A Risky Defense Strategy

Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has promised to use new technologies to strengthen America’s weapons arsenal and has directed an 8 percent budget cut.

Supporters of the move believe the United States has grown complacent when it comes to defense innovation, relying too much on contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and overspending on assets like warships. Meantime, U.S. adversaries, including China, are plowing ahead, building cheap, software-enabled weapons.

Jonathan Panter, a nuclear security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, urges caution with this approach. “The Tech Right’s futuristic weapons have not yet been manufactured at scale, much less deployed as system-of-systems across all military branches,” he writes. “The cheap, mass-produced weapons celebrated by the Tech Right have a role, but so do the exquisite—albeit expensive—platforms of yore, such as aircraft carriers, which give the U.S. unique advantages over its adversaries.”

Read his take here.

New York City’s onerous permitting process has become a major contributor to the city’s housing and affordability crisis, with developers waiting months or even years for approvals from a panoply of agencies. “To break through this logjam, New York should create a fast-track permitting system to accelerate and streamline the review process,” writes Arpit Gupta, noting that this approach has yielded results in cities like San Francisco and Baltimore. A fast-track system would send a clear message: New York is open for business.

Lowering the ten-year yield has been a White House priority. It’s easy to understand why. When the yield—the return paid on a ten-year bond—is low, borrowing is easier for consumers. And though it has fallen over the past few weeks, it’s still high. Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Allison Schrager explains what the Trump administration can do to bring it down.

Seemingly overnight, Hamas sympathizer Mahmoud Khalil has become a martyr for free speech. Why? “As long as we agree that campus protests are generally praiseworthy, radicals will be able to hide behind that notion to advance their agenda. And when consequences come—as they have for Khalil—activists will use the popular notion of the innocent campus protester to avoid them,” writes City Journal Senior Editor Charles Fain Lehman.

“Columbia University, once again, finds itself as an elite ground zero for the darkness that threatens to engulf our civil liberties.”

If you think this was written last summer during the pro-Hamas campus protests that saw university students calling for “intifada, revolution,” expressing blatant anti-Semitism, and supporting the violence in Israel on October 7 that left thousands dead, you are sadly mistaken.

Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah is referring to the recent arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia student and Syrian national with U.S. permanent resident status who has been a ringleader of anti-Semitic activity. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson explained that Khalil was arrested because he “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” and that the move was “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.”

And yet, Attiah goes on to warn: “What happened to him should chill all Americans.”

Maybe it will chill those Americans who support terrorists. 

It gets better.

Attiah writes: “I heard from students how professors were too scared to even discuss the Middle East. I watched as journalists were blocked from access to what was happening to students who—taking a page from the tradition of Columbia anti-apartheid activists—took over a building and were arrested, and later suspended or expelled.”

Never mind the harassment and intimidation of Jewish students or the constant footage broadcast in real time by journalists, official and unofficial.

As Manhattan Institute Fellow Hannah E. Meyers wrote recently, “Mahmoud Khalil does not deserve American residency if he uses his time here to support a murderous international movement.”

If Attiah is so distraught about this “direct attack on personal and civil liberties,” maybe she should rethink her own U.S. residency.

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