The appearance of an Apple CEO in front of a bank of cameras is enough to get the company’s diehard fans worked up into a frothy lather over a new iPhone or an even thinner MacBook Air.

In a report this month, the GAO found that while the DoD is working to implement its plans to organize and streamline the very systems it uses to run the defense bureaucracy, it’s falling short. While the GAO report is focused on the business systems used by the Pentagon, it is an important subject because these are the very tools used to make decisions involving more than half a trillion dollars a year in taxpayer money. If the IT systems themselves are not up to snuff, it will be hard to enact the kind of oversight and management that is expected today.

As summer approaches, many families are beginning to plan where they will travel and in which hotels they will stay while on holiday. For some 900 people in the New York City area displaced by Hurricane Sandy, hotels have been their only home for more than half a year. That aid program looks to continue, according to The New York Times, by the order of a judge. That is just one way to count the toll that extreme weather events are taking on the U.S.

America’s competitiveness keeps taking blow after blow. Congress and the White House run headlong willingly into political skirmishes over these issues while ignoring the big, strategic challenges that will shape America’s security and prosperity well into the 21st Century.

In a time of historic political clashes and a fight over spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the nation’s military, it is easy to miss the little things. A great example is the risk run by the Defense Department when it comes to the future of the defense industrial base and, in particular, the sourcing of so-called rare-earths metals.

The stupidity of Congress’ actions should not excuse military and civilian leadership in the Department of Defense from making the important investments into the future; it is strategically important for the military to develop new sources of energy like biofuels.