Tag: military industrial complex

Trump Admin Chooses Boeing To Construct the ‘Most Lethal Aircraft Ever Built’

The Pentagon has awarded Boeing a billion-dollar contract to build the Air Force’s most advanced fighter jet, President Donald Trump announced Friday.

The Next Generation Air Dominance program will replace Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor with Boeing’s F-47, a sixth-generation jet designed to operate alongside drones in combat. While details of the new jet remain classified, the aircraft is expected to feature stealth capabilities, advanced sensors, and new engines, Reuters reported.

“The F-47 will be the most advanced, most capable, most lethal aircraft ever built,” Trump said at the White House. “An experimental version of the plane has secretly been flying for almost five years, and we’re confident that it massively overpowers capabilities of any other nation.”

The new plane comes as part of a “family of systems” intended to “counter adversaries such as China and Russia,” according to Reuters. The contract is valued at more than $20 billion, with Boeing expected to receive hundreds of billions of dollars in orders.

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Why is the U.S. Military Involved in Fighting “Climate Change” at All?

President Trump’s Pentagon is making a bold move to refocus America’s military on its core mission – winning wars, not battling climate change. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is leading the charge to eliminate what he calls “climate zealotry” from defense spending as part of a broader effort to streamline military operations.

At a glance:

  • Trump administration plans to cut Pentagon climate programs as part of 8% budget reduction over five years
  • Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth states military should focus on “deterring and winning wars, not climate change”
  • Pentagon has already canceled multiple climate studies, including assessments of climate impact on African stability
  • Department of Defense Climate Resilience Portal has been taken down
  • Pentagon working with Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to eliminate what officials call “woke chimeras of the Left”

Trump Administration Refocuses Pentagon on Core Mission

The Trump administration is making significant changes to Pentagon priorities, cutting programs related to climate change as part of a broader initiative to reduce defense spending by 8% over the next five years. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been explicit about the shift in focus, declaring that addressing climate concerns is not part of the military’s core responsibilities.

Defense Department spokesman John Ullyot reinforced this position, stating that “climate zealotry and other woke chimeras of the Left are not part of that core mission” of deterring, fighting, and winning wars. The administration’s efforts include reviewing contracts to eliminate billions in climate-related spending across the department.

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Judge Ana Reyes Blasted for ‘Disturbing,’ Unprofessional Ruling, Hectoring DOJ Attorney on What ‘Jesus Would Say’ About Trans Soldier Ban

A D.C. judge is being accused of being one of many “activist judges” who is using her position to stymie President Donald Trump’s agenda after blocking his de facto ban on transgender people in the military.

U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, a Biden-appointee and the first openly lesbian federal judge in D.C., blocked the Trump administration’s transgender troops ban on Tuesday night, in part citing Hamilton, a Broadway musical beloved by liberals, to justify her decision.

“The Court’s opinion is long, but its premise is simple. In the self-evident truth that ‘all people are created equal,’ all means all. Nothing more. And certainly nothing less,” the order reads, differing from the Declaration of Independence which reads, “all men are created equal.”

“Women were ‘included in the sequel’ when passage of the Nineteenth Amendment granted them the right to vote in 1920. See Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton: An American Musical (2016); compare U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776) with U.S. Const. amend. XIX (1920),” the citation reads. “That right is one of the many that thousands of transgender persons serve to protect.”

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Medical Surveillance Part 2: Tracking the Unvaccinated

Part 1 of “Medical Surveillance” revealed how contact tracing evolved into databases called real-time AI ecosystems. The data stored in these ecosystems ranges from medical records to genomic sequences that were largely collected using Covid-19 PCR tests. Health privacy laws were revised to enable an alarming amount of data sharing with public and private intelligence agencies for military operations. Using the Covid-19 scamdemic as a front, the military worked with so-called health authorities to weaponize Covid-19 statistics to target non-compliant or undesirable groups with mRNA vaccines, ventilators, and Remdesivir. In other words, it was a military operation that utilized covertly collected private medical and genetic data to deploy bioweapons. Targets were acquired using AI generated predictive behavior models provided by government intelligence agencies like Palantir. If that sounds disturbing to you, keep reading because that was just a warm-up.

The DELAYED REACTION THAT ENABLED THE ILLUSION OF THE PANDEMIC OF THE UNVACCINATED

As contact tracing phased into the background and the genome-collection method known as PCR testing was normalized, one more important piece of data needed to be collected: vaccination status.

The mockingbird media foreshadowed that vaccination status must be made public information because during a public health emergency everyone has a right to know their risk. Soon everyone would need to have a Covid-19 shot to travel, work, go to school, and participate in society. All this would inevitably lead to a vaccine passport. Yet there was no official way to track who was vaccinated in the healthcare industry.

The CDC and Medicare (CMS) announced new codes for tracking vaccination status that would go live on April 1st 2022. The update occurred exactly two years after the Covid-19 diagnosis code went live — on April fools’ Day. This time the emergency update was for the purposes of tracking vaccination status. It just wasn’t an emergency during the most aggressive portion of the vaccine campaign; the part where everyone had to get the shot in order for society to come out of lockdown and “go back to normal”. At any point during 2021, the CDC, CMS, or the AMA could have stopped the presses to do another emergency update to introduce a new code for vaccination status (or for adverse events, for that matter). They did not.

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We’re #1 in Selling Weapons!

We’re #1 (once again) in selling weapons! Amazingly, the USA now accounts for 43% of the world’s trade in deadly weaponry. No country beats more plowshares into swords and pruning hooks into spears than America, which is also, obviously, the most Christian nation in the world.

Let’s take a look at a useful chart from Stephen Semler (be sure to check out his blog on Substack)…

Finding #1: The US is the world’s largest arms dealer

The US accounts for 43% of global arms exports, more than the next seven largest arms-exporting countries combined. All the countries outside the top eight account for less than 17% of the worldwide total.

For another perspective on America’s record-breaking year of selling deadly weaponry, check out this column by Lenny Broytman.

Way back in 2012, I wrote a column for TomDispatch: “Weapons ‘r’ us,” in which I examined America’s dominance of the weapons trade. Here’s what I wrote back then:

Yes, we’re the world’s foremost “merchants of death,” the title of a best-selling exposé of the international arms trade published to acclaim in the U.S. in 1934. Back then, most Americans saw themselves as war-avoiders rather than as war-profiteers. The evil war-profiteers were mainly European arms makers like Germany’s Krupp, France’s Schneider, or Britain’s Vickers.

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US Army’s Joint Light Tactical Vehicles Never Passed Required Armor Testing

In news that we’re certain will have Adam Schiff laying out a multi-national, multi-planetary conspiracy that can only be stopped by impeaching Donald Trump tomorrow, a new report from Bloomberg found that from 2017 to 2019, employees at Evraz North America Inc., a Russian-owned steel manufacturer, falsified quality control tests on armor plating used in the JLTV, according to an internal report and company officials.

The Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), the U.S. Army’s successor to the Humvee, is designed to protect troops from bullets, mines, and explosives. At its Portland, Oregon facility, workers skipped mandatory hardness tests and fabricated results for about 12,800 armor plates, which were falsely labeled as approved. Some of these plates later developed cracks, raising concerns about their reliability in combat.

Oshkosh Defense LLC, a major military vehicle manufacturer, was a key customer for Evraz’s armor plates. The company produces the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), marketed as a “go-anywhere, do-anything” light tactical vehicle. Primarily used by the U.S. military, the JLTV has also been provided to Ukraine, Israel, Brazil, and Lithuania. As of last year, over 22,000 JLTVs had been built, each expected to last around 20 years, the report says.

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What happens if the robot army is defeated?

Many of the national security establishment’s leading voices say America’s military needs to rapidly modernize by embracing the digital future through adopting Artificial Intelligence, network-centric warfare, and uncrewed weapons.

Some even claim that such technology has already fundamentally changed the nature of war. The Pentagon’s technologists and the leaders of the tech industry envision a future of an AI-enabled military force wielding swarms of autonomous weapons on land, at sea, and in the skies.

However, before the United States fully mortgages its security to software code and integrated circuits, several questions must be addressed. Assuming the military does one day build a force with an uncrewed front rank, what happens if the robot army is defeated? Will the nation’s leaders surrender at that point, or do they then send in the humans?

The next major question is, what weapons will the humans wield? It is difficult to imagine the services will maintain parallel fleets of digital and analog weapons. Judging by current trends, Pentagon leaders are much more likely to invest the bulk of their procurement budgets in purchasing autonomous or “optionally manned” systems like the XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle.

Those promoting such a future appear ignorant of a very simple truth: war is a human endeavor. Wars are fought to serve human ends. The weapons used are only the means to achieve those ends.

The humans on both sides of a conflict will seek every advantage possible to secure a victory. When a weapon system is connected to the network, the means to remotely defeat it is already built into the design. The humans on the other side would be foolish not to unleash their cyber warriors to find any way to penetrate the network to disrupt cyber-physical systems.

The United States may find that the future military force may not even cross the line of departure because it has been remotely disabled in a digital Pearl Harbor-style attack.

Technology certainly has its place in the military. Uncrewed aerial vehicles fill many of the roles traditionally performed by pilots flying expensive aircraft to take just one example. In certain circumstances, troops on the front lines should have the ability to employ technology directly.

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Visualizing Washington’s Key Role In Military Aid To Ukraine

As doubts over future American support for Ukraine and the Trump administration’s commitment to NATO loom large, European leaders have rallied to assure Ukraine of its unwavering support and to become more independent of their transatlantic partner. 

On Thursday, leaders gathered for a special European Council meeting, where the future of Europe’s security and the bloc’s role in Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression was discussed.

“This is a watershed moment for Europe. And it is also a watershed moment for Ukraine, as part of our European family,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said in a statement. 

“Europe faces a clear and present danger. And therefore, Europe has to be able to protect itself, to defend itself, as we have to put Ukraine in a position to protect itself, and to push for a lasting and just peace.”

As Statista’s Felix Richter reports, to be able to negotiate a “peace through strength”, as von der Leyen put it, the EU must quickly ramp up its military aid to Ukraine after U.S. President Donald Trump paused U.S. military support earlier this week. 

According to the IfW Kiel’s Ukraine Support Tracker, the EU’s 27 member states have allocated a total of $53.8 billion in military aid to Ukraine between January 24, 2022 and December 31, 2024. 

That’s equivalent to 39 percent of total military aid supplied to Ukraine during that time and roughly $15 billion short of what the U.S. supplied. 

Adding contributions from European non-EU members Norway and the UK, Europe’s military aid to Ukraine was roughly on par with U.S. support so far, meaning it would have to double its investment if the U.S. were to withdraw its support permanently.

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Could the US Military’s Recruitment Problem Be a Good Thing?

Some experts worry that, if the country went to war, many reserve units might be unable to deploy. A U.S. official who works on these issues put it simply: ‘We can’t get enough people.’”

“Vietnam Syndrome” hasn’t gone away! It resulted in the elimination of the draft and ultimately morphed into “Iraq Syndrome” – so it seems – and even though those lost, horrific wars are now nothing but history, the next American war is ever-looming (against Canada?… against Greenland?). And yet, good God, the military is having a hard time recruiting a sufficient amount of patriotic cannon fodder.

“We can’t get enough people” – you know, to kill the enemy and to risk coming home in a box. And maybe that’s a good thing! The public is kind of getting it: War is obsolete (to put it politely). War is insane; it threatens the future of life on the planet – even though a huge swatch of the American media seems unwilling to get it and continues to report on war and militarism as though they literally equaled “national defense.” After all, we spend a trillion dollars annually on it.

Indeed, war unites us… in hell.

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Trump Should Cut Off Europe’s Defense Welfare Queens

The new administration isn’t even a month old, but already hysteria has swept Europe. After visits by Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, top European officials threw “a temper tantrum” in the words of one observer, which featured wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments on a Biblical scale. On Monday French President Emmanuel Macron hosted an emergency summit of selected continental leaders, which generated abundant kvetching but little more.

Ukraine and its European advocates warn of a new Dark Age if the U.S. makes peace with Russia, as President Donald Trump is trying to do. Even worse, NATO members fear the loss of their heretofore presumed birthright to defense by America. Governments which have repeatedly claimed that Kiev’s defeat would invite a reformed Red Army to march to the Atlantic are preparing new excuses for failing to spend more on defense. The spectacle resembles a theatrical farce.

Americans have subsidized the continent’s defense for eight decades. Despite complaints from Washington, Europeans have consistently minimized military expenditures, convinced that the U.S. would continue to do whatever was necessary to protect them. There were occasional American outbursts, such as by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates more than a decade ago. However, this political theater changed nothing—Gates retired three weeks after his famous speech—and the Pentagon continued to provide defense welfare for prosperous and populous nations across the pond and beyond.

Indeed, top U.S. officials, including Joe Biden as both vice president and president, repeatedly told the Europeans “never mind,” visiting the continent to assure listeners that no matter how little they did, they could count on America to bail them out. The Europeans understandably left the heavy lifting to Washington while concentrating on funding generous welfare states at U.S. expense. (The same Europeans often pilloried Americans for their “Anglo-Saxon model” of capitalism.)

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