The Secretary's SitRep

For the past few weeks, my life has resembled George Clooney’s character in Up in the Air — the 2009 film where he’s living out of airports, speaking at a different conference every day. Genine Fallon was there too every step of the way (You can subscribe to her new substack here.) Much of our trip centered on ‘veterpreneurship’ — helping more veterans become founders, owners, investors, and business leaders. Our first stop was Jackson Hole for the Wyoming Global Tech Summit.

This past Friday, my former congressional colleague, Steve Stivers, and I published a new piece in the Washington Examiner making the bipartisan case for permitting reform. That may not sound like the most exciting topic, but it is one of the most fundamental. If we want to lower energy costs, build more housing, expand American manufacturing, modernize our infrastructure, and compete in AI, we have to get much better at actually building things.

Fifteen years ago this month, I helped repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” But before I led the fight to overturn it, there was a time when I blindly supported it. As a young Army cadet, I accepted the argument that allowing gay and lesbian troops to serve openly could undermine cohesion and readiness. Like many Americans at the time, I initially thought it made sense.

This weekend, federal agents arrested a 21-year-old Pennsylvania man from the suburbs of Pittsburgh, who they say was preparing to carry out an ISIS-inspired mass shooting. According to prosecutors, Jonathan Hunter Kramer had repeatedly pledged allegiance to ISIS online, shared extremist propaganda, and told others that he was ready for a “mission” as soon as he could obtain a weapon.

For most of the past generation, American business leaders and investors were rewarded for thinking about globalization primarily through the lens of efficiency. Goods moved easily across borders, capital followed opportunity, and supply chains stretched across oceans with remarkably little friction. If a component could be manufactured more cheaply somewhere else, that was usually taken as evidence that the system was doing its job. For a long time, it did.

It’s hard to believe this Friday will be 25 years since 9/11. Like 93% of Americans who were at least 10 years old that day, I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news. I was a 27-year-old Army officer teaching military and constitutional law at West Point. During my 8 a.m. class in Thayer Hall, word came that a plane had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Like so many Americans that morning, we didn’t immediately understand what we were watching.

For years, Americans’ confidence in many of the country’s major institutions has fallen to historically low levels. Congress, the news media, the presidency and the Supreme Court all command far less trust than they once did. Much of that decline is attributed to polarization, misinformation and growing public cynicism. But institutions also lose trust when they give people reasons to question the processes behind their authority. A revealing example surfaced in July. At a congressional hearing, Sen.

When I was 19 years old, I raised my right hand and swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I spent years teaching constitutional law to the next generation of Army officers at West Point. I have taken versions of that oath more than once since then — as a soldier, as a member of Congress, and while serving at the Pentagon. Over the years, I have thought a lot about why the oath is written the way it is.

Hi Friends, Earlier this week, I published my first piece in The Wall Street Journal, arguing that if America wants to remain competitive in the global AI race, we need to be willing to build the infrastructure that makes AI possible. Communities should have a say in what gets built, but addressing those concerns doesn’t have to mean stopping construction altogether. Gov.

Our college experiences could hardly have looked more different. One of us was in Army ROTC, doing PT every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with days that began before sunrise and a college experience structured around duty, discipline, and service. The other became Rush Chair for Chi Omega, immersed in a very different American college tradition built around friendship, community, and belonging. Decades later, those experiences don’t seem nearly as different as they once did.