Tag: military industrial complex

Politico’s Defense News, Brought to You by Northrop Grumman

Since its inception 14 years ago, Politico has risen to become an internet news giant. Now employing over 700 people and reaching 50 million people per month, the website and newspaper has become one of the most trusted sources of information on political issues in the United States. Key to this is its range of influential newsletters, which reach millions every day.

And yet the organization has entered into a number of very troubling partnerships that could potentially undermine the credibility and independence of its reporting. Both its defense and space newsletters, which keep readers informed and up to date on those topics, come sponsored by giant military and aerospace contractor Northrop Grumman.

To its credit, Politico is upfront about their partnership, with those sections bearing an advertisement label stating “presented by Northrop Grumman.” The question is whether readers can truly trust the outlet to accurately report and scrutinize those areas that are so critical to its chief sponsor. Does taking Northrop Grumman’s money make Politico less likely to call out the Pentagon’s enormous and bloated military budget, war crimes committed overseas, or the gross wastage of public funds?

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Weapons biz bankrolls experts pushing to extend Afghan War

Earlier this month, a study group established by Congress recommended that President Joe Biden extend the May 1 deadline for withdrawing troops from America’s longest war. It’s a strategy that many experts say runs the risk of abrogating the U.S.-Taliban agreement and potentially setting back the potential peace process in Afghanistan — or even dooming it to failure. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a striking similarity in the backgrounds of the individuals involved in these critical recommendations, which are likely to influence whether Biden maintains a “conditions based” U.S. military footprint in Afghanistan. Two of the group’s three co-chairs and nine of the group’s 12 plenary members, comprised of what the group refers to as “members,” have current or recent financial ties to major defense contractors, an industry that soaks up more than half of the $740 billion defense budget, and stands to gain from protracted U.S. military involvement overseas.

There was more diversity in views and financial interests among the 26 “senior advisers” that the group consulted. At least three of these advisers have warned publicly that the suggested troop withdrawal extension may pose significant risks. But the study group’s plenary is deeply intertwined with the military industrial base, with nearly $4 million the group’s co-chairs and plenary have received in compensation for their work on the boards of defense contractors.

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The Pentagon Just Admitted to ‘Testing’ UFO Wreckage. Here’s What They Have Discovered

Pentagon, the USA’s Defence Department’s headquarters have admitted to testing wreckage they gathered from UFO crashes, researcher and author Anthony Bragalia has said. Bragalia had written to the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request over three years ago

Bragalia said that the DIA let out 154-page test results regarding a mysterious “memory” metal called Nitinol which can remember its original shape when folded. Bragalia revealed in his blog the UFO Explorations that “A stunning admission by the US government that it possesses UFO debris was recently made in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed over three years ago by this author.” His blog also mentions that “some of these futuristic materials have the potential to make things invisible.”

Bragalia said that “although much of the reports’ details are redacted, what can be gleaned is that these technologies represent a literal quantum leap beyond the properties of all existing material known to man.” He also added that in the pages he received, there have been repeated mentions of ‘advanced technology reports’ surrounding Nitinol, described as a shape recovery alloy. The Nitinol had similar properties to the ‘memory metal’ found near the Roswell, New Mexico, UFO crash site of 1947.

The revealed documents have also said that the Pentagon was trying to test whether the metal Nitinol could be integrated into the human body for health purposes or not.

The Pentagon’s run-ins with UFOs is not a new thing. It haf earlier acknowledged funding a secret multi-million dollar program to investigate such ‘extra-terrestrial sightings’. Even though the department said that the programme had ended in 2012, a New York Times report had said it still continued with officials bringing in incident to probe. It was called the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program and officially ran between 2007 to 2012 and had $22 million a year for funds.

The programme also kept track of videos of encounters between unknown objects and US military aircrafts.

Among such sightings were one released in August of a white coloured oval object about the size of a jetliner being pursued by two Navy fighter jets from an aircraft carrier off the California coast in 2004.

Last year, an account by Debrief said that there exist two classified reports by the Pentagon on UFOs. Reportedly, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force of the United States Department of Defense issued two classified intelligence position reports in 2018 and the 2020 summer. These reports were circulated widely in the US intelligence community. It included a leaked photo, an account of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena emerging from the ocean through the sky, and an admission that the object might have an extraterrestrial origin.

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U.S. Government Contractor Embedded Software in more than 500 Apps to Track Phones of hundreds of millions of users!!!

A damning new WSJ report says a small U.S. government contractor embedded software in over 500 apps, tracking millions of people worldwide.

According to the report:

A small U.S. company with ties to the U.S. defense and intelligence communities has embedded its software in numerous mobile apps, allowing it to track the movements of hundreds of millions of mobile phones world-wide, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Anomaly Six LLC is the company in question, apparently boasting in marketing material that it was “able to draw location data from more than 500 mobile applications” from its own software development kit, embedded directly in some apps:

Anomaly Six says it embeds its own SDK in some apps, and in other cases gets location data from other partners.

The report says Anomaly Six is a federal contractor that provides global location data “to branches of the U.S. government and private-sector clients”. It told WSJ that it restricts the sale of U.S. mobile phone movement data only to the private sector, however.

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Robot Motherships To Launch Drone Swarms From Sea, Underwater, Air And Near-Space

Loitering munitions, otherwise known as kamikaze drones, differ from other weapons in being relatively slow but able to patrol an area for a prolonged period looking for targets before identifying, selecting and attacking them.

The LRUSV is much smaller than the flagship Sea Hunter unmanned experimental vessel and the Navy’s Overlord robot transport but shares many of their goals. Like them, the LRUSV is supposed to travel the sea lanes without direct human supervision, sailing safely with other vessels. Unlike them it will “collaboratively interact with other vessels as a cluster,” suggesting that numbers of LRUSV would be deployed together. Such a cluster could unleash a swarm of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of small drones to overwhelm a target. (And while they might not be able to sink a warship, knocking out radar and defensive systems would leave it an easy target for other weapons).

Raytheon previously developed low-cost swarming drones based on their proven Coyote under the U.S. Navy’s LOCUST program in 2015. The goal was for a swarm which would work together collaboratively as a unit – and which would collectively cost less than a single missile. By 2016, 30 of the 13-pound drones were flying together, but the swarm size is likely to have increased significantly since.

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Pentagon blog warns that freedom leads to populism, which “undermines national security”

The military-industrial complex is doubling down on its crusade against free expression, warning that the First Amendment should no longer be tolerated because it threatens “national security.”

Citing the Jan. 6 “insurrection” against the United States Capitol as proof, Divya Ramjee and Elsa B. Kania, writing for the Pentagon’s Defense One blog, contend that all online free speech needs to be filtered by a Ministry of Truth in order to prevent the type of “disinformation and incitements to violence” that led to the Capitol false flag attack.

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What Biden’s Warmongering Will Actually Look Like

Trump’s base has been forcefully pushing the narrative that the previous president didn’t start any new wars, which while technically true ignores his murderous actions like vetoing the bill to save Yemen from US-backed genocide and actively blocking aid to its people, murdering untold tens of thousands of Venezuelans with starvation sanctions, rolling out many world-threatening cold war escalations against Russia, engaging in insane brinkmanship with Iran, greatly increasing the number of bombs dropped per day from the previous administration, killing record numbers of civilians, and reducing military accountability for those airstrikes. Trump may not have started any “new wars”, but he kept the old ones going and inflamed some of them. Just because you don’t start any new wars doesn’t mean you’re not a warmonger.

Rather than a throwback to “new wars” and the old-school ground invasions of the Bush era, the warmongering we’ll be seeing from the Biden administration is more likely to look like this. More starvation sanctions. More proxy conflicts. More cold war. More coups. More special ops. More drone strikes. More slow motion strangulation, less ham-fisted overt warfare.

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Biden’s Choice For Pentagon Chief Further Erodes a Key U.S. Norm: Civilian Control

Joe Biden’s pick to be the next Secretary of Defense, according to reports on Monday night, is recently retired Gen. Lloyd J. Austin, III. The choice of Gen. Austin further erodes the once-sacred American norm that military officials will be barred from exercising control over the Pentagon until substantial time has passed after leaving active-duty military service.

Before Gen. Austin can be confirmed, Biden will need a special waiver from Congress under the National Security Act of 1947. That law, a cornerstone of the post-World War II national security state, provides that “a person who has within ten years been on active duty as a commissioned officer in a Regular component of the armed services shall not be eligible for appointment as Secretary of Defense.” Enactment of the law after the war, explained the Congressional Research Service, was imperative to “preserve the principle of civilian control of the military at a time when the United States was departing from its century-and-a-half long tradition of a small standing military.” A 2008 law reduced that waiting period to seven years, but Gen. Austin, who retired from the U.S. Army only four years ago, in 2016, still falls well within its prohibition.

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