Tag: military industrial complex

Cheerleaders of the Military-Industrial Complex

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have something in common.  They both embrace colossal Pentagon budgets and both celebrate the “lethality” of the U.S. military, which, they agree, must be the strongest, bestest, in the world.  They also agree on giving a blank check to Israel and its leaders to do whatever they want in Gaza to the Palestinians and will continue to provide whatever weapons Israel desires to kill massive numbers of Palestinians while flattening and destroying the Gaza Strip.

With respect to Iran, Harris appears to be even more hawkish than Trump, and indeed criticized him for not being aggressive enough with Iran’s leaders.  Harris is also a strong supporter of Ukraine, seeing war as its best option to defeat Russia, whereas Trump is more skeptical of war and more open to diplomacy with Putin and Russia.

This isn’t surprising.  Mainstream Democrats in DC are basically warmongering neo-conservatives on foreign policy, so a vote for Harris/Walz is a vote, as the “liberal” New York Times reported, for “muscular patriotism” (or, to paraphrase my wife, febrile and unapologetic nationalism).  This is Washington Beltway conformity at its finest, as organs such as the National Interest write unironic articles about cheerleading the wonders of the military-industrial complex (MIC).

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DARPA Funding Project To Turn Plastic Waste into Food for Soldiers

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding research to turn military plastic waste into a variety of different useful products, including food for military personnel.

According to Ars Technica, DARPA first put out a call in 2019 for projects to deal with the large amounts of plastic waste produced by military units when they work in remote locations.

The agency wanted a system that could convert plastic wrappers, water bottles and other plastic waste into usable products, such as fuel and rations. The system would have to be compact enough to fit in a Humvee, capable of running on low amounts of energy and use plastic-eating microbes.

DARPA’s goal, according to microbiologist Stephen Techtmann, who works at Michigan Technological University, is not to feed soldiers products made from the plastic, but the microbes themselves that digest and transform it. Techtmann and his team believe the technology will be available soon, and are currently conducting toxicity testing to ensure that plastic-eating microbes are safe for human consumption.

The system being developed by Michigan Tech involves using a small shredder to reduce plastic waste in size, before burning it and subject it to chemical treatment which allows it to be digested by special bacteria. These bacteria were found in compost piles. Many naturally occurring bacteria already have the ability to digest plastics.

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Everything We Just Learned About The Ghost Shark Uncrewed Submarine

Anduril says it has received active interest in integrating more than a dozen new military and commercial payloads onto its Ghost Shark extra-large autonomous undersea vehicle (XL-AUV). Payload testing and otherwise demonstrating the Ghost Shark’s highly modular design are core focuses of new work on the underwater drone that is now set to occur in the United States.

The War Zone learned these and other new details about Ghost Shark in an interview earlier this week with Dr. Shane Arnott, Senior Vice President for Engineering at Anduril and the company’s maritime lead.

The Ghost Shark’s U.S. debut, which Anduril announced this week, came at the biennial U.S. Navy-led Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise in Hawaii, where the uncrewed undersea vehicle (UUV) was displayed to attendees. RIMPAC 2024 wrapped up on August 1. Development of Ghost Shark began in Australia in 2022 for that country’s navy, which is looking to acquire at least three of the UUVs by 2025. The Ghost Shark now in the United States is an additional example that Anduril built using its own funds.

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Partners in Genocide: Israel Is Slaughtering Palestinians With Western Arms

While many are earnestly pointing at the devastation of war, the rampant human rights violations and the deliberate relegation of international and humanitarian law, there are those who see war from an entirely different perspective: profits.

For the merchants of war, the collective pain and misery of whole nations is dwarfed by the lucrative deals of billions of dollars generated from weapons sales.

The great irony is that some of the loudest advocates of human rights are, in fact, the ones who are facilitating the global arms trade. Without it, human rights would not be violated with such impunity.

The Geneva Academy, a legal research organization, says that it currently monitors about 110 active armed conflicts worldwide. Most of these conflicts are taking place in the Global South, though many of these cases are either exacerbated, funded or managed by western powers or western multinational corporations.

Of the 110, 45 armed conflicts are taking place in the Middle East and North Africa region, 35 in the rest of Africa, 21 in Asia and six in Latin America, according to the Academy.

The worst and bloodiest of these armed conflicts is currently taking place in Gaza, one of the poorest and most isolated regions in the world.

To estimate the future death toll resulting from the war in Gaza, one of the world’s most respected medical journals, the Lancet, undertook a thorough research entitled “Counting the dead in Gaza: Difficult but essential”.

The approximation was based on the death toll figure produced as of June 19, when Israel had then reportedly killed 37,396 Palestinians.

Lancet’s new number was horrifying, even though the medical journal said that its conclusions were based on conservative estimates of indirect deaths vs direct deaths that often result from such wars.

Should the war end today, meaning June 19, 7.9% of the population of the Gaza Strip will die because of the war and its aftermath. That’s “up to 186,000 or even more deaths”, according to the Lancet.

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F-35: $2T in ‘generational wealth’ the military had no right to spend

On October 26, 2001, Jim Roche, the then Secretary of the Air Force, stood behind the podium in the Pentagon briefing room to announce that Lockheed Martin had won the competition to build the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Joining him on the stage, were Edward Aldridge, the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, and Gordon England, the Secretary of the Navy.

All three took turns at the microphone to tout the Joint Strike Fighter’s anticipated virtues. “The Joint Strike Fighter is a family of highly common, lethal, survivable, supportable, and affordable next generation multirole strike fighter aircraft,” said Aldridge.

All these claims have proven to be spurious to a greater or lesser extent in subsequent years as the F-35 program limped through a seemingly endless development process, but none so much as the “affordable” claim. At the time of the announcement, the F-35 was supposed to enter active service in 2008 and the program was expected to cost $200 billion.

Nearly 23 years later, the F-35 is officially the most expensive weapon program in history clocking with an anticipated total program cost of $2 trillion and engineers continue to struggle to make the jet work properly with development and procurement costs having more than doubled.

The three men who made that announcement were nearing the end of their long careers. Aldridge retired from the government in 2003 and went on to serve on the board of Lockheed Martin. Jim Roche left the Pentagon in 2005 and became the director of Orbital ATK. Gordon England eventually became deputy secretary of defense before retiring in 2009.

Through their Joint Strike Fighter decision, these three men committed the United States to spend hundreds of billions of dollars for a program that has proven to be an unmitigated disaster. They created a massive financial obligation that future generations of taxpayers must bear, without the much-touted program having produced any of the actual security benefits it was supposed to bring to the U.S. armed forces.

By the time the program’s conceptual flaws became obvious, all three individuals had long since left government service and it was left to an entire generation of their successors to salvage something from the mess they left behind.

It is that last point the individuals who temporarily occupy offices vested with such authorities need to keep front of mind. They have the power to commit future generations to truly massive amounts of spending. All three of the prime F-35 decision-makers were born in the 1930s making them part of the Silent Generation. Generation X, the Millennials, and Gens Z and Alpha must bear the burden of their decisions.

The power to spend such generational wealth should not be wielded in a perfunctory manner. Those with the power of the pen should be far less credulous when people pitch them on pie-in-the-sky programs based on unproven technological promises and assumptions.

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The Emperor Has No Clothes: Stealth Technology is Sexy and Useless

On 27 March 1999, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, a Yugoslav Army unit (3rd Battalion of the 250th Air Defense Missile Brigade, which was under the leadership of Colonel Zoltán Dani) shot down an F-117 Nighthawk stealth aircraft of the United States Air Force by firing a S-125 Neva/Pechora surface-to-air missile. It was the first ever shootdown of a stealth technology airplane. The F-117, which entered service with the U.S. Air Force in 1983 was the first operational aircraft to be designed using stealth technology; by comparison, the Yugoslav air defenses were considered relatively obsolete. The F-117 fleet was officially retired on April 22, 2008.

Innovative tactics and leaders who know what they are about can take ancient weapons to destroy “state of the art” weapons systems and platforms such as the use of ancient pike tactics at Stirling Bridge to slaughter the English King’s modern heavy horse on 11 September 1297 in Scotland or the English victory against the French at Agincourt on 25 October 1415 (Saint Crispin’s Day). During WWII, the Russian-Finnish War in 1939-40 set a David versus Goliath fight that saw a very lop-sided body-count for the Russians fighting the tiny Finnish forces.

Stealth is very expensive and puts tremendous constraints on the utility of the the platform employing it. In the calculus of war, its use diminishes over time. Yet another exemplar of the adage that complexity and sophistication doesn’t always yield martial advantage. The stealth capability has been oversold on shaky science in the art of war.

In a fight with peer and near-peer adversaries, the stealth advantage is negligible.

It is overpriced and the enemy always gets a vote.

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China’s Restrictions on Antimony Exports Could Cripple US Military-Industrial Complex: Here’s Why

China has slapped export controls on antimony metals, ores and oxides effective September 15. Companies seeking to export these materials will have to apply for export licenses for dual-use products. That’s bad news for resource import-dependent American arms manufacturers.

In its explanation of last Thursday’s decision to introduce export controls on antimony, China’s Commerce Ministry said the measure was not aimed against any country, but at assuring China’s national security and fulfilling the PRC’s “non-proliferation obligations.” But with China accounting for nearly half of global antimony ore production in 2023, and the US a top buyer, it’s not hard to discern who the restrictions may hit the hardest.

The US International Trade Commission considers antimony “critical to economic and national security – similar to rare earth elements, plus cobalt and uranium.” US business media have described it as “the most important mineral you never heard of.”

That’s because in addition to a long list of civilian uses ranging from flame retardants, lead-acid batteries, and plastics, to ceramics, consumer electronics and safety clothing, antimony has a dizzying array of military applications, from armor-piercing bullets and tracer ammo to night vision goggles, laser sights, communications equipment and even components in nuclear weapons.

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“Hyperscale” Weapons Factory Vision Outlined By Anduril

Defense technology contractor Anduril has announced plans to build a novel “hyperscale” production facility that will be able to churn out huge numbers of different military products, including uncrewed combat aircraft and autonomous underwater vehicles. The project closely aligns with the Pentagon’s aim of securing the ability to manufacture at scale, to meet future demands, especially for uncrewed systems that are increasingly seen as being critical in potential peer-state conflicts.

The California-based company announced today that it will build the first so-called “Arsenal facility” in the United States, using funding from a recent $1.5-billion Series F investment round. In a document titled Rebuilding the Arsenal of Democracy, Anduril lays out plans for the manufacturing facility, which will measure more than five million square feet and, once up and running, will be able to “produce tens of thousands of autonomous weapons systems addressing the urgent needs of the United States and our allies.”

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US-Ukraine-Russian War: It’s About the Money

Well, “the cat is out of the bag, now.” Thanks to US Senator Lindsey Graham, everyone knows one of the more compelling reasons behind the Ukraine war with Russia. And it has little to do with Kiev’s “agency,” “democracy,” and “liberalism.” The latter are merely ‘talking points’ for public consumption – what Noam Chomsky and Ed Hermann called ‘manufactured consent’ in their 1988 seminal work on propaganda, Manufacturing Consent.

Lindsey Graham voiced out loud part of an agenda that is usually hidden from public view or the media – it isn’t talked about (admitted) openly. It’s a veritable “gold mine,” Graham confessed, and America can’t afford to lose control of it. Here’s the translation of Graham’s admission:

It’s About the Money.

Our reliably hawkish Republican Senator is well known for provocative statements. As early as 2022 (at the beginning of the Ukraine war) Graham was all in for regime change in Russia, when everyone else in the West was trying to downplay such a prospect. Moreover, he is quoted as saying at a press conference with Zylensky that “Russians are dying” in the war, while US aid was the “best money we’ve ever spent.”

But with the panache and subtlety of a train wreck the good senator created another stir recently, admitting on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” why Russia must not be allowed to prevail in Ukraine. The latter possesses $10 to $12 trillion worth of rich deposits of critical minerals.

Here are Senator Graham’s reasons justifying the necessity of Kiev (i.e. Washington) winning its fight with Moscow. First, the Kremlin’s access to these deposits would enrich Russia and allow via the Kremlin, China’s participation. Second, if Ukraine retains control over the minerals, it could be “the richest country in all of Europe” and “the best business partner we ever dreamed of.” Third, the outcome of the war in Ukraine is a “very big deal” for the US from an economic standpoint. Thus, Graham is saying that Ukraine’s war is “a war we can’t afford to lose.”

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UFO breakthrough as two of UK’s most famous cases finally ‘solved’

A British UFO researcher claims to have solved one of the UK’s most intriguing UFO mysteries 34 years after it was spectacularly captured on film.

Dubbed the “Calvine UFO” it was snapped in the Scottish area of the same name by two hikers on August 4 1990.

Six staggering photographs they took are said to show an odd diamond-shaped object in the sky, seemingly tailed by one or two Harrier jets.

The images were reportedly handed to the the Scottish Daily Record by the witnesses for publication.

The newspaper handed the prints and negatives to the Ministry of Defence (MOD) for comment, which is said to have returned them, but bizarrely, the story was never published.

The images and negatives also disappeared.

The story only became public in 1996 when Nick Pope, a former MOD civil servant, responsible for investigating UFO phenomena, wrote an unclassified version of the event in his book, Open Skies Closed Minds.

Mr Pope stated that he had a copy of the photo enlarged on his office wall at the MOD but this was later removed by his superiors.

In August 2022 retired RAF press officer Craig Lindsay released what was purported to be one of the original photos to the press.

A handwritten note on the back, named the photographer as Kevin Russell, but attempts to trace him have so far proved fruitless.

This image was analysed by Andrew Robinson, a senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallum University, who concluded there had been no manipulation of the photographs or editing and it was a genuine print from the time.

But, the question nobody has been able to answer is what was this diamond shaped craft and why was a military jet following it?

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