Tag: pentagon

DOD Inspector General Not Sure If We Spent $50 Million in Chinese Labs for Gain-of-Function Research

The Department of Defense Inspector General’s Office has found that the US military can’t tell how much money it gave to Chinese bio labs or what research it funded. More troubling is that the only evidence that US funds were not involved in gain-of-function-type research are the representations by military officials that it did not happen…and that is totally reliable.

Under the National Defense Authorization Act for FY2024, the DODIG was required to “report on the amount of Federal funds awarded by the DoD, directly or indirectly, through grants, contracts, subgrants, subcontracts, or any other type of agreement or collaboration, to Chinese research labs or to fund research or experiments in China or other foreign countries that could have reasonably resulted in the enhancement of pathogens of pandemic potential, from 2014 through 2023.”

This audit was driven by information provided by Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) showing that some $50 million in US funds had found its way to Chinese biolabs.

The audit covers any US taxpayer funding “used to fund research or experiments that could have reasonably resulted in the enhancement of any coronavirus, influenza, Nipah, Ebola, or other pathogen of pandemic potential or chimeric versions of such a virus or pathogen in the People’s Republic of China or any other foreign country” — money which Ernst accused the Pentagon of “blindly giving away.”

“The Department of Defense should defend the nation, not support research with the potential to do us harm,” she told The Post in a statement.

“While bureaucrats are blindly giving away taxpayer funds, China doesn’t even have to steal our research,” Ernst added. “It’s clear Americans deserve a detailed inventory of all the dangerous dollars sent overseas, which is why I’ve launched an investigation to track down every cent.”

The Pentagon announced the results on Thursday. (Read the whole report.)

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Pentagon Wants to Feed Troops ‘Experimental’ Lab-Grown Meat to ‘Reduce CO2 Footprint’

A Pentagon-funded company is seeking proposals to feed America’s soldiers lab-grown meat in a bid to “reduce the CO2 footprint” at Defense Department outposts.

BioMADE, a public-private company that has received more than $500 million in funding from the Defense Department, announced earlier this month that it is seeking proposals to develop “innovations in food production that reduce the CO2 footprint of food production at … DoD operational environments,” according to an online announcement.

These include “novel cell culture methods suitable for the production of cultivated meat/protein,” or lab-grown meat, a product that is still in its experimental phases. This type of meat is grown in a lab from animal cells with the aid of other chemicals, and has emerged as a flashpoint in debates about the efficacy and morality of manufacturing meat products without slaughtering animals.

BioMADE—which earlier this year received a $450 million infusion of taxpayer cash—maintains that lab-grown food products will reduce the Pentagon’s carbon footprint, a priority for the American military as it pursues a Biden administration-mandate to address climate change and other cultural issues that critics describe as “woke.”

“Innovations in food production that reduce the CO2 footprint of food production at and/or transport to DoD operational environments are solicited,” the company says in an informational document and accompanying press release. “These could include, but are not limited to, production of nutrient-dense military rations via fermentation processes, utilizing one carbon molecule (C1) feedstocks for food production, and novel cell culture methods suitable for the production of cultivated meat/protein.”

BioMADE is also soliciting proposals for “processes that convert greenhouse gasses” and “projects that develop bioproducts useful in mitigating the negative environmental impacts either regionally or globally,” including “bioproducts that can be used to prevent or slow coastal erosion.”

Critics of the DoD’s partnership with BioMADE say that U.S. troops should not be used as test subjects for lab-grown meat products that are still in their experimental phase.

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Pentagon official reveals tantalizing seven-minute encounter with glowing blue UFO – which emitted enough energy to ‘power a small city’

A US Department of Defense contractor’s tantalizing encounter with a giant, glowing UFO has sparked 10 years of research and two patents inspired by his encounter.

Three witnesses, including that Pentagon engineer, report that they captured electronic evidence of a ‘barbell’ UFO, half the length of a football field, that glowed an eerie ‘indigo’ blue.

The craft, they said, flew silently over an old logging road in southwestern Ontario, Canada, on August 28, 2013, near where the trio had camped for a hunting trip. 

DailyMail.com spoke with the case’s first investigators, who shared electronic data from the contractor’s attempt to film the object — showing ‘white noise’ pulses in the video that recur in one-second loops identical to strobing light from the UFO itself.

‘The captured data of the event,’ the witness reported, ‘may be the first real physical proof of not just a craft flying, but that it flies by virtue of an incredibly complex and […] powerful spinning electromagnetic propulsion system.’

The case was investigated by the same nanotechnology expert whose analysis of a 2007 mass UFO sighting in Texas became a centerpiece of the Steven Spielberg-produced UFO docuseries ‘Encounters’ last year on Netflix.

‘Is there another ‘barbell’ case we’ve investigated like this?’ that engineer, UFO investigator Robert Powell, told DailyMail.com of this rare case. ‘No, it’s the only one.’

Powell told DailyMail.com that UFO cases with this shape are so rare that only about ’50 to 60 cases’ exist ‘throughout history.’

Powell, whose new book on UFOs has garnered praise from former Defense Department intelligence official Chris Mellon, personally visited the contractor’s lab and worked with him on analyzing the eerie interference on his UFO video.

‘He gave me a tour of the defense facility,’ Powell said, who vetted the source’s identity and biographical claims.

‘There was a heavy duty commercial 3D printer in the lab and there were offices with three or four engineers that worked there beside him in that his building,’ he noted.

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Houthis claim missile attack on USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in Red Sea; DoD says attack never happened

There is conflicting information out there about what happened or did not happen in the Red Sea pertaining to the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, also known as “Ike.”

The Houthis in Yemen say they successfully conducted a missile attack on the nuclear-powered carrier while the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) says no such attack happened.

After the Houthis claimed credit for the attack, an unnamed DoD official reportedly told Politico‘s Lara Seligman that this is “false information,” adding that “there was no hit on the Ike or any attacks in its vicinity.”

The Houthis, meanwhile, say that the attack with both cruise and ballistic missiles did, in fact, happen in response to the American-British bombardment of Sanaa and Hodeidah, calling the hit “accurate and direct.”

Both Reuters and Al Jazeera reported that the attack happened, citing Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree who issued a televised statement about the alleged attack.

An English translation of a tweet from Saree’s X account explains how the alleged attack was a response to “American-British aggression in support of the Zionist enemy, which caused 58 martyrs and wounded, to dissuade our dear people and the Armed Forces from their position of support for the oppressed Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.”

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Pentagon’s AI office awards Palantir a contract to create a data-sharing ecosystem

The Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, or CDAO, leveraged its marketplace for fast-tracking the acquisition of innovative technologies to award Silicon Valley-based Palantir a contract to develop a data-sharing ecosystem — a tool that will help the Pentagon with its connect-everything initiative.

CDAO announced last Thursday that the ecosystem — known as Open Data and Applications Government-owned Interoperable Repositories, or Open DAGIR — will enable the Department of Defense to scale its use of data, analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities through greater collaboration with private sector partners. 

Palantir said it received a $33 million prototype Other Transaction award from CDAO “to rapidly and securely onboard third-party vendor and government capabilities into the government-owned, Palantir-operated data environment to meet priority combatant command digital needs.”

The contract was awarded through CDAO’s Tradewinds Solution Marketplace, which allows private firms of all sizes to pitch DOD their AI, machine learning and data capabilities through five minute infomercial-style videos. Once companies are accepted into the marketplace, Pentagon components can search the platform to view videos of solutions from industry partners. Companies, in turn, are able to access post-competition, readily awardable contracts. 

Bonnie Evangelista, CDAO’s acting deputy for acquisition directorate, told Nextgov/FCW earlier this year that the platform can significantly shorten the time it takes for companies to receive DOD contracts.

During a NetApp conference on Tuesday, CDAO Director of Procurement Quentin McCoy said Palantir’s use of the Tradewinds marketplace allowed it to receive the award for Open DAGIR in 30 days. 

“It’s a sort of healthy prototype,” McCoy said about the Open DAGIR solution Palantir will provide, noting that “it’s going to allow industry and government to ingest data together and share and bring in third-party vendors to do this action.”

DOD said it will initially use Open DAGIR to support its Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control — or CJADC2 — initiative that is designed to promote interoperability across disparate military environments. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced in February that CDAO had achieved “the minimum viable capability” of the information-sharing network.

CDAO is also planning to use its ongoing Global Information Dominance Experiments, or GIDE, to determine whether any additional capabilities should be added to the Open DAGIR ecosystem. GIDE is designed, in part, to help inform the Pentagon’s use of emerging technologies to support its CJADC2 initiative. 

The GIDE series — created by U.S. Northern Command and relaunched by CDAO last year — tests out AI and data analytics tools to determine how they can be used for military decisionmaking. The department finished its GIDE 9 iteration in March. 

McCoy said CDAO is planning to hold several industry days in the next few months, including one scheduled for mid-July, in preparation for the office’s next GIDE iteration. 

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Pentagon says none of the aid unloaded from US pier off coast of Gaza has been delivered to broader Palestinian population

None of the aid that has been unloaded from the temporary pier the US constructed off the coast of Gaza has been delivered to the broader Palestinian population, as the US works with the UN and Israel to identify safe delivery routes inside the enclave, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.

Several desperate Gazans intercepted trucks delivering aid from the pier over the weekend, leading the UN to suspend the delivery operations until the logistical challenges are resolved.

The US is working with Israel and the United Nations to establish “alternative routes” for the safe delivery of the 569 tons of aid transported to Gaza since last week, Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said on Tuesday.

Asked whether any of the aid has been delivered to the people of Gaza, Ryder said, “As of today, I do not believe so.” He added that aid had been held in an assembly area on shore, but as of Tuesday had begun getting moved to warehouses for distribution throughout Gaza as alternative routes have been established.

A US official told CNN that the Defense Department and UN are still working to determine how much aid can be held at he staging area inside Gaza at any given time.

The amount of aid getting to the Gaza shoreline from its initial staging area in Cyprus has also fallen short of initial Pentagon estimates.

Since Friday, more than 569 metric tons of humanitarian assistance have been delivered through the temporary pier, called JLOTS, or Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, to the shore of Gaza to be distributed by humanitarian partners, Ryder said. But Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander of the US Naval Forces Central Command, said last week that the US hoped to initially transport 500 tons of aid per day via the pier, and scale up as time went on.

Over the weekend, as trucks began moving the aid delivered off the floating pier, CNN reported that a group of men in Gaza intercepted the aid, saying they did not trust that it was actually meant for the Palestinian people.

“I have doubts,” Mounir Ayad, a Gaza resident, told CNN near the pier. “I don’t understand this floating pier or what it indicates and what its purpose is. They say it’s for aid, but people are apprehensive. Is this aid or something else? We know that the US has never supported the Palestinian cause, so it’s implausible that it’s giving us aid without something in return.”

Ryder acknowledged on Tuesday that some initial aid brought into Gaza was “intercepted by some people who took that aid off those vehicles.”

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Pentagon sounds alarm over Ukraine corruption

The conflict with Russia has created new opportunities for bribes, kickbacks and theft in Ukraine, the US military’s inspector general told Congress in the quarterly report on the $113 billion in aid sent to Kiev.

Department of Defense Inspector General Robert Storch also serves as the special inspector for Operation Atlantic Resolve, the US-led operation to arm Ukraine.

“The ongoing war with Russia has created new opportunities for corruption, with several recent scandals within the defense sector revealing the misuse of wartime resources and weapons procurement funds,” the report said.

“Endemic corruption persists” in Ukraine, which remains “one of the least accountable governments in Europe,” according to the Pentagon’s inspector-general.

“Bribes, kickbacks, and inflated procurement costs are common risks for corruption within the Ministry of Defense,” leading to purchases of “inferior equipment” or “diversion of funds” intended for food and ammunition, according to the report.

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Back Door War: SecDef Admits US Troops In Gaza May See Combat

In a fascinating exchange US Rep. Matt Gaetz probed US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin about the role of the estimated 1,000 US troops involved in building a floating pier to deliver aid to Gaza. Austin insisted that they were not “boots on the ground” although he admitted they would be armed and would respond to incoming fire. Injecting US troops into a warzone requires a Congressional vote, Gaetz warned Austin.

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The Pentagon is lying about UFOs

Congress held a historic hearing on UFOs last July. The hearing, which featured testimony from two former Navy fighter pilots and a former senior intelligence officer, garnered a notable amount of attention and interest not seen on Capitol Hill in years.

In one remarkable exchange, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) described how his office received a “protected disclosure” from Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, regarding a January 2023 UFO incident over the Gulf of Mexico. After being stonewalled by the Air Force, he delivered a tense, on-base reminder to the military about “how authorities flow in the United States of America.” The Air Force relented, permitting Gaetz to review sensor data gathered during the encounter.

According to Gaetz, fighter pilots tracked four unknown objects flying in a “clear diamond formation.” Notably, the incident occurred on a training range typically conspicuously free of any airborne clutter.

Still imagery indicated that one of the objects demonstrated capabilities that Gaetz, who has served on the House Armed Services Committee for nearly a decade, was “not able to attach to any human capability, either from the United States or from any of our adversaries.”

Radar data, according to Gaetz, showed that the four objects moved in a “very clear formation [with] equidistant” separation.

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Pentagon Chief Engaged In Pressuring EU Countries To Give Up Their Patriot Systems

America’s top defense official is engaged in efforts to pressure European countries to give up their own US-made anti-air defenses for Ukraine.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Tuesday he’s been actively encouraging countries to donate their Patriot missile systems to Ukraine. “There are countries that have Patriots, and so what we’re doing is continuing to engage those countries,” Austin testified before a House Armed Services Committee hearing.

“I have talked to the leaders of several countries… myself here in the last two weeks, encouraging them to give up more capability or provide more capability,” he said.

Last Friday Austin announced that as part of a massive new $6 billion aid package for Kiev, the US will provide additional Patriot missiles. This is part of the first approved roll-out in the wake of Biden signing into effect the $61 billion in defense funding for Ukraine belatedly approved by Congress this month.

President Zelensky and his top officials have been essentially begging for more Patriots as Russia continues pummeling its cities and infrastructure. 

A Ukrainian outlet has quoted Zelensky as ramping up the pressure on his backers in NATO:

“Regarding the number of missiles to Patriots, we really expect a positive result in this regard. Thank God that after we convened the Ukraine-NATO Council, we received an assurance that there will be no delays in the process (of supplying missiles to the Patriot systems – ed.), Volodymyr Zelensky said.

Earlier this month a disturbing report by Financial Times identified Greece and Spain as being under the most pressure from Western allies to give up what few Patriot anti-air defense systems that they possess.

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