“What do you think of Douglas MacArthur?” Few questions in military history are more loaded. “It’s no secret that MacArthur was and is a polarizing figure,” Barbara Noe Kennedy wrote in World War II magazine. “A brilliant tactician, revered for helping to win World War II and overseeing the successful Allied occupation of postwar Japan, but also a man who could be vain, arrogant, suspicious and insubordinate.” To be sure, multitudes of American service members fondly remember the Army general for his variation on the “island hopping” strategy along the northern coast of New Guinea, which broug ..read more

Sailors interested in studying health science may now submit their application with the U.S. Naval Community College. The U.S. Naval Community College, known as USNCC, reached initial operating capability last fall after it got underway in 2019 as part of a broader effort aimed at enhancing the service’s enlisted educational offerings. Now, USNCC is partnering with Western Governors University to provide sailors with an associate degree in health science that covers health science management, planning, coordination, processes, and protocols. “Medical roles are the backbone of the fleet, from t ..read more

An active-duty service member who was convicted for his participation in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol is now pleading for home confinement, rather than probation, so that he’s allowed to remain in the Navy. Leading Petty Officer David Elizalde urged the judge to sentence him to two weeks of home detention, as well as community service and restitution. The rules of home detention would allow Elizalde to continue working during the week. In a sentencing memorandum filed Wednesday, Elizalde’s attorney, Stephen Brennwald, said he was told by a Navy officer that sailors on probation ..read more

A new agreement between the Pentagon and State Department will ease some restrictions for federally employed military spouses who want to take their careers with them when moving overseas. The memo, signed during a White House ceremony Wednesday by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Verma, strengthens the Domestic Employees Teleworking Overseas (DETO) program for military spouses. “We are enabling federally employed military spouses to work remotely from where their service member is stationed overseas and continue their professions with as little ..read more

One of the Navy’s Military Sealift Command ships slated to take part in building a humanitarian aid pier off the Gaza Strip suffered a mishap last week and had to return to Florida, even as the Pentagon’s target date for getting the pier operational nears. The cargo ship 2nd Lt. John P. Bobo suffered a fire in its engine room Thursday while on its way to the Mediterranean Sea and returned under its own power on one engine to Jacksonville, Florida, on Tuesday, the Navy said in a statement. “The crew evacuated the area and used portable extinguishers to put out the fire,” the Navy said. “All shi ..read more

Testing on dogs, cats and nonhuman primates by the Department of Veterans Affairs is set to be largely eliminated by 2026, an issue praised this week both in Congress and by advocates, but which others have previously asserted could impair the discovery of future medical advancements. The move, included in the VA’s fiscal year 2024 spending bill that was signed into law in March, restricts the department from conducting certain research on the animals in the future. “VA is on the cutting edge of research, and I am proud to say that it will be eliminating the use of research on animals within t ..read more

The three combatant commands involved in the Pentagon’s counternarcotics mission in the Americas need more defined roles in their joint operations, according to a watchdog report released Tuesday. The Government Accountability Office noted that the commands involved in U.S. efforts to curb drug trafficking of cocaine, fentanyl and precursor chemicals — U.S. Southern Command, Northern Command and Indo-Pacific Command — do not have updated agreements on their “individual and joint responsibilities in the overlapping operation area.” While the Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Counter ..read more

On Wednesday, President Joe Biden suggested not once, but twice that the remains of his uncle, Second Lt. Ambrose Finnegan, were unable to be recovered “because there used to be a lot of cannibals” in the southwestern Pacific. Serving in the U.S. Army Air Force during the Second World War, Finnegan was a passenger of an A-20 Havoc, when, for “unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea,” according to an account published by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting agency. “Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard ..read more

A House panel has made clear it wants the Navy to buy two attack submarines in fiscal 2025 in order to keep the submarine-industrial base on a path of recovery, despite the service requesting just one. In a fiscal year when the defense budget is capped at 1% growth above the previous one, the Navy elected to ask for six ships in its FY25 budget, including one Virginia-class attack submarine. That submarine program is supposed to be on a cadence of two per year or greater to support the needs of both the U.S. and Australian navies. The latter is acquiring submarines as part of the trilateral AU ..read more

The dock landing ship Gunston Hall returned home to Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek, Virginia, on April 11 after a four-month deployment that saw the ship taking part in the largest NATO exercise in decades, according to the Navy. During NATO’s Steadfast Defender 2024, Gunston Hall was one of 50 ships taking part in the exercise, which also involved 90,000 troops. The exercise focused on carrying out complex operations across thousands of miles, spanning from the Arctic to central and eastern Europe. Gunston Hall left Virginia in January and first headed to Portsmouth, United Kingdom, wh ..read more