Tag: military industrial complex

Pentagon Focuses on New Weapons Research in $715 Billion Budget

On Friday, the Pentagon released its $715 billion budget request for the 2022 fiscal year, part of the $752.9 billion Biden is requesting for so-called “national defense.” The budget emphasizes research for new weapons technology, which the US sees as vital for competition with China and Russia.

In a statement on the budget, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin named China as the Pentagon’s primary focus. “The budget provides us the mix of capabilities we need most and stays true to our focus on the pacing challenge from the People’s Republic of China,” he said.

The budget request asked for over $112 billion for research, development, testing, and evaluation, known as RDT&E. It is about a 5 percent increase from the 2021 budget and is the highest-ever request for RDT&E.

US military officials frequently say that investment in technology like artificial intelligence, robotics, space and cyber capabilities, and hypersonic missiles are needed to compete with Beijing in the coming years. Space Force’s top scientist recently said human augmentation to create super-soldiers should be embraced by the US.

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Everything Keeps Getting Weirder And Weirder

Back in 2019 I wrote an article titled “Things Are Only Going To Get Weirder“, and from Covid to the 2020 election to the steadily increasing regularity with which UFOs are now mentioned in the mainstream media, that has indeed proved to be the case.

Our ongoing slide into the abyss of infinite weirdness may have eclipsed this from your memory by now, but there was once a time not too long ago when frequent mainstream news stories about the possibility of extraterrestrial aircraft in our skies would not have sounded like something from real life. Lately it’s been a daily occurrence, and the president of the United States is now being asked about it at news conferences.

“President Obama says there is footage and records of objects in the skies — these unidentified aerial phenomena — and he says we don’t know exactly what they are. What do you think that it is?” a reporter asked Biden near the end of a joint press conference with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Friday. Biden brushed off the question in his trademark almost-but-not-quite-lucid way with the comment “I would ask him again,” and hustled off the stage.

The question followed comments by Barack Obama earlier in the week on The Late Late Show with James Corden.

“But what is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there are, there’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are, we can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory,” Obama said. “They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.”

This follows a recent high-profile 60 Minutes special on UFOs (or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena as the cool kids are calling them nowadays), while the Pentagon continues to release “information” to the public about the existence of these encounters and the US Senate prepares to receive a mandated report on the matter next month.

A new Telegraph article titled “The Pentagon thinks UFOs may exist after all… and the evidence is growing” just trended on Twitter under the much more click-friendly title “The Pentagon strongly suspects aliens exist – and we’ve got the evidence”, and it ominously warns us that there is “a growing acceptance among defence officials around the world that there may indeed be something ‘out there’ – and that it might pose a genuine global security threat.”

These are just a few of the many, many mainstream news reports that have been pouring out lately on a subject which until recently was the sole purview of fringe “crackpots” and “conspiracy theorists”. Speaking of which, another weird thing we’re seeing is the roles between mainstream reporters and UFO enthusiasts being almost reversed: we now see MSNBC pundits openly musing that “UFO’s are clearly real? And have been hanging around our airspace for a while?”, while influential UFOlogists like Steven Greer are warning that this is a hoax by the US military to get a bunch of dangerous weapons into space.

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Pentagon Marches Towards AI Taking The Kill Shot

Dozens of autonomous war machines capable of deadly force conducted a field training exercise south of Seattle last August. The exercise involved no human operators but strictly robots powered with artificial intelligence, seeking mock enemy combatants.

The exercise, organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a blue-sky research division of the Pentagon, armed the robots with radio transmitters designed to simulate a weapon firing. The drill expanded the Pentagon’s understanding of how automation in military systems on the modern battlefield can work together to eliminate enemy combatants.

“The demonstrations also reflect a subtle shift in the Pentagon’s thinking about autonomous weapons, as it becomes clearer that machines can outperform humans at parsing complex situations or operating at high speed,” according to WIRED. 

It’s undeniable artificial intelligence will be the face of warfare for years to come. Military planners are moving ahead with incorporating autonomous weapons systems on the modern battlefield.

General John Murray of the US Army Futures Command told an audience at the US Military Academy in April that swarms of robots will likely force the military to decide if a human needs to intervene before a robot engages the enemy.

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Liz Cheney Says Not Increasing Military Spending by 3-5% Is a ‘Red Line’

President Biden requested a $753 billion military budget for the 2022 fiscal year, which would be the highest of all time. But this number is not enough for Republican hawks in Congress. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WI) said not increasing the budget by three to five percent would be a “red line” for Republicans. Biden’s budget request would be about a 1.6 percent increase from 2021.

“In my view, that is a red line, and if the administration is not going to be proposing a budget that meets that requirement, then I think they will need to explain to the American people why they’re unwilling to fund defense at the levels the nation needs,” Cheney said at the McAleese Defense Programs Conference, which was held virtually on Wednesday and Thursday.

“I would clearly oppose budgets that were below that number, and I think we’re going to have a very healthy debate and discussion about the administration’s proposal because it is coming in significantly below that number,” she said.

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Questioning America’s Warlords

I know, I know: President Joe Biden has announced that our combat troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan by 9/11 of this year, marking the 20th anniversary of the colossal failure of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to defend America.

Of course, that other 9/11 in 2001 shocked us all. I was teaching history at the U.S. Air Force Academy and I still recall hushed discussions of whether the day’s body count would exceed that of the Battle of Antietam, the single bloodiest day of the Civil War. (Fortunately, bad as it was, it didn’t.)

Hijacked commercial airliners, turned into guided missiles, would have a profound impact on our collective psyche. Someone had to pay and among the first victims were Afghans in the opening salvo of the misbegotten Global War on Terror, which we in the military quickly began referring to as the GWOT.

Little did I know then that such a war would still be going on 15 years after I retired from the Air Force in 2005 and 80 articles after I wrote my first for TomDispatch in 2007 arguing for an end to militarism and forever wars like the one still underway in Afghanistan.

Over those years, I’ve come to learn that, in my country, war always seems to find a way, even when it goes badly — very badly, in fact, as it did in Vietnam and, in these years, in Afghanistan and Iraq, indeed across much of the Greater Middle East and significant parts of Africa.

Not coincidentally, those disastrous conflicts haven’t actually been waged in our name. No longer does Congress even bother with formal declarations of war. The last one came in 1941 after Pearl Harbor. During World War II, Americans united to fight for something like national security and a just cause. Today, however, perpetual American-style war simply is. Congress postures, but does nothing decisive to stop it. In computer-speak, endless war is a feature of our national programming, not a bug.

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Marines Fire Anti-Ship Missile from Back of Unmanned Truck to Hit Target at Sea

Marines scored a direct hit in a first-ever live-fire test in which they launched a Navy missile from the back of an unmanned tactical vehicle to strike a surface target at sea.

The Marine Corps has combined two existing technologies to produce a deadly new way to hit targets offshore. Coined NMESIS, the Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System can launch naval strike missiles from the back of a modified Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, or JLTV, to destroy targets on land or at sea.

Raytheon Missiles and Defense, which makes the naval strike missile, announced Wednesday that the Marine Corps used NMESIS to hit a target in the water from Point Mugu Sea Range in California. The missile can take out targets from more than 100 nautical miles away.

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