Tag: military industrial complex

Global Censorship Strategy: US And UK Military Contractors Conspiracy

Newly leaked documents have revealed a secretive initiative by U.S. and UK military contractors to establish a global censorship framework in 2018, according to a new report by journalists behind the Twitter Files.

ublic has published a report by Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi claiming that a whistleblower has surfaced with documents suggesting that U.S. and UK military contractors, including prominent defense researchers and cybersecurity experts, orchestrated a comprehensive plan for global censorship. These documents, rivaling the significance of the Twitter Files and Facebook Files, which both Taibbi and Shellenberger contributed to, depict the formation of an “anti-disinformation” group named the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL). Allegedly a “volunteer project” by data scientists and defense veterans at its outset, CTIL’s tactics were seemingly integrated into projects of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The CTIL documents fill gaps left by previous disclosures, painting a detailed portrait of the so-called “Censorship Industrial Complex.” This network, comprising over 100 government agencies and NGOs, has been instrumental in pushing for censorship on social media platforms and spreading targeted propaganda. The documents include detailed accounts of digital censorship programs, military and intelligence community involvement, partnerships with civil society organizations and media, and the deployment of covert techniques like sock puppet accounts.

The whistleblower’s revelations highlight the pivotal role of CTIL in the creation and expansion of the Censorship Industrial Complex. Spearheaded by Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp, a former UK defense researcher, and others, CTIL developed a comprehensive censorship framework in 2019. This framework was later adopted by various governmental and non-governmental organizations, including DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Keep reading

US Army Enlists University of Arkansas at Little Rock To Fight Online “Misinformation”

The US Army has announced a “combat” partnership (effective through 2025) with the publicly-funded University of Arkansas at Little Rock – and what they plan to “combat” together is none other than whatever is deemed to be online disinformation, but also, something defined as “cognitive threats.”

And by that, they don’t mean all manner of government and formally or otherwise government-associated entities falling over themselves trying to pass off various forms of speech suppression and censorship as fighting “disinformation.”

But there’s no denying that this, too, could fall under the definition of misinformation and cognitive threats offered here – namely, the goal is “to detect and combat bad actors online who are trying to manipulate how and what populations think.”

But if an actor is perceived as “good” – does manipulating how and what populations (note the plural) think, then magically become a good thing?

Sarcasm aside – the new initiative is backed with a grant worth $5 million. What the deal reveals is that more and more universities in the US are getting “hired” – whether by non-profits, or, again, the government – to work toward this goal via various dedicated research hubs.

In UA Little Rock’s case it’s called the Collaboration for Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies (COSMOS) Research Center. Beside the US Army’s own Research Office, another key player in putting this project together was Senator John Boozman.

“War is on the social media platforms,” is one of the comments cited in reports about this development, but curiously, it doesn’t come from a military representative but a budding academic with the COSMOS Research Center, graduate assistant Mano Har.

Keep reading

US Spends Billions On Overseas Wars, But Who Really Benefits?

Fears over incentivizing global conflicts are rising as the Biden administration requests more than $105 billion in supplemental security spending.

The administration says the money, primarily for Israel and Ukraine, will be good for the economy.

President Joe Biden has described the mammoth spending package as “a smart investment” that will “pay dividends” to U.S. security interests.

Likewise, Assistant Secretary of State James O’Brien described the supplemental as “a very good bargain.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the money will “flow through our defense industrial base, creating American jobs in more than 30 states.”

Many are skeptical of the administration’s claims, however, and believe that the massive investment in the defense industry will squander the nation’s ability to adequately address social and infrastructure needs.

Presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy Jr. is among them.

“Creating jobs is a poor excuse for a foreign policy that wreaks mayhem around the world,” Mr. Kennedy told The Epoch Times in an email.

“If we want to increase employment in good manufacturing and construction jobs, instead of making weapons we should repair our infrastructure and manufacture products that actually serve human well-being.”

Keep reading

Israeli ‘Iron Beam’ Lasers Are ‘Future Of Warfare’

Last year we reported on Israel’s development of a ground-based laser defense system dubbed ‘Iron Beam,’ which then-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called “a game-changer” that could “bankrupt” the enemy.

Now, it’s being reported that the system – which has been in development by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems for 15 years, and was originally set for a 2025 rollout, will be deployed more quickly than that due to the Israel-Hamas war, and it may be placed in service as early as 2024.

More than a hundred Rafael engineers have reportedly been working on this project, considered one of the most significant technological challenges ever faced by the Israeli defense industries, in order to create a fast and effective interception system, with inexhaustible and near cost-free ammunition.

Recent tests of Iron Beam in the Negev have shown promising results, with the system successfully intercepting various airborne threats. The heart of the system is an electric laser pointer, capable of targeting and sending out a powerful laser beam, invisible to the naked eye.

Since the war erupted on October 7, more than 10,000 projectiles have been fired at Israel, including 3,000 in the first hours of the conflict. Rafael and the Israeli Defense Ministry have considered the current operations as an opportunity to test the Iron Beam under real combat conditions. –i24news

Speaking with Calcalist, one of Rafael’s iron beam program managers expressed high hopes for the system, saying “Our aim is to reach a state where the enemy feels totally powerless. He has to understand that our laser pointers, deployed where needed, intercept and destroy all his attacks, almost instantly after they are launched, long before they reach Israeli territory or threaten anyone else. In such a scenario, the activation of warning sirens might even become unnecessary.”

Keep reading

THE ARCHITECTS OF THE IRAQ WAR: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

THE U.S. AND its allies invaded Iraq 20 years ago in Operation Iraqi Freedom. President George W. Bush’s press secretary Ari Fleischer twice accidentally referred to it as Operation Iraqi Liberation, which was definitely not its official name and would have generated an unfortunate acronym.

The men and women who launched this catastrophic, criminal war have paid no price over the past two decades. On the contrary, they’ve been showered with promotions and cash. There are two ways to look at this.

One is that their job was to make the right decisions for America (politicians) and to tell the truth (journalists). This would mean that since then, the system has malfunctioned over and over again, accidentally promoting people who are blatantly incompetent failures.

Another way to look at it is that their job was to start a war that would extend the U.S. empire and be extremely profitable for the U.S. defense establishment and oil industry, with no regard for what’s best for America or telling the truth. This would mean that they were extremely competent, and the system has not been making hundreds of terrible mistakes, but rather has done exactly the right thing by promoting them.

You can read this and then decide for yourself which perspective makes the most sense.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.”

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading