Tag: pentagon

Pentagon accounting error provides extra $6.2 billion for Ukraine military aid

The Pentagon said Tuesday that it overestimated the value of the weapons it has sent to Ukraine by $6.2 billion over the past two years — about double early estimates — resulting in a surplus that will be used for future security packages.

Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said a detailed review of the accounting error found that the military services used replacement costs rather than the book value of equipment that was pulled from Pentagon stocks and sent to Ukraine. She said final calculations show there was an error of $3.6 billion in the current fiscal year and $2.6 billion in the 2022 fiscal year, which ended last Sept. 30.

As a result, the department now has additional money in its coffers to use to support Ukraine as it pursues its counteroffensive against Russia. And it come as the fiscal year is wrapping up and congressional funding was beginning to dwindle.

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Pentagon Personnel Did Not Appropriately Track Weapons Transferred to Ukraine

A report from the Department of Defense Inspector General found Pentagon employees in Poland failed to follow procedures to account for military equipment being transferred to Ukraine. In the shipments of weapons monitored by the office, Pentagon employees failed to properly track the weapons in three of five shipments.

“DoD personnel did not have the required accountability of the thousands of defense items that they received and transferred at Jasionka, [Poland],” it stated. “We observed that DoD personnel did not fully implement their standard operating procedures to account for defense items and could not confirm the quantities of defense items received against the quantity of items shipped for three of five shipments we observed.”

The Pentagon does not “have reasonable assurance that their database of all defense items transferred to the [Ukraine] via air transport in Jasionka was accurate or complete.” The report added, “14 The DoD may risk providing more or less equipment than authorized by [President Joe Biden], and may not be able to verify the quantity of all defense items before they are transferred to [Ukraine].”

One example in the inspector general report explains how weapons are shipped without a manifest. “One shipment containing thousands of small arms, night vision optics devices, and various types of cold weather gear did not include an air manifest.” The report continues, “DoD personnel opened crates to identify the types of defense items contained within the crates, but even then the personnel could not verify whether the number of items they identified represented the true number shipped.”

Since Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Washington has shipped tens of billions in weapons to Ukraine, including advanced platforms. The Pentagon inspector general report examined arms shipped to Ukraine directly from American stockpiles. 

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Pentagon Readies New $2B Military Aid Package for Ukraine

The Pentagon is set to announce another military aid package for Ukraine valued at more than $2 billion, according to a report.

The new package would come about a week after the Pentagon announced a $300 million package for Ukraine on May 31.

Bloomberg News reported Friday morning that the Pentagon could announce as early as Friday that the package would include air defense munitions.

The package will reportedly be awarded under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which funds new purchases of weapons, versus using presidential drawdown authority, which has been used to authorize the transfer of U.S. military equipment to Ukraine.

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EXPOSED: DISTURBING DETAILS OF NEW PENTAGON “PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT OFFICE”

Ken Klippenstein, an investigative journalist at The Intercept, has exposed how the Pentagon very quietly launched a new internal division, dubbed the “Influence and Perception Management Office” (IPMO), in March.

Its existence is not strictly secret, although there has been no official announcement of its launch, let alone an explanation from Department of Defense (DoD) officials as to its raison d’être or modus operandi. Its budget likewise remains a mystery but purportedly runs into the “multimillions.”

Pentagon financial documents from 2022 offer a laconic and largely impenetrable description of IPMO. The Office, it is said, “will serve as the senior advisor” to Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security, Ronald S. Moultrie, on “strategic and operational influence and perception management (reveal and conceal) matters”:

It will develop broad thematic influence guidance focused on key adversaries; promulgate competitive influence strategies focused on specific defense issues, which direct subordinate planning efforts for the conduct of influence-related activities; and fill existing gaps in policy, oversight, governance, and integration related to influence and perception management matters. [IPMO]…provides necessary support to National Defense Strategy…to address the current strategic environment of great power competition.”

Nonetheless, references to “reveal and conceal” and “influence and perception management” are tantalizing in the extreme. So too, is IPMO’s position within the U.S. national security structure and the Office’s acting director being intimately tied to the Pentagon’s spookiest operations.

Despite its low-key rollout, IPMO looks set to be a hugely influential new DoD agency in the future, waging ceaseless information warfare at home and abroad. What makes the new venture all the more sinister is that such capabilities are nothing new; the Pentagon has managed multiple similar, if not identical, operations in the past and continues to do so, despite significant controversy and public backlash.

Indeed, the DoD’s official dictionary has a dedicated definition of “perception management”, linking the practice to “psychological operations,” which are defined as actions intended to influence the “emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior” of target governments, organizations, groups, and individuals:

Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator’s objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.”

This, of course, begs the question of why a new incarnation of what came before and never went away is now being inaugurated by the U.S. defense establishment. As we shall see, no reassuring answers are forthcoming.

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Pentagon says there is no proof ‘to date’ of top secret UFO retrieval program that whistleblower claims has discovered ‘a number’ of ‘non human’ aircraft – but vows to follow investigation ‘wherever it leads’

The Pentagon today said it had no proof to date of the top-secret UFOs retrieval program that a military whistleblower claims has discovered ‘a number’ of aircraft and ‘non human’ pilots, but that it will follow the investigation ‘wherever it leads.’

On Monday night, David Charles Grusch, an Air Force veteran and former member of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, made the astonishing, on-air claims  that the US and other nations are engaged in a top-secret arms race to ‘reverse-engineer’ alien technology, and that the US has recovered ‘quite a number’ of UFOs. 

The House Oversight Committee has launched an investigation and intends to hold a hearing about the topic. 

Grusch claims the government has been lying about the program for decades. 

Today, the Pentagon denied knowing about such a program, but said it would follow the ‘data’. 

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Pentagon Now Actively Hunting For UFOs With Purpose-Built Sensors

Only between 2% and 5% of the 800 cases currently being investigated by the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) “display signatures that could reasonably be described as anomalous,” the head of that office testified during a NASA hearing Wednesday. But while the majority of those cases “demonstrate mundane characteristics of readily explainable sources,” a “large number” of those sightings are “technically unresolved…primarily due to a lack of data associated with those cases,” AARO Director Sean M. Kirkpatrick testified. That’s a key reason, he said, why AARO has been developing its own “purpose-built sensors” to detect, track and characterize objects in suspected hot spots.

“Without sufficient data, we are unable to reach defendable conclusions that meet the high scientific standards we set for resolution,” Kirkpatrick said at NASA’s UAP Independent Study Team hearing Wednesday. UAP, or unidentified aerial phenomena, is the new term for UFOs.

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Pentagon Has Lost ‘Hundreds of Thousands’ of F-35 Parts Worldwide

It was billed as the ultimate joint-fighter project that promised to make all other combat jets redundant. However, two decades on, the Pentagon still can’t managed to pull it together in any coherent fashion. 

By now, the grounding F-35 planes has become a regular feature in defense news and analysis, as experts continue to commiserate over the constant stream of technical and logistical errors which have plagued the multibillion dollar program.

Whether its the future engine choice resulting delays in production, the lack of operable engines, subsystem design flaws, or perhaps incidents involving the jet’s propulsion and thermal management systems, its onboard oxygen system, its custom helmet-mounted display, and even its susceptibility to lighting strikes – the bloated F-35 boondoggle is still struggling to make sense.

Now we have a global failure in the Pentagon’s supply chains and logistics resulting in loss of money and delays…

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Entertainment or propaganda? Washington’s insidious grip on the arts

AN EVIL dictator is on the brink of making a nuclear bomb at a secret facility carved deep inside the Zagros mountains. With no option, the American military deploys jets and, against all odds, destroys the factory — then flies home to the strains of [Highway to the] Danger Zone.

An evil dictator is on the brink of using a nuclear bomb. With no option, the American military deploys secret agents and, against all odds, triggers a democratic revolution by blowing up the dictator in his helicopter to the strains of Katy Perry’s Firework.

I‘ve just outlined the plots of Top Gun: Maverick starring Tom Cruise and The Interview starring Seth Rogan.

But it also describes real world aspirations — here towards Iran and North Korea — from top policymakers across Nato.

These parallels are no coincidence. Because each film was actually subject to script changes imposed by Washington. In the documentary Theaters of War, we show how the CIA and Defence Department have exercised editorial control over thousands of films and TV shows in exchange for lending equipment like helicopters to producers to use on screen.

Such films reflect and construct the paranoid fantasies of our imperial masters, most of them with direct script input: Iran taking Western hostages in Ben Affleck’s Argo; kindly marines unjustly slaughtered for handing out grain to hungry Africans in Black Hawk Down; US politicians too innocent to realise that arming Islamic terrorists will lead to 9/11 in the Julia Roberts hit Charlie Wilson’s War, and the Gerard Butler film Kandahar in which an evil dictator is on the brink of manufacturing a nuclear bomb at a secret facility carved deep inside a mountain. With no option and against all odds…

Is it any wonder that 30 per cent of Americans in a poll said they want to bomb Agrabah, the capital city in Disney’s Aladdin?

Is it any wonder that our politicians, as though clutching rosary beads, prefigure Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with the word “illegal” with no sense of irony and “unprovoked” with no sense of history? When was the last thing you saw depicting Russia which didn’t have it crawling with tyrants? Red Dawn? Rambo; Air Force One; Hunter Killer; James Bond; Jack Ryan; 24; Homeland; Stranger Things…the 6 O’Clock News?

The US government has suppressed scripts — but on others it has overturned their original messages. In the Iron Man screenplay, Robert Downey Jr’s hero was opposed to his father’s arms business. After rewrites he became the ultimate evangelist for a bloodless industry: “Peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy.”

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Pentagon Walks Back Claim It Killed Al-Qaeda Leader In Syria

US military officials are walking back claims that a drone strike Central Command (CENTCOM) launched on May 3 in northwest Syria killed a senior al-Qaeda leader after evidence emerged that a civilian was killed.

When the strike was first launched in Syria’s northwest Idlib province, reports immediately emerged that the strike killed a sheep herder with no ties to any militant groups. The Associated Press spoke with family members and neighbors of the victim, Lotfi Hassan Misto, who insisted he was innocent.

According to The Washington Post, Misto was a 56-year-old father of 10, and the paper spoke with terrorism experts who said it was unlikely he was affiliated with al-Qaeda. 

The operation was overseen by U.S. Central Command, which claimed hours after the strike, without citing evidence or naming a suspect, that the Predator drone strike had targeted a “senior Al Qaeda leader.” But now there is doubt inside the Pentagon about who was killed, two U.S. defense officials told The Washington Post.

“We are no longer confident we killed a senior AQ official,” an unnamed military official told the Post. Another official claimed the person they killed was al-Qaeda but offered no evidence.

“Though we believe the strike did not kill the original target, we believe the person to be al-Qaeda,” the official said.

CENTCOM’s initial press release on the strike did not name the person they killed. Since then, the command has refused to share any details of the operation or say why they could have targeted the wrong person.

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INSIDE THE PENTAGON’S NEW “PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT” OFFICE TO COUNTER DISINFORMATION

NOT LONG AFTER the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration launched what it called the Office of Strategic Influence, which would seek to “counter the enemy’s perception management” in the so-called war on terror. But it quickly became clear that the office, operating under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, would be managing those perceptions with its own disinformation.

As the New York Times reported at the time, its work was to “provide news items, possibly including false ones, to foreign journalists in an effort to influence overseas opinion.” In the nascent Internet age, observers worried the propaganda could boomerang back on Americans.

“The question is whether the Pentagon and military should undertake an official program that uses disinformation to shape perceptions abroad,” the Times reported in 2004. “But in a modern world wired by satellite television and the Internet, any misleading information and falsehoods could easily be repeated by American news outlets.”

Now, two decades later, “perception management” is once again becoming a central focus for the national security state. On March 1, 2022, the Pentagon established a new office with similar goals to the one once deemed too controversial to remain open. Very little has been made public about the effort, which The Intercept learned about through a review of budget documents and an internal memo we obtained. This iteration is called the Influence and Perception Management Office, or IPMO, according to the memo, which was produced by the office for an academic institution, and its responsibilities include overseeing and coordinating the various counter-disinformation efforts being conducted by the military, which can include the U.S.’s own propaganda abroad.

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