A brutal loss in a wargaming exercise over Taiwan last year convinced the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. John Hyten to scrap joint warfighting concepts that had guided U.S. military operations for decades, Defense One reports.

Said Hyten: “Without overstating the issue, it failed miserably. An aggressive red team that had been studying the United States for the last 20 years just ran rings around us. They knew exactly what we’re going to do before we did it.”

Roll Call: “Conservatives are expressing outrage about a pending Senate National Defense Authorization Act that would require women to register for the draft, and two defense hawks opposed the Pentagon bill in the Armed Services Committee over the issue.”

Said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO): “American women have heroically served in and alongside our fighting forces since our nation’s founding. It’s one thing to allow American women to choose this service, but it’s quite another to force it upon our daughters, sisters, and wives.”

“What do rocket strikes by Shiite militias in Iraq, ransomware attacks on targets in the U.S., and Russia’s use of mercenaries on battlefields in the Middle East have in common? They are part of a trend in which America’s rivals are using nonstate actors and quasi-deniable means to put pressure on its interests,” Bloomberg reports.

“Washington is frequently finding itself on the business end of a classic strategy — proxy warfare — for which it has yet to devise an effective answer.”

“CIA Director William Burns has tapped a veteran of the agency’s hunt for Osama bin Laden to head a task force aimed at finding the cause of unexplained health incidents suffered by U.S. spies and diplomats around the world,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The choice of the Central Intelligence Agency officer—whose identity remains undercover—is part of what the officials described as a quickening effort to determine the source of the apparent attacks, which has proven elusive.”

CNN: “The Department of Defense inspector general is launching a review of the Pentagon’s and White House’s ability to keep the ‘nuclear football’ secure during a crisis, following an incident on January 6 when rioters came within 100 feet of the backup ‘football.’”

“The inspector general will evaluate the policies and procedures around the Presidential Emergency Satchel, also known as the ‘nuclear football,’ in the event that it is ‘lost, stolen, or compromised,’ according to an announcement from the DoD IG’s office.”

New York Times: “The Biden team picked up where the Obama administration left off with the repatriation of a Moroccan man, reducing the prison population to 39.”

Former President Donald Trump said in a statement that if General Mark Milley said what was reported — that he felt Trump might stage a coup after he lost the election— “perhaps he should be impeached, or court-martialed and tried.”

Of course, generals are not impeached, unlike Trump, who was impeached twice.

“For the first time, a female sailor has successfully completed the grueling 37-week training course to become a Naval Special Warfare combatant-craft crewman — the boat operators who transport Navy SEALs and conduct their own classified missions at sea,” the Associated Press reports.

NPR: “The war in Afghanistan has lasted nearly 20 years. One of its key architects, former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, died last month. And this week, President Biden said the U.S. military operation there will end on Aug. 31, just shy of the twentieth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”

“So what does that mean for Gitmo? After all, the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was created to hold enemy fighters captured in Afghanistan and the so-called War on Terror. If the Afghanistan conflict ends, what happens to its prisoners of war?”

“President Biden warned President Vladimir Putin of Russia on Friday that time was running out for him to rein in the ransomware groups striking the United States, telegraphing that this could be Mr. Putin’s final chance to take action on Russia’s harboring of cybercriminals before the United States moved to dismantle the threat,” the New York Times reports.

“In Mr. Biden’s starkest warning yet, he conveyed in a phone call to Mr. Putin that the attacks would no longer be treated only as criminal acts, but as national security threats — and thus may provoke a far more severe response… It is a rationale that has echoes of the legal justification used by the United States and other nations when they cross inside another country’s borders to rout terrorist groups or drug cartels.”

“It’s a 20-year war that has not been won militarily. We’re not having a moment of celebration.”

— White House press secretary Jen Psaki, commenting on U.S. troops leaving Afghanistan.

“Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) tweeted that members of the U.S. military have contacted him saying they will ‘quit’ if forced to get a COVID-19 vaccine,” the Louisville Courier-Journal reports.

“Others on the platform informed Massie that members of the armed forces cannot simply ‘quit’ the military.”

Politico: “Biden made the announcement after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin accepted the recommendation of an independent review panel that the Pentagon take sexual assault and related crimes out of the chain of command, and instead let independent military lawyers handle them.

“Austin’s recommendation does not, however, go as far as legislation gaining support in Congress that would make that change for all major crimes, not just sexual assault.

Prompted by Tucker Carlson’s unfounded accusations that he’s being spied on, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) called for an investigation into the National Security Agency, which he claims is being “used as a political instrument.”

That brought a succinct reply from Gen. Michael Hayden, who formerly headed the agency: “You’re an asshole.”

Donald Rumsfeld, whose roles overseeing the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and efforts to transform the U.S. military made him one of history’s most consequential as well as controversial Pentagon leaders, has died at age 88, the Washington Post reports.

New York Times: “Encores are hardly rare in the Washington merry-go-round, but Mr. Rumsfeld had the distinction of being the only defense chief to serve two nonconsecutive terms: 1975 to 1977 under Mr. Ford, and 2001 to 2006 under Mr. Bush. He also was the youngest, at 43, and the oldest, at 74, to hold the post — first in an era of Soviet-American nuclear perils, then in an age of subtler menace by terrorists and rogue states.”

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley told members of Congress that he wants to learn more about critical race theory and doesn’t see any harm in it.

Said Milley: “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.”