Tag: military industrial complex

AFRICOM Says African Coup Leaders Share ‘Core Values’ With US Military

Gen. Michael Langley, the head of US Africa Command (AFRICOM), was grilled by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on Thursday about African soldiers who received US military training and went on to carry out coups.

Langley insisted only a “very small number” of Africans who receive US training later go on to be involved in coups against civilian governments and said the programs focus on “core values.”

When asked by Gaetz if the US shares “core values” with Guinea coup leader Col. Mamady Doumbouy, Langley replied, “Absolutely … In our curriculum, we do.” Doumboy and his forces carried out a coup in 2021 while US Green Berets were in the country training them, and he still leads Guinea to this day.

Gaetz also referenced a January 2022 coup in Burkina Faso, which was led by Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damib, who had a long history of participating in US training exercises. Later that year, in September 2022, Damib was ousted in another coup led by Capt. Ibrahim Traore. When asked by journalist Nick Turse if Traore also received US training, the Pentagon said it didn’t know.

Writing for Responsible Statecraft, Turse said since 2008, US-trained soldiers in Africa have “attempted at least nine coups (and succeeded in at least eight) across five West African countries, including Burkina Faso (three times), Guinea, Mali (three times), Mauritania, and the Gambia.”

Langley insisted that the “core values” AFRICOM’s training focuses on include “respect for civilian governance” and said the command will “continue with our persistence in assuring that they harbor democratic norms, democratic values, apolitical.” Gaetz said those values aren’t sticking.

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Pentagon Leaders Say New Budget Will Help Prepare For War With China

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told Congress at a Thursday hearing that the Pentagon’s 2024 budget request will help the country prepare for a future war with China.

Milley insisted the Pentagon’s massive $842 billion budget request is meant to deter war but said it will also prepare the US military to fight one. He told the House Appropriations subcommittee on defense that deterring and preparing for a conflict “is extraordinarily expensive, but it’s not as expensive as fighting a war. And this budget prevents war and prepares us to fight it if necessary.”

The Pentagon identified China as the “most comprehensive and serious challenge to US national security strategy” in the 2022 National Defense Strategy, and lately, US military leaders have been speaking more explicitly about how they’re preparing for a direct war with China despite the risk of nuclear war. President Biden has also vowed to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack.

Milley said China’s actions “are moving it down the path toward confrontation and potential conflict with its neighbors and possibly the United States,” echoing similar warnings made by Chinese officials.

Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang warned earlier this month that if the US doesn’t change course on its military buildup in the Asia Pacific and other policies aimed at China, it will lead to “conflict and confrontation.” The Pentagon’s budget request will further expand the US military footprint in the region by funding a buildup plan known as the Pacific Deterrence Initiative.

“This budget includes a 40 percent increase over last year’s for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative to an all-time high of $9.1 billion,” Austin said at the hearing.

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The Military-Intelligentsia Complex: How Higher Education Enables US Militarism

Throughout history, most academics have been the witting or unwitting servants of power. Socrates was accused of failing to honor the gods of Athens and corrupting the youth with his ideas. He was canceled in the ultimate way: sentenced to die. Aristotle, by contrast, tutored the young Alexander the Great, future King of Macedonia, which at the time was occupying Athens. During the rebellion, Aristotle fled to save his skin.

Today, some academics refusing to toe the line are also threatened with death. Chicago University’s John Mearsheimer was placed on the US-funded Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation’s blacklist, where he and others, including myself, were accused of committing “informational terrorism” by expressing fact-based opinions about the war with Russia. At the same time that Ukrainian fascists were placing me on their list, a cabal of liberal staff at my military-funded institution, the University of Plymouth (UK), terminated my position without warning or right of reply.

If we look at the US imperial apparatus, we see that higher education plays a major role.

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US sending $350M in weapons, equipment to Ukraine in latest aid package

The United States will send Ukraine another $350 million in military assistance including more missiles and air defense ammunition, the Biden administration announced Monday.  

The lethal aid package includes more ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and howitzers, as well as ammunition for Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles, High-speed Anti-radiation missiles, anti-tank weapons and riverine boats, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement. 

A separate Defense Department release said the package also included grenade launchers, heavy fuel tankers, mine clearing equipment, mortar systems and rounds and additional artillery.

“This week, as Russia’s unconscionable war of aggression against Ukraine continues at great human cost, we are again reminded of the boundless courage and steadfast resolve of the Ukrainian people, and the strong support for Ukraine across the international community,” Blinken said.  

He also reiterated that the United States will stand with Ukraine “for as long as it takes.” 

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Rolls-Royce wins UK funds for ‘Moon’ nuclear reactors

British aerospace giant Rolls-Royce said Friday it had secured UK funding to develop small nuclear reactors that could provide power on the Moon.

Rolls said the UK Space Agency had offered it £2.9 million ($3.5 million) to help research “how nuclear power could be used to support a future Moon base for astronauts”.

“Scientists and engineers at Rolls-Royce are working on the micro-reactor program to develop technology that will provide power needed for humans to live and work on the Moon,” the aerospace company added in a statement.

Rolls forecast its first car-sized reactor would be ready to be sent to the Moon by 2029.

Friday’s news comes as US space agency NASA aims to return humans to the Moon in 2025.

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Pentagon asks for biggest budget EVER at $842 BILLION – and it could soon hit $1 TRILLION: US wants $11B for hypersonic weapons, $29.8B for missile defense systems, 72 jets and $1.5B to defend Guam from China

The Pentagon has asked Congress for a range of advanced missiles, modern jets, state-of-the-art defense systems and more money to guard against threats from China in its biggest peacetime budget in history.

The $842 billion request includes $11billion for hypersonic weapons, $37.7 billion to modernize the nuclear arsenal and a huge investment in research and development to take on threats from adversaries including China and Russia.

$6.2 billion has been requested for a Columbia ballistic missile submarine, $28.8 billion on missile defense systems, an investment in space warfare and cash to bolster defenses in Guam and Hawaii – as Beijing bulks up its military and threatens Taiwan.

There’s almost $38 billion to buy new nuclear submarines, field the new B-21 stealth bomber and manufacture new ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles 

The huge Department of Defense blueprint would put the military’s annual budget over the $1 trillion threshold in just five years, its chief financial officer said Monday.

It’s the largest request since the peak of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the mid-2000s, when the weight of hundreds of thousands of troops deployed in those overseas conflicts ballooned overseas war spending.

There could be the largest pay raise for troops in more than 20 years, as the Pentagon faces problems with recruitment across all branches.  

The budget could surge again to meet the higher cost of weapons and parts, but also to answer the vulnerabilities that the Ukraine war has exposed in the U.S. defense industrial base, and the strategic threat the U.S. sees from China´s rapidly growing nuclear arsenal, its hypersonic capabilities and its gains in space.

Even if it only grows to account for inflation, ‘the budget will hit a trillion dollars,’ probably before the next five years, Pentagon comptroller Michael McCord told a press briefing.  

‘Maybe that´s going to be a psychological, big watershed moment for many of us, or some of us, but it is inevitable.’

While the number seems astronomically high, it is only about 3 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product. For comparison, during the Second World War the country was spending about one-third of its GDP on defense, McCord said.

The budget request is part of an overall $6.8 trillion spending proposal rolled out by Biden last week, which Republicans say they’ll reject. 

But it’s not clear how they’ll act on the Pentagon proposal.

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Six War Mongering Think Tanks and the Military Contractors that Fund Them

From producing reports and analysis for U.S. policy-makers, to enlisting representatives to write op-eds in corporate media, to providing talking heads for corporate media to interview and give quotes, think tanks play a fundamental role in shaping both U.S. foreign policy and public perception around that foreign policy. Leaders at top think tanks like the Atlantic Council and Hudson Institute have even been called upon to set focus priorities for the House Intelligence Committee. However, one look at the funding sources of the most influential think tanks reveals whose interests they really serve: that of the U.S. military and its defense contractors.

This ecosystem of overlapping networks of government institutions, think tanks, and defense contractors is where U.S. foreign policy is derived, and a revolving door exists among these three sectors. For example, before Biden-appointed head of the Pentagon Lloyd Austin took his current position, he sat on the Board of Directors at Raytheon.

Before Austin’s appointment, current defense policy advisor Michèle Flournoy was also in the running for the position. Flournoy sat on the board of Booz Allen Hamilton, another major Pentagon defense contractor. These same defense contractors also work together with think tanks like the Center for Strategic and International Studies to organize conferences attended by national security officials. On top of all this, since the end of the Cold War, intelligence analysis by the CIA and NSA has increasingly been contracted out to these same defense companies like BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin, among others — a major conflict of interest. In other words, these corporations are in the position to produce intelligence reports which raise the alarm on U.S. “enemy” nations so they can sell more military equipment!

And of course these are the same defense companies that donate hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to think tanks. Given all this, is it any wonder the U.S. government is simultaneously flooding billions of dollars of weaponry into an unwinnable proxy war in Ukraine while escalating a Cold War into a potential military confrontation with China?

The funding to these policy institutes steers the U.S. foreign policy agenda. To give you a scope of how these contributions determine national security priorities, listed below are six of some of the most influential foreign policy think tanks, along with how much in contributions they’ve received from “defense” companies in the last year.

All funding information for these policy institutes was gathered from the most recent annual report that was available online. Also note that this list is compiled from those that make this information publicly available — many think tanks, such as the hawkish American Enterprise Institute, do not release donation sources publicly.

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US Military Group Wants Weaponized Deepfakes, Better Biometric Tools

At least some in the U.S. military have heard enough about deepfakes and they want in.

Investigative-news publisher The Intercept has got hold of a lengthy technology wish list that its editors feel was created by the U.S. Special Operations Command. Two items in the document are biometric in nature.

The command, most often referred to as SOCOM, performs the United States’ most secret and daring military missions. And officers want to add the ability to create and deploy deepfakes against those outside the country.

They also want to better their game when it comes to biometrically identify individuals using, among other techniques, touchless fingerprint capture over long distances and in all environments. Officials also want rapid handheld DNA collection gear. This can be found in the document above under 4.1.2.3 Biometrics.

In all cases, SOCOM wants to cut false positives and the ability to compare scanned biometrics against watch lists on handheld devices or remote databases. Those handhelds will need to perform all common biometric analyses, including DNA comparisons.

But the showstopper is the unit’s deepfake ambitions (at 4.3.1.4. Military Information Support Operations in the document). The leaders of many advanced economies, including various agency heads in the United States, have publicly stated their wariness of deepfakes.

(Three years ago, a NATO panel about deepfakes dismissed concerns about deepfakes. Even last year, there were those telling people not to worry.)

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The Military-Industrial Complex and American Fascism

President Dwight D. Eisenhower (Ike) had it right. The military-industrial complex (MIC) is fundamentally antidemocratic The national security state has become the fourth branch of government and arguably the most powerful one. It gets the most money, more than half of the federal discretionary budget, even as the military remains America’s most trusted institution, despite a woeful record in wars since 1945.

A colleague, Christian Sorensen, says that when we look closely at the MIC we see something akin to American fascism. As he put it to me: “Our fascism certainly doesn’t look like past European movements, but it is far more durable, has killed millions and millions (SE Asia, Indonesia, Central America, Middle East), and has manifold expressions: wars abroad, wars at home, surveillance state, digital border, militarized law enforcement, economic warfare in the form of sanctions, militarization of space.”

It’s hard not to agree with him, not in the sense of Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy but in the sense of concentrated government/corporate power that draws sustenance from nationalism at home and imperialism abroad. It’s true that America doesn’t have goose-stepping soldiers in the street. There are no big military parades (though Donald Trump once wanted one). It still seems like we have contending political parties. But when we look deeper, a militant nationalism and aggressive imperialism powered by corporations and enforced by government, including notably the Supreme Court, is the salient feature of this American moment.

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US Begins ‘Training Assessment’ For Ukrainian Pilots On F-16s

The White House has so far ruled out calls to provide the Ukrainian government with F-16 fighter jets, but clearly the idea is still on the table and Biden may be close to pulling the trigger amid intense administration discussions.

“Two Ukrainian pilots are currently in the United States undergoing an assessment to determine how long it could take to train them to fly attack aircraft, including F-16 fighter jets, according to two congressional officials and a senior U.S. official,” a weekend NBC report indicates.

“The Ukrainians’ skills are being evaluated on simulators at a U.S. military base in Tucson, Arizona, the officials said, and they may be joined by more of their fellow pilots soon,” the report continues.

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