Communication is a critical element to the human experience. As warfighting demands high-quality, immediately available, and secure communications, you would think that the Services and the forces who fight together have something as simple as radios sorted out. While I do not have any immediate field experience to draw on, I can offer a look at how the good intentions of the military Services, almost 20 years ago, failed to ensure that units fighting alongside each other were trained to rapidly communicate when conditions of life and death were at play.

As we go to press with this issue, Bashar al-Asad, one of the longtime dictators in the Middle East, has fled to Russia, and the Syrian people have risen to make that happen. In a similar way to the experiences of the Germans who lived under communist rule for decades until the fall of the Berlin Wall 35 years ago, Syrians are both rejoicing and awakening to the full impact of an authoritarian regime now passing into the dustbin of history.

By the time you read this, our national elections will be imminent. Our next President, regardless of whom that will be, must confront the world as it is, not as it could be. No one solution will fit all foreign conflicts, and none of these will necessarily fit our domestic needs.