are still free to buy malt beverages. And for a limited time they are also still free to buy caffeinated drinks like coffee …
Speaking on Meet the Press this week, former congressman and current chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council Harold Ford Jr. said: I think that there is a sense of who we are, what we represent, and why we’re important to the world. The notion of exceptionalism is thrown around… I think people realize that we’ve built a lot of stuff in this country, we’ve innovated, we’ve lead, and for us to maintain that position, some changes are going to have to come about. It was only last spring that President …
There are three essential things that the Administration must commit to before the strategic arms control agreement between the United States and the Russian Federation (known as New START) is approved in the Senate, writes James Woolsey in The Wall Street Journal. Safeguarding the option to develop and deploy the most effective missile defenses possible is at the top of the list. Given the current multipolar nuclear landscape, the U.S. should be moving away from the Cold War retaliation-based deterrence policy and toward a more defensive strategic posture. Unfortunately, New …
Last week the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based free-market advocacy group, filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court to review the 1998 tobacco Master Settlement Agreement on the grounds it violates federal antitrust laws and is unconstitutional. The tobacco MSA is the result of 46 state attorneys general striking a deal with the four major tobacco companies in 1998 to settle Medicaid lawsuits over tobacco-related health care costs. Tobacco companies agreed to fork over $246 billion to the states over 25 years and adhere to restrictions on advertising, marketing …
The United States no longer considers relations with Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) a top priority. This was one of the recurring themes at the Young Leaders Dialogue with America conference last week in Prague. Irena Kalhousova, chief analyst at Prague’s Security Studies Institute, lamented that President Barack Obama ignores CEE and cast doubt on the certainty of transatlantic partnership. Indeed, the Administration’s brazen cancellation of the third site missile defense program last year, with radar stations in the Czech Republic and missile interceptors in Poland, was “a slap in …
