Tag: perpetual war

NATO developing plans for MASS CASUALTIES in WWIII conflict with Russia

Lieutenant-General Alexander Sollfrank, the head of NATO’s logistics command, confirmed this week that the Western-led security bloc is developing new mass evacuation and rescue plans in preparation for a future war with Russia.

NATO is working, according to Sollfrank, to expand its operational capacity for extracting large numbers of wounded troops from the front lines. The apparent plan is for another world war that results in large numbers of casualties, and NATO recognizes that it will face heavy battlefield losses against Russia.

Russia’s air force has vaunted rockets and missile stockpiles that will make it too risky for medical evacuations via aircraft. This means NATO troops will need to operate “hospital trains” instead to extract large numbers of wounded soldiers off the battlefield.

“The challenge will be to swiftly ensure high-quality care for, in the worst case, a great number of wounded,” Sollfrank said.

The German military, in which Sollfrank is a general, recently announced that it expects Russia will have the capacity to attack a NATO country as soon as 2029. This means there is still time for NATO to build up its defenses against such an attack.

Keep reading

The military showers universities with hundreds of millions of dollars

The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight.

Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, The Cold War and American Science, “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it still remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research.

And now, Pentagon-funded research is once again on the rise, driven by the DOD’s recent focus on developing new technologies like weapons driven by artificial intelligence (AI). Combine that with an intensifying drive to recruit engineering graduates and the forging of partnerships between professors and weapons firms and you have a situation in which many talented technical types could spend their entire careers serving the needs of the warfare state. The only way to head off such a Brave New World would be greater public pushback against the military conquest (so to speak) of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers whose skills are so essential to building the next generation of high-tech weaponry.

Keep reading

The Israeli Government Must Be Stopped

The Israeli government has been dragging Western weapons and militaries into wars for far too long, putting all of the world — and its global institutions — at risk. The move into Lebanon, creating more dead, injured, traumatized, and homeless already in huge numbers ought to snap some war supporters out of their trance.

The danger of a catastrophic war on Iran that is joined by the United States and NATO on one side, and additional nations on the other, looms horrifically on the horizon.

It is high time for the world’s governments, including that of Israel’s top supplier, the United States, to begin complying with the International Court of Justice, the United Nations General Assembly, and each of the treaties and domestic laws violated by each arms shipment.

While the UK and Canada have stopped some weapons, that is far from sufficient. While a handful of U.S. Senators anti-democratically plan a vote weeks from now after a U.S. election, on halting illegal arms shipments to Israel, that is far from sufficient, and yet more than we see in the U.S. House of so-called representatives.

Western governments have emboldened the Israeli government with weapons supplies for so long that Israel understands there are no limits. There is nothing it can do that anyone could reasonably expect the U.S. and allied governments not to support, not to protect with propaganda assistance, Security Council vetoes, and yet more instruments of mass killing. That has to change.

Public pressure in the West has prevented western governments from going to war with Iran for decades. But Israel is now expanding an existing war in an effort to create a wider war without any debate or decision. Western media is already using the passive language of “being dragged into” a war — as if no decision need be made at all. This could not be more dangerous, more dishonest, more opposed to the supposed ideal of democracy.

Keep reading

Israel Again Accused of Illegally Using White Phosphorus in Lebanon

Israeli forces were accused Tuesday of the war crime of firing white phosphorus artillery munitions over populated areas of southern Lebanon as Israel escalates an assault on its northern neighbor that has killed or wounded thousands of people.

Video footage published on social media and reported by Middle East Eye shows distinctive explosions that appear consistent with the use of white phosphorus rounds over civilian areas of southern Lebanon, including the village of Kfar Kila.

While white phosphorus munitions are not completely prohibited under international law, their use in populated areas is forbidden. White phosphorus round are primarily used to create smokescreens. However, when used as an incendiary weapon, white phosphorus – which ignites on contact with air and burns at nearly 1,500°F (815°C) – can maim and kill by burning flesh straight through to the bone, often causing a slow, agonizing death. Water does not extinguish it.

Keep reading

Little Known Episode in U.S. History Explains Executive War Powers

Within five years of the publishing of The Federalist papers (and four years of the ratification by the states of the Constitution), the co-authors of those seminal and influential essays on American political theory and constitutional interpretation were back at their desks once again writing letters to the editors of newspapers.

This time, however, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton weren’t allies working to  to persuade others to commit to their common constitutional cause, but they were opponents, striving through their letters to reveal each other’s perceived constitutional misdeeds to the American people.

This episode in American history is known as the Pacificus-Helvidius debates, named for the pen names adopted by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, respectively.

In the earliest days of the republic, the precise balance of powers between the legislative and executive branches in the arena of foreign affairs was unsettled. The Constitution, many argued, wasn’t clear on the point and the various views on the matter created controversy.

George Washington issued the Neutrality Proclamation of 1793 after France declared war on Holland and Great Britain. According to Washington’s way of thinking, it was in the best interest of the country to avoid war at all costs and he did not want the belligerents to be unsure of the official American position.

While certainly laudable, some of Washington’s colleagues considered the Neutrality Proclamation to be hostile to the French as it required the United States government to violate a provision of the Treaty of Alliance signed by France and the United States in 1778. Thomas Jefferson was among the most vociferous of the claque calling out Washington for allegedly violating the prior agreement.

Some of the opposition, including Jefferson and James Madison, believed that the advice and consent of the Senate should have been sought before President Washington issued any declaration of the official American position on any topic touching upon foreign affairs.

Alexander Hamilton was one of the first president’s most ardent advocates, however. And that’s where the trouble started.

Just weeks after the Neutrality Proclamation was published, Hamilton wrote a letter defending the document. Then, beginning in June 1793, he wrote an essay almost once a week, under the pen name Pacificus, in support of President Washington, his administration, and his policies.

After the seventh “Pacificus” letter was published on July 27, 1793, Thomas Jefferson wrote a now famous letter to James Madison, pleading, “my dear sir, take up your pen….”

Madison took up his pen and on the 24th of August, 1793, he responded to Hamilton’s “Pacificus” essays, using the pseudonym “Helvidius.”

In the first letter, Madison wrote that the first Pacificus essay “may prove a snare to patriotism” and warned that he (Hamilton) has advocated principles “which strike at the vitals of its constitution.”

Later in the essay, Madison recommended that in all questions concerning the correct conduct of federal officials, Americans must be guided by “our own reason and our own constitution.”

And, in a statement that is as timely now (perhaps more so) than it was then, Madison wrote that the power to declare war is “of a legislative and not an executive nature.”

Keep reading

NATO takes the plunge into the world of venture capital

The NATO Innovation Fund, the “world’s first multi-sovereign venture capital fund,” made its first investments earlier this summer in deep tech companies including British aerospace manufacturing company Space Forge and AI companies ARX Robotics and Fractile.

Modeled like the U.S. intelligence community’s venture capital arm IQT (In-Q-Tel), the fund’s intention is to focus on spurring innovation in areas including biotechnology, AI, space tech, and advanced communications.

As NATO Innovation Fund Board Chairs Klaus Hommels and Fiona Murray described the project’s purview in Fortune in July: “By investing in and adopting emerging dual-use technologies, NATO can leverage the private sector’s innovation power and its transatlantic talent pool, while countering our strategic competitors’ influence and ambitions.”

Keep reading

Disabled refueler exposes fragility of US mission in Middle East

A U.S. Navy oil tanker running aground off the coast of Oman isn’t a huge event. The fact that it is the only tanker to refuel American warships in a Middle East conflict zone, is.

In fact, this only underscores the fragility of the Navy’s logistic systems at a time when the U.S. has chosen to lean in on an aggressive military posture when it may not have the full capacity to do so, and it may or may not be in the national interest for the Navy to be conducting these operations in the first place.

The first is a question for Naval experts, many of whom may not feel comfortable second guessing the mission. So let’s tackle that one first.

The issue: according to a statement by the U.S. Navy, “USNS Big Horn sustained damage while operating at sea in the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations overnight on Sept. 23. All crew members are currently safe and U.S. 5th Fleet is assessing the situation.”

The Big Horn is a 33-year-old Kaiser class refueler. This ship is owned by the Navy and is operated by civilian mariners under the U.S. Sealift Command. These ships are responsible for getting jet fuel out to the carrier’s fighter planes and replenishments to the other escort ships at sea — in this case, the Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, which has been serving in the Arabian Sea area since August. It includes the flagship carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, the air wing (including 5th generation F-35s) and three destroyers.

It is the only replenisher nearby, making refueling tricky for the strike group, which is busy in the throes of a fight with the Houthis. The Lincoln had been accompanied by the Theodore Roosevelt strike group which had departed the area in mid-September, according to reports.

Sal Mercogliano, in his “What’s Going on With Shipping?” podcast last week laid out where the other refuelers currently assisting other Navy assets are in the world right now: the Mediterranean, Singapore, the Western Pacific, two on the West Coast of the U.S., one on the Southern coast at Norfolk, and a number that are being fixed or ready for decommissioning at various shipyards across the globe. There aren’t many to spare.

“What this means is that the ability of the U.S. Navy to deploy and sustain its battle groups is very precarious,” Mercogliano points out. “So to support U.S. battle groups, whether it’s an amphibious group or a strike group, requires vessels that can go from forward bases, fuel up, and bring the fuel, ammunition, dry cargo out to them.”

“You don’t have a lot of back backup in this and that’s a big problem,” he added, “because if you don’t have backup, when you lose a ship like Big Horn, you’ve got to scramble to fix it.”

Keep reading

What Would World War III Really Look Like? It’s Already Starting…

One of the most common assumptions I come across in the survival-sphere is the idea that the next world war would automatically necessitate global nuclear conflict and a Mad Max-like outcome. In other words, a lot of people assume we aren’t in a world war until the nukes start flying and the survivors are left fighting in soda can armor over an irradiated desert. This is a dangerous misunderstanding for a lot of reasons.

What people are overlooking is the fact that we are ALREADY in the middle of WWIII. They don’t realize it because they’ve based their entire concept of world war on Hollywood fantasy.

There are many ways in which wars are fought. In our current situation WWIII is being waged through proxies like Ukraine and Israel (and maybe Taiwan in the near future). The war is also being fought on the global economic stage using sanctions, inflation and the dumping of the US dollar as the world reserve. To be sure, these situations can easily escalate into something bigger and that is exactly what I suspect they will do. However, planetary nuclear war is the least likely scenario.

Survival and preparedness communities have a tendency to hyper-focus on the obviously Apocalyptic. We talk a lot about EMP strikes and split-second grid down calamities. We talk about solar flares, overnight economic crashes and nuclear holocaust. I think survivalists do this because it acts as a mental exercise – A way to better clarify what the best preparedness solutions are in the majority of cases, including the worst cases.

But as I’ve said for many years, collapse is a process, not an event.

These things happen slowly, and then all at once. If you went back in time ten years ago and warned people that in 2024 the US would be in the middle of a stagflationary crisis with a 30%-50% average price increase on all necessities, they would probably dismiss you as a doom-monger. Well, guess what, that’s exactly what a handful of alternative economists (myself included) were doing well over a decade ago, and we were dismissed over and over again – Welcome to our world.

The reason people refused to believe us is because the danger was not immediately obvious. The economic threat was not hitting them in their wallet yet. Stock markets seemed to be doing fine. The jobs market was still functioning somewhat normally. They could only view economic crisis through the lens of a total collapse. The idea that it would happen incrementally never crossed their minds.

Even today there are still people who argue that everything is fine. The stock market is “fine.” The labor market is “healthy.” If you suggest all is not well, you’re a “chicken little.” This is the incredible danger of having a Hollywood fantasy idea of collapse. We may never get to 100% systemic implosion; but even a 50% collapse is still a survival situation.

The same dynamic goes for WWIII. We must not overlook the dangers right in front of us simply because intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles aren’t crisscrossing the sky.

Keep reading

Did the Abraham Accords Pave the Way for Total War?

The Abraham Accords, the U.S.-sponsored alliance between Israel and several Arab states, were supposed to get the United States out of the Middle East. At least, that’s what many conservative proponents argued.

In 2020, neoconservative writer Michael Doran argued in Tablet magazine that the accords were an agreement to “step up and bear more of the burden so that America can step back.” Two years later, the hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Affairs claimed that the accords were allowing Washington “to gradually withdraw from the Middle East to focus its efforts and resources on the Pacific Ocean, the rise of China, and the consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) has even made this strategy a large part of his foreign policy pitch. A few months before being nominated as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, Vance told the antiwar Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft that “combining the Abraham Accords approach with the enduring defeat of Hamas” will ensure that “Israel, with the Sunni nations, can actually police their region of the world. That allows us to spend less time and less resources in the Middle East.”

That’s not how former Trump administration official Jared Kushner, a key architect of the accords, sees it. Over the weekend, he posted an essay to social media arguing that the United States should build on the “Abraham Accords breakthrough” by backing an Israeli war in Lebanon, and hinted that the time is ripe for a wider U.S. war. “Iran is now fully exposed,” he wrote, adding that “it’s not only Israel’s fight.”

Of course, the Trump administration has never pretended that the Abraham Accords were meant to allow U.S. disengagement; then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo bragged about unlocking more “defense cooperation.” The Biden administration itself promised a permanent U.S. military commitment to Abraham Accords member Bahrain in order to entice Saudi Arabia to join the alliance.

But Kushner’s essay moves the goalposts from a defensive commitment to an offensive one. It’s now hard to pretend that the vision is anything less than a regime change campaign on the scale that old-fashioned neoconservatives could only dream of.

Kushner wrote his essay in response to the Israeli assassination of Hezbollah commander Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia backed by Iran, had been engaged in a low-grade border war with Israel for the past year. Israel decided to assassinate Nasrallah after he kept demanding an end to the Israeli war in Gaza in exchange for a ceasefire in Lebanon, an Israeli official told NBC.

The Israeli army is now beginning a ground incursion into Lebanon, after the Biden administration reportedly talked Israel out of a full-on ground invasion. However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has hinted at even larger plans, calling Nasrallah’s assassination “Operation New Order” and stating that the fall of the Iranian government “will come a lot sooner than people think.”

Nasrallah’s assassination “is significant because Iran is now fully exposed. The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defense systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel,” Kushner wrote. “The right move now for America would be to tell Israel to finish the job. It’s long overdue. And it’s not only Israel’s fight,” he added.

Kushner added that Iran is the “main issue between Lebanon and Israel” and brought up Hezbollah’s role in killing U.S. Marines in 1983, during the last U.S. military intervention in Lebanon.

Keep reading

Ukraine’s Army Is In Bad Shape, Over Half Of Recruits Survive Just For A Few Days

The Ukrainian army is suffering from a steady decline in the capabilities of its front-line units, according to Polish news outlet Do Rzeczy, citing a report in the London Financial Times that between 50 and 70 percent of recruits survive only a few days on the frontlines.

Soldiers have low motivation and are prone to panic, while losses among trained and experienced units have led to a dependence on conscript units with very limited operational capabilities.

Training standards were reportedly so poor that not all of them knew how to hold a weapon. Furthermore, the depletion of the number of men considered fit to fight means that the average age of recruits now stands at 45.

The report follows a statement by Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, who was appointed in early February. Syrsky said that recruits were consistently lacking the necessary training for frontline operations. Lamenting the sheer technological superiority of Russian forces, he said that personnel had received just two months of training, although other sources indicated that the training time was much shorter.

Meanwhile, Military Watch Magazine has said that poor training standards in frontline units have repeatedly emerged over the past two years, and back in mid-2023, the Wall Street Journal even reported that the Ukrainian army was recruiting poor men from the countryside, equipping them with Soviet-era rifles and uniforms, and then sending them to the front after just two nights at a base.

When some of the conscripts tried to sign a waiver, citing a lack of proper training, a Ukrainian sergeant replied, “Bakhmut will teach you,” referring to the frontline city that was then the epicenter of the fighting.

One of the conscripts recalled protesting that he had never held a gun before. The Wall Street Journal had written that such poorly trained and equipped men were necessary, as Western-trained and better-equipped brigades would be needed for the upcoming offensive. 

Since the beginning of June 2023, multiple offensives have resulted in extensive losses and further increased Kyiv’s reliance on conscripts.

Keep reading