Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci testified Wednesday in Congress that the mortality rate for coronavirus was about one percent.
“I think if you count all the cases of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic, that probably brings the mortality down to around one percent,” Fauci testified during a House of Representatives hearing on Capitol Hill.
Fauci said that the mortality rate for the common flu was 0.1 percent, which meant that the coronavirus was about ten times as lethal.
“This is ten times more lethal than the seasonal flu,” he said. “I think that’s something that people can get their arms around and understand.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci: “It is ten times more lethal than the seasonal flu.”
Fauci also said that the stated mortality data including that from China showed that the virus had a three percent fatality rate so far, but said the number was only based on patients demonstrating serious symptoms.
Fauci also said that coronavirus was not as lethal as SARS, which infected 8,000 people in America and killed 775, putting the mortality rate at between 9-10 percent.
“It clearly is not as lethal, but it certainly spreads better,” he said about coronavirus.
He said that the outbreak would continue to grow in the United States and proposed that Americans take steps to contain and mitigate the disease, especially in communities experiencing more cases as well as blocking infected individuals from coming into the country.
“I can say we will see more cases and things will get worse than they are right now,” he said, adding, “bottom line, it’s going to get worse.”
We don’t do this often, but we’ll just let Republican National Committee Ronna McDaniel’s words, dropped down in an eight-part Twitter thread, speak for themselves.
THREAD.
Since Democrats in Congress keep attacking @realDonaldTrump, let’s compare records.
JAN 7:
CDC established a coronavirus incident management system, two days before China announced the outbreak.
Pelosi began Week 3 of withholding her sham impeachment articles. (1/8)
JAN 31:@realDonaldTrump initiated travel restrictions from China, which the experts have praised as a critical decision to slow the spread of coronavirus.
Democrat leaders called him “xenophobic” and “racist.” (4/8)
2020 Democrat candidate Joe Biden on Thursday slurred his way through a speech on the Wuhan Coronavirus.
Biden attacked President Trump over his handling of the Coronavirus — then suggested a plan of his own to combat the virus — only it wasn’t his plan, he ripped off Trump’s plan.
“Joe Biden’s Coronavirus remarks today sounded awfully familiar. Listening to him, we felt a sense of déjà vu,” Trump’s camp said. “Here’s why: Biden blatantly ripped off President Trump, and bizarrely called on him to do things he has in fact already done.”
Now the hair sniffer and serial groper Joe Biden is advising Americans to stop hugging each other.
WATCH:
Biden has been told to keep his hands to himself because he gives women and children the creeps.
Biden has been caught fondling children and inappropriately touching women for years..
Just last week he sniffed a baby.
But now he’s telling Americans to stop shaking hands and hugging each other.
Watch Biden get overcome by his urge to sniff a baby:
"Okay, sir, after the countless gaffes & missteps, we are somehow still in this thing."
BIDEN: "Dynamite."
"Just please, for the next 48 hours, do not sniff, kiss, hug, or otherwise touch any strangers’ children."
President Rodrigo Duterte’s cancellation of key strategic pact with US has opened the way for Chinese infiltration
As President Rodrigo Duterte moves to boot US troops from Philippine soil through the cancellation of a key defense pact, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is quietly moving in to take their place.
Duterte’s recent decision to abrogate the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), which allowed the US to rotate troops and position equipment in the country, is opening the way for China to solidify its competing strategic position in the country.
That’s at least according to early findings of investigations into China’s undercover and illicit activities, ranging reputedly from espionage to surveillance to money laundering, now being spearheaded by Philippine Senator Richard Gordon.
Those probes have included scrutiny of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens now employed in the burgeoning online casino sector, known locally as Philippine Offshore Gaming Operations (POGOs), many of which are clustered close to key military camps and strategic bases in Manila, the national capital.
Gordon has claimed that the POGOS have been infiltrated by PLA soldiers for intelligence gathering and other activities. Those claims were validated when two card-carrying PLA members attached to a POGO were were arrested in a shooting incident in Manila late last month.
Anti-China protesters during a demonstration in front of the consular office of China, Manila, April 9, 2019. Photo: AFP/Ted Aljibe
The Senate investigations have revealed a tangled web of official corruption and conspiracy which has allowed countless Chinese citizens, including allegedly between 2,000-3,000 PLA soldiers, to illegally and secretly reside in the country.
Under the so-called “pastillas” scheme, exposed by whistleblower Allison “Alex” Chiong of the Philippine Bureau of Immigration (BI), Chinese nationals pay roughly 10,000 pesos (US$200) as a “service fee” for special treatment and ease of entry into the country.
While around $40 of that fee goes to immigration officers, the rest is allegedly spread among senior officials and other allies of the president who oversee the alleged syndicate run out of Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport.
The money, according to the whistleblower, is rolled inside a sheet of bond paper, similar to how the Philippine milk candy delicacy “pastillas” is packed. That, the investigations claim, has paved the way for so-called Chinese “immersion missions” by PLA members.
Public anger against the POGOs has recently spiked, fueled by the Duterte government’s belated imposition of a travel ban on Chinese citizens amid the coronavirus outbreak that started its deadly global spread in late January.
Many believe that wayward officials who benefit from the POGOs and import of illegal Chinese workers played an outsized role in the decision to allow thousands of Chinese citizens, including from Wuhan, the outbreak’s epicenter, to enter the country even after Beijing quarantined all of Hubei province.
Senator Panfilo Lacson, chairman of the committee on national defense and security and a former police chief, said that he has recently received information from security agencies claiming that thousands of undercover PLA members are engaged in “immersion missions” in the country, with Chinese spies operating under the guise of POGO workers.
“The intelligence community should exert extra effort to gather information in this regard,” Lacson recently said.
Chinese-run gambling operations in the Philippines are under growing scrutiny as potential spy havens. Image: Facebook
Lacson, Gordon and Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon have all recently warned that China aims to take advantage of the new and growing security vacuum caused by Duterte’s recent abrogation of the VFA with the US, a move that has undermined the legal status of the two sides’ 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT).
The US and Philippines stage thousands of bilateral military activities and exercises each year, including war games that include mock invasions of islands that aim to send a strong signal to China in the South China Sea.
“That may confirm a yet unvalidated report that a good number of PLA members are on ‘immersion mission’ in several parts of the country, although the reason for it is still unclear,” Lascon said.
“The police as well as the intelligence community should lose no time in exerting serious efforts to authenticate the discovered PLA using sources independent of the Chinese government, for obvious reasons,” warned the senator.
Lascon has also claimed that 47 Chinese individuals recently smuggled US$446 million into the Philippines over a recent five month span, whereby the Chinese money launderers paid and made connections with bent Philippine officials.
Senator Gordon, long seen as a Duterte ally, has warned of large-scale money laundering going hand-in-hand with a potential “fifth column” infiltration of Chinese security forces.
“There is tolerance. I don’t know where it is coming from,” said Gordon, implying the Beijing-friendly president is partly responsible for the threat, according to media reports.
“The shenanigans of what we see here, all happened because of the policy decision to allow overseas gaming operations in our country,” said Drilon in directly blaming the Duterte administration.
“What is happening in our country is apparently rooted in the very presence of POGOs run by the Chinese. If there were no POGOs, all of these nefarious activities would have no purpose,” he added.
An aerial photo depicting the location of Chinese-run POGOs and the Philippine military’s headquarters. Source: Defense Forum
Fears of systematic Chinese espionage activities were sparked last year when netizens shared images showing the suspicious proximity of Chinese-run POGOs to security and law enforcement agencies in Manila.
Those include POGOs situated near the Philippine Air Force and Navy headquarters, Philippine National Police headquarters at Camp Crame, and Camp Aguinaldo which hosts the Philippine Army and National Defense Department offices.
“When you already see many people [at the POGOs], who are always there…it’s very easy for all these [Chinese] people to perhaps shift their activities to spying,” Philippine Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said last year. “They are near [military facilities].”
Philippine National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon, meanwhile, raised alarms last year over the entry of thousands of undocumented Chinese as a potential security “threat”, including through possible PLA surveillance and espionage.
“You’d also start getting worried when a whole building, condominium, tower is occupied by only one nationality where you would not be able to guard all their activities,” the national security adviser said. “Some unwelcome activities could transpire there so we need to prevent those.”
It’s not clear yet that Duterte’s pro-China administration will undertake any concrete measures to address these concerns and reputed threats.
“He [Duterte] told me…We really need the funds from those [POGO] operations,” presidential spokesperson Salvador Panelo said amid an escalating call for their closures. “Because the money we get from whatever [Chinese] sources is for the government, so the government can use that in any undertaking.”
Travis Dyson is the 30-year-old Florida man who was found in a hotel room with Democratic politician Andrew Gillum on March 13. Police said Dyson appeared to have suffered a drug overdose. He is conscious and in stable condition in a Miami-area hospital.
Dyson maintains a profile on a website for male escorts and is studying at a nurse practitioner school. Gillum has been married to R. Jai Gillum since 2009. The couple has three children together.
In 2018, Gillum, 40, was the surprise winner of the Democratic primary for governor in Florida. Gillum lost the general election narrowly to Ron De Santis. Since then, Gillum has been a rising star in the Democratic party. Between 2014 and 2018, Gillum served as the mayor of Tallahassee.
By now you’ve seen clips of President Trump’s press conference in the Rose Garden where he outline a series of steps involving major U.S. businesses to join forces to help fight the coronavirus pandemic. ICYMI, here’s a good one from Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale.
Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner who has been a frequent critic of the federal government’s response, said the announced steps “will meaningfully improve readiness”:
House Democrats have introduced legislation that would undo President Trump’s travel bans from coronavirus stricken areas, despite the fact that the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has said that the impact of the crisis would be much worse had the travel bans on China and Iran not been in place.
Democrats want to strip the President of the authority to implement the bans, introducing a bill titled the “No Ban Act,” which would allow travellers from Wuhan and other infected areas to keep arriving in the US unimpeded.
“This bill imposes limitations on the President’s authority to suspend or restrict aliens from entering the United States and terminates certain presidential actions implementing such restrictions,” the bill summary reads.
The legislation vaguely says that Trump should only be able to “issue a restriction when required to address a compelling government interest.”
The bill further declares that before any travel ban is imposed, the President would be mandated to “consult with Congress.”
Democratic Presidential contender Bernie Sanders also said this week that he would not impose any travel bans during the coronavirus crisis.
The action flies in the face of advice from Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIAID, who told lawmakers during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing Wednesday that “I believe we would be in a worse position,” had such travel bans not been imposed by Trump.
Fauci’s comments come at the 1:00:39 mark
“Whenever you look at the history of outbreaks, what you see now in an uncontained way and although we are containing it in some respects, we keep getting people coming into the country that are travel-related, we’ve seen that in many of the states that are now involved.” Fauci said.
“We will see more cases and things will get worse than they are right now. How much worse they get will depend on our ability to do two things: To contain the influx of people who are infected coming from the outside and the ability to contain and mitigate within our own country. Bottom line, it’s going to get worse.” he added.
Fauci’s comments regarding travel restrictions have been echoed by The New England Journal of Medicine, which recently reported: “At least on a temporary basis, such restrictions may have helped slow the spread of the virus.”
Trump extended the travel ban Wednesday night to most of Europe (but not the UK) for at least 30 days.
“The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hot spots,” the president said, adding “As a result, a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe”.
Trump’s words, and the announcement of the travel restriction drew anger from some European officials, who reportedly described it as “unbelievable” and “very strange.”
Taking an emergency such as the #Coronavirus epidemic as another opportunity to wage his personal war against #China and the #EU … that says everything!
Any attempt to contain the #CoronaOutbreak is welcome, but the decision of @realDonaldTrump to exclude the UK from a European travel ban is nothing short of irresponsible. Viruses do not recognise borders. Decisions should be based on facts, not politics.
The European Commission and Council issued a joint statement declaring that “The European Union disapproves of the fact that the US decision to impose a travel ban was taken unilaterally and without consultation.”
“The Coronavirus is a global crisis, not limited to any continent and it requires cooperation rather than unilateral action.” the statement continued.
Trump was unwavering in his belief that his administration can mitigate the spread of the virus:
I am fully prepared to use the full power of the Federal Government to deal with our current challenge of the CoronaVirus!
….Together we are putting into policy a plan to prevent, detect, treat and create a vaccine against CoronaVirus to save lives in America and the world. America will get it done!
The Media should view this as a time of unity and strength. We have a common enemy, actually, an enemy of the World, the CoronaVirus. We must beat it as quickly and safely as possible. There is nothing more important to me than the life & safety of the United States!
Amid a global pandemic that began in their country, Chinese government officials have ramped up rhetoric to blame America for the spread of coronavirus in an unusually overt propaganda effort.
Following one Chinese government official’s tweet implying the U.S. military spread the virus, another Chinese official asserted that the U.S. was “immoral and irresponsible” in referring to the city of Wuhan as the origin of the disease.
The first known case of the coronavirus was in Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei province, in late 2019.
“It doesn’t surprise me they would do this. If the [Chinese] government can centralize the hatred toward the U.S., it’s good for them now,” former U.S. Army intelligence officer Greg Barbaccia told The Daily Signal in an interview.
“What I am surprised about is that they think people would believe this,” Barbaccia said. “I don’t think any college-educated people in China believe this.”
In recent weeks, Chinese officials had tried to deny the virus began within their borders, while also pushing conspiracy theories on the internet.
Zhao Lijian, a spokesman and deputy director general for the information department at the Chinese Foreign Ministry, tweeted: “It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!”
1/2 CDC Director Robert Redfield admitted some Americans who seemingly died from influenza were tested positive for novel #coronavirus in the posthumous diagnosis, during the House Oversight Committee Wednesday. #COVID19pic.twitter.com/vYNZRFPWo3
2/2 CDC was caught on the spot. When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation! pic.twitter.com/vYNZRFPWo3
During a press briefing Thursday, chief Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang lectured the United States, in part responding to comments the day before from White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien at The Heritage Foundation.
O’Brien said China initially “covered up” the virus and delayed a global response to the disease, which many health officials call COVID-19.
“We hope certain U.S. officials could focus on domestic response and international cooperation instead of trying to shift the blame to China by denigrating the Chinese government and people’s efforts to fight the epidemic,” Geng said, according to a transcript. “This immoral and irresponsible behavior will in no way help mitigate COVID-19 in the U.S.”
Geng said China has been “open and transparent” about the virus.
“Here we do not comment on whether the U.S. response is open and transparent, but obviously, someone in the U.S. still turns a deaf ear to international appraisal on China,” he said.
Barbaccia, whose specialty is corporate espionage and intelligence operations, said Chinese government officials are externalizing responsibility because they are economically exposed.
“They didn’t concede this was a problem earlier because they don’t think they can be seen as needing help,” Barbaccia said. “Part of their 2025 plan is that China is a world leader on every front.”
China has had about 80,000 reported cases of coronavirus and 3,177 known deaths from it, according to the website WorldoMeter. That is by far the largest national caseload in the world, which has seen about 143,000 cases and 5,400 deaths.
The United States has had 1,629 confirmed cases and 41 deaths from COVID-19 across 46 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Once the crisis is over, the events could bring long-term change in China, Barbaccia said.
“This could be a major turning point,” he said. “Now that people are dying because the government is not truthful, it could sow discord in the party, and that could be dangerous to the government.”
China’s communist government has engaged in propaganda before, but this is akin to Soviet propaganda, said James Carafano, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at The Heritage Foundation.
“Chinese information campaigns are usually more subtle and through third parties, while the overt campaigns are usually promoting the Chinese,” Carafano told The Daily Signal. “This is something we’ve not seen a lot of from China.”
China’s “brand” has suffered on several fronts, Carafano said, which could be a motive for the rhetorical attacks on the U.S.
Still, he said he doesn’t anticipate the dust-up between the United States and China to affect ongoing trade negotiations. The two countries recently reached “phase one” of a new trade deal.
“The Trump administration lets things stay in its own lane with China, whether it’s political, economic, or military competitiveness,” Carafano said.
On the day Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was threatening Supreme Court justices in front of a pack of cheering partisans, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., told the same crowd: “We have two alleged sexual predators on the bench of the highest court of the land, with the power to determine our reproductive freedoms. I still believe Anita Hill. And I still believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford!”
Now, it is far more accurate to call Hill a “disgraced accuser” than Clarence Thomas an “alleged sexual predator.”
Not a single credible accuser—and Thomas had scores of subordinates working for him during his years in government—ever corroborated Hill’s description of Thomas’ actions.
Unlike Blasey Ford, whose nebulous and unverifiable accusations were decades old, Hill’s allegations were a potential criminal matter. So the FBI investigated Hill’s claims—though it found her reluctant to cooperate—and failed to uncover any evidence to substantiate the accusations.
After the hearings, agents sent affidavits to the Senate accusing Hill of misleading them and the public, skipping portions of her story, and offering testimony that contradicted what she had told law enforcement officials. This part of the story rarely gets mentioned when the media recount her supposed heroics.
Accusing Thomas and Justice Brett Kavanaugh of being “alleged sexual predators”—which, incidentally, suggests something even worse than Hill’s accusation—is a politically motivated slander. It is meant to undercut the authority of the court and to intimidate justices (and future nominees) who take the “wrong” side on the issue of life.
For contemporary Democrats, the court exists primarily to safeguard the only constitutional “right” that really matters to them anymore: abortion.
In that regard, it’s curious to see former Vice President Joe Biden, who has spent 40 years shifting his abortion position to appease the base of his party, being dragged by progressives for failing to give Hill the unrestrained ability to destroy Thomas back in 1991.
After all, it was Biden who helped turn Senate Judiciary
Committee hearings into nasty, hyper-politicized smear-fests that set the
precedent for the Kavanaugh hearing.
In 1986, the year before Biden was lifted to chairmanship of
the Senate Judiciary Committee, Antonin Scalia had been approved 98-0 by the
Senate. There weren’t really any Supreme Court confirmation battles before
then.
A year later, in 1987, Robert Bork—who, Warren Burger, the former chief justice, claimed was one of the most qualified jurists he’d seen in 50 years—would be grossly caricatured by real-life sexual harasser Ted Kennedy, who warned that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids.”
Thomas would be accused of being a puppet of his white
colleagues, among other racist stereotypes, merely for his ideological outlook.
In those days, hyperbolic statements from senators were somewhat rare. Now they
are a modus operandi.
To be fair to Biden, he was an exceptionally incompetent and indecisive chairman, easily cowed and unable to control the hearings.
After promising to support Bork, he switched his vote. After promising to afford Thomas some semblance of due process, he presided over what the future justice famously called a “high-tech lynching.”
Biden now claims to regret that he “couldn’t come up
with a way” to give Hill “the kind of hearing she deserved.”
What does Biden think Hill deserved? Without any supporting evidence, the Senate gave her the opportunity to make her case. She was given enormous coverage by the media when her allegations emerged—leaked to the press, most likely by Democrats—despite the obvious problems with her story from the start. No one ever stopped Hill from telling that story.
Hill still tells her story. Hill wrote a book telling her
story. There are hagiographic movies and documentaries about her story. Even
today, journalists interview her without a hint of journalistic skepticism.
Sensing that the issue might be problematic, Biden called
Hill last year to apologize. Hill, a professor, wasn’t impressed, saying,
“I will be satisfied when I know that there is real change and real
accountability and real purpose.”
Or, in other words, the patriarchy must unilaterally surrender to the poetic truth, rather than to the evidence—or, in Hill’s case, to a lack of it.
If Biden should apologize to anyone, it’s Clarence Thomas, or maybe the American people, for allowing judicial confirmation hearings to be turned into partisan-fueled character assassinations, weaponized to destroy the legitimacy of the Supreme Court—all in the service of nothing more noble than the killing of the unborn.
KYIV, Ukraine—Due to the
coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. military has plans to scale back, but not
cancel, its biggest military exercise in Europe in 25 years.
Some
20,000 U.S. troops were slated to deploy to Europe and back this spring for the
Defender-Europe 20 exercise, which was to last through May and take place in 10
European countries.
U.S.
European Command said on Thursday that “in light of the current coronavirus
outbreak” it was “reducing” the number of U.S. participants in Defender-Europe
20.
“We take
the Coronavirus outbreak seriously and are confident that by making this
important decision we’ll continue to do our part to prevent the further spread
of the virus,” U.S.
European Command officials said in a statement.
That announcement followed
President Donald Trump’s Wednesday address to the nation in which he announced
restrictions on travel from Europe in a bid to limit the spread of COVID-19,
the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
“We can
always do another Defender. Right now public health concerns ought to take
priority,” said James Jay Carafano, vice president for The Heritage
Foundation’s Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy.
Triage
As of
Friday, the Pentagon had not yet specified the revised number of U.S.
participants in Defender-Europe 20.
However,
Europe is now registering more new coronavirus cases than any other global
region, raising concerns about the wisdom of going forward with the exercise,
albeit on a smaller scale than originally planned.
“The
virus is the culprit. Leaders must take prudent action now to preserve the
force structure required to respond to a crisis should we need to,” said John
Venable, senior research fellow for defense policy at The Heritage Foundation.
“Without
an exercise, we could still deploy to fight,” Venable told The Daily Signal.
“It would be ugly, but we could make it happen. We need to exercise that
process but … we can always do it another time.”
Defender-Europe
20 is a unique chance for the U.S. military to practice the logistical
challenge of deploying a large force to Europe—and then bringing everything and
everyone home.
According
to a U.S. military statement, the exercise’s overarching objective is to
“validate” America’s ability to deploy personnel and equipment to Europe, as
well as “to test the national support of hosting nations.”
The
American forces scheduled to deploy to Europe this spring comprise units from
15 U.S. states. An additional 9,000 American military personnel already
stationed in Europe were to participate in Defender-Europe 20, as well as 8,000
troops from other allied nations.
“Nothing
has been lost,” Carafano said of the possibility of the
exercise’s cancellation. “Even the planning to this point is something to
build on.”
The
first coronavirus case among U.S. military personnel in Europe was announced on
March 6—a sailor stationed in Naples, Italy, reportedly tested positive for the
disease.
On
Wednesday, the Pentagon announced that Norwegian officials had canceled a military
exercise called Exercise Cold Response 20, in which the U.S. was also a
participant.
According
to a U.S.
European Command press release, the decision was “a precautionary measure in response to the
ongoing outbreak of COVID-19 and to protect the health and safety of all
participants and local population.”
Deterrence
After a
generational focus on counterinsurgency warfare in the Middle East and
Afghanistan, U.S. armed forces are spinning up for a new era of conventional
threats from other nations.
While
U.S. military planners didn’t call out Russia by name, exercises
like Defender-Europe 20 are clearly meant to show Moscow that the U.S.
is willing and able to defend its European allies by force.
The Obama
administration announced the European Reassurance Initiative, or
ERI, in June 2014, three months after Russia illegally annexed Ukraine’s
Crimean Peninsula and launched military
operations in eastern Ukraine.
The program
called for a buildup of U.S. military forces and equipment in Eastern and
Central Europe, as well as rotating military exercises throughout the region.
Totaling
roughly $1 billion in 2014, the ERI was meant to be a temporary measure to deter
Russia from military provocations and show NATO and its European partners that
the U.S. was committed to their defense.
However,
since taking office, the Trump administration has boosted spending for the
Obama-era program, now known as the European Deterrence Initiative,
underscoring that the
Russian threat to NATO and its European partners has not dimmed since
2014.
With
about $6 billion pledged for the program in fiscal year 2020, the number of
American troops scheduled to rotate in and out of Europe was set to ratchet up
this year.
“This
exercise is not a one-off,” Heritage’s Carafano said of Defender-Europe
20. “This
will be the new normal. The U.S. has to demonstrate it can reinforce Europe
quickly. It’s a key component of conventional deterrence.”
