Author: Michael

Monica Witt stepped off a plane in Tehran in late August 2013 and began a new life. No matter how hard the United States Air Force veteran has tried, however, she can’t fully escape her past.
The U.S. government won’t let her.
Six years after Witt defected, a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., indicted the former counterintelligence officer on February 8, 2019, and charged her with espionage and other crimes for supplying Iran with top-secret information.

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Is America running out of missiles? The attacks on Iranian forces and leadership have had a devastating impact on the regime, but the repeated salvos of precision-guided munitions and interceptors have put a strain on U.S. and Israeli stores of some of these munitions. While the United States retains significant capacity, as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has stated, the expenditures do create risk, particularly in other potential theaters of action such as East Asia.

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An alliance is only as credible as the runway it can repair under fire.The Pentagon’s latest National Defense Strategy clarifies American aims in the Indo-Pacific while exposing what those aims demand of frontline allies such as the Philippines. The strategy’s emphasis on a “strong denial defense” shifts the metric of credibility. Though the strategy does not specify the objectives to be denied, its logic implies preventing a rapid Taiwan fait accompli and constraining the People’s Liberation Army’s ability to establish sustained sea and air control inside the chain.

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