US, NATO forces begin final phase of Afghan pullout May 1 U.S. Army soldiers return home from a nine-month deployment to Afghanistan on Dec. 10, 2020, at Fort Drum, N.Y. (John Moore/Getty Images) KABUL, Afghanistan The final phase of ending America’s “forever war” in Afghanistan after 20 years formally began Saturday, with the withdrawal of the last U.S. and NATO troops by the end of summer.
President Joe Biden had set May 1 as the official start of the withdrawal of the remaining forces about 2,500-3,500 U.S. troops and about 7,000 NATO soldiers. Even before Saturday, the herculean task of packing up had begun.
Unspent border wall funds will be rerouted back to military construction projects April 30 President Donald Trump tours a section of the border wall in San Luis, Ariz. The Defense Department is canceling border projects and rerouting funds back into DoD activities. (Evan Vucci/AP) The Pentagon announced Friday that it would cancel all of the border construction projects funded by the siphoning of money destined to to build military schools, training facilities and more. More than 100 projects were put on hold in late 2019 after then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper signed off on rerouting $3.6 billion from the Defense Department’s military construction account. What’s left will go back into those deferred projects, according to a Pentagon release.
As counterterror missions fade, special operations finds time to fix its own problems April 30 Air Force special tactics and combat rescue officer candidates perform push-ups in the water during an assessment and selection process at Hurlburt Field, Fla., March 25, 2021. (Tech. Sgt. Sandra Welch/Air Force) A sea change is coming to special operations. After 20 years of relentless combat operations, organizations are taking a hard look at their mission sets, who is in the formations and how the job treats them. Special Operations Command has openly discussed its imminent shift from counter-terror to near-peer competition in recent years, but at the same time, another major shift is underway in the military writ large: a new focus on attracting and retaining women in every career field, a renewed focus on preventing and responding to sexual assault and sexual harassment, and the first department-wide efforts to crack down on extremism.
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China routinely objects to the U.S. military presence in the South China Sea, which it claims virtually in its entirety, as well as the passage of Navy ships through the Taiwan Strait.