The US military is exploring ways to improve its ability to move personnel and materiel into remote parts of the world, Maj. Gen. Michelle Johnson, US Transportation Command’s director of strategy, policy, programs, and logistics, said last week. “As we look at our responsibilities in the future environment that we’re going to face, the idea of going to remote places with austere environments is more and more a reality,” she told the House Armed Services Committee’s readiness panel. She continued, “Our alignment in the world has been fairly east-west. We find that our presence, north and south and those, whether in Africa, South America, or even southern parts of the Pacific, perhaps aren’t as robust.” Accordingly, TRANSCOM has been working with the combatant commands to see “what if we could fix a road here or a port there, so that in the future, we would be able to go in” for missions like humanitarian assistance, she said. “As we build relationships with other countries, whether Vietnam or others, [they] . . . might give us this presence so that we don’t have a giant expensive footprint, but we have a way to respond,” she said during the April 7 oversight hearing.
When Donald Trump begins his second term as president in January, national security law experts anticipate he may return to his old habit of issuing orders to the military via social media, a practice which could cause confusion in the ranks.