Tag: military industrial complex

Who Benefits From US Government Claims That The UFO Threat Is Increasing “Exponentially”?

A US senate report which is an addendum to the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 has people talking due to the surprising statements it includes about the US government’s current position on UFOs.

I mean Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.

I mean Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena.

This latest moniker for the thing we all still think of as UFOs is the US government’s way of addressing how these alleged appearances, which began entering mainstream attention in 2017, are said to be able to transition seamlessly from traveling through the air to moving underwater in what’s been labeled “cross-domain transmedium” movement. Because branches of the US war machine are roughly broken up into forces specializing in air, sea, land and space operations, the notion that these things move between those domains gets special attention.

UFO enthusiasts are largely focusing on a part of the addendum which oddly stipulates that the government’s newly named Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena Joint Program Office shall not be looking into objects “that are positively identified as man-made,” because of the obvious implications of that phrase. This is understandable; if you’ve got a government office that’s responsible for investigating unidentified phenomena, you can just say it won’t be looking into phenomena that are “positively identified”. You wouldn’t have to add “identified as man-made” unless you had a specific reason for doing so.

But for me the claim that really jumps off the page, authored by Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mark Warner, is the claim that these unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena are a “threat” that is increasing “exponentially”.

“At a time when cross-domain transmedium threats to United States national security are expanding exponentially, the Committee is disappointed with the slow pace of DoD-led efforts to establish the office to address those threats,” Warner writes in the report.

“Exponentially” is a mighty strong word. Taken in its least literal sense, it means that threats to US national security from UFOs are increasing at an alarmingly rapid rate. That they have swiftly become much greater than they used to be.

What is the basis for this incendiary claim? What information are US lawmakers being given to make them draw such conclusions and make such assertions? There’s a long chain of information handling between an alleged UFO encounter and a US senator’s pen, and corruption can occur at any point in that chain (including the first and last link).

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These Are The 10 Biggest Military Spending Nations In The World

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has continued, military spending and technology has come under the spotlight as the world tracked Western arms shipments and watched how HIMAR rocket launchers and other weaponry affected the conflict.

But, as Visual Capitalist’s Niccolo Conte details below, developing, exporting, and deploying military personnel and weaponry costs nations hundreds of billions every year. In 2021, global military spending reached $2.1 trillion, rising for its seventh year in a row.

Using data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), this visualization shows which countries spent the most on their military in 2021, along with their overall share of global military spending.

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Pentagon announces extra $775M in weapons to Ukraine

The United States will send another $775 million in missiles, drones, vehicles and mine clearing equipment to Ukraine to help in its war with Russia as the conflict enters a near standstill, the Pentagon announced Friday.

The new assistance package will include 16 howitzers and ammunition, AGM-88 High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles (HARM), ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, 15 Scan Eagle reconnaissance drones, and armored vehicles, among other armaments, a senior Defense official told reporters. 

The package comes at a critical time as Ukraine and Russia battle for control of the eastern part of Ukraine.  

Nearly six months into the war, the two sides are locked in a near operational standstill, with neither Kyiv nor Moscow able to drum up enough ground troops and weapons to turn the course of the conflict, Western officials assess.  

The extra shot of lethal aid could help Ukrainian forces gain the upper hand as Russian troops struggle with losses inflicted by U.S.-made missile systems.  

“I would say that you are seeing a complete and total lack of progress by the Russians on the battlefield,” the senior Defense official said, adding that it’s important to both sustain Ukrainian battlefield successes and enable them to be make gains as the conflict shifts.   

“We want to make sure that Ukraine has a steady stream of ammunition to meet its needs, and that’s what we’re doing with this package.” 

The latest lethal aid follows the $1 billion in weapons and equipment given to the embattled country earlier this month, the largest such tranche pledged since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. 

The package also pushes the United States past the $10 billion mark for military assistance for Ukraine under the Biden administration, spread out over 19 packages since August 2021. 

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Report: post-9/11 era one of the most militarily aggressive in US history

The United States has conducted nearly 400 military interventions since 1776, according to innovative research by scholars Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft. 

Half of those conflicts and other uses of force – including displays and threats of force as well as covert and other operations – occurred between 1950 and 2019, the last year covered in a new dataset, introduced by Kushi and Toft in a Journal of Conflict Resolution article published earlier this week. More than a quarter of them have taken place since the end of the Cold War.    

The United States has carried out 34 percent of its 392 interventions against countries in Latin America and the Caribbean; 23 percent in East Asia and the Pacific region; 14 percent in the Middle East and North Africa; and just 13 percent in Europe and Central Asia, according to a newly refined version of the Military Intervention Project (MIP) dataset — a venture of the Center for Strategic Studies at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. 

In addition to providing the most accurate count ever of U.S. military interventions — doubling the number of cases found in existing data, while also employing rigorous sourcing methods — the MIP offers 200 variables that allow for complex analyses of drivers and outcomes of wars and other uses of force.

Crucially, Kushi and Toft, the director of the Fletcher School’s Center for Strategic Studies, found that U.S. interventions have “increased and intensified” in recent years. While the Cold War era (1946–1989) and the period between 1868–1917 were the most “militaristically active” for the United States, the post-9/11 era has already assumed third position in all of U.S. history.  

Unlike earlier eras in which displays and threats of force were employed, such posturing short of military violence has been absent in recent years. The United States, they found, has actually “engaged in 30 interventions at level 4 (usage of force) or 5 (war).”

Until the end of the Cold War, note Kushi and Toft, U.S. military hostility was generally proportional to that of its rivals.  Since then, “the U.S. began to escalate its hostilities as its rivals deescalate it, marking the beginning of America’s more kinetic foreign policy.”  This recent pattern of international relations conducted largely through armed force, what Toft has termed “kinetic diplomacy,” has increasingly targeted the Middle East and Africa.  These regions have seen both large-scale U.S. wars, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, and low-profile combat in nations such as Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, and Tunisia. 

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US Government Reveals that It’s Providing Ukraine With Previously Unannounced Missiles

The United States military has recently admitted to the delivery of American anti-radar missiles to Ukraine. According to Press TV, these missiles are part of a plan “to facilitate the targeting of Russian radar systems by Ukrainian warplanes.”

The US Defense Department’s Undersecretary for Policy Colin Kahl announced at a press briefing on August 8, 2022 that the DOD sent several missiles to Ukraine. Though Kahl did not specify how many missiles were sent and when they were sent.

Per a CNN report released on August 9, also called attention to how Kahl did not explicitly spell out what kind of anti-radiation missile was sent to Ukraine.  

CNN was able to get in touch with a military official who said that the missile was an AGM-88 High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missile (HARM). 

In addition, the Pentagon official revealed that the US assisted Ukraine with the delivery of spare parts for Russian Mig-29 planes to keep the Ukrainian Air Force’s fleet operating. Kahl claimed that the missiles “can have effects on Russian radars and other things.”

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Pentagon announces additional $1B in lethal aid to Ukraine

The United States has greenlighted the largest military assistance package to Ukraine thus far, preparing to send $1 billion in ammunition for advanced rocket systems, vehicles and explosives to help the country beat back the Russian invasion.    

The new assistance package will include ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), as well as 75,000 rounds of 155 mm artillery ammunition and 50 armored medical treatment vehicles, according to a Pentagon statement released Monday.  

“It is the largest single drawdown of U.S. arms and equipment utilizing this authority, and this package provides a significant amount of additional ammunition, weapons, and equipment — the types of which the Ukrainian people are using so effectively to defend their country,” according to the statement 

The U.S. government has now approved nearly $10 billion in security assistance for Ukraine over the course of 18 packages since August 2021. 

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‘Hellfire Missiles’: US Military Fired Upon UFO That Looked Like ‘F*cking Jellyfish,’ Filmmaker Says

While the Pentagon tries to gain new insights into the nature of the unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), as UFOs are referred to today, US documentary filmmaker and ufologist Jeremy Corbell has alleged that one such object recently came under fire from troops on Earth.

During his appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Corbell claimed that the “increased frequency” of UFO over “active warzones” has led to the creation of rules “about whether to fire or not” on these objects.

According to Corbell, the documents he has been “exposed to” suggest that any object that looks like it could be carrying a payload, thus posing a potential threat, is to be fired at.

“And there’s been such an increased frequency since 2021 that it has been pushed up to kind of a critical where they are, like, ‘okay, these things are in our airspace, we could have collisions,’” he said. “But more importantly, we see other countries firing on these – Russia, Syria. We know it is not their assets. So the question is, whose are these?”

Corbell also claimed that he has images of one object that “we fired on” – likely referring to the US military by “we” – which he described as looking like a “f*cking jellyfish.”

“It is stiff, about the size of, like, a big coffee table – that’s the one at least that we fired on recently,” he said.

Earlier in the conversation, when Rogan asked him what he meant by “firing,” Corbell promptly replied “Hellfire missiles.”

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The U.S. Army, not Meta, is building the metaverse

In terms of industry progress towards the cloud-supported, scalable metaverse, no organization has come further than the U.S. Army. Their Synthetic Training Environment (STE) has been in development since 2017. The STE aims to replace all legacy simulation programs and integrate different systems into a single, connected system for combined arms and joint training. 

The STE fundamentally differs from traditional, server-based approaches. For example, it will host a 1:1 digital twin of the Earth on a cloud architecture that will stream high fidelity (photo-realistic) terrain data to connected simulations. New terrain management platforms such as Mantle ETM will ensure that all connected systems operate on exactly the same terrain data. For example, trainees in a tank simulator will see the same trees, bushes and buildings as the pilot in a connected flight simulator, facilitating combined arms operations.

Cloud scalability (that is, scaling with available computational power) will allow for a better real-world representation of essential details such as population density and terrain complexity that traditional servers could not support. The ambition of STE is to automatically pull from available data resources to render millions of simulated entities, such as AI-based vehicles or pedestrians, all at once.

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