Tag: military industrial complex

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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The US Military Is Taking Generative AI Out for a Spin

Matthew Strohmeyer is sounding a little giddy. The US Air Force colonel has been running data-based exercises inside the US Defense Department for years. But for the first time, he tried a large-language model to perform a military task.

“It was highly successful. It was very fast,” he tells me a couple of hours after giving the first prompts to the model. “We are learning that this is possible for us to do.”

Large-language models, LLMs for short, are trained on huge swaths of internet data to help artificial intelligence predict and generate human-like responses to user prompts. They are what power generative AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

Five of these are being put through the paces as part of a broader series of Defense Department experiments that are focused on developing data integration and digital platforms across the military. The exercises are run by the Pentagon’s digital and AI office and military top brass, with participation from US allies. The Pentagon won’t say which LLMs are in testing, though Scale AI, a San Francisco-based startup, says its new Donovan product is among the LLM platforms being tested.

The use of LLMs would represent a major shift for the military, where so little is digitized or connected. Currently, making a request for information to a specific part of the military can take several staffers hours or even days to complete, as they jump on phones or rush to make slide decks, Strohmeyer says.

In one test, one of the AI tools completed a request in 10 minutes.

“That doesn’t mean it’s ready for primetime right now. But we just did it live. We did it with secret-level data,” he says of the experiment, adding it could be deployed by the military in the very near term. 

Strohmeyer says they have fed the models with classified operational information to inform sensitive questions. The long-term aim of such exercises is to update the US warhorse so it can use AI-enabled data in decision-making, sensors and ultimately firepower.

Dozens of companies, including Palantir Technologies Inc., co-founded by Peter Thiel, and Anduril Industries Inc. are developing AI-based decision platforms for the Pentagon.

Microsoft Corp. recently announced users of the Azure Government cloud computer service could access AI models from OpenAI. The Defense Department is among Azure Government’s customers.

The military exercise, which runs until July 26, will also serve as a test of whether military officials can use LLMs to generate entirely new options they’ve never considered. 

For now, the US military team will experiment by asking LLMs for help planning the military’s response to an escalating global crisis that starts small and then shifts into the Indo-Pacific region.

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Report Shows How Military Industrial Complex Sets Media Narrative on Ukraine

Wealthy donors have long funded think tanks with official-sounding names that produce research that reflects the interests of those funders (Extra!, 7/13). The weapons industry is a major contributor to these idea factories; a recent report from the Quincy Institute (6/1/23) demonstrates just how much influence war profiteers have on the national discourse.

The Quincy Institute—whose own start-up funding came mainly from George Soros and Charles Koch—looked at 11 months of Ukraine War coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, from March 1, 2022, through January 31, 2023, and counted each time one of 33 leading think tanks was mentioned. Of the 15 think tanks most often mentioned in the coverage, only one—Human Rights Watch—does not take funding from Pentagon contractors. Quincy’s analysis found that the media were seven times more likely to cite think tanks with war industry ties than they were to cite think tanks without war industry ties.

With 157 mentions each, the top two think tanks were the Atlantic Council and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Both of these think tanks receive millions from the war industry. The Atlantic Council has long been the brain trust of NATO, the military organization whose expansion towards Russia’s borders was a critical factor in Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine. (See FAIR.org, 3/4/22.) Both think tanks receive hundreds of thousands of dollars from Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, companies which have already been awarded billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts as a result of the war in Ukraine.

CSIS was revealed in a New York Times expose (8/7/16) to produce content that reflected the weapons industry priorities of its funders.  It also “initiated meetings with Defense Department officials and congressional staff to push for the recommendations” of military funders.

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UFO fever grips Washington: Republican Congressman says UFOs may be ‘ancient civilization’ as Senator Marco Rubio worries craft retrieval programs are being run by ‘internal military complex’ that is ‘accountable to no one’

UFO fever appears to be gripping Washington after a series of extraordinary claims and revelations from lawmakers this week.

Claims of an illegal, hidden UFO crash retrieval program operating within the shadows were made public this month by Air Force and intelligence agency veteran David Grusch.    

Congressman and Marine veteran Mike Gallagher let loose his theories on the mystery this Tuesday, suggesting that UFOs might be time-traveling craft piloted by humans from the future, as in the 1984 film ‘The Terminator.’

Florida Senator Marco Rubio also revealed he had been approached by several high ranking Government officials with top-level security clearances who said they had ‘first-hand’ knowledge of UFO programs.

Appearing on ESPN analyst Pat McAfee’s sports talk show, Rep Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican, floated his hypothesis that the unexplained phenomena ‘could actually be an ancient civilization that’s just been hiding here and is suddenly showing itself.’

But Rep. Gallagher also brought the conversation back down to Earth, airing his concerns that the airborne mysteries might prove to be breakthrough aerospace technology mastered by a US foreign adversary. 

‘I’m probably the most interested in is whether it’s adversary technology, particularly from China,’ said Gallagher, who is also the chair of the House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. 

Whether or not we are alone in the universe, the congressman is not alone among his fellow lawmakers in openly airing his UFO concerns. 

Senator Rubio — in the unaired portions of his interview with NewsNation on Monday — voiced concern over the apparent and ‘very problematic’ lawlessness of the alleged UFO crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program.

Behind closed doors, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, where Senator Rubio is vice chairman, has heard even more ‘firsthand’ testimony on these covert UFO programs from senior military and intelligence whistleblowers beyond Grusch.  

In a complete and uncut transcript of his recent interview, supplied to the DailyMail.com by a member of Senator Rubio’s office, Rubio described the alleged UFO program as ‘in essence, some sort of an internal military complex that’s their own government and is accountable to no one.’

‘It would be a huge problem,’ the Florida Republican said, ‘if it’s even partially true.’ 

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