Tag: perpetual war

US will send Russian-made helicopters to Ukraine

The US government is expediting the transfer of five transport helicopters to Kiev, as Washington insists that Moscow could “invade” Ukraine any day now. The Mi-17 helicopters were originally purchased from Russia and intended for the former Western-backed government in Afghanistan, before it surrendered to the Taliban last August.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki confirmed on Friday that Congress has been notified of the move, which will be conducted under the Excess Defense Articles program. The State Department said on Thursday this was the “fastest transfer ever” for the US government.

The helicopters are already in Ukraine, which was servicing them on behalf of the Pentagon and was supposed to send them to Afghanistan until the Taliban takeover disrupted those plans. Ukrainian Defense Minister Alexey Reznikov requested them from the Pentagon in late November, along with ammunition also earmarked for the defunct Afghan Army, Foreign Policy reported last month.

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NATO’s ‘Space Policy’ Outlines Readiness to Jointly Respond to Attacks in Space

NATO on Monday made public its official “overarching Space Policy” that outlines how it would protect its members from space attacks, citing threats from potential adversaries.

The U.S.-led alliance said its collective defense principles will be extended to outer space in response to developments made at last year’s Brussels Summit.

“At the 2021 Brussels Summit, Allies agreed that attacks to, from, or within space present a clear challenge to the security of the Alliance, the impact of which could threaten national and Euro-Atlantic prosperity, security, and stability, and could be as harmful to modern societies as a conventional attack. Such attacks could lead to the invocation of Article 5. A decision as to when such attacks would lead to the invocation of Article 5 would be taken by the North Atlantic Council on a case-by-case basis,” the document states.

Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty states that an attack on any one of the 30 allies will be considered an attack on them all. Until now, it has only applied to more traditional military attacks on land, sea, or in the air, and more recently in cyberspace.

Considering that members have recognized that space is essential to NATO’s deterrence and defense, NATO will consider a range of potential options, for council approval, across the conflict spectrum to deter and defend against threats to or attacks on allies’ space systems, it said.

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The CIA Has Been Training Ukrainian Paramilitaries To ‘Kill Russians’

The CIA has been overseeing a secret training program for Ukrainian special operations forces and intelligence operatives since 2015, Yahoo News reported on Thursday, citing five former intelligence and national security officials.

One former CIA official said the US is “training an insurgency” in Ukraine and that the program teaches the Ukrainians how “to kill Russians,” although other officials downplayed the training and said it was not meant for offensive purposes.

The training has been held at an undisclosed base in the southern United States. It was started by the Obama administration, was expanded by President Trump, and further expanded by President Biden. The program includes training in firearms, camouflage techniques, land navigation, and other areas, former officials told Yahoo.

According the report:

The program has involved “very specific training on skills that would enhance” the Ukrainians’ “ability to push back against the Russians,” said the former senior intelligence official.

The training, which has included “tactical stuff,” is “going to start looking pretty offensive if Russians invade Ukraine,” said the former official.

The program was overseen by the CIA’s Ground Branch, the spy agency’s elite paramilitary unit. The Yahoo report said by 2015, Ground Branch personnel were deployed to the front in eastern Ukraine to advise the Ukrainian forces.

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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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