US Marines – Problems Stall Pentagon's New Fighting Vehicle

Washington Post – After 10 years and $1.7 billion, this is what the Marines Corps got for its investment in a new amphibious vehicle: A craft that breaks down about an average of once every 4 1/2 hours, leaks and sometimes veers off course???And for that, the contractor, General Dynamics of Falls Church, received $80 million in bonuses.

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Iraq – Officers With PhDs Advising War Effort

Washington Post – Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new U.S. commander in Iraq, is assembling a small band of warrior-intellectuals — including a quirky Australian anthropologist, a Princeton economist who is the son of a former U.S. attorney general and a military expert on the Vietnam War sharply critical of its top commanders — in an eleventh-hour effort to reverse the downward trend in the Iraq war.
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Iraq – US Army report got Iraq right

UPI – A month before the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, a team of military and Middle East experts at the Army War College published a 60-page booklet that laid out in detail the problems the U.S. military would likely encounter and how to mitigate them.

Here is the report: Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario.
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Geopolitics / Health – The Challenge of Global Health

Foreign Affairs – Thanks to a recent extraordinary rise in public and private giving, today more money is being directed toward the world’s poor and sick than ever before. But unless these efforts start tackling public health in general instead of narrow, disease-specific problems — and unless the brain drain from the developing world can be stopped — poor countries could be pushed even further into trouble, in yet another tale of well-intended foreign meddling gone awry.
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