Tag: pentagon

Priorities: Defense Dept. Holds Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion “Summit” As Military Fentanyl Overdoses Surge

In an article entitled “‘You Can’t Fix the Problem If You’re in Denial:’ The Military’s Surge of Fentanyl Overdoses,” Military.com tells the story of Carole De Nola, whose son Ari McGuire, “a 23-year-old reconnaissance scout with Fort Bragg’s storied 82nd Airborne Division,” died of a fentanyl overdose.

[O]n a Friday night in August 2019, De Nola got a call from an Army officer: Her son was on life support in a Fayetteville, North Carolina, hospital. Ari’s heart had stopped beating while riding in an Uber, coming through the gate at Fort Bragg. An ambulance had managed to revive him, and Ari was induced into a coma upon arriving at the hospital.

De Nola, her husband Joseph, and the cantor from their synagogue had made the daylong trek from California to North Carolina to say goodbye to Ari. “When we got there, the doctor told us that there was nothing they could do. I’m sure that the whole hospital heard me screaming.”

Unfortunately, statistics show that Ari is not alone. His death was one of 332 fatal overdoses within the military, according to information newly released by the Pentagon on ODs between 2017 and 2021. That five-year period also saw 15,000 non-fatal ODs among the active-duty force. Fort Bragg is a known drug “hot spot“; “Thirty-four soldiers died at the base between 2017 and 2021; it also saw a 100% increase in drug crime over 2021. Those deaths account for more than 10% of the total fatalities reported by the military.”

Gil Cisneros, the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, stated in a letter accompanying the new fentanyl statistics that “[w]e share your concern that drug overdose is a serious problem and must be addressed.” But “De Nola said that she doesn’t feel that the military has done enough.” Others agree.

Alex Bennett, a professor at NYU’s School of Public Health who has led several studies addressing opioid-use among military veterans, stated that “what we have in the military is sort of an epidemic that’s not fully acknowledged.”

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How Does This Happen? U.S. Military Email Server Was Exposed for Two Weeks

Why is it that we can’t go more than a week without another Biden administration embarrassment?

On Tuesday, a top U.S. defense official verified to Fox News that a Department of Defense email server was left exposed for two weeks and that, as a result, internal emails were accessible without a password.

The exposed server was allegedly the result of a misconfiguration. Anyone who knew what the server’s IP address was could access the emails with a web browser.

“The server contained around three terabytes of military emails, with many related to the U.S. Special Operations Command, which is a military unit which conducts special operations,” Fox News reports. The emails on the server went back several years and contained personal information.

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Pentagon fixes glitch after tech researcher discovers unsecured email server with sensitive military info

An unsecured server that allowed for US military emails to be spilled across the web for weeks was repaired on Monday. 

The exposed server was hosted on Microsoft’s Azure government cloud, reports TechCrunch, “which uses servers that are physically separated from other commercial customers and as such can be used to share sensitive but unclassified government data.”

The server contained roughly three terabytes of military emails which may have pertained to US Special Operations Command. The site reports that a misconfiguration left the server “without a password,” which allowed the emails to be easily accessible by anyone with internet access with just a web browser, so long as the IP address was known.

One security researcher, Anurag Sen, found the server last weekend and gave the details to TechCrunch, which then alerted the US government.

The server contained sensitive military information and email messages which dated back “years.” One email included a filled-out questionnaire that federal employees use to seek security clearances. Those forms contain sensitive individual information before they are cleared to handle classified information.

The questionnaires hold a “significant amount of background information on security clearance holders valuable to foreign adversaries,” TechCrunch reports. 

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Defense Department DEI Chief Made Disparaging Remarks About White People on Twitter

Kelisa Wing is the chief diversity officer in the education wing at the Department of Defense. She is herself, currently on defense, over some things she wrote on Twitter about white people.

This story is an excellent reminder of just how embedded the ideology behind diversity, equity and inclusion is at every level of our government.

FOX News reports:

Defense Department DEI education official claims past racially-charged tweets were ‘private speech’

The chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer at the Department of Defense’s education wing defended herself against claims from lawmakers that she made “racially disparaging” statements, according to reports.

Fox News Digital reported in September 2022 that Kalisa Wing, the DEI chief at the Department of Defense Education Activity, or DODEA, which provides K-12 education to the DoD community in the U.S. and all over the world, wrote a series of disparaging posts about White people on Twitter.

In an interview with the Military Times, Wing said when she made the statements, she was not speaking on behalf of the DoDEA, but instead as an educator and private citizen.

“No, I did not make disparaging comments against White people,” she said. “I would never categorize an entire group of people to disparage them. I’m speaking now as a private individual, about my private free speech from July of 2022.”

Wing wrote in a series of tweets in June 2020, that have since been taken down, “I’m exhausted with these white folx in the [professional development] sessions.”

“[T]his lady actually had the CAUdacity to say that black people can be racist too… I had to stop the session and give Karen the BUSINESS… [W]e are not the majority, we don’t have power,” she continued.

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Pentagon Finally Stops Hiding Military Overdose Epidemic

THE U.S. ARMY Special Forces, better known as the Green Berets, has a serious problem with substance abuse and fatal drug overdoses. The same is true of the Army’s two most important infantry divisions: the 101st Airborne Division and the 82nd Airborne Division.

That’s the takeaway of data released by the Pentagon this week to a group of five U.S. senators, led by Massachusetts Sen. Edward Markey. Markey, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and others grew concerned about rising drug use in the military after reading a report in the September issue of Rolling Stone that at least 14 and as many as 30 American soldiers had died in 2020 and 2021 of overdoses at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Fort Bragg is the headquarters of the Special Forces, as well as the top-secret Joint Special Operations Command, the “black ops” component of the military.

The senators wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in late September requesting detailed statistics, going back five years, on accidental overdoses in the ranks. “We share your concern that drug overdose is a serious problem,” the Pentagon’s undersecretary for personnel and readiness wrote in response this week. “We must work to do better.”

A total of 15,293 American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines overdosed on illicit drugs from 2017 to 2022, according to a compendium of data and analysis enclosed with the letter. Of those, 332 cases were fatal.

Consistent with Rolling Stone’s recent reporting, the data showed a rising long-term trend, followed by a sharp spike in overdose deaths among active-duty military men in 2020 and 2021. Fentanyl was by far the biggest killer, accounting for more than half of the casualties. “The number of OD deaths involving fentanyl has more than doubled over the past five years,” the Pentagon disclosed.

“With hundreds of fatal overdoses reported on U.S. military bases in recent years,” Markey writes in a statement to Rolling Stone, “the toll is mounting. We can and must curb this tragic trend.”

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Whatever They Decide These UFOs Are, The Answer Will Be More US Militarism

US war planes have shot down three unidentified objects in North American airspace over the last three days, which is entirely without precedent.

On Sunday an octagon-shaped object was reportedly shot down over Lake Huron near the Canadian border after first being detected some 1,300 miles away over Montana on Saturday night. On Saturday a cylindrical object was reportedly shot down over Canada’s Yukon territory by an American F-22, and on Friday an object “about the size of a small car” was reportedly shot down after being detected over Alaska.

Unlike the Chinese balloon that was shot down earlier this month which the US claims was an instrument of espionage, as of this writing there’s still no solid consensus as to what these last three objects were or where they came from. While all three were found at high altitude like the balloon, the Pentagon is refusing to classify them as such, with the head of US Northern Command General Glen VanHerck going as far as to say it hadn’t yet been determined how these objects are even staying aloft.

“I’m not going to categorize them as balloons. We’re calling them objects for a reason,” VanHerck told the press on Sunday. “I’m not able to categorize how they stay aloft. It could be a gaseous type of balloon inside a structure or it could be some type of a propulsion system. But clearly, they’re — they’re able to stay aloft.”

VanHerck also made headlines for saying he couldn’t rule out extraterrestrial origin for the objects.

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Pentagon Spotting More Flying Objects Due to Enhanced Military Radar

The rise in the number of high-altitude objects recently identified flying in U.S. airspace is due in part to the government enhancing its radar systems, a top Pentagon official said on Sunday.

Melissa Dalton, assistant secretary of defense for Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs, told reporters in a briefing on Sunday that officials have been closely scrutinizing U.S. airspace ever since the first Chinese surveillance balloon was shot down on Feb. 4 after making its way across the United States and approaching the Atlantic coast.

“In light of the People’s Republic of China balloon that we took down last Saturday, we have been more closely scrutinizing our airspace at these altitudes, including enhancing our radar, which may at least partly explain the increase in objects that we detected over the past week,” Dalton said.

She added that the Pentagon is also aware that a number of high-altitude objects can be used by a range of companies, countries, and research organizations for “purposes that are not nefarious, including legitimate research.”

With that being said, Dalton noted that officials had not been able to definitively assess or verify what the recent objects that were discovered flying over U.S. airspace were being used for, and thus the government acted out of an “abundance of caution” to protect national security.

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Pentagon Wants To Return Special Ops Propagandists To Ukraine

An article by The Washington Post titled “Pentagon looks to restart top-secret programs in Ukraine” contains some interesting information about what US special ops forces were doing in Ukraine in the lead-up to the Russian invasion last year, and what they are slated to be doing there in the future. 

“The Pentagon is urging Congress to resume funding a pair of top-secret programs in Ukraine suspended ahead of Russia’s invasion last year, according to current and former U.S. officials,” writes the Post’s Wesley Morgan. “If approved,the move would allow American Special Operations troops to employ Ukrainian operatives to observe Russian military movementsand counter disinformation.”

Much further down in the article we learn the specifics of what those two top-secret programs were. One of them entailed US commandos sending Ukrainian operatives “on surreptitious reconnaissance missions in Ukraine’s east” to collect intelligence on Russia. The other entailed secretly administering online propaganda, though of course The Washington Post does not describe it as such.

“We had people taking apart Russian propaganda and telling the true story on blogs,” WaPo was told by a source described as “a person in the Special Operations community.”

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US Pentagon is developing a new ‘weapon of mass destruction’: Thousands of drones will work together to destroy enemy defenses – but experts fear humans will lose control of the ‘swarms’

The US Pentagon is planning a new ‘weapon of mass destruction’ that involves thousands of drones that strike by air, land and water to destroy enemy defenses – but experts fear humans could lose control of the ‘swarms.’

The top-secret project, dubbed AMASS (Autonomous Multi-Domain Adaptive Swarms-of-Swarms), would represent automated warfare on an unprecedented scale.

AMASS is still in the planning stages, but DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) has been collecting bids from suppliers for the $78 million contract.

Small drones would be equipped with weapons and tools for navigation and communication, along with abilities ranging from radar jamming to launching lethal attacks.

While the technology would change how the US goes to war, experts in the industry raise concerns.

Zachary Kallenborn, a policy fellow at George Mason University in Virginia, said: ‘As the swarm grows in size, it’ll become virtually impossible for humans to manage the decisions.’

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