Tag: military industrial complex

A Family Business of Perpetual War

Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan have a great mom-and-pop business going. From the State Department, she generates wars and from op-ed pages he demands Congress buy more weapons. There’s a pay-off, too, as grateful military contractors kick in money to think tanks where other Kagans work, writes Robert Parry.

Neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, run a remarkable family business: she has sparked a hot war in Ukraine and helped launch Cold War II with Russia and he steps in to demand that Congress jack up military spending so America can meet these new security threats.

This extraordinary husband-and-wife duo makes quite a one-two punch for the Military-Industrial Complex, an inside-outside team that creates the need for more military spending, applies political pressure to ensure higher appropriations, and watches as thankful weapons manufacturers lavish grants on like-minded hawkish Washington think tanks.

Keep reading

DOD Formalizes Program Giving Companies More Access to Classified Info

The Pentagon has formally created a group of defense companies that can get broader access to classified initiatives known as special-access programs, hoping that more insight will make contractors more efficient and cost-conscious.

In a Dec. 15 memo to the defense industrial base, Pentagon acquisition boss Ellen M. Lord formalized the SAP Contractor Portfolio Program, which ran as a pilot initiative for several years. The effort will help companies balance the need to understand technology development with the need to protect that information.

“As the world sees a return to great power competition, the Department of Defense must strengthen its engagement with the defense industrial base in order to respond to the national security challenges facing the United States in a more responsive and cost efficient manner,” Lord wrote.

“However, the new phenomenon of rapid technology proliferation has also increased the level of technology protection necessary to maintain the United States’ competitive edge. This increased protection, resulting in many activities being secured in special access programs, challenges the DOD’s ability to share critical information and to collaborate with the DIB to deliver capability to the warfighter,” she said.

Keep reading

What’s actually IN the US “Covid Stimulus Bill”?

The US congress just passed their Covid stimulus bill, or the “Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021” to give its official title. So what’s actually inside it? What has just been passed into law?

The answers to that is “nobody really knows”, least of all the members of congress, who passed the law without reading it, as they so often do. It’s the longest bill in US history, at over 5500 pages and it sailed through the voting mostly sight unseen.

We’ve downloaded a copy of the full document and will embed it below for those of you patient or masochistic enough to tackle the whole thing. We’ve read some already, and will point out the highlights:

  • “Foreign aid” is a big winner. Egypt is getting $1.3 billion, Sudan, Israel and Ukraine get over 500 million each, and many other countries around the world sizeable contributions, much of which will be spent on “defense”. Which is to say sent straight back to America via massive arms purchases.
  • Not all the money being sent overseas is for buying weapons, some is for backing coups. Venezuela and Belarus get special mention here, each getting their own section of the bill detailing how terrible their “illegal regimes” are. There’s also a large section on “combating Chinese influence”.
  • For some reason there’s another section on copyright law, which makes illegal streaming copyrighted content a federal crimes, punishable by up to three years in prison.
  • Nearly 300 million is put aside to develop influenza vaccines and prevent a future influenza pandemic.
  • 4 BILLION dollars for the Gates-funded GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance.
  • Vaccine “misinformation” is also a concern, and the bill provides for a pro-vaccine propaganda campaign – or rather a “PUBLIC AWARENESS CAMPAIGN ON THE IMPORTANCE OF VACCINATIONS”

So – huge amounts of foreign aid, support for various coups, totally irrelevent copyright laws, provisions for pro-vaccine propaganda campaigns…it’s not your typical “stimulus bill” so far, is it?

Keep reading

White House makes Friday afternoon announcement of what members of the Space Force will be called: reports

Vice President Mike Pence on Friday announced that members of the Space Force will be officially called “guardians.”

“Vice President Mike Pence announces that uniformed members of the U.S. Space Force will be called Guardians. [There] you have it: Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Guardians,” Defense One editor Marcus Weisgerber reported.

Keep reading

Emails Show Navy’s ‘UFO’ Patents Went Through Significant Internal Review, Resulted In A Demo

The War Zone continues to dig into the bizarre U.S. Navy patents authored by enigmatic inventor Dr. Salvatore Pais and the seemingly unusual circumstances of their approval by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As part of our investigation, we recently obtained a tranche of internal emails from Naval Air Systems Command, or NAVAIR, which appear to have been sent between Pais and personnel in different NAVAIR offices. While the Navy’s exotic energy production patents remain as mysterious as ever, these emails add to the backstory surrounding the inventions of Salvatore Pais and suggest that the patents went through a more rigorous internal evaluation process than was previously known. The emails also seem to indicate that the research program that emanated from the patents did in fact result in an experimental demonstration of some sort.

Last year, the publication of several unusual patents assigned to the U.S. Navy raised eyebrows due to the seemingly radical and unconventional claims found within them. These patents included bizarre technologies such as a “high temperature superconductor,” a “high frequency gravitational wave generator,” a force field-like “electromagnetic field generator,” a “plasma compression fusion device,” and a hybrid aerospace/underwater craft featuring an “inertial mass reduction device.” They truly sound like the stuff of science fiction and seem to describe the theoretical building blocks of a craft with UFO-like performance.

Keep reading

GOP/Democrat COVID-19 Package Bails Out Defense Contractors, Excludes Stimulus Checks for Americans

A COVID-19 relief package, reportedly negotiated between a handful of Senate Republicans and Democrats, includes a bailout for Defense Department contractors while excluding a second round of stimulus checks for Americans.

A draft of the relief package, obtained by The Daily Poster, reveals that the spending bill does not include a plan by Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to provide Americans with $1,200 stimulus checks but does provide a bailout for defense contractors.

Slipped into the package, seemingly on the final 525 pages, is an extension of a CARES Act provision that allows federal agencies to pay taxpayer money to defense contractors who are not working during the Chinese coronavirus crisis.

“There are no direct payments for regular working people, people living off tips,” a congressional aide told Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist. “But they made sure there’s a provision in there to help defense contractors who aren’t working right now. They get what they’re looking for.”

Keep reading

An AI just helped an Air Force pilot fly a U-2 spy plane during a simulated missile strike

The Air Force has taken a giant step toward creating an artificial intelligence system that would never in a million years turn on humanity – unlike the “Skynet” nemesis in the first two Terminator movies, which are the only ones that count.

Recently, an artificial intelligence algorithm named ARTUµ — possibly a reference to Star Wars’ R2D2 — performed tasks on a U-2 Dragon Lady spy plane that are normally done by humans, the Air Force announced on Wednesday.

“After takeoff, the sensor control was positively handed-off to ARTUµ who then manipulated the sensor, based off insight previously learned from over a half-million computer simulated training iterations,” according to a news release from the humans who run the Air Force — for now. “The pilot and AI successfully teamed to share the sensor and achieve the mission objectives.”

The algorithm used the plane’s tactical navigation as an Air Force major whose callsign is “Vudu” flew the U-2, which was assigned to the 9th Reconnaissance Wing, Beale Air Force Base, California, the news release says.

In short: Man and machine successfully flew a reconnaissance mission during a simulated missile strike.

Keep reading