The Economist.
Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist.
I'm your host, Jason Palmer.
Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.
America's Secretary of Defense is on a ruthless cleanup mission with the Army.
Nixing kit at a prodigious rate and clearing out the highest ranks.
Our defense editor says that, perhaps unsurprisingly, that comes with big risks.
And Ed Smiley spent decades at NASA,
working on the most high-tech tech of the early spacefaring age.
But our obituaries editor looks back at what made him famous,
a life-threatening problem and the most low-tech solution imaginable.
First up, though.
Vietnam has enjoyed one of Asia's greatest economic success stories.
It opened up to the world in the late 1980s and has become a manufacturing powerhouse in industries from sneakers to smartphones.
But Tho Lam, Vietnam's new leader, talks sharply of challenges ahead.
Earlier this month, he rang a now-familiar note of urgency,
saying Vietnam cannot rest on its laurels, it cannot delay.
What he's in such a hurry for amounts to the most sweeping economic overhaul
since the country embraced the open market four decades ago.
Tho Lam wants to make Vietnam a rich world country by 2045.