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Persistent and substantial maintenance delays are hindering the U.S. Navy’s its ability to be ready for operations and training. The Government Accountability Office says vessels have spent at least 33,700 more days in maintenance than expected due to insufficient shipyard capacity and a shortage of skilled workers, among other things. The GAO also says that while the USN is trying to remedy the situation, it has not complied with 11 of 17 earlier recommendations.

Helping veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder is the reason for a new U.S. Postal Service stamp. Proceeds from sales will be donated to the Department of Veterans Affairs and to the National Center for PTSD.

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper says the U.S. has completed its military pullback in northeastern Syria, settling into a more stable posture of about 600 troops in the rest of the country. That represents a 40 per cent reduction since President Donald Trump’s initial withdrawal order in October, but Esper says he still can redeploy smaller numbers as needed.

A reservist in Calgary with a history of ties to hate groups and spreading racism is being investigated by the Royal Canadian Navy nearly four years after enlisting. Boris Mihajlovic was an administrator of a now-defunct neo-Nazi website as well as being involved with another froup identified by the government as a terrorist organization. Mihajlovic now says no longer holds those views and has tried to turn his life around.

With Canada and several other NATO members still struggling to reach the alliance’s stated goal of two per cent of national GDP on defence, a former senior U.S. diplomat responsible for NATO policy says three per cent would be a more useful goal. Daniel S. Hamilton, now the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, says the alliance “must be prepared to confront a wider variety of challenges."

A Canberra-based think-tank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, says 43 Chinese universities should be considered “very high” or “high” risk to deal with because of their work on defence projects. The assessment by the ASPI, which is partly funded by the U.S. State Department, comes just weeks after the Australian government published guidelines for universities on how to reduce the threat of foreign entities leveraging academic research. The institute also launched a database that classifies risk posed by research partnerships with some 160 Chinese universities, security institutions and defence industry groups.

The U.S. Air Force sees systems integration as the key to military effectiveness but it says a budget hike is needed to turn its vision into reality. A key element of preparedness would be an ability to link so that combat could be replicated can replicate combat on a massive scale. “Individual weapon system simulators can help our men and women become proficient tacticians, but it’s their ability to integrate and connect that will differentiate us against a peer threat,” says Gen. Stephen Wilson, Vice Chief of Staff, adding that the USAF plans to spend “a lot of money” on multidomain command and control in its next five-year plan.

Looking ahead to the 2020 presidential election, the U.S. Marine Corps has issued a directive on what’s off-limits to personnel in terms of their political activity. Troops on active duty and civilian personnel can use social media but must clarify that their views are individual and not those of the USMC or the Department of Defense. It also states, among other things, that sharing or linking to a political page would be akin to distributing material on behalf of the source.

A spokesman for the Kremlin says reports that NATO plans to increase defence spending is proof that Moscow is right to be concerned about what it sees is the alliance’s eastward expansion. “We see that NATO carries out actions aimed at containment and expansion with regards our country,” Dmitry Peskov told reporters in a confrence call, adding that his country would not engage in a costly arms race.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says Turkey has walked back its refusal to support the alliance’s defence plan for the Baltics and Poland until other NATO members supported Turkey’s fight with the Syrian Kurdish militia it calls a terrorist organization. He also told reporters Dec. 4 that NATO wants a better relationship with Russia and that he feels China must be involved in arms limitations or reductions talks.

A day after China banned U.S. military ships and aircraft from visiting Hong Kong, Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff , spoke by telephone Dec. 3 with Gen. Li Zuocheng, head of the Joint Staff Department in China’s Central Military Commission. The U.S. says they “agreed on the value of a productive dialogue, effectively managing differences, and cooperation on areas of common ground.”

While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did not mention President Donald Trump by name during a Dec. 3 cocktail gathering in Buckingham Palace, Trudeau is being called “two-faced” by the U.S. President over some overhead comments. During a chat with his British and Dutch counteparts, French President Emmanuel Macron and Princess Anne, Trudeau had said Trump was late due to his lengthy press conferences. Asked the following morning to comment, Trump said, “well, he’s two-faced” and suggested the PM was reacting to U.S. pressure to spend more on defence. “I can imagine he’s not that happy, but that’s the way it is.”