Tag: pentagon

US Military Thanks And Praises Retiring CNN “Journalist” For Her Service

The US military has been showering CNN’s retiring Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr with effusive thanks and praise for her lifetime of service, giving some insight into the cozy working relationship between the media and the war machine inside the US empire.

“Today closes a remarkable career for CNN’s Barbara Starr, a leader in the Pentagon Press Corps,” reads a post by the Twitter account for US Central Command. “Her aggressive reporting and tireless commitment to the truth brought this Nation closer to its military. She will forever be missed.”

Starr received a standing ovation at a Pentagon press briefing on Tuesday after Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder sang her praises and thanked her for two decades on the job.

“I’d like to take this opportunity to say farewell to our media colleague, Miss Barbara Starr,” Ryder said. “Barbara has reported for CNN for over 20 years, and has been a fixture in the Pentagon Press Corps, and today marks her final day with CNN after a storied and fully-impressive — excuse me — truly impressive career.”

“So Barbara, on behalf of Secretary of Defense Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley and the entire Department of Defense, I would like to extend a special congratulations and thank you for your many years of timely, insightful and important reporting on our nation’s most pressing defense issues,” Ryder continued. “And as someone who has worked with you for many of those last 20 years and someone who has had to take your late-night phone calls and emails and answer your tough, but fair questions, I can say from personal experience that the U.S. public and audiences worldwide have been well served by your in-depth reporting from the Pentagon, your journalistic integrity and your determination to tell the stories of service members worldwide, and to ensure the government and DOD remain transparent and accountable to the taxpayers and the American public they serve. Congratulations again, and we wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.”

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The Pentagon Budget Normalizes War

Two dogs walking. One of them says to the other: “I bark and I bark, but I never feel like I affect real change.”This is the caption of a New Yorker cartoon by Christopher Weyant from several years ago. It keeps popping up in my head — I mean, every day. Like everyone else, I want what I do to matter, to “effect real change.” What I do is write. Specifically, I swim in the infinity of possibility. Humanity can kill itself or it can learn to survive. Most people (I believe) prefer the latter, which is all about discovering how we are connected to one another and to the rest of the universe. This is what I try to write about.

Then Congress passes another military budget. And once again, there’s the New Yorker cartoon.

“An emerging compromise on annual defense policy legislation will endorse a $45 billion increase to President Joe Biden’s defense spending plans,” Politico reports. “. . . The deal would set the budget topline of the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act at $847 billion for national defense.”

You know, more than the world’s next nine defense budgets combined. We have more than 750 military bases around the world. We’re sending billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Ukraine to keep the war going, in the wake of our two decades of war in the Middle East to rid the world of terrorism . . . excuse me, evil. As a result, the planet is bleeding to death. Not to worry, though. We still have nukes.

How safe and secure can we get?

And here’s Northrop Grumman, presenting to the world the B-21 Raider, an updated nuclear bomber, a.k.a., the future of Armageddon. No need to worry. When Armageddon is ready to happen, it will happen smoothly, at the bargain cost of $750 million per aircraft.

Northrop Grumman itself puts it this way: “When it comes to delivering America’s resolve, the B-21 Raider will be standing by, silent and ready. We are providing America’s warfighters with an advanced aircraft offering a combination of range, payload, and survivability. The B-21 Raider will be capable of penetrating the toughest defenses to deliver precision strikes anywhere in the world. The B-21 is the future of deterrence.”

We’re dancing on the edge of hell.

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Pentagon clarifies position on aliens

A new body set up by the Pentagon to look into reported sightings of UFOs has so far not found any evidence of alien life, the US Department of Defense has said.

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which was established this July to track unidentified objects in the sky, space, and underwater, and to assess any security threat these may pose, has received “several hundreds” of additional reports of unexplained phenomena, the head of the body, Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, told journalists on Friday.

However, according to undersecretary of defense for intelligence Ronald Moultrie, AARO experts “haven’t seen anything that would lead us to believe any of the objects we have seen are of alien origin.”

“I haven’t seen anything… to suggest there has been an alien visitation or alien crash,” Moultrie added.

The undersecretary also said that the US considers any “unauthorized system” in its airspace to be “a threat to safety.”

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Lawmakers ask Pentagon chief for details on waivers allowing retired generals to consult for foreign governments

Three House members on Tuesday sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to ask for additional details about how former generals receive waivers to consult on behalf of foreign governments. 

The letter from Reps. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), Michael Cloud (R-Texas) and Jason Crow (D-Colo.) comes after a Washington Post report in October that noted more than 500 retired military personnel received waivers to pursue jobs with foreign governments with known human rights abuses and histories of political oppression. 

The lawmakers said they are concerned about a lack of transparency in the waiver approval process and reporting to Congress, the lack of standardized internal procedures at the Defense Department to implement the waiver approval process and the lack of enforcement when retired personnel violate the law through failing to report that they are advising for a foreign government. 

They said they are also worried about potential conflicts of interest that were identified during the waiver approval process and the extent to which International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) concerns are discovered and resolved during the approval process. 

ITAR is intended to control the export of defense and military technologies to protect national security. 

The three House members said the public has a right to know the extent of influence that foreign powers might have over the country’s former military leaders and if high-ranking retired officers are taking advantage of their roles in government to create employment opportunities with foreign governments. 

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Senators Press Pentagon To Give Ukraine Advanced Drones

A group of bipartisan senators is urging the Biden administration to provide Ukraine with advanced MQ-1C Gray Eagle drones that would give Kyiv longer-range capability.

The Biden administration has been hesitant to send the drones due to the risk of escalation with Russia and concerns that the sensitive technology in the drones could end up in the wrong hands.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Biden administration has decided not to provide the drones, although other reporting disputed that claim and said a final decision hadn’t been made.

In a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, 16 senators expressed “concern” over the reports that said the administration has declined to send the MQ-1C. The senators asked the administration to give “careful reconsideration” to the Ukrainian request.

The letter was led by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) and was signed by many members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including ranking member James Inhofe (R-OK).

The senators said the MQ-1C and other long-range capabilities would provide “Ukraine additional lethality needed to eject Russian forces and regain occupied territory.”

Providing MQ-1Cs would be a major escalation in US military aid to Kyiv as the drones can be armed with powerful hellfire missiles and can fly for up to 30 hours. The drones would give Ukraine the capability to strike targets inside Russian territory.

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Pentagon fails to pass new financial audit, unable to account for over $2 trillion in assets

The US Department of Defense has, for the fifth straight year, failed to pass a financial audit, with only seven out of the Pentagon’s 27 military agencies receiving a passing grade.

“We failed to get an ‘A’,” Mike McCord, the Pentagon’s comptroller and chief financial officer, told reporters last week, announcing the results of the Pentagon’s fifth-ever financial audit.

“I would not say that we flunked,” he added, despite his office acknowledging that the Pentagon only managed to account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets.

With this failure, the Pentagon has kept its spot as the only US government agency to have never passed a comprehensive audit. It also highlights the US war department’s persistent lack of internal financial control, its poor budget estimations and rampant overspending.

A clear example of this is the F-35 program, which has gone over its original budget by $165 billion to build a plane tasked to perform many different tasks, none of which it does well.

The Pentagon is slated to buy more than 2,400 F-35s for the Air Force, Marines, and Navy. The estimated lifetime cost for procuring and operating these planes – $1.7 trillion – would make it the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons project ever.

A 2021 Pentagon assessment of the F-35 found 800 unresolved defects in the plane.

There is also the current plan to expand Washington’s ship production, as part of the Pentagon’s obsession with preparing for a potential war with China.

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The US military is operating in more countries than we think

U.S. military forces have been engaged in unauthorized hostilities in many more countries than the Pentagon has disclosed to Congress, let alone the public, according to a major new report released late last week by New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice.

“Afghanistan, Iraq, maybe Libya. If you asked the average American where the United States has been at war in the past two decades, you would likely get this short list,” according to the report, Secret War: How the U.S. Uses Partnerships and Proxy Forces to Wage War Under the Radar. “But this list is wrong – off by at least 17 countries in which the United States has engaged in armed conflict through ground forces, proxy forces, or air strikes.”

“This proliferation of secret war is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it is undemocratic and dangerous,” the report’s author, Katherine Yon Ebright, wrote in the introduction. “The conduct of undisclosed hostilities in unreported countries contravenes our constitutional design. It invites military escalation that is unforeseeable to the public, to Congress, and even to the diplomats charged with managing U.S. foreign relations.” 

The 39-page report focuses on so-called “security cooperation” programs authorized by Congress pursuant to the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, against certain terrorist groups. One such program, known as Section 127e, authorized the Defense Department to “provide support to foreign forces, irregular forces, groups or individuals engaged in supporting or facilitating authorized ongoing military operations by United States special operations forces to combat terrorism.”

According to the report, that “support” has been broadly — or, more accurately, too broadly — interpreted by the Pentagon. In practice, it has enabled the U.S. military to “develop and control proxy forces that fight on behalf of and sometimes alongside U.S. forces” and to use armed force to defend its local partners against adversaries (in what the Pentagon calls “collective self-defense”) regardless of whether those adversaries pose any threat to U.S. territory or persons, and, in some cases, whether or not the adversaries have been officially designated as legitimate targets under the 2001 AUMF. 

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Pentagon says it will fund tanks for Ukraine

The Pentagon on Friday announced it will be funding tanks sent to Ukraine for the first time, part of a $400 million military assistance package that will also provide armored vehicles, drones and a budget to refurbish air defense missiles. 

The additional military, ground and air capabilities come as Ukrainian forces are pushing forward on an offensive to retake the southern city of Kherson, even as they come under increased aerial attacks from Russia, including from Iranian-supplied drones.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had called for NATO to supply tanks within the first weeks of Russia’s invasion, which began on Feb. 24.

On Friday he tweeted that Ukraine is “thankful to [President Biden] and the people of [the United States] for another $400 military assistance package.” 

The weapons package includes 90 refurbished T-72 tanks, which will all come from the Czech Republic. The United States will pay for 45 of them to be refurbished, while the Netherlands will pay to refurbish the other 45, according to Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh.

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Pentagon Confirms US Boots Are On The Ground In Ukraine

Two bombshell reports by the Associated Press and Washington Post Monday and Tuesday have confirmed that the United States has boots on the ground in the Ukraine conflict. Crucially, these troops are performing tasks separate from mere embassy security. 

The American troops are said to be performing “inspections” of US weapon caches after last week the State Department and Pentagon unveiled a new plan to track US-supplied weapons in efforts to implement accountability for the billions of dollars worth of arms and ammunition transferred to Ukrainian forces since near the start of the war eight months ago.

“A small number of U.S. military forces inside Ukraine have recently begun doing onsite inspections to ensure that Ukrainian troops are properly accounting for the Western-provided weapons they receive, a senior U.S. defense official told Pentagon reporters Monday,” the AP/WaPo reporting revealed.

A Pentagon briefing confirmed this “small” contingency of troops has been advised to not do inspections “close” to the front lines of fighting: 

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to provide a military update, would not say where the inspections are taking place or how close to the battlefronts the U.S. troops are getting. The official said U.S. personnel can’t do inspections “close to the front lines,” but said they are going where security conditions allow.

There have already been “several inspections” overseen by U.S. Defense attache and a US Office of Defense Cooperation team based out of the Ukrainian capital. The report underscores that “U.S. President Joe Biden has ruled out any combat role for U.S. forces inside Ukraine.” 

However, what’s clear is that despite the White House’s ruling out of “combat” troops, this is the start of perhaps inevitable ‘mission creep’ – as has been seen in other conflict zones (such as Syria). If US troops are doing inspections of Ukrainian arms and ammo, and presumably Russia is currently targeting any and all Ukrainian military bases, this puts American troops and assets in Russia’s crosshairs, greatly increasing the possibility that the US and Russia could stumble into a direct shooting war.

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