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,

mixing 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 space-faring 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, Tau 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. Tolan wants to make Vietnam a rich world country by

2045.

That's a hard thing to do.

Many countries have tried, and they failed, particularly in Southeast Asia.

Ethan Wu is our Asia Business and Finance editor and a co-host of Money Talks, our weekly show on Business and Finance.

So to do that, what Tolom needs to do is transform the entire economic model that has pulled Vietnam out of poverty in the last few decades.

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