Today, H.R. McMaster explores the intent of a rare gathering of all of America’s flag officers in a Quantico, Virginia, Marine base auditorium to hear from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Glenn Tiffert and Kevin Gamache find there is an increasing amount of US-Iranian research cooperation occurring today, even as Iran launches increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks on global research institutions. And scholars from Hoover’s Financial Regulation Working Group launch a landmark collaboration with the European Central Bank to predict what may cause the next global financial crisis.
Determining America’s Role in the World
On his Substack, Senior Fellow H.R. McMaster comments on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s gathering Tuesday of all US military flag officers in Virginia. He welcomes the emphasis on returning to the warrior ethos and walking back the social engineering excesses of the Pentagon during the Biden administration, as some measures such as invoking identity politics could “‘weaken the bonds of sacred trust among warriors’ in a way that is destructive to combat effectiveness.” But he says that part of returning to the warrior ethos involves keeping partisan politics out of the military. Specifically, he pointed out that any suggestion from Hegseth or others that generals and admirals might have to leave the service if they didn’t meet a “subjective assessment” of loyalty to the new administration risks bringing military leaders into the realm of partisan politics. Read more here.
In a new publication for the NSF Secure Analytics program, Distinguished Research Fellow Glenn Tiffert and Kevin Gamache report on the state of Iran’s science and technology ecosystem and the ways in which it interacts with the United States. They find that the US is the top international research partner for scholars in Iran, with the number of joint publications growing 250 percent between 2015 and 2024. But they also observe that some of these publications originate from partnerships between US researchers, some of whom receive federal funding, and Iran-based coauthors who are designated on certain US sanctions lists. They also find that Iranian security agencies and the military are engaged in a sustained campaign of cyberattacks on research institutions around the world. Read more here.
The latest issue of Strategika, dealing with military medicine, is now available. Inside, former Veteran Fellow Jeremy Cannon writes about the serious task of preparing to avoid preventable US combat deaths in a future confrontation. Renowned trauma surgeon Sherry M. Wren writes about battlefield medical care, our national culture, and balancing the needs of many versus the needs of the few. And Emily Mayhew chronicles the history of battlefield medicine from Czarist Russia to the Global War on Terrorism. Read more here.
The Economy
In a landmark collaboration, the Hoover Institution’s Financial Regulation Working Group joined forces with the European Central Bank (ECB) to tackle one of the most pressing questions facing the global economy: What could trigger the next financial crisis? The conference drew senior officials from the world’s most influential financial institutions, including the ECB, the Federal Reserve, the Bank for International Settlements, and the European Banking Authority. Several Stanford scholars, led by Hoover Senior Fellows and conference co-organizers Ross Levine and Amit Seru, helped shape the conversation, ensuring that the latest research on financial regulation was debated directly with the policymakers and supervisors charged with safeguarding the global system. Read more here.
A new book chronicles the history of a group of outsiders who’ve evaluated and sometimes criticized the activities of the US Federal Reserve over the past fifty years. It also generates useful discussion about monetary policy as central banks work to curb persistent inflation. Now available in print, Fifty Years of the Shadow Open Market Committee: A Retrospective on Its Role in Monetary Policy is a deep dive into the 50-year history of the Shadow Open Market Committee, a group of private academic economists that has acted as the Federal Reserve’s outside watchdogs. Over the years, the group has provided candid and economically grounded critiques of the Fed’s conduct of policy. This criticism is especially important today as the Fed and other central banks around the globe continue to grapple with persistent, higher-than-target rates of inflation. The book is coedited by Hoover Fellows Michael D. Bordo, John B. Taylor, and Mickey D. Levy, alongside Jeffrey M. Lacker of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Read more here.
In the latest episode of Economics, Applied, Senior Fellow Steven J. Davis speaks with Austan Goolsbee, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, to discuss his paper, which attempts to explain the poor productivity growth observed in the US construction sector. The paper charts a decades-long decline in the productivity of the US construction sector and also indicates that this phenomenon is not caused by poor measurement of productivity in the segment. This sluggishness results in terribly expensive public infrastructure construction costs and also makes new housing construction more expensive. What might be the cause of all this? The answer may be found in restrictive land use legislation. Watch or listen to the episode here.
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