Read it.

Twenty-five years after the 9/11 attacks, we hardly need reminding that aviation security can never be taken for granted. But we got one anyway.

On Sept. 30, a Flydubai flight carrying 174 passengers from Dubai to Tel Aviv made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia after the co-pilot stabbed the captain and, according to Israeli officials, attempted to crash the aircraft.

The details are extraordinary, and the lesson is simple. Threats can emerge without warning, and aviation security depends on trained people being ready to respond.

That is why Americans should pay attention to a newly filed Transportation Security Administration record detailing the operational burden of the agency’s 2024 collective bargaining agreement. The federal government is now appealing a court injunction keeping that agreement in force.

Americans for Fair Treatment, of which I am CEO, has been fighting this battle for years. Congress never expressly granted collective bargaining rights to TSA screeners. The current union system began with a 2011 decision by Obama-era TSA Administrator John Pistole.

The legal questions belong to the courts, but TSA’s own record raises a broader question: How much union bureaucracy should a national security agency be expected to absorb?

Jerry Pournelle was fond of saying that the purpose of government was to hire and pay government employees.

Al Jezeera, a Voice of Woke Jihad.

Christa Pike, convicted of murdering a classmate three decades ago, has survived Tennessee’s effort to execute her ?by means of lethal injection, prison officials said.

Her lawyers said late on Wednesday that she had been taken away from the prison in an ambulance and was being treated at a hospital, but they said they had not been told about her condition.

Hanging works pretty much every time. Guillotine is guaranteed. Or they could send her to Canada, which seems to be on top of killing people.

The Foundry.

A new Senate report highlights startling amounts of health care fraud, including a payment of almost $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to Russian fraudsters and hundreds of millions to others.

The report, which points to some of the most egregious cases out of a total of more than half a trillion in fraud, highlights more than $21 billion in bogus claims billed to the federal government. Of that, more than $3.1 billion in taxpayer money was actually paid out to these fraudsters.

“While some Americans will be fortunate enough to earn a few million dollars over a lifetime, Washington is literally making these scammers instant billionaires off the backs of the working class,” the report says. “Yet, you never hear socialists ranting about this unfair redistribution of wealth.”

The War Zone.

The U.S. Navy’s schedule for getting USS Connecticut, one of its prized Seawolf class nuclear attack submarines, back into service has slipped into next summer. The boat suffered severe damage, especially to its bow, in a collision with an underwater seamount in the South China Sea in 2021. The service had previously hoped that repairs would be finished before the end of this year, and planning is also now underway for the submarine’s retirement in 2031. This would mean it could serve for just four years before being pulled from service once and for all.

The only thing that saves us is that other governments are even more stupid than our government.

The exact reasons for the delays are unclear.

What’s clear is that our ship maintenance facilities are highly incompetent. Maybe we ought to outsource that to the Chinese; they don’t seem to have these problems.

Read it.

The White House returned over half a billion dollars previously appropriated by Congress for programs serving illegal immigrants. While conservatives praised the return of federal funds, the rare action by President Donald Trump has lawmakers scrambling, with some members calling it an illegal check on Congress’ power of the purse.

On Friday, the White House Office of Management and Budget returned $810 million of taxpayer funds appropriated by Congress that were soon to expire on Sept. 30. The move, known as a pocket rescission, is a rare check on legislative power provided by the Impoundment Control Act.

The good guys win one for a change.

Read it.

This is the Met Office in Britain, but I doubt that the U.S. functionaries are any more honest.

Read it.

And, if it is, would that surprise anybody? Anybody at all?

The state of California spends billions of state and local tax dollars each year on welfare benefits for illegal immigrants through programs built to sidestep federal restrictions on public assistance, according to a new report from City Journal.

The report estimates that California taxpayers spent at least $11 billion subsidizing illegal immigrants during the last fiscal year. Federal law prohibits states from spending federal money on illegal immigrants, so Sacramento built a shadow welfare system financed with state and local funds and opened it to anyone who walks in. Residents paying the nation’s highest tax rates cover the tab. The pool of potential beneficiaries keeps growing, with more than a quarter of California’s residents today foreign-born.

Reporters for the outlet visited four public-services offices across Southern California to see how the system works on the ground. Officials at every stop confirmed that illegal immigrants can sign up for benefits themselves or collect them through their children. Nobody seemed concerned about who might be asking.

Watts Up With That.

The price of electricity in America rose about 30% in five years. Washington has decided the culprit is a building that, for the most part, hasn’t been built yet.

Americans are right to be angry, and both parties are scrambling to respond before the midterms. Data centers are the most visible piece of the energy landscape, so data centers are getting the blame for higher prices. But that view misses the real issue.

To be clear, data centers should pay for the infrastructure built to serve them, and host communities deserve enforceable commitments rather than press releases. But those are questions about allocating cost. None of them create another megawatt, and the reason your bill is going up is that we stopped creating megawatts.

As usual, government is the reason we can’t have nice things.

Watch it.

Tim Pool lays out the case that Trump is in charge of who gets access to the White House.

Not the Bee.

No wonder taxes in California are so high.

Read it.

The Space Force could turn President Donald Trump’s proposed U.S. Space Academy into a new source of highly skilled civilian employees while continuing to rely on the Air Force Academy to produce military officers, the service’s top officer said Tuesday.

Chief of Space Operations Gen. Douglas Schiess said the NASA-led academy could help address the Space Force’s growing demand for workers with specialized technical expertise.

“We need a lot of technical civilians in the Space Force,” Schiess told reporters at the Air and Space Forces Association’s annual Air, Space, and Cyber Conference outside Washington.

“Anybody that’s space-minded and is going to have that background, that can then get a job in the Space Force as a civilian, that’s great.”

The Space Force is seeking to rebuild and significantly expand its civilian workforce. The service lost nearly 14% of its civilian employees amid federal workforce reductions and is asking Congress to fund about 7,200 civilian jobs in 2027, a 40% increase over 2026.

Civilians make up about one-third of the Space Force workforce and hold critical jobs across missions including satellite communications, missile warning, and cyber operations.

Trump signed an executive order last month creating a presidential commission to develop plans for the U.S. Space Academy, envisioned as a NASA-led federal institution that would educate astronauts, engineers, scientists, operators, civil servants, and others for careers in the nation’s space enterprise.

The commission has 120 days to recommend how the academy should be structured, governed, and accredited, as well as what service obligations graduates would have in exchange for their education.

Read it.

A conservative group is calling for a Senate investigation into a nonprofit hospital, the New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System, because of its federal grants, executive compensation, and reported “rural” status.

Save Our States noted in a letter Wednesday to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., that Mount Sinai has filed as a rural hospital, which could allow it to gain access to funds intended for rural communities. However, Save Our States stresses that it’s a Manhattan-based hospital system operating in the nation’s most populous city with 8 million people.

Read it.

A Massachusetts family has spent nearly two years fighting the state for custody of their daughter after a public school socially transitioned her behind their backs and child-welfare officials treated the parents’ refusal to play along as the crime.

Read it.

Gee, who could have predicted that?

Read it.

The other day, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told Qatari state media that the United States was “spending tens of billions of dollars on killing people” when that money “could have been used to make life easier” for the public. “There always seems to be money for war,” he went on, “but not to feed the poor.”

The United States, in reality, spends immense amounts of money feeding and taking care of the poor—far more than it does on war.

Yet, if you listened to the Left, you’d think military spending was driving the debt and squeezing the poor. National defense comprises around 13% of the federal budget, far less than the primary drivers of debt, Social Security and Medicare.

We spend less on the military than we do paying down the interest on our immense $40 trillion national debt.

A debt that exists predominantly because Democorats never met a dollar that they didn’t want to spend (on something that would buy them votes).

Read it.

In July, the Federal Communications Commission added foreign-produced “advanced robotic devices” to its Covered List, generally preventing new models from receiving the authorization needed to be imported, marketed, or sold in the United States. Although early headlines emphasized Chinese humanoid robots and mechanical dogs, Sean Hollister reported in The Verge that the rule also encompasses robotic vacuums, lawnmowers, delivery machines, and many warehouse robots. It potentially applies to almost any wireless, software-controlled ground robot weighing more than 4.4 pounds and capable of perceiving its surroundings.

As usual, the government is the reason we can’t have nice things.

The Antiplanner.

Nearly five years ago, Congress passed the infrastructure bill, formally known as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). Supposedly it was needed to fix crumbling infrastructure, but the crumbling infrastructure that is most heavily used — city- and county-owned streets and bridges — received hardly any money from the law. Instead, most of the money went for new infrastructure that, if built, will probably soon be crumbling because politicians would rather support glitzy new projects than maintain old ones.

Read it.

The United States government minted its final penny in November of 2025. This came after fiat money inflation succeeded in depriving pennies of nearly all their value. Pennies are still circulating, but it is increasingly common for stores to round cost totals to avoid giving pennies in change.

Also, people seeing that the metal content of their pennies is worth more than the face value are deciding that it is better to store pennies in a jar than to spend them.

The same issues that caused the US government to give up on pennies may soon encourage it to make a major change in regard to nickels.

Read it.

Social Security is fundamentally an intergenerational transfer program. It is not a personal savings account in which each of us has accumulated a pot of money earmarked exclusively for our own retirement. “Our” Social Security payroll taxes were immediately distributed as benefits to then-current retirees. Payroll taxes collected today are used primarily to pay benefits to today’s beneficiaries. To make that clear … today, the Social Security benefits we retirees receive come mainly from our kids’ Social Security taxes. In turn, the benefits today’s workers eventually receive will depend largely on the contributions of future workers.

That distinction matters.

Read it.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been frantically trying to restart a presidential campaign that appears moribund, with polls showing him losing in some states to figures such as Pete Buttigieg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In his absence, his multibillion-dollar high-speed train also seems to be going nowhere fast. A new report from the state inspector general revealed that the train will be delayed again and that the public is being kept in the dark about ongoing problems with Newsom’s signature project. Oh, and one more thing: the project will run out of money by December 2027.

Newsbusters.

The auto-pen writes, and, having written, moves on.

Read it.

Does Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., secretly want Republicans to lose the midterm elections?

Rather than pass the SAVE America Act and other key legislation, the majority “leader” adjourned the Senate for a 36-day break. SAVE’s absence makes Capitol Hill even steeper to climb, if Republicans hope to maintain control after November.

Thune’s less-than-flaccid “leadership” rivals his lassitude. His work ethic lags that of a Skid Row panhandler. It takes real energy to rattle a tin cup all day long. Too bad Thune lacks such stamina.

The American Mind.

A little over a year ago, General Mills, maker of Trix and Lucky Charms, promised to pull synthetic dyes from all its U.S. cereals and school foods by the summer of 2026, and from its whole retail line by the end of 2027. Kraft Heinz made the same pledge days earlier, while Nestlé USA, Conagra, and Tyson followed with similar commitments.

Nobody forced them. They read the room.

The room had changed because of one man: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Secretary of Health and Human Services has transformed how Americans think and talk about health policy. For years, Washington rightly worried about access to affordable care, especially in troubled federal programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Kennedy took on a bigger task: making Americans healthier.

Read it.

For many generations, government has been a ratchet. It only grows, never shrinks. Trump flipped the switch. He is actually reducing the size of government. The process starts by cutting parts of government doing mostly harm, and very little good. USAID: send food to the starving, cut everything else. Department of Education: keep standardized testing, cut everything else. The EPA: End the War on Carbon, let the marketplace determine the future of electric cars and optimal miles per gallon, and quit moving the goal posts regarding clean air and water standards.

The next stage will be much harder. Don’t just cut bloated, wasteful, and ineffective, replace it with something lean, useful, and effective.

Read it.

The Justice Department filed three lawsuits Monday against states that offer in-state tuition for illegal aliens, after securing victories in five similar cases.

“Congress long ago made clear that states cannot put illegal aliens over our nation’s own citizens,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in a statement first provided to the Daily Signal. “By granting illegal aliens in-state tuition, New York, Vermont, and Connecticut are doing just that. No more.”

“Our efforts will not cease until President [Donald] Trump’s promise is fulfilled: illegal aliens will not receive benefits denied to our nation’s own citizens,” he added.

The American Mind.

For 80 years, American science has operated under the Vannevar Bush model that was established in the wake of World War II. In his 1945 report, Science, the Endless Frontier, Bush argued that the government should fund “curiosity-driven basic research,” with panels of peer scientists choosing which projects deserved financial support. His goal was not merely to subsidize scientists’ intellectual whims without regard for visible applications, but to secure American technological supremacy by developing fundamental knowledge before its practical uses were apparent. In practice, however, Bush’s vision mutated into a bloated, risk-averse bureaucracy split between government and universities, stifling the very innovation it was designed to foster.

I’d even vote for a Democrat to get rid of one of these clowns.

Hours After Murkowski Predictably Sides With Dems, Cassidy Unblocks Blanche AG Nomination

Read it.

Her husband was freaking out back when she slapped the teenage Trump fan at the Jersey Shore and was detained.

Read it.

Well, now at least someone is being charged: The principal and athletic director who refused to report high school wrestler Kallie Keeler’s claim of sexual assault by a male wrestler pretending to be a female.

Read it.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was shut down about a year ago. Since then, I’ve noticed a couple of things:

1) Latin American and other countries around the world are electing more pro-American leaders.

2) America’s Democratic National Committee is out of money.

It’s hard to say for sure, of course, but I don’t think that these two events are coincidences. I think they are direct results of USAID’s money spigot being turned off.

The vast majority of USAID money was used for leftist and other anti-American causes. So around the world, leftist and anti-American leaders are suddenly underfunded. And here in America, our leftist and anti-American party (the Democratic Party) is suddenly underfunded.

Read it.

A Smithsonian Institution exhibit featuring 250 objects claiming to tell the story of American history is overwhelmingly dedicated to promoting liberal causes, including controversial sexual themes, a review of the exhibit’s catalog reveals.

The Smithsonian’s “Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness” exhibit at the Museum of American History features three times more liberal than conservative items, the Fox News Digital review found. Several of the liberal items were overtly sexual items.

Read it.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE’s) Homeland Security Investigations carried out a nationwide operation between June 22 and July 10 that dismantled “SIM farms” run by transnational criminal organizations.

Read it.

Moderate Republicans in the Senate Committee on Health, Education and Pensions have introduced two bills that would prohibit outsourcing certain education programs from the U.S. Department of Education to other federal agencies, blocking a complete shutdown of the federal agency.

Under bill S. 5046, sponsored by Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, the Education Department could not transfer offices that oversee special education, postsecondary education, elementary and secondary education, and Native American education programs.

“Moderate GOP Senators” = RINO minions of the Deep State. The fact that it was co-sponsored by former Democrat VP-nominee Tim Kaine tells you all you need to know.

Thank God Mitt Romney is no longer in office, and John McCain is dead.

ATQUE: Keep Dismantling the Department of Education

The Antiplanner.

I thought that spending $4.7 billion on a passenger train from Fort Collins to Pueblo was a crazy idea. Yet that sounds positively cheap compared to a new proposal for a train from Denver’s airport to Eagle, Vail and other Colorado ski areas, which is estimated to cost $33 billion. As usual, this humongous amount of money is justified based on the claim that it will relieve traffic congestion.

The Denver West Express was first unveiled in an article in the Colorado Gazette by Bob Loevy. Loevy is a retired professor at Colorado College, so you know he has the expertise to offer such a proposal.

Of course, he was a professor of political science, not engineering, transportation, or economics. But that’s okay because, he claims, the project “is supported by a group of professionals with engineering, architectural and business training.” The only one Loevy names is Jay Branch, who is presumably the Jay Branch who has a masters degree in management and runs a management consulting firm — still a long way from engineering or economics.

DWE would not be a high-speed rail line. The trains would go as fast as 90 miles per hour “in places,” says Loevy, but no train is going to climb the Rockies at 90 mph. The proposal calls for a two long tunnels in the mountains, one 5.0 miles and the other 6.5, but otherwise the route will go around lots of curves that will slow down trains even if they are on the level. Moreover, the route from DIA to Eagle would be 17 miles (more than 10 percent) longer than I-70, making it even harder for the train to compete with driving.

Read it.

In an effort to gain the financial support of a public sector union before an election, Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education in 1979. Its first year in operation was 1980, when it had a budget of $14 billion (a little over $50 billion in today’s dollars). That $14 billion in taxpayer dollars was enough to get him significant campaign contributions from teachers’ unions. So it was a successful policy, politically. Although he still lost the election. Oh well. Still, $14 billion is a lot of money. Today the Dept of Education’s budget is around $260 billion. That is absolutely remarkable growth. The Dept of Education is doing better than nearly any company in the private sector.

The one major accomplishment of Joe Biden was to bump Jimmy Carter into being only the second worst President ever.

If you look at the list of Fortune 500 companies from 1979, 40% of them no longer exist. Only around 14% of those companies are still on the Fortune 500 list today. The Dept of Education has grown exponentially over this time, but only 3% of 1979’s Fortune 500 companies have moved up that list since that year.

Which means one of two things:
1) Perhaps our government is much, MUCH better at managing things than private companies.
2) Perhaps we have a very serious problem.

Tough call. What do you think? Hard to say.

But I think we may have a very serious problem…

I’m told that Ronald Reagan used to say that the closest we’ll ever come to eternal life on this earth is a government program.

Read it.

The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, as early as January 2020 did not believe that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese wet market. He later publicly insisted that a wet market was the likely origin of the virus while dismissing a theory that the virus had a man-made origin.

That was among the many revelations uncovered by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who on Saturday released portions of Fauci’s diary from the pandemic. The diary posts occurred between December 2019 and December 2022.

My, what a surprise.

The Foundry.

For at least 30 years, the American welfare state has become a global magnet for immigrants, both legal and illegal, despite longstanding law to prevent exactly that.

Since the late 19th century, federal law has barred any immigrant likely to become a public charge from entering the country. In 1996, with bipartisan support, Congress declared self-sufficiency the explicit policy of the United States and required many legal immigrants to have a sponsor sign a legally binding contract that they would support the immigrant to prevent their enrollment on welfare programs.

But, to put it mildly, Democrats have changed in the years since. Most recently, the Biden administration’s 2022 “public charge” rule gutted a principle as old as the Republic itself: Those who come to America should get to work, not get on welfare.

Yet, half of all households headed by noncitizens use at least one welfare program—a rate much higher than that of households headed by the American-born, according to census data analyzed by the Center for Immigration Studies. Some countries’ immigrants, like those from Somalia living in Minnesota, receive welfare at more than a 70% clip when they show up in the U.S.

The Foundry.

According to a recent report from the Utah legislative auditor general, the state’s higher education system lost over $830,000 in recent years to “ghost students” who apply to receive financial aid and run off with the money without pursuing a degree.

“Institutions reported disbursing $834k to suspected fraudulent applicants and spending over 15,000 hours working to mitigate enrollment fraud,” the 2026 Performance Audit on Enrollment Fraud in Higher Education report noted.

Salt Lake Community College alone saw at least 2,000 fraudulent applications in recent years, the report highlighted.

The community college did not respond to the Daily Signal’s request for comment.

It’s easy to defraud the government because nobody has a vested interest in pursuing such fraid—after all, it’s just Free Government Money. If education were paid for by the consumer (student/parents), such fraud would be far less frequent, and more likely prosecuted.

Read it.

My, what a surprise.

Modern War Institute.

The United States Army spent the last two decades optimizing sustainment for permissive environments defined by uncontested supply lines, contractor support, and static forward operating bases. As the National Defense Strategy shifts toward strategic competition and multidomain operations, however, this efficiency-driven model has become a liability. In large-scale combat operations, victory will depend less on which force fields the most advanced weapons and more on which can sustain combat power under persistent attack. A lethal maneuver force without a survivable logistical backbone is simply a stationary target waiting to culminate.

 Not the Bee.

The Deep State Uniparty struts its stuff.

Read it.

States across the country saw steep drops in the number of people covered by the Affordable Care Act over the past year, with Ohio and Oklahoma each losing nearly one-third of enrollees, according to new federal data that provides the first complete 50-state breakdown of sharp enrollment declines following the January expiration of enhanced subsidies.

The data, posted in late June by the Trump administration and first reported on by The Associated Press, reveals how changes in each state’s insured population led to around 2.6 million fewer Americans having Obamacare plans in February compared with the same time last year.

It captures not only how many people signed up for or were automatically reenrolled in plans in 2026, but how many paid their first monthly premiums to keep coverage, according to Cynthia Cox, a vice president and director of the ACA program at the healthcare research nonprofit KFF, who reviewed the dataset. She said it accounts for people who were retroactively removed from coverage after a nonpayment grace period ended

People are realizing what a shitty program Obamacare was, and is, without the back-door-socialism of whacking great Federal subsidies.

The Antiplanner.

As of June 23, 2026, Brightline trains had killed 214 people, an average of one every 13 days since the passenger trains began operating in 2017. Make that 215, as Brightline killed a pedestrian on July 2.

In August 2022, Brightline announced that it had received a $25 million federal grant to fence its lines and make them safer. The state of Florida also contributed $10 million and Brightline itself agreed to match that, providing a total of $45 million for safety.

Now, nearly four years later, Brightline says it is still “in the midst” of installing those safety measures. There is no explanation for why this is taking so long or why it is spending money on some measures, including “No Trespassing” signs and suicide prevention signs, that seem unlikely to do much.

Read it.

One of California’s wealthiest and safest cities descended into chaos over the Independence Day weekend after a social media-fueled “teen takeover” led to more than 400 arrests, an officer being struck by a mortar firework, and the looting of a grocery store.

According to Newport Beach city officials, thousands of unruly juveniles and young adults gathered near the Newport Pier on July 4. As the crowd grew, fireworks were launched into the crowd and at police officers. An officer was struck by a mortar, roadways were blocked, emergency vehicles were delayed, and a nearby grocery store was looted.

When Muslims profit from welfare and other fraud, they think of it as jizya. When Ebonics loot and destroy without being prosecuted, they think of it as ‘reparations’.

Watch it.

Your Friends in Government, of course, are attempting to ban them by law—and have succeeded with new ones, but a loophole regarding used ones is being (as you might expect) heavily exploited. As you might (als0) expect, the charge on that is being led by the Usual Suspects in the Usual Blue States. As the video points out, “You do not need a conspiracy when you have an incentive.”

I am reminded of a story I heard when I was young; I have no idea whether it’s actually true, but it’s too good not to share.

Supposedly Bill Gates, in the halcyon days when he was newly The Richest Man in the World, bought a brand new high-end Porsche sports car. Unfortunately, he couldn’t drive it in the U.S. because part of the process laid down by Your Friends in Government was that in order to be certified as street-legal a manufacturer actually had to crash a couple of cars to test whether they were sufficiently safe to be on America’s roads. Porsche responded, “Fuck that. We’re not deliberately destroying a couple of $900,000 cars just to slake your appetite for bureaucratic micro-management.” So Bill had to keep it in storage while he attempted to work his way around Our Democracy.

For all I know, it’s still there.

ATQUE: The Real Reason Why You Can’t Own a New Kei Truck or Hilux Champ in the US

As always, government doesn’t provide solutions, it just creates more problems.

Read it.

There has clearly been trillions of fraud over the last several decades, and politicians in both parties have shown very little interest in rooting out the fraud until Trump. Somehow, most of the media and other Democrats aren’t too concerned with saving taxpayer dollars—they spend their time attacking Trump.

The media and other Democrats were outraged when Trump spent $16 million dollars fixing the reflecting pool problems, and there was endless reporting, but there is virtually no outrage and minimal reporting on the endless fraud, no matter how many billions have been legitimately stolen from the taxpayers.

The following is a small sample of what crooks have gotten away with, which is only the tip of the iceberg.

Navy Matters.

More and more, the Western naval ship acquisition world is reverting to ‘existing designs with only minor modifications’ instead of new ship designs. This is due to fear rather than combat requirements: fear of runaway costs, fear of schedule delays, fear of bad publicity and criticism, fear of innovation, etc. Fear. The Western naval world is acquiring ships as a reaction to fear of their own ineptitude

Instead of honestly and objectively assessing the reasons for acquisition failures and fixing the problems, Western navies have opted for the perceived path of safety over that of combat effectiveness.