Tag: military industrial complex

State Department Approves $3.5 Billion Missile Sale to Saudi Arabia

The State Department has approved a $3.5 billion sale of air-to-air missiles to Saudi Arabia ahead of President Trump’s planned visit to the country.

The Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) said the sale includes 1,000 AIM-120C-8 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles, related equipment, and US government contracting services. The missiles can be fired by Saudi Arabia’s fleet of US-made F-15 fighter jets.

President Trump is scheduled to arrive in Saudi Arabia on May 13 and is expected to announce a series of new arms sales to the Kingdom. According to Reuters, he could unveil over $100 billion in weapons deals.

Axios has reported that, on May 14, Trump will attend a summit in Saudi Arabia of leaders from the Gulf Cooperation Council states, which include the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman.

The visit to Saudi Arabia will mark Trump’s second foreign trip after his brief visit to Italy for Pope Francis’s funeral. According to Middle East Eye, the Saudis have made clear to the administration that they don’t want to discuss normalizing relations with Israel.

Saudi officials have made clear that normalization is off the table as long as the genocidal war in Gaza continues. “Saudi Arabia is serious not to be tricked into anything that regards Israel during the upcoming visit. It was made clear in DC,” an Arab official told MEE.

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A Big Spike in Defense Spending requires a Different Approach as DOD Spending Tops $1 Trillion

The current appropriation for the Fiscal Year 2025 Department of Defense budget is capped at $892.5 billion, the largest ever.  However, with the worldwide arson campaign of the Chinese Communist Party, the U.S. Military is finding itself outpaced significantly by China in many important metrics such as shipbuilding, nuclear forces, cyber, and others.  The U.S. Navy is firing missiles at a rapid rate to keep open the Red Sea, but their ships are rusting and behind on maintenance.

Congress is now working on a $150 billion immediate supplemental for the DOD which will bring it to over $1 trillion in spending, another first.  The threat of the Chinese led alliance of Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and South Africa is real and being projected right to the beaches of America with Chinese fighting age males making boat runs into Florida from their forward staging bases in the Bahamas and Chinese and Russian Bombers conducting regular patrols on the West Coast of the U.S.  The increase in defense spending is badly needed – but there needs to be Inspector General and Congressional vigilance to ensure the large budget increases are used judiciously to build capability and lethality not slothful bureaucracy.

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Bringing Back Medium Range Ballistic Missiles Fast Tracked Under Proposed $150B Defense Boost

The U.S. Army could be in line to get nearly $640 million in extra funding for new medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBM), including ones capable of hitting ships at sea.

Work on MRBMs, a long-range strike capability the Army has not had since the end of the Cold War, is one of a slew of efforts that would be accelerated by a $150 billion defense spending package recently proposed by members of Congress. The Army is already looking at a medium-range version of its Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) short-range ballistic missile, but the legislation on the table now may also point to a new design in the works.

The current Republican Party chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees rolled out the proposed multi-billion-dollar defense spending legislation yesterday. If passed and signed into law, it would provide funds to accelerate work on a host of advanced capabilities across the U.S. military, including, but certainly not limited to the Air Force’s F-47 and Navy’s F/A-XX sixth-generation stealth fighter programs, the B-21 Raider stealth bomber, the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, a new sea-launched nuclear-tipped cruise missile, new medium landing ships for the U.S. Marine Corps, and President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense initiative. Additional funding to help expand the U.S. defense industrial base to meet these and other demands, as well as spur further research and development, is also part of the package.

When it comes to Army MRBMs, the spending plan includes four separate provisions amounting to a combined $639 million:

  • “$175,000,000 for production capacity expansion for next-generation Army medium-range ballistic missiles”
  • “$50,000,000 for the accelerated development of Army next-generation medium-range anti-ship ballistic missiles”
  • “$114,000,000 for the production of Army next-generation medium-range ballistic missiles”
  • “$300,000,000 for the production of Army medium-range ballistic missiles”

The legislation does not name any specific Army MRBM program, and TWZ has reached out for more information.

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“Fit, Not Fat”: Hegseth Vows Course Correction As Report Finds Two-Thirds Of Reserve Troops Are Overweight

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth expressed his dismay on April 25 after a new report found that more than two-thirds of U.S. military reserve personnel are overweight.

Washington-based think tank American Security Project (ASP) published a white paper this week that found that nearly 68 percent of reserve troops are overweight or obese.

In 2018, when the Department of Defense last surveyed obesity rates in the reserve military components, it found that around 65 percent of reserve troops were considered overweight or obese.

“The number of young adults interested in military service remains sufficient to maintain current force strength. However, as overweight and obesity disqualify thousands of applicants each year, services are incentivized to violate body composition enlistment standards to meet recruitment goals,” the new ASP report reads.

Hegseth took to social media platform X on Friday to call the report’s findings “completely unacceptable.”

“This is what happens when standards are IGNORED — and this is what we are changing. REAL fitness & weight standards are here,” the defense secretary said. “We will be FIT, not FAT.”

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F-47 6th Generation Fighter Future Force Size Questions Emerge

The U.S. Air Force is firmly of the view that its new F-47 6th generation stealth fighters are key to “how we win” in future fights, according to the service’s top general in charge of force structure planning. Though the Air Force previously said it would buy 200 of the next-generation combat jets, how many of the aircraft the service now plans to acquire is an open question as its vision of the core air superiority mission set continues to evolve.

Air Force Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel talked about the F-47 and how it factors into his service’s current work on a new over-arching force design during a virtual talk that the Air & Space Forces Association (AFA) hosted today. Kunkel is currently the director of Force Design, Integration, and Wargaming within the office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Air Force Futures at the Pentagon.

Kunkel described the announcement in March that Boeing’s F-47 had won the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) combat jet competition as “a fantastic day for the Air Force” that has “assured air superiority for generations to come.” The Air Force had put the NGAD combat jet program on hold for a deep review last year, which ultimately concluded that the service needed to acquire the aircraft to be best positioned to achieve air superiority in future high-end fights.

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Navy Scraps Biden-Era ‘Climate Action’ Plan, Returns Focus To Warfighting

The U.S. Navy officially scrapped a Biden-era “climate action” plan for the force on Tuesday, signifying the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to refocus the military towards warfighting.

“Today, I’m focusing on the warfighters first, and I’m rescinding the Biden administration’s climate action program. Our focus needs to be on lethality and our warfighters,” Navy Secretary John Phelan announced in a video message.

Released in May 2022, the Climate Action 2030 program contained a series of actions and goals the Department of the Navy (DON) has taken or planned to undertake to tackle what Biden Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro characterized as the “urgency of the climate crisis.” In the document’s opening foreword, Del Toro claimed the Navy and Marine Corps “are in the crosshairs of the climate crisis,” and that “[c]limate change is one of the most destabilizing forces of our time, exacerbating other national security concerns and posing serious readiness challenges.”

The action plan identified two “performance goals,” one of which included the DON’s stated aim of reducing “greenhouse gas emissions and draw[ing] greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere to stabilize ecosystems, and achieve, as an enterprise, [President Biden’s] commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050, as well as other targets.”

In order to achieve these objectives and comply with a 2021 climate-related executive order by Biden, the DON laid out a series of targets for the branch to work towards in the years ahead. This included commitments to “[a]cquiring 100 percent zero-emission vehicles by 2035, including 100 percent zero-emission light-duty vehicle acquisitions by 2027” and “[a]chieving a 50 percent reduction in emissions from buildings by 2032.”

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U.S. Army Intelligence Analyst Sentenced to 7 Years for Leaking Top-Secret Military Documents to Communist China

25-year-old former Army intelligence analyst Korbein Schultz was sentenced to 84 months in federal prison for conspiring to hand over America’s most closely guarded military secrets to a hostile foreign power: Communist China.

The disgraced soldier from Wills Point, Texas, pleaded guilty in August 2024 to transmitting sensitive defense intelligence, unlawfully exporting classified material, and accepting bribes — all in the service of a foreign adversary.

“This defendant swore an oath to defend the United States — instead, he betrayed it for a payout and put America’s military and service members at risk,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi in a statement.

She continued, “The Justice Department remains vigilant against China’s efforts to target our military and will ensure that those who leak military secrets spend years behind bars.”

From May 2022 until his arrest in March 2024, Schultz conspired with an individual from Hong Kong, whom he believed to be affiliated with the Chinese government — referred to in court filings as Conspirator A.

That individual masqueraded as a geopolitical analyst on a freelance website but quickly turned the relationship into an espionage pipeline.

For just $42,000, Schultz sold out American troops, revealing tactical and technical data, training documents, and sensitive material relating to U.S. missile defense and aerial combat capabilities.

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Nine US military planes deliver bunker-busting bombs to Israel: Report

Nine US military transport aircraft loaded with bunker-busting bombs landed at an Israeli airbase near Tel Aviv in the past 24 hours, Israel’s public broadcaster said Thursday, Anadolu reports.

“Nine US transport planes carrying bunker-busting bombs and other defensive weapons landed at Nevatim Airbase near Tel Aviv, in central Israel,” the Israeli broadcasting authority KAN reported.

It added that the move comes “in anticipation of a possible joint US-Israeli strike, should nuclear negotiations between Washington and Tehran fail.”​​​​​​​

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Close the US Military Bases in Asia

President Donald Trump is again loudly complaining that the U.S. military bases in Asia are too costly for the U.S. to bear.  As part of the new round of tariff negotiations with Japan and Korea, Trump is calling on Japan and Korea to pay for stationing the U.S. troops. 

Here’s a much better idea: close the bases and return the U.S. service members to the U.S.  

Trump implies that the U.S. is providing a great service to Japan and Korea by stationing 50,000 troops in Japan and nearly 30,000 in Korea.  Yet these countries do not need the U.S. to defend themselves. 

They are wealthy and can certainly provide their own defense.  Far more importantly, diplomacy can ensure the peace in northeast Asia far more effectively and far less expensively than U.S. troops.      

The U.S. acts as if Japan needs to be defended against China.  Let’s have a look.  During the past 1,000 years, during which time China was the region’s dominant power for all but the last 150 years, how many times did China attempt to invade Japan?  If you answered zero, you are correct.  China did not attempt to invade Japan on a single occasion.

You might quibble.  What about the two attempts in 1274 and 1281, roughly 750 years ago? It’s true that when the Mongols temporarily ruled China between 1271 and 1368, they twice sent expeditionary fleets to invade Japan, and both times were defeated by a combination of typhoons (known in Japanese lore as the Kamikaze winds) and by Japanese coastal defenses.  

Japan, on the other hand, made several attempts to attack or conquer China. 

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Military Finds Physical Reality Shatters DEI-Fueled Theories About The Sexes

Ten years have passed since the Department of Defense initiated a social experiment with women in the military. Pentagon officials promised that female trainees headed for previously all-male combat arms units would have to meet the exact same standards as men. Has the experiment played out as promised?

We are about to find out. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s March 30 memorandum calls for a 60-day review to achieve high, uncompromised standards in combat arms units such as the infantry, special operations, and other occupations with extraordinary physical demands. 

Thanks to a series of executive orders that President Donald Trump has issued since January, Hegseth’s six-month implementation period should proceed without equivocation or distractions related to percentage-based diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) quotas. Wrote Hegseth, “[I]t is essential to identify which positions require heightened entry-level and sustained physical fitness.”

An honest review of contemporary policies regarding women in the military should reflect sound priorities unrelated to DEI. Career opportunities are important, but if there is a conflict, the needs of the military must come first.

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