Perspectives: Veterans Day 2020

The values that shaped them include leadership, optimism and charting your own course.

Debra Weiner is interviewing 100 newsmakers, thought leaders and other people who’ve made an outsize difference about the most valuable thing their parents taught them. Following are excerpts from a few of those stories, edited and condensed.

Leadership: JIM DUBIK, retired U.S. Army lieutenant general

Commanding general for training the Iraqi forces during the surge of 2007-08; Senior Fellow, Institute for the Study of War; author, “Just War Reconsidered: Strategy, Ethics and Theory.”

My dad was an...

The Pentagon under President-elect Joe Biden will face the same threats as it has under the Trump administration but will likely approach them in a different way, analysts say.

The Pentagon's massive $700 billion budget is unlikely to take deep cuts given those threats, they say. Clear breaks with Trump's approach to the military, however, are likely on social issues.

Trump's defense strategy, authored in large part by former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, views China and Russia as the nation's principal adversaries with lesser threats posed by Iran, North Korea...