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Month: September 2020
Inside the National Guard’s Daring Rescue of Hundreds from a California Wildfire
More than 200 campers were trapped near a boat dock on Shaver Lake in California’s Fresno County over the Labor Day weekend, encircled by flames and a blinding wall of wildfire smoke.
Chief Warrant Officer 5 Joseph Rosamond, piloting a California Army National Guard CH-47 Chinook, had already made the decision to try to put his helicopter down close by the desperate campers on Sept. 5.
So had CWO 5 Kipp Goding, pilot of a California Guard UH-60 Black Hawk, who had linked up with Rosamond’s aircraft and was trailing him to the scene, weaving through peaks rising to 7,000 feet and then dropping down to a valley leading to the dock.
“We were quickly running out of time,” Rosamond said.
Order Gives Employees Social Security Withholding Tax Deferral, Not Forgiveness
President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order on August 8 that allows employers to defer withholding Social Security taxes.
However, it’s a payroll “deferral,” not payroll “forgiveness” — meaning it’s a temporary change, and service members and Defense Department civilians have to pay that money in 2021.
Internal Revenue Service officials said the Presidential Memorandum defers the employee portion of Social Security taxes. The Social Security tax is set for employees by law at 6.2 percent.
For service members, that would be 6.2 percent of basic pay. An E-5 with eight years of service has a monthly basic pay rate of $3,306.30. The monthly Social Security tax equals $204.99. Through the end of the year, this adds up to $819.96.
Beginning Jan. 1, 2021, the deferred Social Security taxes will be collected through April 30, 2021. So, that E-5 with eight years of service who received a total of $819.96 from the tax deferral now has to pay it back early in 2021.
DOD Officials Describe Modernization Priorities That Will Benefit Warfighters
Defense Department officials spoke about the DOD’s modernization strategy, including the development and procurement of high priority systems — such as artificial intelligence, directed energy, small satellites, hypersonics, a 5G network and unmanned aerial systems — which could potentially offer game-changing results on the battlefield.
Dr. Mark J. Lewis, the acting deputy undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, and Michael Brown, the director of the Defense Innovation Unit, spoke today at the Defense News Conference.
Lewis noted that Congress has been very supportive with the direction of the DOD’s research and engineering work.
One of the important reasons for this support on the Hill, Lewis said, is that the DOD has demonstrated that it has adopted an approach to “accepting risk intelligently.” That means supporting research and engineering efforts that either result in success or in some measure of success, such that even if an experiment fails, some learning about the physics and process results in enlightenment for the successful creation of a future capability.
A Conversation With West Point’s Associate Dean for Strategy and Initiatives
By Joshua Kim
Chris Mayer is an Associate Dean for Strategy and Initiatives, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and a colonel in the US Army. I first ran across Chris on his active Twitter feed @ChrisMayer_WP. Chris generously offered to answer my questions about academic life within the military, his thoughts on COVID-19 and the academy, and the future of higher education. Please note that the views expressed in this article are Chris Mayer’s and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense.
Q1: I’d like to start by trying to understand the world of the US service academies. These include West Point (where you are) and the four other academies for the Navy, the Air Force, the Coast Guard, and the Merchant Marine. Can you provide insights into where the service academies fit into the broader postsecondary ecosystem, and maybe some points of distinction and differentiation?
Service academies have the mission of developing and graduating leaders of character to serve as officers in their respective services. The United States Military Academy’s (West Point) graduates are commissioned as Army officers, United States Naval Academy graduates as Naval officers, United States Air Force Academy graduates as Air Force officers, United States Coast Guard graduates as Coast Guard officers, and United States Merchant Marine Academy graduates become licensed Merchant Marine officers or commissioned officers in the Armed Forces. Students at service academies do not pay tuition or room or board, but they do have a service obligation once they graduate (West Point graduates have a five-year active duty service obligation).