Tag: pentagon

Awkward moment an aging Mitch McConnell needs help from staff during hearing with Pete Hegseth

Mitch McConnell appeared confused when a staffer interrupted him because he tried to end a Senate hearing with Pete Hegseth before it was set to conclude.

The former Majority Leader, 84, was part of a hearing of the Senate Committee on Appropriations on Defense that had been questioning the defense secretary regarding the War in Iran. 

As McConnell was given the floor again after questioning by Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski, he tried to end the hearing with Hegseth, much to his colleagues’ confusion.

‘Here’s where we are, the vote is about over, the secretary has to get with the President on the China trip, I’m gonna’ ask Senator Murkowski to wrap up and thank you all for being here.’

Before finishing, he was interrupted by a younger, male staffer who could be heard whispering into his ear. 

‘Baldwin, Shaheen, and Kennedy still have questions,’ the staffer said.

He was referring to Wisconsin Democrat Senator Tammy Baldwin, New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen and Republican John Kennedy. 

The staffer can then be heard clarifying that the hearing should ‘wrap up after’ those questions. 

Keep reading

US war in Iran has cost $36.9 billion so far: Pentagon

The US’ war in Iran has cost US$29 billion (S$36.9 billion) so far, a senior Pentagon official said on May 12, an increase of US$4 billion from an estimate provided in late April.

With just six months before the mid-term elections, in which US President Donald Trump’s Republicans may face an uphill battle to keep their House majority, Democrats are riding high in public opinion polls as they attempt to link the war to cost-of-living issues.

On April 29, the Pentagon said the war at that point had cost US$25 billion.

Mr Jules Hurst, who is performing the duties of the comptroller, told lawmakers on May 12 that the new cost included updated repair and replacement of equipment and operational costs.

“The joint staff team and the comptroller team are constantly looking at that estimate,” he said.

He was speaking alongside Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine.

It is unclear how the Pentagon arrived at the US$29 billion figure. A source told Reuters in March that the Trump administration estimated that the first six days of the war had cost at least US$11.3 billion. REUTERS

Keep reading

As Hegseth Spars With Congress Over Iran War, Trump Decries Criticism As ‘Virtual Treason’

There was a bit of a narrative shift on display in Congress as back-to-back hearings on Capitol Hill with top defense and Trump admin officials played out Tuesday, with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth repeatedly on the defensive as he and the administration face intensified scrutiny over the Iran war.

And the growing frustration vented in Congress is not just being sounded by Democrats. As Washington Post’s Tuesday headline aptly described: Hegseth, Caine encounter intense bipartisan frustration with Iran war. It seems President Trump has been made keenly aware of potential growing rebellion among GOP ranks, and biting criticisms over how the conflict and Strait of Hormuz standoff is going, given he decided to level the word “treason” in an afternoon Truth Social Post. It seemed also aimed at a series of apparent recent sensitive or classified info leaks within the administration and Pentagon to the media, related to the conflict…

Trump stated while en route to China: “When the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, Militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON” – and he went on to charge that “they are aiding and abetting the enemy!”

“Only Losers, Ingrates, and Fools are able to make a case against America!” he also wrote.

This moment might remind the American public of another key turning point in US history when past president cast all criticisms of wars of choice in the Middle East: When President George W. Bush was gearing up to launch new forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11 attacks, he declared, “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”

This week also saw arch-neoconservative Robert Kagan break from Trump’s Iran War in the the pages of the generally pro-war Atlantic:

It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored.

Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.

Keep reading

Pete Hegseth Accuses Democrat Senator Mark Kelly of ‘Blabbing’ About ‘Classified’ Briefing

U.S. Department of War (DOW) Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) may be in deep trouble for comments he made over a classified Pentagon brief.

In a social media post on Sunday, Hegseth shared a post from Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan in which she detailed Kelly’s comments regarding U.S. weapons stockpiles.

“After hearing the Pentagon classified brief on Iran war impact on U.S. weapons stockpiles, Senator Mark Kelly says it is ‘shocking how deep we have gone into these magazines.’ He said the Tomahawks, ATACMS, SM-3, THAAD rounds, Patriot rounds, so those interceptor rounds to defend ourselves have been hit hard. He says it’ll take years to replenish those stockpiles, which could affect a hypothetical U.S. conflict with China,” Brennan reported.

In response, Hegseth criticized the senator, who is a retired U.S. Navy captain, and said officials were taking action.

Keep reading

A $1.5 Trillion Military Budget Is a Gift to the Grifters

Last week “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth insulted Americans by claiming that a 50 percent increase in the US military budget – from an incomprehensible one trillion dollars to an impossible one and a half trillion – was a “fiscally responsible investment.”

“Thanks to President Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense budget, this War Department has moved from bureaucracy to business,” he said last Thursday.

In a way he was right, though. The huge increase is much more about “business” than what is needed to protect the United States from potential invasion.

But it isn’t the kind of “business” that most supporters of free markets would applaud. On the contrary, this is the business of transferring massive amounts of wealth from the struggling middle and working classes to the well-connected Beltway elite based on lies and scare tactics.

The US mainstream media is crucial in manufacturing the fairy tale that if we don’t mortgage our children’s and grandchildren’s future to finance this obscene military budget, we will be attacked or invaded by some evil foreign power.

It’s not difficult to do a little research and see why the mainstream – and even some “independent” – media outlets push these scare tactics: they are owned or funded by giant corporations with close ties to military contractors.

This unhealthy relationship is known as “corporatism” – the intermingling of pseudo-private companies with the government. It is the precursor to actual fascism, where the government takes a stake in such companies.

We’re getting there faster than most Americans understand.

The whole scam is not about protecting the citizens of the United States. It’s about protecting the US empire overseas, which actually harms the citizens of the United States.

Yes, they rob us to fund their empire and lie to us that it keeps us safe. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our constant military interventions on virtually every continent of the globe only build resentment among the rest of the world’s population. Anyone who thinks people overseas welcome US bombs has been watching too much Fox News or reading too much Washington Post.

And what do we get for the most expensive military on earth – larger than the combined militaries of the next dozen or so countries? Not much. Iran’s military budget is less than one percent of ours, yet Iran destroyed or disabled every US military base in the Middle East.

It turns out that Iran has destroyed dozens of multi-million dollar US spy drones – and several near-billion dollar spy radar stations – with their own drones costing mere thousands of dollars each.

The US surprise attack was supposed to make Iran cower and beg for mercy, but it did the opposite: it showed that despite the trillions extorted from Americans for the most expensive military on earth, the US military can no longer win the wars that US presidents illegally force them into fighting.

The US military continues to fight World War II – with massively expensive aircraft carriers that do not dare get close to combat – while warfighting has evolved into something entirely different.

The only good thing about the Iran war is that it demonstrates how much the special interests have lied to us about the need to continue our suicidal military spending increases.

Keep reading

When one man, a civilian, controls the kill switch for military ops

In September 2022, Ukrainian forces prepared to launch a drone strike on the Russian naval fleet anchored off Crimea. The drones never arrived.

Elon Musk had decided, unilaterally, not to activate Starlink coverage over the region. But he wasn’t simply declining to help. SpaceX had already been managing battlefield access for both sides: restricting Russian use, imposing speed limits to prevent drone integration, and maintaining a verified whitelist with Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense. One private citizen, with no security clearance and no accountability to any electorate, was governing the battlefield connectivity of an active war.

The public debate treats this as a story about Elon Musk — his politics, his proximity to the White House, his X posts. That framing lets the actual problem off the hook. Replace Musk with the most patriotic, internationalist, apolitical CEO imaginable and the structural problem remains identical. The Pentagon has spent a decade building critical military functions on infrastructure it can’t legally compel, and the consequences are now arriving in real time.

A common reflex is to argue that private defense contractors have always been central to American military power. Lockheed Martin builds the F-35; Raytheon builds the Patriot. What’s different now is the control plane: who has real-time administrative control during use. When the government buys a tank, it owns it. The keys don’t expire. The manufacturer can’t disable it mid-mission or impose terms in combat. Software and AI are different. Vendors keep ongoing control — updates, access, and usage limits. They don’t sell a capability; they license access to one, and the license has conditions.

Those conditions have already collided with active operations. After months of failed negotiations, the Pentagon formally designated the AI firm Anthropic a supply-chain risk because of restrictions on how its model could be used. The Pentagon was explicit in its decision: “The military will not allow a vendor to insert itself into the chain of command.” Emil Michael, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, described the moment he fully grasped the vulnerability: Anthropic’s models were already embedded across combatant commands and intelligence agencies, wired into classified workflows. Anthropic retained the control plane inside the Pentagon’s cloud — able to update, restrict, or shut off access. When Michael raised hypothetical crisis scenarios, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, offered exceptions case by case. “Just call me if you need another exception,” Michael recalls him saying. In a genuine crisis, a commander can’t call a vendor to authorize military action, nor should he have to.

This isn’t about whether Anthropic’s rules are reasonable. They weren’t set by anyone accountable to the joint force, there’s no override mechanism, and the Pentagon had made itself dependent on systems it doesn’t control.

Keep reading

Astronauts Saw Strange Things in Space: UFO Files

The United States Defense/War Department published on Friday previously classified documents related to “aliens” and UFO/unidentified anomalous phenomena sightings. The drop includes transcripts of astronauts reporting strange lights and objects during space missions in the ’60s and ’70s.

Not the Whole Story

But, according to a member of Congress who has been very invested in this issue, the interesting stuff is yet to come. Around the same time, he also said the public will never be told everything. “The 1st drop will be big but in comparison to what is coming they will be a drop in the bucket,” Tennessee’s Republican Rep. Tim Burchett said on X Friday morning. “I would say ‘Holy Crap’ is coming.”

Burchett has made many comments over the last few months suggesting the government is concealing bombshell information about non-human intelligent beings on this planet. As a member of Congress, he has received briefings that include information not available to the public. The big questions are: How much of the information that he and other members of Congress have received is legitimate, and how much of it is mis- or disinformation?

In a recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Burchett likened UFO-alien disclosure to MKUltra, the illegal CIA mind-control and human-experimentation program. In 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered most MKUltra files to be destroyed. The order was carried out by Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who had been the longtime head of the program. Investigators on the Church Committee — the senate committee tasked in the mid-’70s with investigating questionable CIA activity — had to rely mostly on survivor testimony and the few remaining documents to get a glimpse into the program. To this day, it is generally agreed the public knows only a fraction of what the government did in it.

When it comes to “aliens” and UFOs, Burchett told Rogan, “It’s kinda like MK Ultra. …They’re not going to tell us everything. … I don’t think they’re going to give us half of what we should get.”

Keep reading

‘Super-hot’ orbs chased US fighter jets in terrifying close encounter reported in UFO files

The UFO files have revealed chilling encounters involving swarms of mysterious orbs chasing US military aircraft and sightings of four-foot-tall beings emerging from unidentified craft.

The bombshell FBI documents, released by the Trump administration, detailed incidents spanning decades, from humanoid occupants reported in the 1960s to a dramatic confrontation involving intelligence agents last year.

One heavily redacted FBI report described a senior US intelligence officer recounting a nighttime mission in a remote mountain range near a classified government site.

According to the report, intelligence personnel, federal agents and helicopter crews were dispatched after local staff repeatedly reported seeing strange glowing ‘orbs’ and hearing loud ‘thuds’ near the mountains.

But when the team arrived, they allegedly encountered swarms of highly maneuverable objects that appeared extremely hot on thermal cameras despite flying through the darkness.

The report stated that the unidentified orbs easily outran military helicopters before later pursuing fighter aircraft called in to intercept them.

At one point during the encounter, a co-pilot aboard the lead helicopter reportedly watched one orb split into two separate objects before another object suddenly ’emerged’ from the formation and shot away at high speed.

Another section of the FBI records detailed alleged encounters with mysterious crewmen said to be between three and a half and four feet tall, ‘wearing what appear to be space suits and helmets,’ who reportedly exited unidentified flying objects.

Keep reading

Mysterious footage captures peculiar ‘eight-pointed star’ streaking across sky: UFO files

Mysterious footage released in the Pentagon’s UFO files on Friday appeared to capture a bizarre “eight-pointed star” streaking across the sky several years back.

The infrared clip, submitted by US Central Command personnel, showed the strange-shaped object appearing to float around in 2013, according to the newly released files.

The footage, which lasts nearly two minutes, was apparently shot from an “infrared sensor aboard a US military platform.”

“This video depicts an area of contrast resembling an eight-pointed star with arms of alternating length,” a description on the UFO files website reads.

A note on the site later warns that the video description is for informational purposes and that “readers should not interpret any part of this description as reflecting an analytical judgment, investigative conclusion, or factual determination.”

The footage was among the trove of 162 files made public when the Department of War unveiled its highly anticipated website dedicated solely to UFOs.

Keep reading

Trump’s Killing Spree Isn’t Stopping the Flow of Drugs Into the U.S.

The Pentagon claims that attacks on civilian boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific have severely curtailed the import of illegal drugs to the United States. And President Donald Trump says this has saved more than 1 million American lives. Experts call these assertions laughable and reporting by The Intercept shows that claims by the White House and War Department are baseless, phony, or both.

“The administration has failed to explain the long-term objectives of this mission or provide any evidence of reduced drug flows into the United States,” Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee said about the campaign on Thursday. “I would ask for a credible answer to this most fundamental question: What is the operation actually meant to accomplish?”

Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted attacks on 54 so-called drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean, killing more than 185 civilians, since September. The latest strike, on April 26 in the Pacific, killed three people. The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name.

Experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress from both parties, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. These summary killings are a deviation from the standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies generally detained suspected drug smugglers and brought them to trial on criminal charges.

“These are extrajudicial executions, or even just murders — something similar to a cop shooting a fleeing suspect in the back when there is no self-defense justification,” said Adam Isacson, the director for defense oversight at Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group. He called the growing death toll “a gross human rights violation.”

While Trump consistently lies about various aspects of the boat strikes, including the illicit narcotics allegedly on the boats and the number of lives supposedly saved by the attacks, the Pentagon has followed suit, using rhetorical sleight of hand and seemingly disingenuous statistics to bolster the claims of their commander-in-chief.

“I can’t imagine how you could come to some of these conclusions regarding illegal smuggling and drug overdose deaths based on the facts as we know them,” said retired Rear Adm. William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, who oversaw drug-interdiction operations in the Southeast U.S. and the Caribbean Basin.

The Pentagon and White House for months failed to respond to detailed questions from The Intercept on the boat strike campaign.

Keep reading