Tag: military industrial complex

Real threat to world is the nation encircling the planet with its military bases

In the eyes of some Westerners, China is accused of posing a “systematic challenge” to the “world order.” However, failing to specifically articulate this challenge or threat, many across the West resort to citing a list of fabricated claims regarding China’s internal political affairs including the status of the island of Taiwan as well as pointing toward territorial disputes in the South China Sea. 

While the West often depicts these territorial disputes as exclusively between China and the rest of the region, omitted is the fact that all other claimants in the region also have disputes with each other. Despite the sometimes heated nature of these disputes, these nations still maintain close ties with one another and with China, revealing this as an excuse rather than a genuine reason to label China as the biggest threat to global security and prosperity.

While Western leaders struggle to justify labeling China as a challenge or threat, the collective West led by the US has participated in the worst acts of aggression of the 21st century. The US, for example, led an invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. This was followed by a bloody occupation that spanned two decades ending only as recently as 2021. 

In 2003, the US yet again led the West into an act of unprovoked military aggression, this time against Iraq. The war resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. US troops remain in a deeply divided and destabilized Iraq to this day. 

In 2011, a US-led attack against the Libyan government destroyed, destabilized and divided Libya. One of the enduring outcomes of the war is modern-day slavery including slave auctions flourishing in the failed state, as US-based Time Magazine reported in 2019. 

In just the 21st century alone, the US and its allies have cut a swath of death and destruction from North Africa to Central Asia, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing or otherwise disrupting the lives of tens of millions. The instability the US has sown globally has created a climate of insecurity as weapons the US surges into proxy wars, including now in Ukraine, are finding their way to battlefields elsewhere around the globe. 

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US OKs First-Ever Foreign Military Financing Arms Package for Taiwan

The Biden administration has approved the first-ever military aid package for Taiwan using Foreign Military Financing (FMF), a State Department program that gives foreign governments money to buy US arms.

The Associated Press noted that FMF is typically reserved for sovereign, independent states, and the US does not recognize Taiwan as a country. US officials told AP that the only other time FMF has been used for a non-nation-state was assistance to the African Union, a bloc of 55 African states.

The FMF package is worth $80 million, but the administration did not disclose its contents in a notification to Congress. The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act included $2 billion in FMF funds for Taiwan. This marks the first time the funds have been used.

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Janet Airlines flies secret jets out of Las Vegas to AREA 51

Here’s an airline you’ll likely never fly on – no matter how much money you have.

Janet Airlines Boeing 737 planes travel to one of the most mysterious and talked-about places on Earth – Area 51, deep in the Nevada desert.

There, the United States government develops its most secretive military technology.

The ultra-secret base is also rumored to host crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft – and even aliens themselves (although cynics claim this provides a useful distraction from exotic aircraft and weapons development that happens there).

But the Janet jets that take workers and government officials there are altogether more nondescript, with the passenger airliners not believed to contain any particularly exciting features. 

Janet – whose letters are rumored to stand for Joint Air Network for Employee Transportation, or Just Another None Existent Terminal – has a fleet of six Boeing 737 jets. 

Its pilots also fly seven smaller Beechcraft propeller planes.

Janet planes making the 87 mile trip from Vegas to Area 51 describe their destination as the mysterious-sounding Station 3. 

Flight trackers show the jets traveling part of the way there, but they turn their transponders off around 12 miles before they reach their final destination, according to journalist Matt Lillywhite. 

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Citizens Rally Outside Artillery Factory in President Biden’s Hometown that Produces Parts of Cluster Bombs Destined To Kill Eastern Ukrainians and Russians

One of President Joe Biden’s biographers, David Hagan, author of No Ordinary Joe, tells the story of a 10-year-old Joe Biden taking a $5 bet to climb a burning coal pile in his hometown of Scranton. Young Joe took the bet and scampered up the mountainous mound of fiery fissures and won the bet. Biden had the $5 bill framed and it hung in his Senate office for decades.

As a boy, Joe Biden was a risk-taker of his own life. Now, President of the United States and leader of NATO, he has taken all of us to the fiery brink of nuclear war. 

Just off Interstate 81 near Scranton, Pennsylvania, Biden’s hometown, is Exit 185 to what is now called the President Biden Expressway.

On July 22, multiple peace and justice organizers went to Scranton to focus on what the Ukrainians and the President of the United States say is the most important weapons needed: artillery shells, and now the added dimension of putting bomblets inside artillery shells for use as cluster bombs.

Drive down the steep slope of the President Biden Expressway to find the #4 Merchant of Death in the U.S., General Dynamics, operating the Army Ammunition Plant just a chip-shot away from the central shopping center of downtown Scranton.

During the Vietnam War students from the nearby University of Scranton protested outside the 155 mm artillery slaughterhouse. There is no record of any protests at the General Dynamics facility in decades. That changed on Saturday, July 22, when anti-war activists drove to Scranton from Vermont, Virginia, New Jersey, Long Island and New York City, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pittsburgh and upstate New York.

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CHINESE MILITARY SAYS IT’S FIGURED OUT HOW TO BUILD LASER WEAPONS THAT CAN FIRE INDEFINITELY

The Chinese military has announced what could be a major breakthrough in energy weapon tech — if it holds up.

As the South China Morning Post reports, representatives from the country’s National University of Defence Technology say they’ve developed a state-of-the-art cooling system that would allow high-energy lasers to remain powered up “infinitely” without getting too hot.

While laser technology has existed for decades, these high-energy beams generate so much excess heat that they often go haywire, hampering previous attempts at similar weapon systems around the world.

The new Chinese cooling system, according to the report, would use gas that blows through the weapon to remove excess heat and allow for weapons to shoot precise laser beams for an indefinite amount of time without losing power or getting distorted.

“High-quality beams can be produced not only in the first second, but also maintained indefinitely,” the team wrote in a new paper on the purported cooling tech, published in the Chinese-language journal Acta Optica Sinica.

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America’s top 5 weapons contractors made $196B in 2022

American weapons makers continue to dominate the global arms industry, with four U.S.-based companies in the world’s top five military contractors, according to a new Defense News ranking of the top 100 defense firms.

In 2022, America’s top five weapons contractors made $196 billion in military-related revenue, according to Defense News. Lockheed Martin dominated all other defense-focused companies, with total military revenue of roughly $63 billion last year. RTX, formerly known as Raytheon Technologies, was a distant second, earning roughly $40 billion in revenue in 2022.

The same five American “prime” contractors have long dominated lists of the world’s biggest arms manufacturers. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX, Boeing and General Dynamics have remained in the top seven of the Defense News ranking since it began in 2000.

Notably, several Chinese firms have expanded their military operations in recent years as tensions have risen between the U.S. and China. Four Chinese companies are now in the top 20, including one — the Aviation Industry Corporation of China — that became the world’s fourth largest military contractor last year. 

The top 5 for 2022 are as follows: Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Aviation Industry Corporation, and Boeing.

The U.S., for its part, had 10 companies in the top 20. Italy, the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom each had at least one of the world’s 20 biggest military firms last year.

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USAF Conducts First-AI Flight With Stealth Drone

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) completed the first-ever flight of an AFRL-developed stealth drone powered by artificial intelligence software.

On July 25, the machine-learning-trained, artificial intelligence-powered XQ-58A Valkyrie flew a three-hour sortie at Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base.

“The mission proved out a multi-layer safety framework on an AI/ML-flown uncrewed aircraft and demonstrated an AI/ML agent solving a tactically relevant “challenge problem” during airborne operations,” said Col. Tucker Hamilton, chief, of AI Test and Operations, for the Department of the USAF.

Hamilton continued, “This sortie officially enables the ability to develop AI/ML agents that will execute modern air-to-air and air-to-surface skills that are immediately transferrable to other autonomy programs.”

Eglin has become the testing ground for advanced autonomous systems within the USAF. Last November, the service received two Valkyrie stealth drones assigned to the 40th Flight Test Squadron.

In past press releases, AFRL describes the Valkyrie as a “high-speed, long-range, low-cost unmanned platform designed to offer maximum utility at minimum cost.”

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Profiteers of Armageddon

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you’re undoubtedly aware that award-winning director Christopher Nolan has released a new film about Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb” for leading the group of scientists who created that deadly weapon as part of America’s World War II-era Manhattan Project.

The film has earned widespread attention, with large numbers of people participating in what’s already become known as “Barbieheimer” by seeing Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie and Nolan’s three-hour-long Oppenheimer on the same day.

Nolan’s film is a distinctive pop cultural phenomenon because it deals with the American use of nuclear weapons, a genuine rarity since ABC’s 1983 airing of “The Day After” about the consequences of nuclear war. (An earlier exception was Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, his satirical portrayal of the insanity of the Cold War nuclear arms race.)

The film is based on American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin.

Nolan made it in part to break through the shield of antiseptic rhetoric, bloodless philosophizing, and public complacency that has allowed such world-ending weaponry to persist so long after Trinity, the first nuclear bomb test, was conducted in the New Mexico desert 78 years ago this month.

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