Tag: military industrial complex

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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Congress Is Not Allowed To Know About TOP SECRET Gain Of Function Research Committee

Appearing on Fox News to discuss the first ever Senate hearing on gain of function research, Rand Paul revealed that there is a committee that is supposed to oversee such experimentation with potentially lethal viruses, but that it is above the oversight of Congress.

Paul noted that according to scientists who testified on Capitol Hill yesterday, “the committee that is supposed to review these viruses is secret.”

“We don’t know the names. We don’t know that they ever meet, and we don’t have any records of their meetings,” the Senator reiterated, adding “It’s top-secret. Congress is not allowed to know. So whether the committee actually exists, we’re uncertain.”

“We do know that they’ve met three times and there are thousands of gain-of-function research proposals. They’ve only met three times, they’ve only reviewed three projects,” Paul continued.

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DARPA To Create New Technology Powerful Enough To See Through Concrete Walls

U.S. Military officials announced Friday a new program of teams from various sectors plan to create a subatomic particle compact source powerful enough to see through thick concrete walls, underground tunnels, and chambers hundreds of meters below the Earth’s surface.

In a press release, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) said the personnel would make deeply penetrating terrestrial muons, subatomic particles about 200 times heavier than electrons. Such particles could create energy beams up to hundreds of giga-electronvolts to scan or characterize materials for scientific discovery and national security.

Mark Wrobel, the program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, said the ever-advancing high-peak-power laser technology could produce terrestrial muons that “can travel easily through dozens to hundreds of meters of water, solid rock, or soil’ if the energy was high enough.

“MuS2 will lay the groundwork needed to examine the feasibility of developing compact and transportable muon sources,” Wrobel said.

Although officials called the process of harnessing the primary sources used to create such muons for advanced surveillance “tedious and not very practical,” they have proven themselves effective. In the late 1960s, scientists used muons to examine about 20 percent of the interior chambers within the walls of great pyramids in Egypt. To this day, scientists still are using are using cosmic radiation to see inside the pyramids.

The Defense Department and other federal agencies have used advanced sources to generate subatomic particles that enabled officials to scan cargo containers with dangerous materials or test an aircraft for internal defects. Still not strong enough, however, to “map the core of a volcano from the outside, or peer deep underground to locate chambers and tunnels.”

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