Tag: military industrial complex

State Department Reports Record Foreign Arms Sales in 2024

The State Department reports that US arms deals sold over $300 billion in weapons to foreign countries last year. The record-high sales include over $20 billion in arms paid for with US aid. 

The State Department’s statement on 2024 arms sales explained that “the total value of transferred defense articles and services and security cooperation activities conducted under the Foreign Military Sales system was $117.9 billion.” 

Compared to 2023, the State Department says last year’s totals represented an increase of  45.7%, adding, “This is the highest ever annual total of sales and assistance provided to our allies and partners.” According to the statement, $21 billion in the FMS was paid for with US aid. 

In addition to the FMS, US arms deals brokered $200 billion in other transactions. “The total authorized value for privately contracted Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) authorizations for FY2024 was $200.8 billion,” the statement explained. “This represents a 27.5% increase, up from $157.5 billion in FY2023.”

Combined, the FMS and DCS sales total over $318 billion. 

Most of the weapon sales went to US allies and partners in Europe, the Middle East or East Asia. In Europe, NATO countries continued to buy weapons at a rapid pace as they transferred older systems to Ukraine for the proxy war against Russia. China is the focus of American arm sales in East Asia as Washington prepares to fight a war with Beijing over Taiwan. 

In the Middle East, Israel bought, often with US aid, billions in weapons from American arms deals. Tel Aviv is conducting what multiple international human rights organizations have identified as a genocide in Gaza. During the Biden administration, the State Department was flooded with hundreds of reports that American weapons were being used to kill civilians in Gaza. 

The State Department asserted that the US arms transfers occurred in “accordance with the U.S. Conventional Arms Transfer Policy, and weighs political, social, human rights, civilian protection, economic, military, nonproliferation, technology security, and end use factors.”

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DEI At USAFA Re-Designated To “Dignity Respect And Leadership”

If you haven’t seen–the new administration is calling DEI “illegal discrimination.” Pretty sweeping actions outlined in the Executive Orders of the last two days.

Hearty thanks to all BCCd on this email whose hard work to eliminate discrimination of this type have made this day a reality! Unity and not divisiveness is in our future!

I have linked in the specific OPM memo here for reference if you haven’t seen.

Click to access OPM%20Memo%20Initial%20Guidance%20Regarding%20DEIA%20Executive%20Orders.pdf

Here is another related Executive Order (embedded in Professor Turley’s article) that is all about “ENDING ILLEGAL DISCRIMINATION AND RESTORING MERIT-BASED OPPORTUNITY“.

Some of our STARRS affiliated lawyers have opined that this order may prohibit Service Academies from discriminating in their admissions processes.

STARRS will be working hard with the White House and especially DOD on any follow orders that may be necessary to ensure clarity–as outlined in the Executive Order on DEI (below) which says in part: “monitor and track agency and department progress and identify potential areas for additional Presidential or legislative action.”

Finally, here is that Executive Order that specifically addresses DEI.

Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing – The White House

All this said and these Executive Orders released–resistance is already showing its subversive head.

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Leaked documents expose deep ties between Israeli army and Microsoft

Microsoft has a “footprint in all major military infrastructures” in Israel, and sales of the company’s cloud and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli army have skyrocketed since the beginning of its onslaught on Gaza, according to leaked commercial records from Israel’s Defense Ministry and files from Microsoft’s Israeli subsidiary.

The documents reveal that dozens of units in the Israeli army have purchased services from Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, in recent months — including units in the air, ground, and naval forces, as well as the elite intelligence squad, Unit 8200. Microsoft has also provided the military with extensive access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model, the engine behind ChatGPT, thanks to the close partnership between the two companies. 

These revelations are the product of an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call in collaboration with The Guardian. It is based in part on documents obtained by Drop Site News, which has published its own story. The investigation shows how the Israeli army deepened its reliance on civilian tech giants after October 7, and comes amid growing protests by cloud company employees who fear that the technology they developed has helped Israel commit war crimes.

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The American Cult of Bombing

Back in August of 2014, I wrote a piece for TomDispatch on the American cult of bombing. The Air Force’s new stealth bomber, the B-21 Raider, was still on the drawing board a decade ago. The Air Force wanted 100 of them at a projected cost of $55 billion to acquire them.

The projected cost of the B-21, you won’t be surprised to learn, has now climbed to roughly $750 million per plane, or $75 billion to acquire 100 of them. Of course, the total program cost will easily exceed $200 billion over 30 years, the Air Force admitted in 2022. (I’m old enough to remember when the entire Pentagon budget was less than $200 billion a year.)

By the way, the Air Force is now talking about buying 200 B-21s, which I think is my old service’s latest ploy to prevent cuts to the initial ask of 100. Cheaper by the hundreds!

America’s belief in the efficacy of bombing is truly incredible. We could end poverty in America and house all the homeless for $200 billion over 30 years, but surely we need bombers more than that.

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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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