Tag: military industrial complex

US Will Boost Military Presence in the Middle East

Washington announced a plan to deploy additional fighter jets to the Middle East to prevent Iran from seizing ships in the Persian Gulf. The Pentagon is additionally evaluating proposals to send more military equipment into the region to address Russian aircraft operating in Syrian skies. 

According to the AP, a defense official told reporters that the US would deploy F-16s to the Middle East to stop Iran from hijacking ships. The official, who spoke to the reporters on the condition of anonymity, said the aircraft would provide cover to vessels traveling in the region. 

The US seized a ship carrying Iranian oil to China in April, kicking off a new tanker war. Iran retaliated, in the Persian Gulf,  by seizing two ships. In response, the US said it increased the number of patrols its personnel were conducting in the region but stopped short of sending additional military equipment to the Middle East. 

The lack of new military deployments angered Washington’s allies in the region, including the UAE. Abu Dhabi halted its involvement with a Washington-led coalition aimed at preventing Iranian ship seizures in May. 

Last week, Washington claimed it prevented Iranian forces from seizing two ships with the presence of a guided missile destroyer. The F-16s sent to the Middle East will support A-10s in conducting patrols over the sea. 

The official additionally told reporters that the Department of Defense is looking to confront the Russian air force in Syria. Over the past several months, the White House and the Kremlin have accused each other of conducting provocative sorties in the skies above Syria. The official claimed that Moscow, Tehran and Damascus were working to drive US forces from Syria. 

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Half of POLITICO Letter ‘Foreign Policy Experts’ Calling for More Arms to Ukraine Tied to Arms Industry

An open letter signed by “46 foreign policy experts” calling for more arms shipments to Ukraine published in POLITICO failed to mention ties of nearly half of the signatories to the defence industry, allegedly glossing over conflicts of interest, the Washington-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft claimed.

On June 5th, the neo-liberal POLITICO news website published an open letter entitled ‘Ukraine Needs a Roadmap to NATO Membership ASAP‘, calling for Western leaders at the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania this week to commit to supplying Ukraine with weapons, fighter jets, and tanks in “sufficient quantities to prevail on the battlefield”.

The letter argued that Western leaders should help facilitate a “comprehensive transition” of the weapons systems being used in the war against Russia up to “NATO standards”.

“The focus should be on the transition to Western weapons systems; creation of a modern, NATO-compatible air and missile defense system; creation of a medical rehabilitation system for wounded soldiers, as well as a system for soldier reintegration into civilian life and a comprehensive demining effort,” the letter stated.

Although POLITICO listed the names of the 46 ‘foreign policy experts’ and claimed to have outlined their “affiliations”, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft — which argues for a less interventionist U.S. foreign policy — claimed that at least 21 of the signatories currently have connections to the military-industrial complex that were left unmentioned by the news outlet.

Quincy Institute Senior Advisor Eli Clifton writing for Reasonable Statecraft noted that “support for increasing Western military aid to Ukraine is not a view exclusively held by those with direct or indirect links to the weapons industry, but signatories of the letter are noticeably embedded in the financial umbrella of institutions and businesses with direct financial ties to some of the world’s largest weapons firms.”

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UFO DISINFO: Four times the US military hoaxed alien contact through the decades

In June 2021, if you were to new to ‘UFO Twitter’ or other social media and websites discussing the UFO topic, you might quite reasonably conclude that this is the year of upper-case D ‘Disclosure’ – finally, the long-awaited revelation from the U.S. government about the existence of alien craft visiting the Earth. From the last four years of revelations in major newspaper and television features regarding military pilots sighting UFOs, through the regular release in recent months of new UFO videos ‘leaked’ from military sources, to this month’s upcoming official report from the Pentagon on what they know about UAPs/UFOs, there has been an accumulation of new information that has led to a growing anticipation of ‘something big’ around the corner.

Many older heads in the UFO scene, though, have been more circumspect. While they have been dismissed by the ‘noobs’ in the scene as being bitter, overly cynical, living in the past and/or not being able to keep up with the recent deluge of information, there is a reason for their skepticism: they know that, for many decades now, certain elements of the U.S. military have worked to seed fake UFO and alien contact information into the public consciousness for their own purposes.

Whatsmore, as Adam Gorightly points out in his book Saucers, Spooks and Kooks: UFO disinformation in the Age of Aquarius, a number of these cases involved supposedly rogue US military and intelligence employees revealing secret UFO/alien information to ambitious film-makers and researchers covering UFO and paranormal topics. Sound familiar?

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These Are The World’s Top 40 Largest Military Budgets

In the final year of World War II, the U.S. spent about 38% of its GDP on its military.

When adjusted for inflation, the military budget over those four years of war came to a staggering $4.1 trillion in 2020 dollars.

And as Visual Capitalist’s Pallave Rao and Joyce Ma detail below, almost 80 years later, modern day military spending isn’t much of a far cry from World War II budgets.

The top spenders have continued to increase their military capabilities, while war in Ukraine has caused countries in the region to re-evaluate their budgets as well.

In 2022, global military budgets hit an all-time high of $2.2 trillion, according to data released by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the eighth consecutive year of increase. This post looks at the top 40 largest military budgets in the world.

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Israel Killed Civilians, Targeted Hospitals in Jenin With US Weapons and Support

From July 3-4, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) — using weapons funded by the United States — mounted the most violent military assault in the occupied West Bank in two decades.

In what Israel dubbed “Operation Home and Garden,” more than 1,000 ground troops invaded the Jenin refugee camp. Assisted by helicopter gunships and armed drones, the IOF killed 12 Palestinians — including six civilians (five of them children) — and wounded more than 120 others (including 14 children), according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. The IOF partially destroyed 109 houses, extensively damaged the infrastructure, leveled the streets and created a power outage. About 4,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes.

While the IOF has used armed drones against Gazans, they are now using them against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank as well.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government, as usual, issued no criticism of the brutal IOF assault on Jenin. Instead, the White House declared that the United States “supports Israel’s security and right to defend its people against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups.”

Under international law, the occupying power (Israel) is not entitled to self-defense against the people it occupies (the Palestinians). A UN-appointed Commission of Inquiry determined last year that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is illegal and called on the General Assembly to seek an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice.

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Biden lets American military info slip during live interview, sparking backlash

President Biden sat down for a recent interview in which he said the United States is low on 155 mm artillery ammunition rounds, sparking outrage and questions of competency from conservatives on social media.

During the interview, which aired Sunday morning, Biden defended his administration for sending cluster munitions to Ukraine as a “transition period” until more munitions are produced.

“This is a war relating to munitions. And they’re running out of that ammunition, and we’re low on it,” Biden told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. “And so, what I finally did, I took the recommendation of the Defense Department to – not permanently – but to allow for this transition period while we get more 155 weapons, these shells, for the Ukrainians.”

Reactions on social media ranged from confused to outrage as conservative pundits and experts alike wondered why Biden was announcing the U.S. shortage during a nationally televised interview that would be seen by adversaries.

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Army exempts trans service members from physical fitness standards

Diversity is our strength. Except, apparently, the more diversity the military seeks, the less strength it requires.

That seems to be the lesson of the Army’s physical fitness standards, which do not apply to people who are getting “gender-affirming” care.

One of the shibboleths of the Left is the claim that increasing the acceptance of “gender-diverse” individuals into the military merely extends the same opportunities to transgender folks as those afforded to people who identify with their natal sex (man, finding the right words is impossible when discussing these issues!).

Combine this idea with the claim that “diversity is our strength,” and you are led to believe that the military will be improved by expanding opportunities to transgender applicants.

Yeah, right. Even the Army doesn’t believe that, and they are the ones saying it.

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HOW A NOTORIOUS GEORGIA ARMY SCHOOL BECAME AMERICA’S TRAINING GROUND FOR GLOBAL TORTURE

Fort Benning, the infamous Georgia U.S. military base, is once again in the news, changing its name to Fort Moore, thereby ditching its Confederate name. Yet none of the media covering the rebranding – not The New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN, ABC, CBS News, USA Today nor The Hill – mentioned the most controversial aspect of the institution.

Across Latin America, the very name of Fort Benning is enough to strike terror into the hearts of millions, bringing back visions of massacres and genocides. This is because the fort is home to the School of the Americas (now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation or WHINSEC), a shadowy academy where around 84,000 Latin American soldiers and police officers have been taught on the U.S. dime on how to kill, torture and how to stamp out political activists.

Thus, these units effectively serve as shock troops for the U.S. Empire, making their country safe for American multinationals to pillage. MintPress has found that no fewer than 16 School of the Americas graduates would go on to become heads of state in their country.

“The school is controversial partly because of its role in promoting US hegemony in Latin America, which undermines the sovereignty and independence of other countries,” James Jordan, national co-coordinator at Alliance for Global Justice, told MintPress, adding,

But even worse, it is how the school has promoted this: teaching methods of torture – even publishing torture manuals, counterintelligence, psyops, repression of political voices that don’t meet the approval of Washington DC. If one looks at cases of human rights abuses by the military throughout Latin America, the number of those responsible who were trained at the School of the Americas is simply staggering.”

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Inside the Pentagon office leading UFO investigations

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office leads the department’s efforts in investigating and understanding what it calls unidentified aerial phenomena, more commonly known as UFOs.

The office, which is within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, was formed last July due to a provision within the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act that expanded the scope of the previous iteration of the office, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Group.

There are six primary lines of effort for the office — surveillance, collection, and reporting; system capabilities and design; intelligence operations and analysis; mitigation and defeat; governance; and science and technology.

Sean Kirkpatrick, the AARO’s first chief, revealed that the office is tracking a total of over 650 UFO cases during a hearing in front of a Senate Armed Services subcommittee in mid-April. He told lawmakers that the office had “prioritized about half of them to be of anomalous interesting value.”

“AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics,” Kirkpatrick added. “In the event sufficient scientific data were ever obtained that a UAP encounter can only be explained by extraterrestrial origin, we are committed to working with our interagency partners at NASA.”

Kirkpatrick’s remarks came after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report in January of this year that noted that “there have been 247 new reports and another 119 that were either since discovered or reported after the preliminary assessment’s time period,” of its initial report from June 2021.

The AARO investigated the 366 claims and found that 163 were characterized as “balloon or balloon-like entities,” 26 were characterized as “unmanned aircraft systems,” and six were attributed to clutter. The office describes the remaining 171 reports as “uncharacterized and unattributed UAP reports,” though it later noted that “many reports lack enough detailed data to enable attribution of UAP with high certainty.”

This report was a follow-up to a “preliminary assessment” on UFOs from the ODNI’s office from June 2021, stating that 144 UFO reports originated from U.S. government sources, with “a handful” of the UFOs “appear[ing] to demonstrate advanced technology.”

“One of the first things that we’re doing” is assessing all existing sensors and calibrating them best to spot and monitor unidentified objects, Kirkpatrick added, according to Defense Scoop, and he noted that only 2%-5% of reported UFO sightings are deemed “possibly really anomalous.”

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Senators want to boost Pentagon UFO office funding, transparency

Senators want to give the Pentagon’s unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, office a major funding boost to scan the skies and near space for threats from China and beyond – part of the fallout from the Chinese spy balloon that U.S. jets shot down after it drifted across the U.S. continent.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., announced a funding boost for the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, tasked with researching and analyzing UAPs, in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. House lawmakers have not made their funding request for the office public. The final spending bills will be debated later this summer.

“With aggression from adversaries on the rise and with incidents like the Chinese spy balloon, it’s critical to our national security that we have strong air domain awareness over our homeland and around U.S. forces operating overseas,” Gillibrand said in a statement. The Senate bill covers more than just the office’s basic operating expenses, as the 2022 defense budget did last year. It also includes measures to reveal more of what they are finding,which will “reduce the stigma around this issue of high public interest,” she added.

The funding push comes after the Chinese spy balloon served as a reminder that U.S. adversaries are increasingly operating in Earth’s upper atmosphere — and as the public’s fascination with unidentified phenomena grow. In a 2021 Gallup poll, more than 40% of respondents blamed alien spacecraft forat least some of the unidentified incidents in recent years.

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