Tag: military industrial complex

The 101st Airborne (Air Assault) Is Testing 3D-Printed Drones

In case the display of the drone threat over states like New York and New Jersey wasn’t enough to cause concern, the famous 101st Airborne (Air Assault) “Screaming Eagles” is partnering with the 5th Special Forces Group (SFG) and Eaglewerx Applied Tactical Innovation Center at Fort Campbell, KY to field and test 3D-printed drones as a fraction of the cost of existing small unmanned systems (sUAS).

The testing will take place during Operation Lethal Eagle, a division level training exercise and will include 100 units and ground control consoles. Lethal Eagle is a 21-day exercise designed to test prototypes or Army initiatives among other tasks.

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Trump signs executive order banning men from women’s prisons, gender-confused troops in military

President Donald Trump rescinded an executive order that allowed gender-confused people to join the military.

Trump rescinded 78 of former President Joe Biden’s executive orders, including a handful that pushed the LGBT agenda. The decision drew praise from conservative groups.

One of the rescinded Biden directives is “Executive Order 14004 of January 25, 2021 (Enabling All Qualified Americans To Serve Their Country in Uniform),” according to the White House website.

The Biden order made it “the policy of the United States to ensure that all [so-called] transgender individuals who wish to serve in the United States military and can meet the appropriate standards shall be able to do so openly” and without alleged “discrimination.”

It revoked President Trump’s first-term decision to prohibit gender-confused individuals from enlisting in the military.

Trump also rescinded other Biden orders on transgenderism and homosexuality, including several relating to “gender identity” and “sexual orientation.”

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Dem Megadonor Reid Hoffman Scrubbed From Pentagon Board Website Ahead of Trump Inauguration

Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman appears to have quietly left a premier Pentagon advisory board after the election of Donald Trump, raising questions about whether he quit the organization on his own or was forced off because of his work to keep Trump out of the White House.

Hoffman joined the Defense Innovation Board, chaired by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, in October 2022. The group provides advice to the Pentagon on how to implement new technologies into the military and work more efficiently with private companies.

Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, was listed as a board member until at least Nov. 27, according to archived versions of its website, but is no longer listed there. If Hoffman was forced off the board, it would be the latest example of a federal agency cleaning house ahead of Trump’s second term. Trump has said he will not allow Democrats or Republicans afflicted with what he called “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to work in federal agencies. In December, the FBI quietly shut its Diversity and Inclusion office.

Hoffman’s position on the board caused outcry from Republicans over his ties to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his funding for controversial political projects to help Democrats. And in July, Hoffman came under fire after he said he hoped his political tactics would make Donald Trump an “actual martyr.” Days later, a gunman attempted to assassinate Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

The National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative legal group, called for Hoffman to “be dismissed” from the board because of what it called Hoffman’s “irresponsible and dangerous remarks” about Trump.

The Defense Innovation Board noted that request at its July 17 board meeting, according to board records. Bloomberg discussed the attempted assassination, though he did not speak about Hoffman’s remarks or acknowledge the National Legal and Policy Center complaint, according to a transcript of the meeting.

The Pentagon, the Innovation board, and members of the board did not respond to requests for comment about Hoffman’s departure.

“I think Reid Hoffman saw the writing on the wall and resigned from the board, on which he should not have been on in the first place,” said Paul Kamenar, counsel for the National Legal and Policy Center.

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Dr. Martin Luther King’s Prophetic Warning, Denouncing the Merchants of Death

Over the past three years, a collective of volunteer researchers, lawyers, and commentators created The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, dedicated to holding accountable four weapon manufacturing corporations based in the U.S. Their tribunal amassed copious evidence to prove that Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon) and General Atomics (a company which manufactures weaponized drones) are guilty of committing war crimes. On January 15, 2025, as the world marks the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, a press conference announced the Tribunal’s verdicts and release the report of ten international jurors who have weighed the evidence submitted to them.

Of necessity, the evidence was culled from examining a limited range of devastatingly criminal U.S. “forever wars,” of brutal and needless wars of choice. The Tribunal focused on   specific U.S. war crimes and crimes against humanity in the invasions, occupations and aerial assaults which followed the “9/11” attacks in 2001.

What if we could enlarge the Tribunal, bringing before it war crimes occurring right now, the U.S.-assisted massacres we watch in real time on our phone and computer screens?

Certainly, one witness we would beg to appear for testimony would be Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was the director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital when such a place existed. The Tribunal would wish to amplify his testimony on the harrowing weeks of siege during which Israel subjected his hospital to artillery and aerial bombardment. They would help to record his story of witnessing assassinations targeting medical staff, field executions of people clutching white flags in an attempt to surrender, the hospital’s forced evacuation with at-gunpoint humiliation stripping of women and girls. The initial attacks disabled the hospital’s operational capacities by targeting power generators and oxygen production equipment, but now an iconic photo shows Dr. Abu Safiya walking towards an Israeli tank through collapsed buildings and rubble. The Tribunal would like to interview him, but he is being held without charge by Israel’s military.

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The Evolution of the Militarized Data Broker

Today, the world’s economy no longer runs on oil, but data. Shortly after the advent of the microprocessor came the internet, unleashing an onslaught of data running on the coils of fiber optic cables beneath the oceans and satellites above the skies. While often posited as a liberator of humanity against the oppressors of nation-states that allows previously impossible interconnectivity and social organization between geographically separated cultures to circumnavigate the monopoly on violence of world governments, ironically, the internet itself was birthed out of the largest military empire of the modern world – the United States.

The ARPANET

Specifically, the internet began as ARPANET, a project of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which in 1972 became known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), currently housed within the Department of Defense. ARPA was created by President Eisenhower in 1958 within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) in direct response to the U.S.’ greatest military rival, the USSR, successfully launching Sputnik, the first artificial satellite in Earth’s orbit with data broadcasting technology. While historically considered the birth of the Space Race, in reality, the formation of ARPA began the now-decades-long militarization of data brokers, quickly leading to world-changing developments in global positioning systems (GPS), the personal computer, networks of computational information processing (“time-sharing”), primordial artificial intelligence, and weaponized autonomous drone technology.

In October 1962, the recently-formed ARPA appointed J.C.R. Licklider, a former MIT professor and vice president of Bolt Beranek and Newman (known as BBN, currently owned by defense contractor Raytheon), to head their Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). At BBN, Licklider developed the earliest known ideas for a global computer network, publishing a series of memos in August 1962 that birthed his “Intergalactic Computer Network” concept. Six months after his appointment to ARPA, Licklider would distribute a memo to his IPTO colleagues – addressed to “Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network”– describing a “time-sharing network of computers” – building off a similar exploration of communal, distributed computation by John Forbes Nash, Jr. in his 1954 paper “Parallel Control” commissioned by defense contractor RAND – which would build the foundational concepts for ARPANET, the first implementation of today’s Internet.

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America’s Merchants of Death Are Making a Killing

Yesterday, the Merchants of Death Tribunal concluded with a verdict of “guilty” for all those U.S. dealers and exporters of weapons globally. Yes, the merchants of death are guilty as sin, even as they account for 40% of the global trade in deadly weaponry. Who says nothing is made in America today? We make plenty of things that go “bang.”

In our culture today, it’s considered “patriotic” to make loads of money, especially by selling guns. Just look at the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its enablers in Congress and all the gun companies domestically.

Assault weapons are highly profitable, much more so than pistols, and isn’t it all about making money? Thoughts and prayers to those innocents caught in the crossfire, of course. No worries – more “good guys with guns” will save us from the bad guys with guns.

If we Americans embrace (or, refuse to stop) the sale of firearms, especially dangerous assault weapons, domestically, indeed, if we fetishize it with ideas of potency and manliness, is it any surprise we brag of weapons sales overseas and our dominance of that trade? If we don’t care (or care enough) about the safety of our own children, why should we care about dead kids in Gaza?

Our culture is violent and sick, and until we reform it, there’s little hope of meaningful change.

That said, it’s encouraging to hear of a ceasefire in Gaza. Perhaps the Trump administration can achieve a ceasefire in Ukraine as well. The problem is there always seems to be another war or wars looming on the horizon for the U.S., more conflicts that America’s merchants of death can make a killing on.

That said, it’s encouraging to hear of a ceasefire in Gaza. Perhaps the Trump administration can achieve a ceasefire in Ukraine as well. The problem is there always seems to be another war or wars looming on the horizon for the U.S., more conflicts that America’s merchants of death can make a killing on.

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Animal Farm Politics: The Deep State Wins Again

“No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”—George Orwell, Animal Farm

It cost the American taxpayer $24 million to find out what we knew all along: politics is corrupt.

After four years of being subjected to special prosecutor Jack Smith’s dogged investigation into alleged election interference by Donald Trump, the Justice Department has concluded that Trump would have been convicted of breaking the law if only he hadn’t gotten re-elected.

In other words, the Deep State wins again.

The revelation here is not that Trump broke the law but the extent to which sitting presidents get a free pass when it comes to misconduct.

None of this is news.

The Deep State has been operating from this exact same playbook for decades, regardless of which party has occupied the White House.

Indeed, Richard Nixon let the cat out of the bag when he explained that the very act of being president places one beyond the rule of law (“when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal”).

This is how we ended up with an imperial president—empowered to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability—and why “we the people” keep finding ourselves mired in a political swamp of lies, graft, cronyism and corruption.

George Orwell, who died 75 years ago on Jan. 21, 1950, must be rolling in his grave.

In the 75 years since George Orwell died, his works of dystopian fiction—which warn against rampant abuse of power, mind control and mass manipulation coupled with the rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism—have become operation manuals for power-hungry political regimes wedded to the corporate state.

While Orwell’s novel 1984 foreshadowed the rise of an omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state, his novel Animal Farm aptly sums up the state of politics today, propped up by a two-party system designed to maintain the illusion that voting matters.

Orwell understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan flag-waving, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people—even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control at all costs.

As Orwell explains:

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”

No doubt about it: the revolution was successful.

That January 6, 2021 attempt by President Trump and his followers to overturn the election results was not the revolution, however.

Those who answered President Trump’s call to march on the Capitol were merely the fall guys, manipulated into creating the perfect crisis for the Deep State—a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State—to amass even greater powers.

It took no time at all for the switch to be thrown and the nation’s capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpoints ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned.

It was a set-up, folks.

The Justice Department’s policy of not prosecuting a sitting president was the tell.

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$20 Billion Price Tag To Complete Development Of USAF’s Next Generation Fighter

Agreater focus on long range strike capabilities is among the alternatives the U.S. Air Force is considering to a costly new crewed sixth-generation stealth combat jet as part of its Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) family of systems. A lower-cost design focused primarily on acting as a ‘quarterback’ for Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones is also still on the table, as is just continuing with the original plan, where another $20 billion would be required just to complete the development process of the highly-advanced crewed tactical jet. The service has already announced that it is leaving it up to the incoming Trump administration to make the final decision on how to proceed, or not, based on the recommendations of a deep review of the program.

Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall offered additional details about alternatives to the original plan for a new sixth-generation NGAD combat jet during a talk the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank hosted today. Last year, the service announced it was putting work on the NGAD aircraft on hold and initiating a deep review of the program’s core requirements and objectives. That review is understood to be close to, if not completed.

“The Air Force [originally] wrote requirements for an aircraft that is essentially an F-22 replacement. And for the last few years, that’s what we’ve been working on,” Kendall said. “We’re now at the point where we commit to going forward, to finish design, and go into production of that, or not. And this is really the most important milestone for almost any program.”

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US Lawmakers Call For Curbs On Clinical Trial Collaborations Linked To Chinese Military

A bipartisan group of lawmakers has asked the U.S. government to consider new rules restricting U.S. biotech companies from conducting clinical trials with entities linked to the Chinese military.

In a Jan. 9 letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party said the proposed restrictions will “help ensure U.S. biotechnology does not fall into the hands of the PRC,” referring to the acronym of communist China’s official name, the People’s Republic of China.

The letter, signed by Reps. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), chair and ranking member of the committee, respectively, along with Rep. Neal Dunn (R-Fla.), said biotech competition between the United States and the PRC “will not only have implications for our national and economic security, but also for the future of healthcare and the security of American medical data.”

The letter cites Beijing’s 14th Five-Year Plan—which “identifies dominance in biotechnology as critical to ’strengthen the PRC’s science and technological power’ and calls to deepen military-civil science and technology collaboration in the sector”—and a publication by a former president of the Chinese military’s National Defense University, which discussed the potential to create new synthetic pathogens that are “more toxic, more contagious, and more resistant.”

The lawmakers praised the proposals issued by the Bureau of Industry and Security in July 2024 to expand export controls to military and intelligence end users as “a welcome update.” They suggested the measures could be further strengthened by requiring a license to conduct clinical trials with medical institutions linked to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

“Specifically, we recommend updating the definition of ‘Military End User’ to state medical infrastructure owned or operated by the national armed services of the PRC and other countries as appropriate constitutes a military end-use if a U.S. person is seeking to engage with the institution to conduct a clinical trial,” they added.

The Epoch Times reached out to the Commerce Department for comment and did not receive a response by publication time.

The letter is a sign of growing concern over China’s role in the biotechnology industry.

In August 2024, the same committee wrote to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), asking the agency to ensure that U.S. clinical trials are not contributing to human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region or aiding the transfer of U.S. critical intellectual property to the PLA.

Citing official data, the letter said U.S. biopharmaceutical companies over the past decade had run hundreds of clinical trials that had at least one Chinese military entity among the research partners and conducted trials in hospitals in Xinjiang, “where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is engaged in genocide of the Uyghur population.”

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Yes, US generals Should Be Fired

In October 1939, just one month after he took over as Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall famously winnowed the ranks of hidebound senior officers to prepare for war.

“Most of them have their minds set in outmoded patterns,” Marshall told his leadership team, “and can’t change to meet the new conditions they may face if we become involved in the war that started in Europe.”

Every democracy since a defeated Athens has pruned its senior leaders proven inadequate to the demands of their respective era – often more painful than mere public shame.

Ours may be the only era when an entire general and admiralty class — more than 80% of which gain employment in the defense sector after retirement — has been consistently rewarded with lucre and prestige for losing.

With two failed wars and scores of weapons acquisition fiascoes now secured in history’s dustbin, many may fear that virtue itself has been swept from the floor.

Mainstream deference to “self-serving delusion” has sustained an unearned and stunting faith in a senior leadership selection system made hollow by long-past assumptions.

Therefore, Secretary of Defense-designate Pete Hegseth’s impassioned plea to focus upon the people who serve and his condemnation of a self-perpetuating, class-creating leadership system may, if we can look past the vitriol of our day, herald our very own Marshall moment to deter war rather than to fight one.

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