Tag: pentagon

PENTAGON’S BUDGET IS SO BLOATED THAT IT NEEDS AN AI PROGRAM TO NAVIGATE IT

AS TECH LUMINARIES like Elon Musk issue solemn warnings about artificial intelligence’s threat of “civilizational destruction,” the U.S. military is using it for a decidedly more mundane purpose: understanding its sprawling $816.7 billion budget and figuring out its own policies.

Thanks to its bloat and political wrangling, the annual Department of Defense budget legislation includes hundreds of revisions and limitations telling the Pentagon what it can and cannot do. To make sense of all those provisions, the Pentagon created an AI program, codenamed GAMECHANGER. 

“In my comptroller role, I am, of course, the most excited about applying GAMECHANGER to gain better visibility and understanding across our various budget exhibits,” said Gregory Little, the deputy comptroller of the Pentagon, shortly after the program’s creation last year. 

“The fact that they have to go to such extraordinary measures to understand what their own policies are is an indictment of how they operate,” said William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and expert on the defense budget. “It’s kind of similar to the problem with the budget as a whole: They don’t make tough decisions, they just layer on more policies, more weapons systems, more spending. Between the Pentagon and Congress, they’re not really getting rid of old stuff, they’re just adding more.”

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PENTAGON-FUNDED STUDY WARNS DEMENTIA AMONG U.S. OFFICIALS POSES NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT

AS THE NATIONAL security workforce ages, dementia impacting U.S. officials poses a threat to national security, according to a first-of-its-kind study by a Pentagon-funded think tank. The report, released this spring, came as several prominent U.S. officials trusted with some of the nation’s most highly classified intelligence experienced public lapses, stoking calls for resignations and debate about Washington’s aging leadership.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who had a second freezing episode last month, enjoys the most privileged access to classified information of anyone in Congress as a member of the so-called Gang of Eight congressional leadership. Ninety-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., whose decline has seen her confused about how to vote and experiencing memory lapses — forgetting conversations and not recalling a monthslong absence — was for years a member of the Gang of Eight and remains a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on which she has served since 2001.

The study, published by the RAND Corporation’s National Security Research Division in April, identifies individuals with both current and former access to classified material who develop dementia as threats to national security, citing the possibility that they may unwittingly disclose government secrets. 

“Individuals who hold or held a security clearance and handled classified material could become a security threat if they develop dementia and unwittingly share government secrets,” the study says.

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The Pentagon’s UFO office is sending cryptic ‘alien’ messages

Last week, the Pentagon’s new UFO office, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), unveiled its long-awaited website. Tucked among previously-released graphics, transcripts and videos is an important new document outlining the office’s mission and objectives.

Within hours of the site’s launch, eagle-eyed sleuths noticed that an image of a spherical object, divided into quarters, appears on the corners of the “Mission Overview” document. Further analysis determined that the image is a stock photo titled “alien technology in a metallic ball.”

While such “alien” and “metallic ball” references might otherwise be chalked up to a crude prank, closer analysis suggests that there is more than meets the eye.

According to AARO director Seán Kirkpatrick, the most common observations claimed in the 800 reports received by his office as of late May are of “spheres,” 3 to 13 feet in diameter and “white, silver, [or] translucent” in color. Two videos and two images of objects fitting this description, all recorded by U.S. servicemembers, have emerged in recent years.

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PENTAGON MISLED CONGRESS ABOUT U.S. BASES IN AFRICA

SINCE A CADRE of U.S.-trained officers joined a junta that overthrew Niger’s democratically elected president in late July, more than 1,000 U.S. troops have been largely confined to their Nigerien outposts, including America’s largest drone base in the region, Air Base 201 in Agadez.

The base, which has cost the U.S. a total of $250 million since construction began in 2016, is the key U.S. surveillance hub in West Africa. But in testimony before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in March, the chief of U.S. Africa Command described Air Base 201 as “minimal” and “low cost.”

Gen. Michael Langley, the AFRICOM chief, told Congress about just two “enduring” U.S. forward operating sites in Africa: Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti and a longtime logistics hub on Ascension Island in the south Atlantic Ocean. “The Command also operates out of 12 other posture locations throughout Africa,” he said in his prepared testimony. “These locations have minimal permanent U.S. presence and have low-cost facilities and limited supplies for these dedicated Americans to perform critical missions and quickly respond to emergencies.”

Experts say that Langley misled Congress, downplaying the size and scope of the U.S. footprint in Africa. AFRICOM’s “posture” on the continent actually consists of no fewer than 18 outposts, in addition to Camp Lemonnier and Ascension Island, according to information from AFRICOM’s secret 2022 theater posture plan, which was seen by The Intercept. A U.S. official with knowledge of AFRICOM’s current footprint on the continent confirmed that the same 20 bases are still in operation. Another two locations in Somalia and Ghana were also, according to the 2022 document, “under evaluation.”

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Pentagon now reports about 400 UFO encounters: ‘We want to know what’s out there’

Top Pentagon officials told a House panel on Tuesday that there are now close to 400 reports from military personnel of possible encounters with UFOs — a significant increase from the 144 tracked in a major report released last year by the U.S. intelligence community.

A Navy official also said at Tuesday’s hearing that investigators are “reasonably confident” the floating pyramid-shaped objects captured on one leaked, widely seen military video were likely drones.

That footage, which the military confirmed last year was authentic, had helped spur interest in purported UFOs, also referred to as “unidentified aerial phenomena” or UAPs.

Indiana Rep. André Carson, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee, called Tuesday’s hearing, the first in more than 50 years focused on the aerial incidents.

UAPs, Carson said, “are a potential national security threat and they need to be treated that way.”

“For too long the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis,” he added. “Pilots avoided reporting or were laughed at when they did.”

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DoD Releases New Document Disclosing the ‘World’s UFO Hotspots’

The U.S. Department of Defense unveiled a document detailing the world’s primary UFO sighting locations, according to a report from the Daily Mail.

The document includes a map pinpointing areas reporting the highest number of unidentified object sightings, based on data from 1996 to 2023, according to the Daily Mail report.

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, stated, “We see these all over the world, and we see these making very interesting apparent manoeuvres.”

The map highlights several regions, including Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan, the east and west coasts of the U.S. and parts of the Middle East as primary locations for UFO sightings, the report noted.

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Pentagon releases new website on UFOs

The Defense Department on Thursday released a new website that will provide official declassified information on UFOs, including pictures and videos, for the public to easily parse through.

The website is the official page for the public to interact with the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a relatively new Pentagon office tasked with reviewing and analyzing UFOs.

The site appears to still be under construction, but it can be found here. The Hill has reached out to the Defense Department for more information about when the full website will go live.

The U.S. government, which now refers to UFOs by the name of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), has taken the presence of unknown flying objects more seriously in the past few years, as has Congress.

In a Thursday release about the website, the Pentagon said it was “committed to transparency with the American people on AARO’s work” on UAPs.

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