During 
a visit to Little Rock AFB, Ark., First Lady Michelle Obama announced that the Defense Department is updating its nutritional standards for the first time in 20 years. The revised standards will “include more fresh fruits and vegetables, more whole grains, lean meats, [and] low-fat dairy products with every single meal,” she told airmen gathered in the Hercules dining facility. They will affect nearly 1.5 million troops and their families and more than 1,000 dining facilities, she said. Improvements also will come to “school cafeterias, vending machines, snack bars, and any other places where military families purchase food,” noted the First Lady during her Feb. 9 speech. The Arkansas air base is one of the pilot locations for the Air Force’s Food Transformation Initiative, launched in October 2010, to provide airmen and their families with enhanced food quality, variety, and availability. Obama said the standards update “means more DOD installations will offer the kind of fresh, healthy food” that FTI brought to Little Rock. (Little Rick report by SSgt. Jacob Barreiro)
While U.S. defense officials have spent much of the past decade warning that China is the nation’s pacing threat and its People’s Liberation Army represents an urgent threat in the Indo-Pacific, several defense researchers are skeptical that the PLA has the human capital, the structural ability, or the political appetite…