From instant coffee to Cheetos, packaged cookies and energy bars, the U.S. military helped invent many of the snacks Americans love to eat.

“There was a tremendous need for the military to develop modern rations, and it ended up not only inventing a bunch of new food processing techniques but putting in place a food science research system that exists to this day,” says food writer Anastacia Marx de Salcedo, author of “Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the U.S. Military Shapes the Way You Eat”. “Out of that came a lot of new techniques and food, and after the war, those were incorporated into snack and convenience foods.”

Those new techniques include high pressure processing, which makes uncooked food safe to eat. The process is routinely used in packaged foods like guacamole, salsa and hummus.

Cheetos, one of America’s favorite cheesy, crunchy snacks, are made possible by the dehydration process the military worked on to remove the water from cheese. That gave cheese both a longer shelf life and made it lighter to transport to troops overseas.

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The Army has started testing recruits for sickle cell trait, or SCT, to identify at-risk Soldiers, as the service plans to screen all Soldiers within a year, according to a U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command medical officer.

Earlier this month, the screening push kicked off to both give Army leaders an idea of how SCT has impacted the ranks, and to help Soldiers combat the lifelong ailment, said Maj. Sean Donohue, command surgeon at TRADOC’s Center for Initial Military Training.

“On the enlisted side, recruits [at basic combat training] are now tested as part of their initial screening exam,” Donohue said. The SCT tests are grouped in “with a variety of other blood samples as part of initial processing.”

Since Nov. 2, roughly 2% of recruits have been diagnosed with the blood disorder, he said, a number on par with the national average.

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The U.S. Army is taking steps to ensure its pre-positioned stock in the European and Asia-Pacific theaters is right-sized not just for conflict but for strategic competition with Russia and China, according to the service’s new commander in charge of materiel.

The service published a strategy for aligning its Army pre-positioned stock, or APS, a few years ago in order to modernize and configure the fleet for combat.

APS historically has been designed to be ready for troops to draw from rapidly to respond during a regional conflict. But since the strategy’s publication, the Army has realized “that we needed to take it to another level,” Gen. Edward Daly, Army Materiel Command chief, told Defense News in a November interview.

Daly assumed command in July after serving as the AMC deputy commander under Gen. Gus Perna. Perna is now in charge of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed — an effort to rapidly develop a COVID-19 vaccine.

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The National Museum of the United States Army officially opened today at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. It is the first museum to tell the entire story of the Army, which has existed since June 14, 1775 — even before the existence of the United States itself.

The Army “has been a force for profound good in our world,” said Acting Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller, who spoke at the museum’s opening event.

“From the fields of Lexington [and] Concord to the hills of San Juan and from the cliffs of Normandy to the Korangal Valley, more than 30 million brave men and women have donned the Army uniform to fight for freedom at home and abroad,” Miller said. “For more than 240 years, they made innumerable contributions to our nation and the world — not just in combat, but also in humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, international cooperation and other vital missions. Their feats are enshrined throughout this museum.”

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