Polling analyst Matt Towery, appearing on Fox News Friday, warned Democrats that they need to get control of their party, or they’ll risk drifting “completely off the edge.” During an appearance on “The Ingraham Angle,” Towery compared the political fate of former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972 to what the Democrats are going through right now. Towery criticized the current trajectory of the Democrats and suggested that they may be heading toward a similar electoral disaster unless they undertake significant reforms. “The Democrats right now look like they’re drifting more towards the direction of George McGovern in 1972. And if you recall that that didn’t go so well. And [Tim] Walz seems to be the perfect replacement for McGovern, except he makes McGovern look a little more serious,” Towery said. WATCH: Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Thursday that his party’s recent electoral defeats can be attributed to them not being “bold enough” in promoting policies like immigration as well as diversity, equity and inclusion. He said he was concerned that Democrats have allowed Republicans to dominate the narrative on these critical issues. In 1972, McGovern’s focus on anti-war and progressive policies alienated moderate Democrats, resulting in an electoral loss to Richard Nixon. Towery said that the Democratic Party faces similar risks as its strong emphasis on opposing Trump may overshadow broader, more pressing issues for the general electorate. He told party leaders to regain control and redirect their focus. “This is a point where the Democrats who really know what they’re doing in their party, and that’s people like Dan and others who have run campaigns over the years, know the real issues people are concerned about, have either gotta get in control of this party or it’s going to drift completely off the edge,” Towery said. Towery advised against continued attacks on Trump and said that despite numerous controversies, Trump’s approval ratings remain in good standing. “They certainly can’t keep attacking Donald Trump, because the pollsters who really get it right about Trump, I’m one, there are others, such as Robert Cahaly at Trafalgar and many others, Rasmussen, who polls every day,” Towery said. “They’re showing the president’s approval ratings are staying up, not going down. This is not, and Signalgate has not done anything either. Yeah, I think that they got to get a new direction.” Trump achieved an all-time high 47% approval rating and a 46% personal favorable rating, the highest marks during his presidency. Additionally, 44% of Americans now believe the country is on the right track, another record high for Trump’s tenure. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

An artist rendering of a B-21 Raider concept in a hangar at Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota. (Courtesy graphic by Northrop Grumman) Even in the era of DOGE, President Donald J. Trump is doubling down on American investment in sixth-generation aircraft.  The Air Force F-47 fighter and a new Navy carrier plane will restock American airpower.  While air dominance is priceless, the fact remains that experience with the B-21 Raider bomber has quietly given Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg, and the new leadership team the confidence to invest in advanced aircraft programs.  Saving money and executing on a predictable schedule is now a must for the survival of Pentagon programs. The B-21 is a “bomber on a budget.”  One of the most overlooked insights from the recent Air Force budgets is that the B-21 program is proving a new business case by keeping costs under control.  During the 2025 budget cycle, smooth progress on the production line enabled the Air Force to negotiate lower rates for the B-21 bombers now in production.  The Air Force trimmed about $1 billion off the B-21 program’s cost for Fiscal Year 2025 alone and bagged additional savings for future years. Coming in under budget is a first for a stealth aircraft – and quite a victory for the bomber leg of the nuclear deterrence Triad.  Contrast that with the snarls affecting nuclear shipbuilding and the Columbia-class submarine program.  It is also a great vote of confidence for future sixth-generation programs for both the Air Force and the Navy. The B-21 was planned from the outset to “bend the cost curve” for advanced aircraft procurement.  A cost cap of $550 million per bomber (averaged over 100 aircraft, and in 2010 dollars) was set as a performance parameter for the competition.  Northrop Grumman was widely believed to have won the B-21 program due to the combination of its experience in stealth bombers and its low bid price.  However, executing the B-21 plan has been a testament, first and foremost, to the Air Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO), the team that ran the B-21 from source selection onward but likes to stay out of the limelight. The Air Force is also capitalizing on progress with digital design, open software approaches, sophisticated aerospace composites, and a host of other advances in the American aerospace industry.  The net effect is smoother progress through design and early production.  For example, in 2021, a “major redesign” of the B-21 engine inlets was completed while the first two B-21s were being assembled, without incurring cost or schedule overruns.  “There’s nothing going on in that program that is leading to either a cost or schedule breach,” Air Force Lieutenant General Duke Richardson said at the time. New approaches to software are also paying off.  One example is the shorter time anticipated for weapons integration.  “It would take me years to integrate a new standoff missile on the B-2,” Air Force Global Strike Command chief General Timothy M. Ray said in March 2021. “It will take me months with the B-21.” By 2022, the Air Force announced that the engineering and manufacturing development contract was producing a quality build B-21, with significant design maturity.  “The B-21 test aircraft are the most production-representative aircraft, both structurally and in its mission systems, at this point in a program, that I’ve observed in my career,” concluded Randy Walden, who was then the Director of the RCO. This was a critical time period.  The B-21 achieved its roll-out at Palmdale, California, in December 2022 and its first flight in November 2023. Of course, inflation in the wake of the COVID pandemic hit the B-21 along with other defense programs, leading to increased costs for wages and supplies for both prime contractors and their hundreds of suppliers.  The B-21 program quickly digested those costs.  In January 2024, Northrop Grumman reported that it had taken a one-time after-tax charge of $1.2 billion due to macroeconomic factors that increased the costs of manufacturing the B-21.  The cost was swallowed as the first low-rate production lot began. As a result, by spring 2024, the Air Force was reporting success in lowering costs for the next four lots of B-21s.  Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall informed the Senate that B-21 unit costs had decreased during contract negotiations with Northrop Grumman.  The Air Force saved money on the B-21 without reducing the planned quantity. In turn, the Air Force was able to reduce its own procurement line for the B-21 down from $6.3 billion to $5.3 billion for the enacted Fiscal Year 2025 budget.  The Air Force was also confident enough to harvest the B-21 cost savings across the out-years.  An Aviation Week report noted nearly 28% savings across the five-year defense plan. The situation was very different for the B-2 Spirit back in the 1980s.  The Air Force requested significant design changes, including the requirement for low-altitude flight capabilities.  The Northrop engineers responded with “a miracle a day” to build the bomber.  Meanwhile, President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, received personal briefings every three months on the progress of the B-2 and often had to allocate additional funds to keep the program going. Forty years later, stealth bomber manufacturing is leading the way for efficient production of sixth-generation aircraft.  With the B-21, the Air Force has a robust program that is delivering on schedule and is ready for a production increase if the Trump administration decides to increase quantity.  As other sixth-generation programs follow the discipline of the B-21 Raider, America won’t lose a step in dominating the skies. Dr. Rebecca Grant is a national security analyst and vice president, defense programs for the Lexington Institute, a nonprofit public-policy research organization in Arlington, Virginia. She has held positions at the Pentagon, in the private sector and has led an aerospace and defense consultancy. Follow her on Twitter at @rebeccagrantdc and the Lexington Institute @LexNextDC.   This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.

An F-35B Lightning II fighter aircraft launches from the amphibious assault ship USS America during low-light flight operations in the Philippine Sea, April 4, 2020. (U.S. Marine photo by Lance Cpl. Kolby Leger) Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s suggestion that Canada should revisit its decision to buy the F-35 and instead consider Sweden’s JAS 39 Gripen is not just wrong – it’s strategically delusional. On two major grounds, his argument falls apart. First, the Gripen, for all its marketing polish, remains a souped-up fourth-generation aircraft struggling to survive in a fifth-generation battlespace. Second, the notion that the Gripen would somehow insulate Canada from dependency on the United States is a fantasy – since the Gripen is built around critical U.S. components, Washington retains veto power over its export and sustainment. Canada has already been down this road. A decade of handwringing, committee reviews, and political indecision led the country to finally – finally – commit to purchasing 88 F-35s. Sixteen of those jets are already under contract, with deliveries beginning in the next few years. Reopening the debate now, just as Canada starts building the infrastructure to support and integrate the F-35 into its air force, would be not only incoherent but reckless. Carney’s intervention suggests either a lack of familiarity with the basic facts of Canadian defense procurement or a willful disregard for them. Let’s begin with the fighter itself. The Gripen is a solid aircraft – agile, affordable, and well-suited to countries that prioritize cost and political independence over raw combat power. It was originally designed for Sweden’s Cold War strategy: defend the homeland with dispersed operations, using roadways as makeshift runways, and get fighters back in the air quickly with minimal personnel. That made sense for Sweden in the 1980s and 90s. But Canada is not Sweden. And the world has moved on. Modern air combat is no longer about close-in dogfights or rugged simplicity. It is about stealth, sensor fusion, and networked warfare. The F-35 was built for that world. The Gripen, despite upgrades to radar and avionics, was not. The latest Gripen E/F variants may boast advanced electronic warfare systems and air-to-air missiles, but they lack the stealth characteristics that allow the F-35 to operate deep into contested airspace. In a fight with peer adversaries like Russia or China, that difference would not be marginal – it would be decisive. What makes the F-35 valuable is not just its stealth, but how it integrates sensors, shares targeting data in real-time with allied platforms, and gives pilots a decisive advantage in situational awareness. It’s a flying intelligence node as much as a fighter jet. That capability can’t be retrofitted into an older airframe like the Gripen. You either design for it from the ground up or you don’t have it. And in a conflict where milliseconds matter, the F-35 pilot sees first, shoots first, and kills first. That’s the entire point. Then there’s Carney’s geopolitical argument – that buying the Gripen would free Canada from excessive reliance on the United States. That’s simply false. The Gripen may wear a Swedish badge, but its guts are American. It flies on a U.S.-built General Electric engine, uses U.S. weapons systems, and relies on other American-made components. Washington retains export control rights over these systems. That means the U.S. has the ability to block sales, halt deliveries, or withhold spare parts. Far from insulating Canada from American influence, choosing the Gripen merely shifts dependence from one U.S.-led program to another – without gaining the operational advantages of the F-35. More to the point, why would Canada want to “free” itself from the United States in the first place? Canada’s defense posture – particularly in the Arctic and North Pacific – is deeply intertwined with the U.S. through NORAD and NATO. Interoperability with American forces is not just desirable, it is operationally essential. The F-35 is the only fifth-generation fighter in widespread use across NATO. Flying it ensures seamless communication, joint training, and integrated operations. The Gripen, by contrast, would require separate doctrine, sustainment, and training pipelines – a logistical headache and a political signal of strategic aloofness at a time when Canada can least afford to look unserious. And that’s where the politics of Carney’s position really start to unravel. The idea that Canada could rip up its current F-35 contracts, switch to a Gripen fleet, and still meet its NORAD and NATO obligations is a fantasy. It would introduce massive delays, escalate costs, and further erode Ottawa’s credibility within the alliance. Defense Minister Bill Blair has been clear: this purchase is not just about new planes – it’s about rebuilding Canada’s credibility with allies after years of delay. Carney’s alternative would blow that credibility up all over again. Indeed, this is not the first time the Gripen has been considered. During the Harper and Trudeau governments, a series of reviews evaluated a range of fighters, including the Eurofighter Typhoon, Super Hornet, and the Gripen. Each was found wanting in different ways. The final assessment found the F-35 superior across almost every performance category, especially in terms of interoperability, survivability, and long-term relevance. The Gripen may have scored well on affordability and ease of maintenance – but it lost where it mattered most: effectiveness in a real war. Some may argue that cost remains a concern, and that the F-35’s sustainment burden is still significant. Fair enough. But let’s remember: the unit price of the F-35 has dropped significantly over the years, and economies of scale – combined with shared allied logistics – will continue to reduce costs over time. More importantly, when it comes to defense, “cheaper” is not always better. In fact, it can be dangerously short-sighted. If Canada’s fighter fleet cannot survive and win in a high-end conflict, the cost savings are meaningless. Carney’s proposal also ignores the immense difficulty and cost of operating a split fleet. Canada has already signed contracts for 16 F-35s. Any attempt to walk that back and operate both Gripens and F-35s in parallel would mean duplicating maintenance facilities, pilot training programs, simulators, spare parts inventories, and aircrew certification processes. The logistical burden would be massive. It would eat into the defense budget, stretch the Air Force thin, and create unnecessary operational risk. This is precisely why Finland, Switzerland, and other countries that considered the Gripen ultimately chose the F-35 – they didn’t want to compromise. Mark Carney has a sterling résumé in global finance. But when it comes to defense, he is out of his depth. Fighter procurement is not a spreadsheet exercise. It is a strategic choice about how Canada defends its sovereignty, deters threats, and contributes meaningfully to its alliances. Canada has made that choice. The F-35 is not perfect – but it is the right aircraft for the world we live in, not the world Carney half remembers, half imagines. Abandoning that decision now in favor of a less capable fighter with no real political payoff and significant operational downsides would be indefensible. Canada has finally begun to right the ship after years of defense mismanagement. The last thing it needs is to be steered off course by someone with no experience in military affairs and no real grasp of what’s at stake. Andrew Latham, Ph.D., a tenured professor at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is also a Senior Washington Fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy in Ottawa and a non-resident fellow with Defense Priorities, a think tank in Washington, DC. This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.

A sailor carries a simulated casualty on a litter while maneuvering through an obstacle course at Camp Gilbert H. Johnson, North Carolina, March 3, 2025 (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Channah Chilton) The U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee recently asked how our struggling Military Health System (MHS) would respond to a large-scale conflict with a peer enemy. As I testified, to meet this looming threat, the MHS needs urgent intervention to get back to its singular focus on lifesaving combat care. The good news: we already have many of the building blocks in place. Let me illustrate with the story of an unexpected trauma survivor. In 2010, U.S. Army Seargent Erik Ramirez* returned home to San Antonio, Texas, after suffering a devastating injury to his chest while serving in Afghanistan. Few patients wounded in battle had ever survived such devastating injuries, and before 2010, none had survived his specific injury—a sniper’s bullet that entered just above his body armor, crossed through his chest, and destroyed the major vessels of his right lung. The story of why SGT Ramirez came home alive to his friends and family is a decades-long tale of a few dedicated military and civilian visionaries pushing the MHS to learn from experience and to embrace cutting-edge medical innovations. In the middle of a combat zone, he was placed on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), a form of heart and lung bypass to rescue his failing heart after life-saving “damage control” surgery. This miraculous intervention occurred within a highly organized system that achieved combat medical supremacy—one that stopped at nothing to minimize preventable death on the battlefield and to bring every servicemember with survivable injuries home alive. Over the past decade, our casualty numbers have thankfully waned significantly. But now our MHS struggles to maintain its edge in preparing medical teams for combat. While military hospitals provide essential medical care every day, it more commonly takes the form of preventive care and treatment for healthy patients, not time-sensitive, emergency procedures in patients with severe traumatic injuries or organ failure. In fact, a recent study found that only 10% military general surgeons are getting experience they need to be combat-ready. As a result, we now stand perilously close to letting the strategic advantage of our military medical system slip into obsolescence. History has shown that allowing our combat medical system to fully dismantle will cost our military dearly in the next conflict. Since the start of World War II, we estimate that the decline in combat medical readiness during peacetime has cost over 100,000 U.S. servicemember lives. This means that up to one in four combat deaths over the past century were potentially preventable. Doctors, nurses, medics—in short, our entire military medical system—entered World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and even Afghanistan and Iraq unprepared, and service members died needlessly as a result. How do we reverse this alarming repeat of history? First, we must continue to invest in the innovations that enabled the lifesaving innovations teams performed on SGT Ramirez in 2010. Founded in 2004, the Joint Trauma System (JTS) embraced our combat wounded from the point of injury through rehabilitation served as the essential bedrock. Upon this foundation we added advanced technology like heart-lung bypass. Leveraging the expertise of the JTS in five to six accredited military trauma centers would afford a strategic geopolitical advantage and build surge capacity into our MHS. The MHS should also continue to leverage key civilian partners to train the military trauma teams we will need at scale. Over the past few years, the Health and Human Services (HHS) Pandemic All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) has supported innovative military trauma training at civilian trauma centers including my trauma center at the University of Pennsylvania through the Mission Zero Program. This program promotes bi-directional military-civilian medical learning, support for our local community in west Philadelphia, and advanced trauma training for our Navy partners. Authorization for this program expired in December 2024. A new, expanded Mission Zero Program funded by both HHS and Department of Defense would greatly strengthen our nation’s ability to respond expertly to acts of terrorism, acts of war, and natural disasters. Imagine two futures. In one, our MHS acts with urgency to establish high-volume military trauma centers while also continuing to collaborate with civilian centers to re-gain and even exceed the level of system-wide excellence we demonstrated a decade ago. In the other, we allow the “peacetime effect” to take hold, frittering away the ability to rescue our servicemembers when injuries occur, inevitably adding to the toll of preventable battlefield deaths when the next conflict erupts. As Edward Churchill observed after serving on the front lines of World War II, “In every new war … soldiers lose their lives and limbs because the doctor was ignorant of past experience.” We can turn away from the urgent need to restore and sustain a combat-ready MHS to our peril or embrace the challenge to re-establish our military medical supremacy. Those who serve our nation deserve medical supremacy. *Name changed to protect patient privacy. Jeremy Cannon is a Veteran Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and Assistant Dean of Veteran Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.

PLANO, TX — Local seven-year-old Benjamin Gunther was outed as a homeschooler after he looked an adult directly in the eyes while speaking in complete sentences.