WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to be secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, has not served in the military or had a civilian leadership role in the service. While officials and defense experts said the Navy is in sore need of a disruptor, they cautioned that Phelan's lack of experience could make it more difficult for him to realize Trump's goals. Trump late Tuesday nominated Phelan, a major donor to his campaign who founded the private investment firm Rugger Management LLC. The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment on his qualifications. According to his biography, Phelan's primary exposure to the military comes from an advisory position he holds on the Spirit of America, a non-profit that supports the defense of Ukraine and the defense of Taiwan. Not all service secretaries come into the office with prior military experience, but he'd be the first in the Navy since 2006. Current Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth similarly does not have prior military service. She, however, has spent her career in a host of defense civilian positions. The appointment comes at a critical moment for the Navy, which has been stretched thin with deployments around the world and must contend with a shrinking fleet even as the naval forces of its main rival, China, are growing. Trump has campaigned on expanding the Navy and would need to fight bureaucratic inertia to do so. But it’s uncertain whether a secretary with no military experience — either in uniform or as a defense civilian — would be well-positioned to lead that effort. “It will be difficult for anyone without experience in the Pentagon to take over the leadership of a service and do a good job,” said Stacie Pettyjohn, a senior fellow and director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security. “Services are sprawling organizations with distinct cultures, subcultures and bureaucratic interests, and where decisions are made through many formal processes. To change a service’s plans, one must understand this Byzantine landscape.” Experts said Phelan's nomination reflects that Trump is seeking service branch heads who will not push back on his ideas — but that Phelan's lack of experience is likely to create issues and delays of its own, They say the Navy can't afford to lose time. One of the Navy’s biggest challenges is preparing for a potential military confrontation with China over Taiwan, a self-ruled island that China claims as its own. " The stakes are high ," said Brad Bowman, senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The success or failure in addressing key problems in the U.S. Navy over the next couple years may have a decisive effect on war and peace in the Taiwan Strait and elsewhere.” Trump has called for a 350-ship Navy since his 2016 presidential campaign, but he experienced first-hand the difficulty in realizing that goal, given the challenges to shipbuilding and the erratic and often delayed congressional budget process. There are just under 300 battle force ships in the fleet — vessels that have a direct role in conducting combat operations. “The Navy is stretched covering Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific. Strategists have wanted to pull back from Europe and the Middle East, but recent conflicts have prevented that,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “So the next secretary will have a shrinking fleet, expanded overseas commitments, and an uncertain budget environment.” The Marine Corps has called for 31 amphibious warships to help it maintain a close-to-shore presence around the globe. The Navy regularly has had to extend the deployments of its aircraft carriers and escorting destroyers, for example, to respond to the unstable security situation in the Middle East. Each extension can create rippling effects: Ships don’t get maintained on schedule, and forces get tired of the lack of predictability for their families and leave the service. Service branch chiefs spend vast amounts of time not only responding to the White House but also appeasing members of Congress in frequent hearings on Capitol Hill, shaping budget requests, holding constant meetings on service member issues, attending industry conferences and filling speakers requests. That all requires a nuanced understanding of the service that a secretary is leading, because major change in any of the branches often involves a lengthy process to review directives and past policy. Any changes to the many weapons systems the Navy and Marine Corps need and pursue are subject to lengthy contract award challenges. “The Navy’s problem here is money,” Cancian said. “Even if the defense budget goes up, there will only be a relatively small increase available for shipbuilding. (If) the budget stays steady or goes down, then the Navy will have a major problem. The fleet will continue to shrink." Trump has signaled through multiple appointments, such as his selection of SpaceX founder Elon Musk to co-lead a nongovernmental Department of Government Efficiency, that he seeks to cut through red tape. But the service secretary can't do that without moving through Congress, which has produced many of those regulations and processes the military must follow. “It might help that he has a personal relationship with the president. However, his lack of experience in defense and the Pentagon will hurt the Navy," Cancian said. "It will take him a while to learn the levers of power.”Lions CBs Terrion Arnold, Ennis Rakestraw Jr. out vs. Colts
Investment deals on the table as Belarus president due in PakistanWith the latest integrations of Chainlink Data Streams, Functions and VRF, all Chainlink services are now live on OP Mainnet SAN FRANCISCO , Nov. 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Chainlink Data Streams , Chainlink Functions , and Chainlink VRF are live on Optimism 's OP Mainnet. Along with this development, Optimism has joined the Chainlink Scale program, which supports the sustainable growth and long-term adoption of lighting-fast OP Mainnet with Chainlink, the standard for onchain finance. OP Mainnet is a stable and scalable layer-2 blockchain built on the Superchain and powered by Optimism's OP Stack. These integrations give developers access to the Chainlink services needed to build feature-rich dApps that scale Ethereum . Joining Scale provides OP Mainnet developers with enhanced access to Chainlink's high-quality, low-cost oracle services by enabling Optimism to cover operating costs for a period of time. As Optimism's ecosystem matures, the operating costs of oracle networks can transition toward being fully covered by dApp user fees. "Optimism joining Chainlink Scale, and the Chainlink standard being natively available to developers on OP Mainnet is a great step for the ecosystem," said Johann Eid , Chief Business Officer at Chainlink Labs. "Bridging the gap between Web2 and Web3 with Functions will allow for more growth and adoption, Data Streams will enable ultra-fast yet secure DeFi apps, and VRF will level up the integrity of blockchain-based games and other onchain apps leveraging verifiable randomness." OP Mainnet is a layer-2 optimistic rollup network designed to utilize the strong security guarantees of Ethereum while reducing its cost and latency. The OP Stack is the standardized, shared, and open-source development stack that makes it easy to spin up your own production-ready layer-2 blockchain just like OP Mainnet. "We joined Chainlink Scale to make the Chainlink standard available to Optimism ecosystem developers, empowering them to build the best applications," said Marine Andraud , Infrastructure Partnership Lead at Optimism Unlimited. "Chainlink Functions will streamline the experience of connecting Web2 data into Web3 apps on OP Mainnet, Data Streams will support the creation of advanced, secure, and low-latency DeFi apps, and VRF will support high-integrity apps. Ultimately, joining Scale will help developers build more advanced and secure applications, driving the mass adoption of blockchain." About Chainlink Chainlink is the standard for onchain finance, verifiable data, and cross-chain interoperability. Chainlink is unifying liquidity across global markets and has enabled over $17 trillion in transaction value across the blockchain economy. Major financial market infrastructures and institutions, such as Swift, Fidelity International, and ANZ Bank, as well as top DeFi protocols including Aave, GMX, and Lido, use Chainlink to power next-generation applications for banking, asset management, and other major sectors. Learn more by visiting chain.link . About Optimism Optimism began as a single layer-2 chain with the goal of scaling Ethereum 's technology and values. Today Optimism has evolved to represent the Superchain, a unified, positive-sum network of blockchains all powered by the OP Stack that share security, governance and values. The OP Stack is an open source, MIT -licensed modular tech stack for deploying scalable blockchain infrastructure. Together, OP Chains in the Superchain are working together to bring Ethereum to internet-level scale. OP Mainnet is one of many chains in the Superchain, providing neutral blockspace and a home for OP Governance. To learn more, please visit www.optimism.io . SOURCE Chainlink
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Rebekah Harding is a freelance reporter for the Daily Dot.NoneJonah Goldberg Among elites across the ideological spectrum, there's one point of unifying agreement: Americans are bitterly divided. What if that's wrong? What if elites are the ones who are bitterly divided while most Americans are fairly unified? History rarely lines up perfectly with the calendar (the "sixties" didn't really start until the decade was almost over). But politically, the 21st century neatly began in 2000, when the election ended in a tie and the color coding of electoral maps became enshrined as a kind of permanent tribal color war of "red vs. blue." Elite understanding of politics has been stuck in this framework ever since. Politicians and voters have leaned into this alleged political reality, making it seem all the more real in the process. I loathe the phrase "perception is reality," but in politics it has the reifying power of self-fulfilling prophecy. Like rival noble families in medieval Europe, elites have been vying for power and dominance on the arrogant assumption that their subjects share their concern for who rules rather than what the rulers can deliver. Political cartoonists from across country draw up something special for the holiday In 2018, the group More in Common published a massive report on the "hidden tribes" of American politics. The wealthiest and whitest groups were "devoted conservatives" (6%) and "progressive activists" (8%). These tribes dominate the media, the parties and higher education, and they dictate the competing narratives of red vs. blue, particularly on cable news and social media. Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of Americans resided in, or were adjacent to, the "exhausted majority." These people, however, "have no narrative," as David Brooks wrote at the time. "They have no coherent philosophic worldview to organize their thinking and compel action." Lacking a narrative might seem like a very postmodern problem, but in a postmodern elite culture, postmodern problems are real problems. It's worth noting that red vs. blue America didn't emerge ex nihilo. The 1990s were a time when the economy and government seemed to be working, at home and abroad. As a result, elites leaned into the narcissism of small differences to gain political and cultural advantage. They remain obsessed with competing, often apocalyptic, narratives. That leaves out most Americans. The gladiatorial combatants of cable news, editorial pages and academia, and their superfan spectators, can afford these fights. Members of the exhausted majority are more interested in mere competence. I think that's the hidden unity elites are missing. This is why we keep throwing incumbent parties out of power: They get elected promising competence but get derailed -- or seduced -- by fan service to, or trolling of, the elites who dominate the national conversation. There's a difference between competence and expertise. One of the most profound political changes in recent years has been the separation of notions of credentialed expertise from real-world competence. This isn't a new theme in American life, but the pandemic and the lurch toward identity politics amplified distrust of experts in unprecedented ways. This is a particular problem for the left because it is far more invested in credentialism than the right. Indeed, some progressives are suddenly realizing they invested too much in the authority of experts and too little in the ability of experts to provide what people want from government, such as affordable housing, decent education and low crime. The New York Times' Ezra Klein says he's tired of defending the authority of government institutions. Rather, "I want them to work." One of the reasons progressives find Trump so offensive is his absolute inability to speak the language of expertise -- which is full of coded elite shibboleths. But Trump veritably shouts the language of competence. I don't mean he is actually competent at governing. But he is effectively blunt about calling leaders, experts and elites -- of both parties -- stupid, ineffective, weak and incompetent. He lost in 2020 because voters didn't believe he was actually good at governing. He won in 2024 because the exhausted majority concluded the Biden administration was bad at it. Nostalgia for the low-inflation pre-pandemic economy was enough to convince voters that Trumpian drama is the tolerable price to pay for a good economy. About 3 out of 4 Americans who experienced "severe hardship" because of inflation voted for Trump. The genius of Trump's most effective ad -- "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you" -- was that it was simultaneously culture-war red meat and an argument that Harris was more concerned about boutique elite concerns than everyday ones. If Trump can actually deliver competent government, he could make the Republican Party the majority party for a generation. For myriad reasons, that's an if so big it's visible from space. But the opportunity is there -- and has been there all along. Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch: thedispatch.com . Get opinion pieces, letters and editorials sent directly to your inbox weekly!
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