Pentagon expands missile production long-term as ICE buys robot dogs for enforcement operations.

As it ran on the front

Two announcements this week, taken together, tell a story about American strength, and this desk intends to tell it straight. First, the Pentagon confirmed a long-term agreement to significantly expand production of the Patriot and THAAD missile systems — systems that, need this desk remind anyone, exist to shoot down other people's missiles, not ours. That is defense. That is the word in the name. Second, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is acquiring robot dogs to assist with enforcement operations, which this desk would characterize as a force-multiplying investment in officer safety, freeing up personnel from — well, from tasks that a machine can now do instead of a person, which, when you say it plainly, is fewer people doing the actual enforcing. That's not a smaller footprint. That's a more efficient footprint. Let's move on.

Some will ask why these two stories belong in the same sentence at all — one is about missile defense against foreign adversaries, the other about domestic immigration operations, and this desk agrees those are different missions with different budgets, different chains of command, different everything. The only thing they share is a taxpayer, and a procurement office, and a general direction of travel that this desk would describe as robust investment in hardware, across the board, at the same moment, for reasons that are entirely unrelated. Coincidental timing is not a conspiracy. It's a fiscal year.…