Found below are a few news items that caught my attention this past week. I am hopeful that the titles and short commentary will encourage SFTT readers to click on the embedded links to read more on subjects that may be of interest to them.

Drop me an email at [email protected] if you believe that there are other subjects that are newsworthy.

Marine General James Mattis for Secretary of Defense
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen retired Marine Gen. James N. Mattis to be secretary of defense, according to people familiar with the decision, nominating a former senior military officer who led operations across the Middle East to run the Pentagon less than four years after he hung up his uniform. To take the job, Mattis will need Congress to pass new legislation to bypass a federal law stating that defense secretaries must not have been on active duty in the previous seven years. Congress has granted a similar exception just once, when Gen. George C. Marshall was appointed to the job in 1950.  Read more . . .

Space:  The Next Military Battlefield?
Since man first explored space, it has been a largely peaceful environment. But now US adversaries are deploying weapons beyond Earth’s atmosphere, leading the US military to prepare for the frightening prospect of war in space.”As humans go out there, there has always been conflict. Conflict in the Wild West as we move in the West … conflict twice in Europe for its horrible world wars,” Gen. John Hyten, head of US Strategic Command, told CNN. “So, every time humans actually physically move into that, there’s conflict, and in that case, we’ll have to be prepared for that.”  Read more . . .

More Troops and Firepower for Trump Military?
President-elect Donald Trump wants a much bigger military. All he needs to do is find the money and political support to make it happen.  Less than two weeks into the Republican businessman’s transition from unlikely presidential candidate to unlikely commander in chief, many details of his plans for the Defense Department remain unsettled. His picks to lead the Pentagon, the individual services and his national security staff are still unsettled. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn was named his administration’s national security adviser on Friday, and Trump has been reaching out to potential defense secretary candidates in recent days, including retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, who as the head of U.S. Central Command from 2010 to 2013 choreographed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under President Obama.  Read more . . .

VA Exec Running “Shameful” Charity to Retire with Full Benefits
Thomas Burch, a career lawyer for the Department of Veterans Affairs will retire November 30 with a full pension and lifetime health care, a congressional source told CNN.Burch was in the process of being fired by the VA after an internal investigation and an investigation by the New York attorney general’s office found Burch personally benefiting from donations made to the National Vietnam Veterans Foundation.The Foundation, which Burch ran, raised more than $29 million in four years but spent less than 2% of that money on actual veterans causes. The New York attorney general’s office discovered most of the donated funds went to professional fundraising, and that “the fraction that actually made it to NVVF was further reduced by a pattern of abuse, mismanagement and misspending by NVVF’s former president.”  Read more . . .

Gulf War Illness Under the Microscope at the VA
Unless you were an adult in the 1990s, you probably don’t remember that the Gulf War kicked off the decade. Though it lasted less than a year, many Gulf War veterans came home with a mysterious disease that researchers are just now beginning to understand. According to a press release issued by the Veterans Affairs Research Communications, three VA-funded studies found that Gulf War Illness (GWI) is caused by an abnormal immune response. Certain forms of a gene known to play a key role in the immune system may offer protection from GWI. GWI is a cluster of medically unexplained chronic symptoms that include fatigue, headache, joint pain, indigestion, insomnia, dizziness and respiratory and memory problems, according to the US Department of Veteran Affairs. It affects about 300,000 veterans—four out of 10 veterans who served in the Gulf War.   Read more . . .

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