Tag: military industrial complex

Pentagon Fails To Account For Over $3 Trillion For 6th Year In A Row

The Pentagon has failed its independent annual audit for the sixth year in a row, as US defense officials could not provide auditors with enough information to form a full accounting evaluation, according to the Defense Department’s yearly financial report released on Thursday.

“Auditing the department’s $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities is a massive undertaking,” Pentagon Comptroller Michael McCord said.

The 2023 audit gave a “disclaimer of opinion,” which means the Pentagon could not provide auditors enough financial data to allow them to form an opinion. An unqualified, or “clean,” opinion is the highest possible rating and a qualified opinion is an acceptable rating. Both mean that auditors were given enough information to make a complete judgement.

In 2022, the Pentagon only managed to account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets. With this failure, the Pentagon has kept its spot as the only US government agency to have never passed a comprehensive audit. It also highlights the US war department’s persistent lack of internal financial control, its poor budget estimations and rampant overspending. 

A clear example of this is the F-35 program, which has gone over its original budget by $165 billion to build a plane tasked to perform many different tasks, none of which it does well.The Pentagon is slated to buy more than 2,400 F-35s for the Air Force, Marines, and Navy. The estimated lifetime cost for procuring and operating these planes – $1.7 trillion – would make it the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons project ever.

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AC-130 Laser Weapon Test Slip Raises Questions About Its Future

Planned flight testing of a high-energy laser directed energy weapon on a U.S. Air Force AC-130J Ghostrider gunship has been pushed back again to next year. This once looked set to be the service’s first operational airborne laser weapon. However, the future of this project is ever more uncertain and there is now a broader review of the Ghostrider’s armament suite that could see the aircraft lose their 105mm howitzers in the future.

Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) has confirmed to The War Zone that flight tests of the Airborne High Energy Laser (AHEL) on the AC-130J are now set to start in January 2024 and wrap up in June of that year. The goal had originally been for the AHEL to take to the sky on a Ghostrider sometime in the 2022 Fiscal Year. Most recently, the hope had been that this would occur before the end of this year.

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U.S. WEAPONS TRANSFERS TO ISRAEL SHROUDED IN SECRECY — BUT NOT UKRAINE

ONE MONTH SINCE Hamas’s surprise attack, little is known about the weapons the U.S. has provided to Israel. Whereas the Biden administration released a three-page itemized list of weapons provided to Ukraine, down to the exact number of rounds, the information released about weapons sent to Israel could fit in a single sentence.

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby acknowledged the secrecy in an October 23 press briefing, saying that while U.S. security assistance flows to Israel “on a near-daily basis,” he continued, “We’re being careful not to quantify or get into too much detail about what they’re getting — for their own operational security purposes, of course.”

The argument that transparency would imperil Israel’s operational security — somehow not a concern with Ukraine — is misleading, experts told The Intercept.

“The notion that it would in any way harm the Israeli military’s operational security to provide more information is a cover story for efforts to reduce information on the types of weapons being supplied to Israel and how they are being used,” William Hartung, a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and expert on weapons sales, told The Intercept. “I think the purposeful lack of transparency over what weapons the U.S. is supplying to Israel ‘on a daily basis’ is tied to the larger administration policy of downplaying the extent to which Israel will use those weapons to commit war crimes and kill civilians in Gaza.”

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In a surprise move, the military’s spaceplane will launch on Falcon Heavy

The US military’s reusable X-37B spaceplane will launch on the next flight of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, scheduled for December 7, officials announced on Wednesday.

This was unexpected because the spaceplane’s six previous missions launched on medium-lift Atlas V or Falcon 9 rockets. This next mission, the seventh by an X-37B spaceplane, will fly on a heavy-lift launcher for the first time.

The payload for the next Falcon Heavy rocket was a secret before the military’s announcement on Wednesday. The mission was known simply by the designation USSF-52, and it will take off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

In a statement, the Space Force said the seventh X-37B mission will have a “wide range of test and experimentation objectives.” The Pentagon wants everyone to know the X-37B spaceplane exists, but military officials are mum about the details of the vehicle’s missions. The Space Force’s statement Wednesday was similarly vague on details of the upcoming flight.

“These tests include operating the reusable spaceplane in new orbital regimes, experimenting with future space domain awareness technologies, and investigating the radiation effects on materials provided by NASA,” the Space Force said.

Shrouded in secrecy, the automated X-37B spaceplane can deploy small satellites, host experiments, and pursue other classified objectives. Flying without any astronauts on board, the vehicle generates electricity with a solar array and autonomously guides itself to a runway landing at the end of each mission.

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First Laser Weapon For A Fighter Delivered To The Air Force

The U.S. Air Force has received a high-energy laser weapon that can be carried by aircraft in podded form. The news came today when Lockheed Martin disclosed that at least one of the weapons, which it developed, has been delivered to the Air Force for test work. This effort falls within the wider framework of still-evolving plans to have laser-armed fighter jets that can engage enemy missiles, and possibly other targets too.

A report today from Breaking Defense confirmed that Lockheed Martin delivered its LANCE high-energy laser weapon to the Air Force in February this year. In this context, LANCE stands for “Laser Advancements for Next-generation Compact Environments.” The recipient for the new weapon is the Air Force Research Laboratory, or AFRL, which is charged with developing and integrating new technologies in the air, space, and cyberspace realms.

Tyler Griffin, a Lockheed executive, had previously told reporters that LANCE “is the smallest, lightest, high-energy laser of its power class that Lockheed Martin has built to date.”

Indeed, Griffin added that LANCE is “one-sixth the size” of a previous directed-energy weapon that Lockheed produced for the Army. That earlier laser was part of the Robust Electric Laser Initiative program and had an output in the 60-kilowatt class. We don’t yet know what kind of power LANCE can produce although there have been suggestions it will likely be below 100 kilowatts.

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Israel’s Military Is Part of the U.S. War Machine

The governments of Israel and the United States are now in disagreement over how many Palestinian civilians it’s okay to kill. Last week — as the death toll from massive Israeli bombardment of Gaza neared 10,000 people, including several thousand children — top U.S. officials began to worry about the rising horrified outcry at home and abroad. So, they went public with muted misgivings and calls for a “humanitarian pause.” But Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear that he would have none of it.

Such minor tactical discord does little to chip away at the solid bedrock alliance between the two countries, which are most of the way through a 10-year deal that guarantees $38 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel. And now, as the carnage in Gaza continues, Washington is rushing to provide extra military assistance worth $14 billion.

Days ago, In These Times reported that the Biden administration is seeking congressional permission “to unilaterally blanket-approve the future sale of military equipment and weapons — like ballistic missiles and artillery ammunition — to Israel without notifying Congress.” And so, “the Israeli government would be able to purchase up to $3.5 billion in military articles and services in complete secrecy.”

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America’s War Economy and the Urgent Call for Peace in the Middle East

On September 19, 2001, eight days after 9/11, as the leaders of both parties were already pounding a frenzied drumbeat of war, a diverse group of concerned Americans released a warning about the long-term consequences of a military response. Among them were veteran civil rights activists, faith leaders, and public intellectuals, including Rosa Parks, Harry Belafonte, and Palestinian-American Edward Said. Rare public opponents of the drive to war at the time, they wrote with level-headed clarity:

“We foresee that a military response would not end the terror. Rather, it would spark a cycle of escalating violence, the loss of innocent lives, and new acts of terrorism… Our best chance for preventing such devastating acts of terror is to act decisively and cooperatively as part of a community of nations within the framework of international law… and work for justice at home and abroad.”

Twenty-three years and more than two wars later, this statement reads as a tragic footnote to America’s Global War on Terror that left an entire region of the planet immiserated. It contributed to the direct and indirect deaths of close to 4.5 million people, while costing Americans almost $9 trillion and counting.

The situation is certainly different today. Still, over the last few weeks, those prophetic words, now 22 years old, have been haunting me, as the U.S. war machine kicks into ever higher gear following the horrific Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians and the brutal intensification of the decades-long Israeli siege of civilians in Gaza. Sadly, the words and actions of our nation’s leaders have revealed a staggering, even willful, historical amnesia about the disastrous repercussions of America’s twenty-first-century war-mongering.

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The Pentagon wants a new powerful nuclear bomb. Please don’t give it to them

Just days after China announced that it would double its nuclear arsenal to more than 1,000 warheads by 2030, Pentagon officials revealed plans Tuesday for a new nuclear gravity bomb that would be 24 times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. By Thursday, President Vladimir Putin had signed a bill withdrawing Russia from its inclusion in a global nuclear test ban — which was followed this week by a test launch from one of its submarines of an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads. That means, by default, the U.S. is also no longer part of the treaty, meaning we could once more begin dropping bombs in the New Mexico desert, à la “Oppenheimer,” though (thankfully) no such plans have been announced. 

What (and I say this with all due respect) in the actual f**k is going on here? Is the world teetering off the edge? The hows are easier to explain than the whys when it comes to all this madness, so let’s start there. 

The plans for a new nuke were rolled out almost exactly a year after the Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review was published, which advocated for a bigger US nuclear flex to compete with the stockpile they estimated China would have built by 2030. As it turns out, that Chinese stockpile is getting much bigger, much faster than we thought — with “more than 500 operational nuclear warheads” as of May.

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Secret Skunk Works Spy Drone Delivered To Air Force

We have explored the possibilities related to the existence of a high-altitude, long-endurance stealth drone, the so-called ‘RQ-180,’ and how it’s likely poised to eclipse the crewed U-2S Dragon Lady and uncrewed RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance platforms and become one of the most important military aircraft of a generation. Now, there are intriguing indications that a complementary platform or perhaps even a successor to the RQ-180 is not only being developed by Lockheed Martin’s legendary Skunk Works, but that this even more advanced spy drone has already been delivered.

These potential revelations come from the latest episode of the Defense & Aerospace Air Power Podcast, hosted by editor-in-chief Vago Muradian, joined by regular guest J.J. Gertler, director of The Defense Concepts Organization and senior analyst at the Teal Group. For the time being, we have no kind of confirmation about these statements, but they are certainly highly interesting, considering what we do know about related programs and emerging requirements.

Speaking about the mysterious new spy drone from the Skunk Works, Muradian explains this is a “much more capable reconnaissance aircraft” than the RQ-180 and that “there are articles that have already been delivered,” although no indication of how many or at what stage the program is at.

Muradian adds that “there have been challenges with that program [and] some speculation that it had been canceled.” He continues: “My understanding is that the program was re-scoped because it is that ambitious a capability that [it] required a little bit of re-scoping in order to be able to get to the next block of aircraft.”

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The AnthraX Chronicles: Part 1: Spills of the Fort Detrick Kind

The mainstream media has purposely turned a blind eye to suspicious biological research institutions in this country, such as the infamous US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick. USAMRIID—pronounced you-SAM-rid – is the medical and biodefense research organization that replaced the base’s former biowarfare lab that was in operation from 1943 to 1969. Fort Detrick was used to store the  CIA’s arsenal of biological poisons, including smallpox, tuberculosis, and anthrax, as well as a number of organic toxins, including snake venom and paralytic shellfish poison. Not only is Fort Detrick a biowarfare facility, but the CIA also used the base for their MK-Ultra mind control program. Arguably, too few Americans have heard of the base, despite its freakish history.

Yet early on in the pandemic, Fort Detrick was actually trending in China; Chinese state media suggested that the COVID-19 coronavirus was made and leaked from a US military installation. One title read In China, 25 Million People Have Called For An Investigation Into Fort Detrick For Causing The Lab Leak That Started The Worldwide Coronavirus Outbreak.  In 2021, a Chinese convoy of 25 million signed a petition, urging Tedros of the World Health Organization to launch a probe. Following the petition, a group of Filipino scholars also launched a similar online petition to break the wall of silence around the suspicious lab.

According to the publication Global Times, reports emerged from many other countries such as Italy, Spain, France, and the US, indicating the presence of COVID-19 even earlier than the first reported case in Wuhan, “which demands an inquiry and verification from WHO experts as soon as possible.”

“Fort Detrick is too dangerous a mystery to remain shrouded in secrecy,” said political commentator Herman Laurel. “It is important for all the peoples of the world to join in the petition to know the truth about Fort Detrick at this time and end the delusions the US is creating. However, the United States put a positive spin on Fort Detrick, saying that the army base is conducting “beneficial research.” A CNN “exclusive” further demonstrated the US was paving the way for the US intelligence agency to frame the Wuhan lab.

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