Tag: military industrial complex

Both Parties Always Serve the Military-Industrial Complex

In 2023, despite skyrocketing inflation, debt, as well as rising sociopolitical divisions, leadership among both the Republicans and Democrats will always agree that substantially more US taxpayer money, never less, should be poured into the military industrial complex, according to an analysis by Judd Legum.

Case in point, the debt ceiling agreement established between the Joe Biden administration and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy caps military spending at a record $886 billion, exactly matching Biden’s mammoth budget request.

The GOP was seeking large increases in military spending and would only entertain cuts in non-military expenditures. The agreed upon war budget represents a 3.3% increase over the current year. The tentative deal still needs to make its way through Congress, where hawks will fiercely oppose any and all military spending caps.

Half of this money will go to defense contractors with Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics receiving the lion’s share. Some of these arms industry giants are currently ensnared in a massive “price gouging” scandal, with a bipartisan group of Senators demanding an investigation be opened at the Pentagon’s highest levels.

Legum highlights the lack of any “peace dividend.” after the disastrous 20 year war and occupation in Afghanistan. “This military spending increase has occurred even as Biden ended the war in Afghanistan, the military’s longest-running and most costly foreign intervention… Each year, the costs go up dramatically,” Legum writes.

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Taiwan Receives Stinger Missiles as Part of Free Military Aid Package from US

Taiwanese media has reported that Taiwan received delivery of Raytheon-made Stinger anti-aircraft missiles from the US as part of a $500 million package of free military aid that Washington has been preparing for Taipei.

According to Taipei Times, the Stingers arrived in a Boeing 747 on Thursday night. So far, the US and Taiwanese governments have not confirmed the delivery, but both sides said recently that the $500 million in weapons would be sent soon.

The $500 million in free weapons is being pulled from US military stockpiles using the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), the primary way the Biden administration has been arming Ukraine. The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) includes $1 billion in PDA for Taiwan.

The military aid for Taiwan is unprecedented as the US has sold weapons to the island since severing relations with Taipei in 1979 to open up with China but hasn’t provided arms free of charge.

The NDAA also included $2 billion for Taiwan under the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing program, which gives foreign governments money to purchase US arms. But the FMF funds did not make it past the appropriations committee.

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Pentagon Has Lost ‘Hundreds of Thousands’ of F-35 Parts Worldwide

It was billed as the ultimate joint-fighter project that promised to make all other combat jets redundant. However, two decades on, the Pentagon still can’t managed to pull it together in any coherent fashion. 

By now, the grounding F-35 planes has become a regular feature in defense news and analysis, as experts continue to commiserate over the constant stream of technical and logistical errors which have plagued the multibillion dollar program.

Whether its the future engine choice resulting delays in production, the lack of operable engines, subsystem design flaws, or perhaps incidents involving the jet’s propulsion and thermal management systems, its onboard oxygen system, its custom helmet-mounted display, and even its susceptibility to lighting strikes – the bloated F-35 boondoggle is still struggling to make sense.

Now we have a global failure in the Pentagon’s supply chains and logistics resulting in loss of money and delays…

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America’s Wars and the US Debt Crisis

In the year 2000, the U.S. government debt was $3.5 trillion, equal to 35% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). By 2022, the debt was $24 trillion, equal to 95% of GDP. The U.S. debt is soaring, hence America’s current debt crisis. Yet both Republicans and Democrats are missing the solution: stopping America’s wars of choice and slashing military outlays.

Suppose the government’s debt had remained at a modest 35% of GDP, as in 2000. Today’s debt would be $9 trillion, as opposed to $24 trillion. Why did the U.S. government incur the excess $15 trillion in debt?

The single biggest answer is the U.S. government’s addiction to war and military spending. According to the Watson Institute at Brown University, the cost of U.S. wars from fiscal year 2001 to fiscal year 2022 amounted to a whopping $8 trillion, more than half of the extra $15 trillion in debt. The other $7 trillion arose roughly equally from budget deficits caused by the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Entertainment or propaganda? Washington’s insidious grip on the arts

AN EVIL dictator is on the brink of making a nuclear bomb at a secret facility carved deep inside the Zagros mountains. With no option, the American military deploys jets and, against all odds, destroys the factory — then flies home to the strains of [Highway to the] Danger Zone.

An evil dictator is on the brink of using a nuclear bomb. With no option, the American military deploys secret agents and, against all odds, triggers a democratic revolution by blowing up the dictator in his helicopter to the strains of Katy Perry’s Firework.

I‘ve just outlined the plots of Top Gun: Maverick starring Tom Cruise and The Interview starring Seth Rogan.

But it also describes real world aspirations — here towards Iran and North Korea — from top policymakers across Nato.

These parallels are no coincidence. Because each film was actually subject to script changes imposed by Washington. In the documentary Theaters of War, we show how the CIA and Defence Department have exercised editorial control over thousands of films and TV shows in exchange for lending equipment like helicopters to producers to use on screen.

Such films reflect and construct the paranoid fantasies of our imperial masters, most of them with direct script input: Iran taking Western hostages in Ben Affleck’s Argo; kindly marines unjustly slaughtered for handing out grain to hungry Africans in Black Hawk Down; US politicians too innocent to realise that arming Islamic terrorists will lead to 9/11 in the Julia Roberts hit Charlie Wilson’s War, and the Gerard Butler film Kandahar in which an evil dictator is on the brink of manufacturing a nuclear bomb at a secret facility carved deep inside a mountain. With no option and against all odds…

Is it any wonder that 30 per cent of Americans in a poll said they want to bomb Agrabah, the capital city in Disney’s Aladdin?

Is it any wonder that our politicians, as though clutching rosary beads, prefigure Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with the word “illegal” with no sense of irony and “unprovoked” with no sense of history? When was the last thing you saw depicting Russia which didn’t have it crawling with tyrants? Red Dawn? Rambo; Air Force One; Hunter Killer; James Bond; Jack Ryan; 24; Homeland; Stranger Things…the 6 O’Clock News?

The US government has suppressed scripts — but on others it has overturned their original messages. In the Iron Man screenplay, Robert Downey Jr’s hero was opposed to his father’s arms business. After rewrites he became the ultimate evangelist for a bloodless industry: “Peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy.”

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BIDEN IS SELLING WEAPONS TO THE MAJORITY OF THE WORLD’S AUTOCRACIES

SINCE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN came into office in 2021, he hasdescribed a “battle between democracies and autocracies” in which the U.S. and other democracies strive to create a peaceful world. The reality, however, is that the Biden administration has helped increase the military power of a large number of authoritarian countries. According to an Intercept review of recently released government data, the U.S. sold weapons to at least 57 percent of the world’s autocratic countries in 2022.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been the world’s biggest weapons dealer, accounting for about 40 percent of all arms exports in a given year. In general, these exports are funded through grants or sales. There are two pathways for the latter category: foreign military sales and direct commercial sales.

The U.S. government acts as an intermediary for FMS acquisitions: It buys the materiel from a company first and then delivers the goods to the foreign recipient. DCS acquisitions are more straightforward: They’re the result of an agreement between a U.S. company and a foreign government. Both categories of sales require the government’s approval.

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Proof that the Vaccines Were a Military-Backed Countermeasure

Here is a high-level review of the manufacturing contracts between US DOD and Moderna. 

Moderna’s injection, mRNA-1273 is co-owned with the US Government, as the company has been funded by the defense research grants for years and also received intellectual property transfers from the US Government, in addition to preclinical and clinical research work conducted for Moderna by the NIH Vaccine Research Center. The NIH and Moderna each have a separate Investigational New Drug number for this product.

Moderna entered 2 types of contracts with the US Government for Spikevax injection:

  • “Vaccine” contract and amendments that specifies R&D projects that the US Government ordered and paid for. Note that in Pfizer’s case no R&D activities were ordered or paid for by the US Government, as these were excluded from the scope of the contract.
  • “Manufacturing” contract(s) that ordered a large-scale manufacturing. This is different from Pfizer manufacturing contracts as the words “demonstration” and “prototype” are not used. I believe this is because OTA contracts must be for prototypes but FAR contracting doesn’t have to be.

Note on redactions. In both Moderna and Pfizer’s contracts many areas are redacted indicating a reason for redaction – the “redaction codes.” Redacted content has been given codes b (4) and b (6), standing for:

(b) (4) Disclosure of information that would affect the application of advanced technology in a U.S. weapons system,

and

(b) (6) Disclosure of information, including information of foreign governments, that would cause serious harm to relations between the United States and a foreign government or to ongoing diplomatic activities of the United States.

There are several versions of the contract available, plus amendments. The first version was signed on August 9, 2020 and the last available version is June 15, 2021. In one of them the name of the signatory on the Moderna side was redacted with (b)(6). In another version it’s unredacted – it was Hamilton Bennett, a senior director of vaccine access and partnerships. 

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Not Your Grandfather’s Military-Industrial Complex

Honestly, it should take your breath away. We are on a planet prepping for further war in a staggering fashion. A watchdog group, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), just released its yearly report on global military spending. Given the war in Ukraine, you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that, in 2022, such spending in Western and Central Europe surpassed levels set as the Cold War ended in the last century. Still, it wasn’t just Europe or Russia where military budgets leaped. They were rising rapidly in Asia as well (with significant jumps in Japan and India, as well as for the world’s second-largest military spender, China). And that doesn’t even include spiking military budgets in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere on this embattled planet. In fact, last year, 12 of the 15 largest military spenders topped their 2021 outlays.

None of that is good news. Still, it goes without saying that one country overshadowed all the rest – and you know just which one I mean. At $877 billion last year (not including the funds “invested” in its intelligence agencies and what’s still known as “the Department of Homeland Security”), the U.S. military budget once again left the others in the dust. Keep in mind that, according to SIPRI, Pentagon spending, heading for a trillion dollars in the near future, represented a staggering 39% of all (yes, all!) global military spending last year. That’s more than the next 11 largest military budgets combined. (And that is up from nine not so long ago.) Keep in mind as well that, despite such funding, we’re talking about a military, as I pointed out recently, which hasn’t won a war of significance since 1945.

With that in mind, let Pentagon experts and TomDispatch regulars William Hartung and Ben Freeman explain how we’ve reached such a perilous point from the time in 1961 when a former five-star general, then president, warned his fellow citizens of the dangers of endlessly overfunding the – a term he invented – military-industrial complex. Now, let Hartung and Freeman explore how, more than six decades later, that very complex reigns supreme. 

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Biden Sending $325 Million In More Military Aid To Ukraine

Biden Administration Announces Additional Security Assistance for Ukraine / For Immediate Release:

Today, the Department of Defense (DoD) announced critical new security assistance for Ukraine. This includes the authorization of a Presidential Drawdown of security assistance with more ammunition for U.S.-provided HIMARS, artillery rounds, and anti-armor capabilities essential to strengthening Ukraine’s defenders on the battlefield valued at up to $325 million.

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GEORGIA NATIONAL GUARD WILL USE PHONE LOCATION TRACKING TO RECRUIT HIGH SCHOOL CHILDREN

THE GEORGIA ARMY NATIONAL GUARD plans to combine two deeply controversial practices — military recruiting at schools and location-based phone surveillance — to persuade teens to enlist, according to contract documents reviewed by The Intercept.

The federal contract materials outline plans by the Georgia Army National Guard to geofence 67 different public high schools throughout the state, targeting phones found within a one-mile boundary of their campuses with recruiting advertisements “with the intent of generating qualified leads of potential applicants for enlistment while also raising awareness of the Georgia Army National Guard.” Geofencing refers generally to the practice of drawing a virtual border around a real-world area and is often used in the context of surveillance-based advertising as well as more traditional law enforcement and intelligence surveillance. The Department of Defense expects interested vendors to deliver a minimum of 3.5 million ad views and 250,000 clicks, according to the contract paperwork.

While the deadline for vendors attempting to win the contract was the end of this past February, no public winner has been announced.

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