Tag: military industrial complex

Parsons Gets $1.9M US Army Technical Direction Letter for Next-Gen Biometrics + More

The U.S. Army granted a technical direction letter worth $1.9 million to Centreville, Virginia-based Parsons Corporation for the acquisition of biometric mobile and static collection devices, including software, in support of the U.S. Army’s Next Generation Biometrics Collection Capability (NXGBCC).

Expected to be fielded in 2025, NXGBCC will replace the Army’s Biometrics Automated Toolset-Army, which the Army says, “is old and obsolete.”

NXGBCC will gather, analyze, and share fingerprints, facial, iris and voice biometrics, and is the first time Army personnel will use a capability that is software-based rather than tied to unique hardware that must be maintained, according to the Army.

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First Plutonium Pit For Nuclear Warhead Produced In The U.S. In 35 Years Is Now “Weapon-Ready”

The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has announced the completion of the first weapon-ready example of a vital component for the W87-1 warhead. The component, called a “plutonium pit,” is the radioactive component that acts as a first stage ‘trigger’ apparatus used to initiate the detonation of the thermonuclear device. Plans call for the W87-1s to be used in the future LGM-35A Sentinel nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), a program that is massively over budget and faces numerous issues.

The NNSA calls this “an important milestone for the United States’ nuclear weapon stockpile modernization” as it phases out the aging W78 warheads, one of two types that are placed atop LGM-30G Minuteman III ICBMs currently stationed in silos. The other is the W87-0.

“The W87-1 nuclear warhead will replace the W78 nuclear warhead, which was first introduced in 1979 and represents the oldest weapon in the U.S. nuclear stockpile that has not undergone a major life extension or replacement,” the Government Accountability Office noted. “The W87-1 will be carried on the Air Force’s Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile and is slated for deployment in the early 2030s.”

The W87-0s will initially be installed on Sentinels, but those will eventually be phased out as well.

To make any of this happen, however, NNSA needs new plutonium pits. A good description of how the pits play a critical role in a nuclear warhead can be found at the Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists, stating:

“Pits are the hollow plutonium cores of the fission “primaries” (triggers) of two-stage modern warheads. A warhead explosion would begin with the implosion of the pit to supercriticality, which would enable an exponentially growing fission chain reaction in the plutonium. That fission explosion—“boosted” by neutrons from a fusion reaction in tritium-deuterium gas injected into the middle of the hollow pit just before implosion—would ignite a much more powerful “secondary” nuclear fission-fusion explosion.”

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The military showers universities with hundreds of millions of dollars

The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight.

Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, The Cold War and American Science, “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it still remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research.

And now, Pentagon-funded research is once again on the rise, driven by the DOD’s recent focus on developing new technologies like weapons driven by artificial intelligence (AI). Combine that with an intensifying drive to recruit engineering graduates and the forging of partnerships between professors and weapons firms and you have a situation in which many talented technical types could spend their entire careers serving the needs of the warfare state. The only way to head off such a Brave New World would be greater public pushback against the military conquest (so to speak) of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers whose skills are so essential to building the next generation of high-tech weaponry.

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NATO takes the plunge into the world of venture capital

The NATO Innovation Fund, the “world’s first multi-sovereign venture capital fund,” made its first investments earlier this summer in deep tech companies including British aerospace manufacturing company Space Forge and AI companies ARX Robotics and Fractile.

Modeled like the U.S. intelligence community’s venture capital arm IQT (In-Q-Tel), the fund’s intention is to focus on spurring innovation in areas including biotechnology, AI, space tech, and advanced communications.

As NATO Innovation Fund Board Chairs Klaus Hommels and Fiona Murray described the project’s purview in Fortune in July: “By investing in and adopting emerging dual-use technologies, NATO can leverage the private sector’s innovation power and its transatlantic talent pool, while countering our strategic competitors’ influence and ambitions.”

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US and Its Corporate Interests Won’t Leave Iraq Anytime Soon – Analyst

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani indicated in January that he was committed to speeding up negotiations with the US-led international coalition on the final withdrawal of its forces from the country. He confirmed Baghdad’s “steadfast and principled” position that the coalition had already fulfilled its mission.

Don’t expect the US to suddenly leave Iraq “while corporate interests steer American foreign policy,” Isa Blumi, an associate professor at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Stockholm University, told Sputnik.

“I don’t see this happening […] unless there is a serious revolution in Iraq itself or in the larger region that sees the US leave permanently from these strategic and very lucrative arenas for American corporations to make money,” Blumi said, commenting on the ambiguous announcement of a partial drawdown of US forces in Iraq.

The US footprint “remains omnipresent, hegemonic, willing to use enormous violence,” he noted.

The military presence “will be modified” due to the “vulnerability of explicit American presence” to aerial attacks, which might chip away at the dimming aura of US invincibility, the expert underscored.

Since the beginning of the escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the bases of the US-led international coalition in Iraq, as well as US troops in Syria, have come under regular attacks, with armed Shiite groups claiming responsibility in Iraq.

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The Militarization of Higher Education

The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight.

Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, “The Cold War and American Science,” “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research.

And now, Pentagon-funded research is once again on the rise, driven by the DOD’s recent focus on developing new technologies like weapons driven by artificial intelligence. Combine that with an intensifying drive to recruit engineering graduates and the forging of partnerships between professors and weapons firms and you have a situation in which many talented technical types could spend their entire careers serving the needs of the warfare state. The only way to head off such a Brave New World would be greater public pushback against the military conquest (so to speak) of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers whose skills are so essential to building the next generation of high-tech weaponry.

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Space Force Touts Plans for Part-Time Service, Even as Opposition and Space National Guard Proposal Loom

Gen. Chance Saltzman, the top military leader of the Space Force, highlighted five former Air Force reservists during a keynote speech at an annual conference this week, revealing they were among the first service members to transfer into jobs in his service.

For now, the initiative allowing such reservists to transfer to the Space Force is accepting only those who are willing to serve full time as Guardians on active duty. The service is hoping to eventually allow part-time Space Force service as an option to those in the Air Force Reserve.

But many of the basic details of a part-time model — most notably, making sure newly transferred Guardians would get paid — still need to be worked out, Saltzman said during an Air and Space Forces Association conference in the Washington, D.C., area. The effort also comes amid a national debate over a potential alternative, the creation of a Space National Guard manned by part-time troops.

“We do not want to hurt anybody in the transition period,” Saltzman said. “That is first and foremost in all our minds. And when I say hurt, I mean when you cross over, you don’t get paid — that’s a problem. Our databases for the Space Force don’t include how you bill part-time hours. That’s done over in the Air Force. We need to migrate those capabilities over so that we can manage our force from a part-time standpoint.”

In a separate conference discussion with reporters Tuesday, Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John Bentivegna told Military.com that the service wants the new part-time model to be a unique experience and one that doesn’t mirror the existing reserve system.

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Wars, Propaganda Wars and Funding Them

By now it’s clear even to the thick-skulled nabobs running our government, that the U.S. can’t win actual wars. It puts up a more respectable performance with propaganda campaigns, probably because those are things the mighty intellects in the CIA truly enjoy, but even those, with their ferocious philippics against malevolent Moscow in The New York Times and Washington Post, even those go down eventually to ignominious defeat. Truth will out.

Like it did in Afghanistan where, for 20 years our military men assured us victory was just around the corner and the established press harrumphed at any peacenik outraged by the slaughter. Then, practically overnight, the whole house of cards collapsed. Even those of us who had predicted a Taliban victory were stunned at the speed with which the U.S. puppet regime folded. It was a disgrace for the Empire. Not unlike the imperial misadventure in Iraq, but somehow worse. It brought all too forcibly to mind those U.S. military helicopters fleeing from Saigon rooftops so many decades ago…

For the past two and a half years, we Americans have been deafened by the clang of a stupendous propaganda war waged against Moscow and on behalf of Kiev and supposedly the west in our mainstream news outlets. We read early on that Russia would soon run out of missiles. It didn’t. Embarrassed silence greeted this uncomfortable fact. Even worse for our press and elite political fabricators, it turned out Russia BRISTLES with missiles. Little said about that in our corporate media. We also read that the desperate Russian military cannibalized washing machines and dishwashers to produce weapons, a lie that I’ve never seen retracted.

Also, those fiendish northern Slavs were accused of every conceivable atrocity against the Ukrainian population, and when later it emerged that the Russian military actually avoids targeting civilians with a care utterly absent in, say, the U.S. assault on Iraq or the Israeli one on Gaza, there were no apologies, no retractions, no expressions of contrition. Nope. The press just moved on to the next tall tale. My guess is that when this whole sorry proxy war ends with Ukraine’s defeat, the propaganda chickens will NOT come home to roost, no, they’ll flap their wings to the next nest of lies. Located where? Farther over the horizon. In China, of course.

For those who dread these frenzies of press prevarication, the news that Washington may allocate $1.6 billion for anti-Chinese propaganda cannot be good. According to a Responsible Statecraft article September 11 by Marcus Stanley, the House passed the “Countering the PRC Malign Influence Fund” on September 9. This money is “about twice, for example, the annual expenditure of CNN,” and it goes to the state department and the infamously, covertly CIA-associated USAID over the next five years. The Global Engagement Center and USAID will lead on spending these monies, making “grants to foreign media and civil society organizations.” The bill, “HR 1157 would supercharge these programs.”

Because the bill doesn’t require transparency to foreign citizens for this U.S. financing, “it’s possible that the program could in some cases be used to subsidize covert anti-Chinese messaging…Such anti-Chinese messaging could cover a wide range of bread-and-butter political issues in foreign countries.” In other words, the U.S. government is poised to launch a MASSIVE black propaganda campaign. Foreigners exposed to its efforts can expect epics of Chinese depravity that make J.D. “One Whopper After Another” Vance’s phony cat-eating Haitian fantasy in Ohio look like child’s play. Who knows what the state department and CIA chefs of hogwash will serve up, but you can be sure it will explode your tastebuds. And for the constipated American legacy purveyors of CIA poppycock, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, it’ll doubtless barrel through them like magnesium citrate.

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Militarism Abuse Disorder: A Very American Malaise

My name is Frida and my community is military dependent. (I feel, by the way, like I’m introducing myself at a very strange AA-like meeting with lousy coffee.) As with people who have substance abuse disorders, I’m part of a very large club. After all, there are weapons manufacturers and subcontractors in just about every congressional district in the country, so that members of Congress will never forget whom they are really working for: the military-industrial complex.

Using the vernacular of the day, perhaps it’s particularly on target to say that our whole country suffers from Militarism Abuse Disorder or (all too appropriately) MAD.

I must confess that I don’t like to admit to my military dependency. Who does? In my case, it’s a tough one for a few reasons, the biggest being that I’m an avowed pacifist who believes that war is a crime against humanity, a failure of the imagination, and never (no, not ever) necessary. Along with the rest of my family of five, I live below the taxable income level. That way, we don’t pay into a system that funds war preparations and war-making. We have to be a little creative to make our money stretch further and we don’t eat out or go to the movies every week. But we don’t ever feel deprived as a result. In essence, I’ve traded career success and workplace achievement for a slightly clearer conscience and time — time to work to end militarism and break our collective addiction!

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation estimates that, in 2023, the United States of America spent $142 billion buying weapons systems and another $122 billion on the research and development of future weaponry and other militarized equipment. And keep in mind that those big numbers represent only a small fraction of any Pentagon budget, the latest of which the Pentagon’s proposing to be $849.8 billion for 2025 — and that’s just one year (and not all of what passes for “national defense” spending either). A recent analysis by the Costs of War Project at Brown University calculated that, since September 11, 2001, the United States has used an estimated $8 trillion-plus just for its post-9/11 wars. Talk about addiction! It makes me pretty MAD, if I’m being honest with you!

It would be nice to ignore such monstrous numbers and the even bigger implications they suggest, to unfocus my eyes slightly as I regularly drive by the fenced facilities, manicured office parks, and noisy, bustling shipyards that make up the mega-billion-dollar-a-year industry right in my own neighborhood that’s preparing for… well, yes… the end of the world. Instead, I’m trying to be clear-eyed and aware. I’m checking my personal life all the time for compromise or conciliation with militarism: Am I being brainwashed when I find myself cheering for the fighters in that blockbuster movie we splurged on? Am I doing enough to push for a ceasefire in Gaza? Am I showing up with young people in my community who are backing higher salaries for teachers and no more police in schools? And of course, I keep asking myself: How are my daily consumer decisions lining up with my lofty politics?

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Man Spots Secret US Military Spacecraft With Amateur Telescope

Just six weeks after spotting a secret Chinese spaceplane, an amateur astronomer in Austria is back at it again.

In an interview with Space.com, sky watcher Felix Schöfbänker described how he came to capture imagery of Pentagon craft that nobody knows much about.

Using a 14-inch Dobsonian telescope that’s optimized to track satellites, the Austrian astrophotographer cross-referenced the images he captured with specs from various spy satellites launched by the Pentagon.

While most of what he’s spotted recently have been known crafts deployed by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), including the Boeing-built Future Image Architecture (FIA)-Radar satellites and some Keyhole (KH)-11 orbiters, one stood out to Schöfbänker as nothing he’s seen before.

“In July, I managed to get a look at a satellite called ‘USA 290,’ which is suspected of possibly being another KH-11,” he told Space.com. “But my image shows a different kind of design, which doesn’t look like a typical KH-11.”

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