Tag: perpetual war

China Pursues “Brain Control” Weaponry In Bid To Command Future Of Warfare

Once believed to only exist in sci-fi movies, the weaponization of the brain has been discussed by Chinese military officials for years. And Beijing is spending billions each year on neuroscience that could draw these scenarios ever closer to reality.

“The study into brain science was born out of a vision for how the future warfare would evolve,” Li Peng, a medical researcher at a subsidiary of China’s state-run Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS), wrote in an article in 2017.

Such research, he added, has “an extremely strong military characteristic” and is crucial to securing a “strategic high ground” for every country.

Li was not alone in stressing the urgency in militarizing brain science.

In March, a Chinese military-run newspaper described cloud-powered artificial intelligence (AI) “integrating human and machine” as the key to winning wars. With the accelerating “intelligentization” of the military, it warned, China needs to quickly get a firm footing in this technology, and any delay “could lead to unimaginable consequences.”

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Humanity’s Final Arms Race: UN Fails To Agree On ‘Killer Robot’ Ban

Autonomous weapon systems—commonly known as killer robots—may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent United Nations Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity’s final one.

The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons debated the question of banning autonomous weapons at its once-every-five-years review meeting in Geneva Dec. 13-17, 2021, but didn’t reach consensus on a ban. Established in 1983, the convention has been updated regularly to restrict some of the world’s cruelest conventional weapons, including land mines, booby traps and incendiary weapons.

Autonomous weapon systems are robots with lethal weapons that can operate independently, selecting and attacking targets without a human weighing in on those decisions. Militaries around the world are investing heavily in autonomous weapons research and development. The U.S. alone budgeted US$18 billion for autonomous weapons between 2016 and 2020.

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Another Nail in the U.S. Empire’s Coffin… Biden Signs $770 Billion War Budget

As this year ends, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law military spending of $770 billion. That’s just for the next year alone. The scale of wastefulness and bloated corruption is eye-watering. It eclipses what the United States is willing to invest for overhauling its badly neglected civilian infrastructure and for combating the coronavirus pandemic that has killed far more people in the U.S. than in any other nation.

If there is one thing that portends a historic collapse of U.S. global power it is its pathological addiction to militarism that is hemorrhaging vital resources.

What is also amazing is how this gargantuan deformity in economic planning is presented as somehow rational and normal by the Western media.

Three decades after the Cold War officially ended, the U.S. is setting a new record high for annual expenditure on its armed forces.

Biden’s budget – his first as president – exceeds the record set by the previous Trump administration for military largesse of $740 billion.

So much for wishing humanity peace and prosperity – as is the international tradition at this time of year – when the U.S. allocates such a grotesque amount of resources to the means of war and annihilation.

This obscene expenditure is not in any way conceivably a “defense budget” as it is termed in Orwellian newspeak. It is a dreadful and despicable war budget.

The United States spends more on its military than the next 11 top nations combined. Compared with China ($250bn) the U.S. budget is nearly three times bigger. The U.S. spends over 12 times more than Russia ($60bn) on its armed forces.

Those figures alone tell beyond any doubt which nation is the ultimate aggressor. Yet, farcically, the Western corporate media in Orwellian fashion portray China and Russia as the aggressors against whom the United States is “defending’ the rest of the world.

Biden’s 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), as it is formally titled, devotes billions more to devising new nuclear weapons and to provoke China and Russia. Camouflaged with Orwellian rhetoric, there is some $7 billion for the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative” and $4 billion for the “European Defense Initiative”.

The Biden administration has committed a further $300 million in military support for Ukraine over the next year. This is on top of the $2.5 billion in arms that Washington has plowed into Ukraine since the CIA-backed coup d’état in Kiev in 2014 which brought to power a Russophobic regime.

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DARPA awards contracts for Phase 2 of Manta Ray programme

Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation and Martin Defense Group were selected to build and test Manta Ray unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). The companies are each developing unique full-scale demonstration systems.

DARPA has awarded on 20 December Phase 2 agreements to continue the Manta Ray programme. The two prime contractors, Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation and Martin Defense Group were selected to build and test unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). The total amount of the contracts was not disclosed.

The companies are each developing unique full-scale demonstration systems. This effort began in 2020 and is intended to design and advance UUVs that operate for extended durations without the need for on-site human logistics support or maintenance.

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Retired Generals Urge Military to ‘War-Game’ Against US Citizens

With the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 incursion into the United States Capitol less than a month away, three retired Army generals  called on leaders to take preventive measures, including to “war game” a “post-election insurrection or coup” attempts.

“The potential for a total breakdown of the chain of command along partisan lines – from the top of the chain to squad level – is significant should another insurrection occur,” former Major Gen. Paul Eaton, former Brigadier Gen. Steven Anderson and former Major Gen. Antonio Tagubathe wrote in The Washington Post on Friday in an opinion column raising the disturbing prospect of the U.S. military training for a confrontation against fellow Americans.

The generals went on to write, “The idea of rogue units organizing among themselves to support the ‘rightful’ commander in chief cannot be dismissed.”

Their comments come in light of the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol by a mob mostly made up of supporters of then-President Donald Trump seeking to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election by disrupting the joint session of Congress assembled to count electoral votes that would formalize then-President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

The incursion proved deadly for five people, including Ashli Babbit, 35, who died from a gunshot wound after being shot by a Capitol police officer while trying to climb through a door inside the Capitol near the House chamber.

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US Hid True Toll of Air Wars; Thousands of Dead Civilians, Many of Them Children

Thousands of previously hidden Pentagon documents show that the US air wars in the Middle East have been marked by “deeply flawed intelligence” and have killed thousands of civilians, many of them children, according to a shocking new report in the New York Times Saturday afternoon.

The 5-year Times investigation received more than 1,300 reports examining airstrikes in Iraq and Syria from September 2014 to January 2018, more than 5,400 pages in all. None of these records show any findings of wrongdoing on the actions of the US military.

The Times reporting confirms many of the previous reports by whistleblowers Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning and others. On July 27, 2021, whistleblower Hale was sentenced to 45 months in federal prison for exposing the true civilian toll of the US drone program. “I am here because I stole something that was never mine to take — precious human life,” Hale said at his sentencing.

From the Times report:

The trove of documents — the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times — lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.

The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. In only a handful of cases were the assessments made public. Not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Documented efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare.

The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away. President Barack Obama called it “the most precise air campaign in history.”

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Biden Considering Giving Ukraine Arms Meant for Former Afghan Govt

The Biden administration is considering redirecting military aid that would have gone to the now-defunct US-backed Afghan government to Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Citing unnamed US and Ukrainian officials, the Journal report said Ukraine is hoping to get the equipment. The weapons package would include Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters and other military equipment.

The National Security Council has yet to approve the plan, and the report comes right after Russia submitted security proposals to the US in a bid to ease tensions over Ukraine. If the US greenlights more weapons to Ukraine as Russia is pushing for talks, it would signal to Moscow that Washington is not that serious about diplomacy.

The report said Ukraine has also been lobbying Washington to provide surface-to-air weapons, such as stinger missiles. In November, CNN reported that the US was considering new military aid to Kyiv that included stingers and other missiles.

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