Tag: military industrial complex

Biden administration set to greenlight $18 billion sale of F-15 fighter jets to Israel


The Biden administration is close to approving the sale of as many as 50 American-made F-15 fighter jets to Israel, in a deal expected to be worth more than $18 billion, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The transaction, which would amount to the largest US foreign military sale to Israel since the country went to war with Hamas on October 7, comes as the administration is also expected to notify Congress soon of a large new sale of precision-guided munitions kits to Israel, the people said.

The new sales of some of the US’ most sophisticated weaponry underscore the extent to which the US continues to support Israel militarily, even as Biden administration officials criticize Israel’s operations in Gaza, which have killed more than 32,000 Palestinians since October, according to the Gaza ministry of health.

The sale is likely to be hotly debated in Congress, particularly by members of the president’s own party. US weapons sales to Israel have come under intense scrutiny in recent months and Democratic lawmakers have called for restricting military aid to Israeli until it allows more humanitarian aid into Gaza and does more to protect civilians there.

Since Hamas’ attack on Israel in October, which killed over 1,200 Israelis, the US has made more than 100 foreign military sales to Israel. Most of those have fallen under the specific dollar amount that requires a notification to Congress, an official familiar with the matter previously told CNN.

But an $18 billion F-15 sale is large enough that it requires congressional notification, and the administration informally notified the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations committees of the F-15 sale in late January, according to two of the people familiar with the matter.

The informal notification gives lawmakers and congressional staff time to review the details and ask questions before the State Department sends a formal notification to all lawmakers.

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NBC REJECTS TRUMP VOICE BUT EMBRACES WAR PARTY

“YOU WOULDN’T HIRE a made man, like a mobster, to work at a DA’s office, right?” MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said this week of NBC’s decision to hire former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel, a decision the network later reversed. “You wouldn’t hire a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener.” 

But NBC does just that with another party: its pro-war stable of retired military generals and admirals who hold forth on wars and threats to national security. A partisan voice if there ever was one, the TV generals and admirals are all the more scandalous because the network presents them as objective “analysts” as they sit on defense industry and corporate boards that profit from forever wars, including ones not being fought by the United States directly. The conflict is not just tolerated by NBC, it is also never disclosed. (NBC did not respond to a request for comment on its current conflict of interest policies.)

“The U.S. needs to get involved in a leadership role here [in Haiti] and very quickly,” retired four-star Adm. James Stavridis said on the air earlier this month, speaking of the deteriorating situation. Stavridis calls for the deployment of a U.S.-led intervention force, warning of the consequences of inaction. “In the ’90s, we had waves of migration, refugee-driven, from Haiti,” he said.

The host, NBC News’s Gabe Gutierrez, to his credit, pushed back. “Admiral, you know this better than anybody else: The history of American intervention in the Americas has not always been that great,” he said. But the network, in giving Stavridis a platform — just as they would have done with McDaniel — doesn’t bother to mention that their “analyst” profits from the use of military force. For example, Stavridis serves as partner of the investment firm Carlyle Group, owner of major defense contractors and which lists the admiral among its Global Aerospace and Government Services Team. 

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Elon Musk Delivers Satellite Tech To Military To Turn Earth Into A Panopticon Of Surveillance

The U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is reportedly acquiring a constellation of hundreds of intelligence-gathering satellites from SpaceX, with a specific focus on tracking targets down below in support of ground operations. Though details about this project are still very limited, there are clear parallels to what the U.S. Space Force has previously said about a highly classified space-based radar surveillance program, which it first publicly disclosed around the same time SpaceX is said to have gotten its NRO contract. If this program is the one we think it is, it could bring about a revolution in both tactical and strategic space-based sensing.

Starshield, SpaceX’s government-sales-focused business unit, has been working on the new low Earth orbit (LEO) spy satellites under a $1.8 billion contract it received in 2021 from NRO, according to a report from Reuters this past weekend, citing five anonymous sources familiar with the deal. The Wall Street Journal had previously published a story about the existence of the contract in February, but did not name NRO as being involved or provide specific details about the deal’s scope of work.

At the time of writing, neither SpaceX nor its CEO Elon Musk appear to have directly responded to the Reuters article or otherwise commented on the details therein. NRO, a U.S. military organization that serves as America’s main remote sensing intelligence arm, and is so secret that its existence was not publicly acknowledged until 1992, declined to comment on the specifics of any deal with SpaceX, according to Reuters.

“We’ve changed our procurement methods to take advantage of LEO technologies,” Troy Meink, NRO’s Principal Deputy Director, did say, speaking generally, in a speech at the Satellite 2024 conference on Monday, according to SpaceNews. “Our main priority is to meet the requirements with minimum risk.

When the new constellation, or at least an initial segment thereof, might begin collecting intelligence operationally, if it hasn’t already, isn’t clear. SpaceX has been launching relevant prototype satellites since 2020, before its formal contract with NRO, and “a U.S. government database of objects in orbit shows several SpaceX missions having deployed satellites that neither the company nor the government have ever acknowledged,” per Reuters.

As for why SpaceX is the one to deliver this constellation to the Pentagon, it pioneered the capability and is really the only experienced contractor in this area at this time, although that will change in the years to come.

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Cutting the Pentagon Down to Size

In an age when American presidents routinely boast of having the world’s finest military, where nearly trillion-dollar war budgets are now a new version of routine, let me bring up one vitally important but seldom mentioned fact: making major cuts to military spending would increase U.S. national security.

Why? Because real national security can neither be measured nor safeguarded solely by military power (especially the might of a military that hasn’t won a major war since 1945). Economic vitality matters so much more, as does the availability and affordability of health care, education, housing, and other crucial aspects of life unrelated to weaponry and war. Add to that the importance of a Congress responsive to the needs of the working poor, the hungry and the homeless among us. And don’t forget that the moral fabric of our nation should be based not on a military eternally ready to make war but on a determination to uphold international law and defend human rights. It’s high time for America to put aside its conveniently generic “rules-based order” anchored in imperial imperatives and face its real problems. A frank look in the mirror is what’s most needed here.

It should be simple really: national security is best advanced not by endlessly preparing for war, but by fostering peace. Yet, despite their all-too-loud disagreements, Washington’s politicians share a remarkably bipartisan consensus when it comes to genuflecting before and wildly overfunding the military-industrial complex. In truth, ever-rising military spending and yet more wars are a measure of how profoundly unhealthy our country actually is.

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Saber Rattling Toward Tragedy: The High Stakes of US-China Tensions

The confirmation of US Army Special Forces’ deployment to strategic locations in Taiwan is a harbinger of the United States inching closer to a precipice, one that overlooks a potential conflict with China—a scenario fraught with peril not just for the involved states but for global peace.

This development, while emblematic of the US’s commitment to Taiwan’s defense, inadvertently amplifies the saber rattling that has come to define US-China relations. The stakes of this brinkmanship are alarmingly high, risking a catastrophic conflict that serves no nation’s true interest, save for the military-industrial complex that stands to profit at the cost of countless innocent lives.

A Dangerous Game

The decision to station US Green Berets in Kinmen and Penghu, areas perilously close to mainland China, is not merely a strategic military maneuver but a bold political statement. It represents a significant escalation in the US’s show of support for Taiwan, a move that, while intended to deter Chinese aggression, equally serves to provoke it. This saber rattling—a display of military might under the guise of deterrence—edges us closer to a conflict that, once ignited, could spiral out of control, drawing in multiple global powers into a confrontation nobody wants.

The True Beneficiaries of Conflict

Amid these tensions, it’s crucial to ask: Who truly benefits from such brinkmanship? The sad answer lies in the military-industrial complex, a conglomerate of defense contractors and associated industries whose fortunes swell with the drums of war. For them, the escalation of tensions is not a harbinger of tragedy but an opportunity for profit, achieved at the expense of human lives and global stability. This stark reality underscores the need to scrutinize the motives behind our foreign policy decisions and question the narrative that military escalation equates to deterrence.

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2025 Department of Defense Budget Request Disarms America

The press release for the Department of Defense 2025 Budget Request told one story, a story replete with lofty, aspirational goals expressed in the usual abstract text of DOD budget requests.

Reading the text, one would think the Arsenal of Democracy 2.0 was in high gear.  On the other hand, the accompanying Comptroller submissions of the different Services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Space Force) that are the official numbers from DOD told a very different story.  The Service submissions do have a similar, flowery textual chapeau laid over the numbers that perhaps this time were serving as a second layer of distraction from the numbers.

The Comptroller numbers don’t lie, the topline number of the entire Department of Defense was flat, $849.8 Billion, only $7.8B more than 2024.  $7.8B is a lot, but it is budget dust in DOD world.

This is less than 1% growth in the DOD budget and taking inflation into account, the number is a significant shrinkage of the DOD topline.  The Comptroller numbers revealed that almost every important warfighting line item, the numbers of ships, airplanes, and missiles, went down.

The disconnect of the descriptive text from the numbers took a few days to sink in with most of the experts.  Professor James Holmes said simply, the “New Defense Budget Makes No Sense”.

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If SpaceX’s Secret Constellation Is What We Think It Is, It’s Game Changing

The U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is reportedly acquiring a constellation of hundreds of intelligence-gathering satellites from SpaceX, with a specific focus on tracking targets down below in support of ground operations. Though details about this project are still very limited, there are clear parallels to what the U.S. Space Force has previously said about a highly classified space-based radar surveillance program, which it first publicly disclosed around the same time SpaceX is said to have gotten its NRO contract. If this program is the one we think it is, it could bring about a revolution in both tactical and strategic space-based sensing.

Starshield, SpaceX’s government-sales-focused business unit, has been working on the new low Earth orbit (LEO) spy satellites under a $1.8 billion contract it received in 2021 from NRO, according to a report from Reuters this past weekend, citing five anonymous sources familiar with the deal. The Wall Street Journal had previously published a story about the existence of the contract in February, but did not name NRO as being involved or provide specific details about the deal’s scope of work.

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DARPA picks Northrop Grumman to develop ‘lunar raiload’ concept

Railroads could open the moon to serious and sustained economic development, as they did in the American West in the late 19th century.

That’s apparently the hope of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is supporting the development of a “lunar railroad” concept proposed by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman.

“The envisioned lunar railroad network could transport humans, supplies and resources for commercial ventures across the lunar surface, contributing to a space economy for the United States and international partners,” Northrop Grumman representatives wrote in a press statement on Tuesday (March 19).

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Niger Ends Military Relationship With US, Says US Presence No Longer Justified

Niger announced on Saturday that it was suspending military cooperation with the US and that the US presence in the country was no longer justified, signaling Washington will have to withdraw its troops.

Col. Maj. Amadou Abdramane, spokesman for the military-led government that’s been in power since last year’s coup, made the announcement after a US delegation visited Niger. He said the US officials did not show respect for Niger’s sovereignty.

“Niger regrets the intention of the American delegation to deny the sovereign Nigerien people the right to choose their partners and types of partnerships capable of truly helping them fight against terrorism,” Abdramane said.

The US has a major drone base in Niger, known as Air Base 201, which it uses as a hub for operations in West Africa. Before former President Mahamoud Bazoum was taken out of power last July, the US had about 1,100 troops in Niger. As of December, the US has 648 troops stationed in the country.

The US formally declared the ouster of Bazoum a coup, which requires the suspension of aid, but was looking for ways to cooperate with the junta to maintain its military presence. However, there are signs the US was preparing for the possibility of getting kicked out. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that the US was in talks with other West African states to base drones on their territory, including Benin, the Ivory Coast, and Ghana.

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70% Or More Of F-35s May Not Be Combat-Capable

A September 2023 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the F-35 revealed some shocking statistics on just how unready hundreds of billions of dollars worth of F-35s are to provide actual combat power. In fact, the report indicated that only 15 to 30 percent of F-35s may be capable of combat.

But if you were to read a typical article in the media, you might believe that, on average, some 55 percent of F-35s are combat-capable. However,  you would be wrong. You see, when the average person sees a report declaring that 55 percent of F-35 combat aircraft are “mission capable,” they assume mission capable equals combat capable. But in doing so, they are being deceived.

The deception comes out of how the F-35 program office and the whole of the Department of Defense define “mission capable.” It turns out that the DoD definition of “mission capable” does not mean combat capable. What it means is that an aircraft can fly and perform at least one mission. So, a plane designated as mission capable might be capable of doing some type of combat, but it might not. Instead, the mission it might be capable of executing could be testing or training, or some other mission that does not involve combat. And even if it is considered capable of testing or training, it might not be capable of doing the full gamut of testing or training you would expect from a fully functional aircraft. Likewise, it could still be classified as mission capable even if it is only capable of executing a portion of the combat-type missions it is supposed to be able to perform.

Hence, within the environs of the military–industrial–congressional complex, “mission capable” is a highly ambiguous term that allows for a whole lot of gaming of accountability metrics. And it tells us very little. Still, it is worth noting that at a 55 percent mission capable rate, the F-35 fleet is well below program targets of 90 percent for the F-35A (Air Force) and 85 percent for the fighter’s F-35B (Marine Corps) and F-35C (Navy) variants. In other words, the F-35 fleet as a whole is nowhere near meeting its mission capability goal of being able to do anything at all.

However, there is another metric that is more useful: “full mission capable.” It turns out that “full mission capable” F-35s are supposed to be able to perform all the missions for which they were contracted, including combat-oriented missions, surveillance, training, testing, show of force, etcetera. This metric is not often publicized, but in the case of the F-35, the watchdog side of the GAO actually did a detailed report of the problems and issues with the F-35 that included how the F-35 fleet looked from the “full mission capable” perspective.

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