What officials do acknowledge, however, is that Vinas became a powerful resource in the U.S. war against al Qaeda.

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As a result, an unfair war for talent is taking place where resource rich companies and countries have an unmatched advantage in attracting and retaining the best talent from, sometimes, already talent-depleted nations and economies.

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World War II simply burned up untold quantities of every resource, human, mineral, and environmental.

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McCANN: First of all, they are a limited resource, and it is in nobody's doctrine to win a war solely with special forces.

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One of Kuwait's leading environmental scientists, with three decades experience in resource conservation, Asem has played a major role in restoring Kuwait's war-ravaged ecosystems as head of the United Nations Compensation Commission's environmental remediation program.

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In the wake of the first Gulf War, the U.S. Army assessed Saudi Arabia's solar energy resource potential in a classified effort to determine how oil fires had affected the region.

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After that high point in the bidding war, the government continued to dump spectrum on the market and the value of the resource plummeted by as much as 85%, according to Herschel Shosteck, who heads telecommunications market research firm Herschel Shosteck Associates in Wheaton, Md.

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