Tag: military industrial complex

Chinese Navy Reveals a Naval Artificial Intelligence “Dreadnaught” Moment

There have been “Revolutions in Military Affairs” (RMAs) over the ages.  RMAs are pivot points when something changes warfare dramatically.  In the naval arena, one of the most memorable RMAs was the introduction of the HMS Dreadnaught in 1906.

It was said, “Dreadnought made every other exist­ing battleship obsolete, and her name became generic for similar fast, modern vessels. All battleships laid down before her were pejoratively labeled “pre-dreadnought.”

The Chinese Navy (PLAN) has revealed a new vessel that may represent the modern, naval “Dreadnaught” moment.  The “Killer Whale” (or Orca), autonomous surface combat vessel has recently been shown in China, cruising on the river from its Guangzhou Shipyard.

This vessel is the largest military purpose USV built to date.  It is little coincidence that Guangzhou was the location of the shipyard.

Guangzhou is the Silicon Valley region of China, and the Orca is not just an autonomous warship, but a floating combat data center.

This vessel reflects significant data collection, data analysis, and AI-enabled autonomous actioning.

AI and Autonomy are trending topics, but the Orca is far ahead of any other AI-enabled, autonomous vessel publicly known to date.

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Current year US military is hilarious

So, the US lit off a Minuteman-3 recently. This system, with origins in the 1950s, is the land-based part of the US nuclear deterrence triad. The test didn’t go well; it blew up right after launch, probably from rotten capacitors. The google machine tells me this isn’t an isolated incident; the last time we tried lighting one off, the same thing happened. We do have a sea based ballistic missile deterrent in the Trident-2. The US hasn’t had any problems with them yet. The British have, and they draw from a shared pool with the US. The other arm of the triad is the B-2 and B-52; the B-2 can’t fly when it’s raining, and the latter dates from 1952. There are plenty of nuclear tipped cruise missiles; fortunately most of those were designed in the 70s and 80s when America still mostly had its shit together.

Unfortunately none of the American cruise missiles are particularly long range or stealthy (there was a stealthy one, retired),  all are subsonic, and they have shorter ranges than the Russian gizmos, which also come in supersonic and hypersonic varieties. Rooskies also have newer generations of ballistic missiles, and are really good at shooting down cruise missiles, so there’s that. Supposedly they also have nuclear tidal wave torpedoes capable of wiping out US coastal areas in radioactive sea water, SLAM hypersonic nuclear  ramjet cruise missiles and who knows what else. Pretty obvious who wins a nuclear war scenario: it won’t be the US. I mean, nobody wins a nuclear war, but the days of US supremacy or even basic competence with maintaining nuclear forces are long over.

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Cost Of Navy’s Newest Arleigh Burke Destroyers Is Ballooning

The U.S. Navy’s Flight III Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) class destroyers are facing cost increases and delays, jumping from an average of $2.1 billion per ship to $2.5 billion per hull, with even steeper cost increases coming in the future, according to a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report. The report analyzes the Navy’s 2025 shipbuilding plan, which calls for a 390-battle force ship fleet by 2054, and includes nine more vessels than in last year’s plan. 

Beyond destroyers, the versatile workhorses of the Navy’s combat fleet, the CBO’s assessment notes cost hikes among other platforms, as well as systemic American shipbuilding industry shortfalls that could impede the service’s fleet size goal. All this long-term planning comes as the sea service races to prepare for a near-term war with China if Beijing invades Taiwan in the coming years. These destroyers and their anti-air, anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare capabilities would be crucial to such a future fight.

The Navy currently has 74 destroyers of the Arleigh Burke class, in Flight I, Flight II, Flight IIA and Flight III variants. Two Flight IIAs and 18 Flight IIIs are already either under construction or their purchase has already been authorized by Congress. CBO’s assessment also found that, overall, the 23 Flight IIIs laid out in the 30-year shipbuilding plan will end up costing $2.7 billion on average. 

“The Navy stated in a briefing to CBO and [the Congressional Research Service] that the increase in its estimates of the cost of the DDG-51 Flight IIIs was attributable to shipbuilding inflation’s outpacing economywide inflation as well as declining shipyard performance,” the CBO report states. 

The report added that the destroyers currently under construction “have experienced substantial delays.” To date, just one Flight III destroyer, the USS Jack Lucas (DDG-125) has been commissioned, and the keel was laid for the second Flight III, the future USS Louis H. Wilson Jr. (DDG-126) in 2023. Inside Defense reported in June that other Flight III vessels could see six-to-25-month delivery delays. 

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US ‘Quietly’ Sent Heavy Weapons To Ukraine Well Before Invasion Started, Blinken Reveals

The United States is currently dealing with conflicts in multiple hot spots from Eastern Europe to Gaza to dealing with a collapsed Syrian state and continued standoff with Iran over its nuclear program.

But the Biden administration regrets nothing – so says Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a major end of term interview given to the NY Times and published this weekend. Among the more interesting pieces of new information from the interview is Blinken’s direct admission that Washington was covertly shipping heavy weapons to Ukraine even months before the Russian invasion of February 2022.

“We made sure that well before [Russia’s ‘special military operation’] happened, starting in September and then again in December, we quietly got a lot of weapons to Ukraine,” he said in the interview published Saturday. “Things like Stingers, Javelins.”

The Kremlin at the time cited such covert transfers, which were perhaps an ‘open secret’, as justification for the invasion based on ‘demilitarizing’ Ukraine and keeping NATO military infrastructure out. Moscow had issued many warnings over its ‘red lines’ in the weeks and months leading up to the war.

Below is the full section from the NY Times interview transcript where Blinken boasts of the pre-invasion transfers:

QUESTION:  You made two early strategic decisions on Ukraine.  The first – because of that fear of direct conflict – was to restrict Ukraine’s use of American weapons within Russia.  The second was to support Ukraine’s military offensive without a parallel diplomatic track to try and end the conflict.  How do you look back on those decisions now?

SECRETARY BLINKEN:  So first, if you look at the trajectory of the conflict, because we saw it coming, we were able to make sure that not only were we prepared, and allies and partners were prepared, but that Ukraine was prepared.  We made sure that well before the Russian aggression happened, starting in September – the Russian aggression happened in February.  Starting in September and then again in December, we quietly got a lot of weapons to Ukraine to make sure that they had in hand what they needed to defended themselves – things like Stingers, Javelins that they could use that were instrumental in preventing Russia from taking Kyiv, from rolling over the country, erasing it from the map, and indeed pushing the Russians back.

Blinken claims elsewhere in the interview that the Biden White House kept diplomacy going the whole time, and tried to engage Moscow, but explains that this basically involved keeping the Western allies and backers of Kiev unified and on the same track.

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White House To Approve Massive Weapons Sale to Israel

Before President Joe Biden leaves office, he will approve one more massive arms sale to Israel. The $8 billion sale of missiles and artillery shells comes as human rights groups have labeled Israel’s war in Gaza as a genocide.

Axios reported on Friday, “The State Department has notified Congress “informally” of an $8 billion proposed arms deal with Israel that will include munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters as well as artillery shells.”

Author Barak Ravid did not define what it means to “informally” notify Congress of the sale or if it fulfills the White House’s requirement to notify Congress of arms deals.

The massive arms sale to Tel Aviv comes after Amnesty International declared Israel’s onslaught in Gaza a genocide. “Amnesty International’s research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today,” the report released in early December explained.

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Honduras President Threatens to Shut Down U.S. Military Base Over Trump’s Plan to Deport Illegal Honduran Immigrants

Honduran President Xiomara Castro has threatened to terminate military cooperation with the United States if President-elect Donald Trump proceeds with his plan for mass deportations of illegal immigrants, including those from Honduras.

This ultimatum underscores the glaring hypocrisy of a leader who has failed to address the root causes driving her own citizens to flee her country in the first place.

A primary objective of Trump’s mass deportation plan is to remove individuals with criminal records who are residing in the country illegally.

By focusing on these individuals, Trump’s administration aims to reduce crime rates and enhance public safety.

Tom Homan, designated as Trump’s “border czar,” has emphasized that the deportation efforts will prioritize those posing threats to public safety and national security.

However, Castro is far from pleased with this development.

“Faced with a hostile attitude of mass expulsion of our brothers, we would have to consider a change in our policies of cooperation with the United States, especially in the military arena, where, without paying a cent for decades, they maintain military bases in our territory, which in this case would lose all reason to exist in Honduras,” Xiomara Castro said in a statement on New Year’s Day.

“We hope that the new U.S. administration of democratically elected President Donald Trump will be open to dialogue, constructive and friendly, and will not take unnecessary reprisals against our migrants, who normally make a great contribution to the U.S. economy,” she added.

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‘Over 800 Biases Uncovered’ As Pentagon Ends AI Chatbot Pilot Program For Military Medicine

The US Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) has concluded a pilot program focused on using AI chatbots in military medical services.  

In a Jan. 2 announcement, the DoD said the Crowdsourced AI Red-Teaming (CAIRT) Assurance Program pilot focused on using large-language models (LLM) for clinical note summarization and as medical advisers in the military.

It comes as more AI firms have begun offering their products to the US military and defense contractors to investigate their usefulness in military applications.

CoinTelegraph’s Stephen Katte reports that, according to the DoD, the pilot was a red-teaming effort conducted by technology nonprofit Humane Intelligence.

It attracted over 200 independent external participants, including clinical providers and healthcare analysts, who compared three prominent chatbot models.

Analysts from the Defense Health Agency and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences also collaborated with the other participants, testing for potential system weaknesses and flaws while the chatbots were used.

According to the DoD, the pilot discovered a few hundred possible issues when using chatbots in military medical applications.

“The exercise uncovered over 800 findings of potential vulnerabilities and biases related to employing these capabilities in these prospective use cases.”

“This exercise will result in repeatable and scalable output via the development of benchmark data sets, which can be used to evaluate future vendors and tools for alignment with performance expectations,” the DoD said.

The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office’s lead for the initiative, Matthew Johnson, said the results will also be used to shape future DoD research and development of Generative AI (GenAI) systems that may be deployed in the future.

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Wilson’s Folly, The Washington Hegemon and Why There Is Still No Peace On Earth

Another Christmas has passed and there is still no peace on earth. And the proximate cause of that vexing reality is the $1.3 trillion Warfare State planted on the banks of the Potomac – along with its web of war-making capabilities, bases, alliances and vassals stretching to the four corners of the planet.

So positioned, it stands in stark mockery of John Qunicy Adam’s sage advice to his new nation 200-years ago:

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.

But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.

She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

The last bolded sentence pretty much sums up the foolish, destructive, unnecessary and fiscally calamitous Forever Wars hatched in Washington all the way back to 1950. Nearly without exception they were waged against alleged foreign “monsters” of the very kind which John Quincy Adams urged his countrymen not to pursue: Kim Il-Sung, Mohammad Mosaddegh, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Ho Chi Minh, Sukarno, Salvador Allende, Ayatollah Khomeini, Daniel Ortega, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, Nicolas Maduro, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are but the most prominent among these targets of Washington’s relentless global-spanning search for “monsters to destroy”.

Yet without exception not one of these assorted authoritarians, dictators, tyrants, thugs and revolutionists, along with the nation’s they ruled, posed a direct threat to the American homeland. Not even Putin or Xi could actually dream of mounting the massive armada of land, air and sea-forces needed to transit the great ocean moats and lay waste to the security and liberty of 335 million Americans domiciled from “sea to shining sea”.

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A Succinct History of The US Bioweapons Program

The United States didn’t have a bioweapons program after World War II, but certain Deep State actors really, really wanted one. So what did they do? They recruited German and Japanese scientists from both countries which had quite an extensive bioweapons program. It was called Operation Paperclip.

Now, before you utter the words “conspiracy theory”, please know that RFK Jr. just mentioned Operation Paperclip in a recent speech. He certainly did. Because it’s real. You can watch the full clip here.

Who recruited these evil scientists? The CIA of course, placing them as the heads of research labs, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies. RFK Jr. then proceeds to tell us about the experiments they did on the unwitting American people. They sprayed toxins everywhere, from airports to the Pentagon air conditioning system, just to see what happened. They poisoned the water at NIH. They filled light bulbs with bacteria and placed them in the New York City subway system. When the bulbs broke, which they inevitably did, harmful microbes filled the space. RFK Jr. says some of the microbes are still there today. He says that 200 aerial dosing tests were done in seaside cities as well as Midwestern cities.

We’ve all heard of German and Japanese ingenuity and efficiency, and by 1969, the US had a bioweapons program that RFK Jr. describes as “equivalent to a nuclear program.” The scientists even bragged at how cost effective their program was, saying that they could kill at a cost of 29 cents per person.

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GEN (RET) LLOYD AUSTIN’S TROUBLING LEGACY OF DEI, COVID, LOSING WARS, AND WAR PROFITEERING

GEN (Retired) Lloyd Austin will be replaced as SECDEF once the new administration’s pick is confirmed. He will finish nearly 50 years of service to our country. He achieved many firsts – first Black theater commander during war and the first Black SECDEF among other firsts. He does however, leave a troubling legacy as both an Army general and SECDEF.

DEI

Austin accelerated the spread of DEI within the US military as SECDEF. As a Black SECDEF warning about extremism and lack of opportunity for minorities, he is to be both commended for his path from West Point and chided as a supreme hypocrite.

The Army is like most other branches of the military where officers typically need to branch into a combat specialty and move up the ranks commanding combat units to reach general officer and high commands. Austin graduated from West Point in 1975 and chose the correct branch – infantry. He commanded at all levels from company grade to field grade to general officer. Examining nothing else in his career, it would seem that he chose the correct path to be a general…and he indeed attained the rank of four-star general.

In the DEI debate, proponents point out the lack of equity in race of general officers. The percentage of Black generals is lower than the percent of Blacks in West Point’s classes. The data for each class is difficult to obtain, but the author is familiar with the demographics of his own 1996 West Point year group. A mere 3 Black males in the West Point Class joined the 180 or so cadets that branched Infantry. Two left before 10 years’ service and the last left as a LTC. Minorities have to be willing to branch the correct branches AND remain in the military if they wish to compete for general officer rank later on in their career. So, in this sense, Austin chose the harder combat arms branch and was later rewarded for it.

In his last speech as SECDEF at West Point in December 2024 he talked about the difficulties facing minorities in today’s military.

“So look, if I get a little fired up about this, it’s just because this isn’t 1950. It isn’t 1948. It is 2024. And we need each and every qualified citizen who steps up to wear the cloth of our nation. And any military that turns away tough, talented patriots—women or men—is just making itself weaker and smaller. So enough already.”1

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