Pentagon Spent $4.6 Million on Lobster Tail and Crab in One Month

The federal government spends a disproportionate amount of its budget for outside contractors in the final month of the fiscal year, as agencies rush to blow through cash before it’s too late.

Source: Pentagon Spent $4.6 Million on Lobster Tail and Crab in One Month – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization

http://www.globalresearch.ca

By Joe Setyon

Global Research, March 15, 2019

Reason 8 March 2019

Chalk it up to use-it-or-lose-it spending.

The federal government spends a disproportionate amount of its budget for outside contractors in the final month of the fiscal year, as agencies rush to blow through cash before it’s too late. Among the more noteworthy expenditures in 2018, according to the watchdog group Open the Books, was $4.6 million for lobster tail and crab.

Such use-it-or-lose-it spending stems from the fact that each federal agency is given a certain amount of money it can spend on outside contractors for the fiscal year. If the agency comes in under budget, Congress might decide to appropriate less money the following year.

Or as The Office‘s Oscar Martinez explains to Michael Scott in “The Surplus”:

“Your mommy and daddy give you $10 to open up a lemonade stand, so you go out and you buy cups and you buy lemons and you buy sugar. And now you find out that it only cost you $9, so you have an extra dollar,” he explains. “So you can give that dollar back to mommy and daddy. But guess what: Next summer, and you ask them for money, they’re going to give you $9 because that’s what they think it cost to run the stand. So what you want to do is spend that dollar on something now, so that your parents think that it cost $10 to run the lemonade stand.”

It works the same way at the federal level. Just replace that $10 with $544.1 billion—the amount federal agencies spent on contracts in the last fiscal year.

Of that $544.1 billion, almost $97 billion was spent in September 2018, the final month of the fiscal year, including $53.3 billion in the final seven days of the month. That’s compared to $47 billion spent in the entire month of August. As the fiscal year came crashing to an end, bureaucrats apparently did their best to spend as much money as quickly as possible.

The Department of Defense led the pack, spending $61.2 billion in September. The Pentagon was followed not-so-closely by the Department of Health and Human Services ($5.7 billion), the Department of Veterans Affairs ($5.4 billion), and the Department of Homeland Security ($4.2 billion).

Federal agencies spent $402.2 million on food that month, with the Pentagon shelling out $2.3 million on crab and $2.3 million on lobster tail.

Also, “agencies spent $2.1 million on games, toys, and wheeled goods,” Open the Books notes, as well as “$412,008 on paint and artist’s brushes.”

A whopping $490 million went to furniture, including a baffling $9,341 for a Wexford office chair. Agencies also spent $49,515 for skis and ski poles, $11,816 for a foosball table, and $258,901 on pianos.

The biggest recipients of the contracts were a trio of military companies: Lockheed Martin ($8.3 billion), Boeing ($5.3 billion), and Raytheon ($3.4 billion).

That $97 billion last September represents a 16 percent increase from the $83.7 billion federal agencies spent on contracts in September 2017. The figure was nearly $73.6 billion in 2016 and $69.6 billion in 2015.

In August, a bipartisan group of senators that included Kentucky Republican Rand Paul wrote letters to 13 federal agencies expressing their concerns about wasteful end-of-year spending. Their efforts appear to have failed.

 

Pentagon doesn’t really know how $2.1 BILLION was spent on F-35 parts – watchdog

The Pentagon has failed to properly manage and account for $2.1 billion worth of parts for F-35 fighter jets, a new report by a government watchdog reveals. Now, the military simply has to take the word of Lockheed Martin on that.

Source: Pentagon doesn’t really know how $2.1 BILLION was spent on F-35 parts – watchdog — RT USA News

RT USA News

15 Mar, 2019

FILE PHOTO. F-35 fighter jet seen at an assembly line. ©  Reuters / Lockheed Martin / Fred Clingerman

The Pentagon has failed to properly manage and account for $2.1 billion worth of parts for F-35 fighter jets, a new report by a government watchdog reveals. Now, the military simply has to take the word of Lockheed Martin on that.

The US military failed to account for 3.45 million pieces of government property – parts and equipment for F-35s, according to a new report issued by the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Office of Inspector General. Pentagon officials have “failed to implement procedures, and failed to appoint and hold officials responsible, to account for and manage government property for more than 16 years.”

Lacking the paperwork and even people to hold responsible for the blunder, the Pentagon has no actual idea how much the aforementioned pile of parts cost, and has to simply trust the word of the main contractor – Lockheed Martin – and its subcontractors, according to the report. The corporation valued the parts at $2.1 billion.

The DoD does not know the actual value of the F 35 property and does not have an independent record to verify the contractor valued Government property of $2.1 billion for the F-35 Program.

While the sum itself is not that big – given the total acquisition cost of the F-35 program, exceeding $400 billion – such a lack of accountability can further damage the ill-fated fifth-generation fighter program, already been plagued by numerous technical issues.

Also on rt.com Bad aim & short life: New Pentagon report reveals MORE problems with trillion-dollar F-35 jet

“The lack of asset visibility restricts the DoD’s ability to conduct the necessary checks and balances that ensure the prime contractor is managing and spending F‑35 Program funds in the government’s best interest and could impact the DoD’s ability to meet its operational readiness goals for the F‑35 aircraft,” the report warns.

In order to somewhat improve the situation, the watchdog has recommended the obvious: appoint people to work with the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) and the contractor in order to “to verify the existence and completeness of all F-35 property and account for it on the appropriate financial statements.”

Russia Wipes US in War?

A recent US war-game report certainly made dramatic headlines claiming that in a conventional war with either Russia or China, American forces would get a whipping.

Source: Russia Wipes US in War? – Sputnik International

sputniknews.com

Finian Cunningham

Marc 13, 2019

© AP Photo /

 

A recent US war-game report certainly made dramatic headlines claiming that in a conventional war with either Russia or China, American forces would get a whipping.

All the more remarkable was that the assessment came from the Rand Corporation, which is closely aligned with the Pentagon. It may seem therefore a rather rude admission by a Pentagon-funded think tank that US military forces would be so humiliated by would-be adversary Russia or China.

The Rand lead analyst put the scale of defeat for the American side rather colourfully. “The US would get its ass handed to it,” he is quoted as saying.

The simulated war scenario found that US military formations in every domain would be vanquished.

For a start, the war-gaming is highly unrealistic. It envisages a limited conventional war scenario. In real life, if the US was staring at a wholesale military defeat, we can be sure that the American rulers and their Pentagon chiefs would have no hesitation in hitting the nuclear buttons. In which case, the conventional war would go straight to the nuclear conflagration, and most likely presage the end of the planet as we know it.

But here’s another factor that raises scepticism about Rand’s apparently scathing defeatist report — the timing.

The Trump administration is coincidently proposing a new federal budget for 2020, and the Pentagon is seeking an even bigger slice of the fiscal pie than it usually devours.

Trump is planning to hike the annual military spending to $750 billion, up from the current allocation of $716 bn, which itself was a record increase on previous budgets. Those figures represent more than half of the total federal discretionary budget.

A big part of the extra funding for the Pentagon is in missile defence. Trump is earmarking $14 bn, while the Rand Corp is recommending $24 bn.

That’s what the scaremongering Rand report is all about. It’s an attempt to frighten the US public into acquiescing to yet another colossal injection of cash to the Pentagon’s military-industrial complex.

It seems significant that Rand’s war-gaming places emphasis on Russia and China’s new generation of hypersonic missiles as a threat to US security, requiring massive new funds to counteract through missile defence systems.

This is a risible repetition of an old ruse. Make the people fearful of some implacable, diabolical enemy, and the people will duly give the rulers and their military-industrial complex a blank cheque to syphon off billions of more dollars to private corporations and Wall Street investors.

Meanwhile, trillions of dollars are to be slashed from vital public services of healthcare and education in the Trump administration’s budget.

Rand Corp was established in 1948 at the beginning of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. One of its founders was General Curtis LeMay who was chief of US air force command. LeMay was notorious for his “strategic bombing” of Japan during the Second World War, masterminding the firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

During the John F Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, LeMay wanted to bomb Cuba during the missile crisis and he was also an advocate of pre-emptive nuclear strikes on the Soviet Union.

The Rand Corp he set up was a major proponent of media stories warning of a “missile gap” and “bomber gap” with the Soviet Union. The notion instilled in public perception was that the US was being outpaced by Soviet weapons. Consequently, as intended, the Pentagon was deluged with taxpayer dollars to “correct” the purported security gaps.

It turned out years later that the so-called missile and bomber gaps were complete fiction, as even former President Lyndon Johnson candidly admitted. The reality was that the US actually always had quantitatively more firepower than the Soviet Union or China.

The Rand Corp served as a pump-primer for funds to its masters in the Pentagon through the hoary old technique of terrorizing its own people.

Today, nearly three decades after the Cold War supposedly ended, nothing much has changed. The American public is still manipulated like children by being told scary stories so that they hide under their blankets while the “adults” empty the coffers of their nation.

The absurdity of it all is that the US spends more money on military than the rest of the top 15 other nations — combined. The Pentagon’s annual budget is some three times that allocated by China and more than 10 times that spent by Russia.

Part of the explanation for this gross discrepancy is that Russian and Chinese military development is more efficient than American. They are achieving way more bang for their bucks. And no doubt in a hypothetical conventional war, Russia or China would give the Americans a formidable challenge.

But the point is this: if America is supposedly vulnerable to being wiped out by an adversary, as Rand makes out, after spending the exorbitant excesses it already does, then how is such an inept military supposed to get any better by spending even more billions?

Rather than spending more on such a losing military, the logical answer would be to liquidate it altogether and rebuild again.

However, the efficiency of US military defence is not the real issue and never has been. Rather, it’s all about finding excuses, pretences and charades in order to funnel unlimited amounts of public money into the Pentagon military-industrial complex.

The biggest national security threat for Americans is not Russia nor China. It is their own parasitic, insatiable and incompetent war machine that is so fundamental to American corporate capitalism.

The views and opinions expressed by the do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.

NEO: US-funded “Disinformation Oversight” of Bio Weapons Prevention Programmes in Georgia

“What has been uncovered so far demonstrates that the question is NOT whether the US is in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Treaty BUT to what degree.”

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With permission from

http://www.veteranstoday.com

By VT Senior Editors

October 10, 2018

By Henry Kamens for Veterans Today and New Eastern Outlook, Moscow

The Richard Lugar Lab is fast becoming a topic of household conversation in both Georgia and the Russian Federation, because increasing numbers of people care that it is not a public health facility, as claimed, but a threat to the population and humanity as we know it.

The Caucasus region is an ideal location for the United States to outsource its ‘grey zone’ research to. Many of the most ‘attractive’ viruses and bacteria for weaponisation occur naturally in this region, so they can be studied in their natural habitat. The region is also known for its thriving black market economy and trafficking, as the lack of democracy and a civil society makes it easier to hide things from the world.

But what is now concerning US officials is the attention Russia is paying to the topic of bio weapons and other related medical programmes. What has been uncovered so far demonstrates that the question is NOT whether the US is in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Treaty BUT to what degree.

The US has long tried to deflect attention from these programmes. American journalist and Bureau Chief for Veterans Today in Georgia, Jeffrey Silverman, a long time resident of Georgia, is again the cross fire for his articles and series of recent TV interviews, having endured a long series of indignities, and downright illegal acts, at the hands of his own government and embassy.

But the new attacks on Silverman coincide with recent revelations in the Russian media. Igor Giorgadze, the former State Security Minister of Georgia, dropped a bombshell in mid September when he leaked documents containing information about “a laboratory located near Tbilisi named after US Senator Richard Lugar”, and how some experiments had turned deadly.

Various media groups describe such breaking stories as recurring disinformation, and further claim that there is no factual evidence that the US is building biological laboratories in the Caucasus region in order to use it as a testing site. The same media groups also denied that the US was losing the Vietnam War and declared the well documented CIA human rights abuses in places like Paraguay weren’t happening either.

But Giorgadze, a former Georgian State Security Minister, and Silverman beg to differ. They claim that such labs and related medical projects may have secretly conducted experiments on people, some of which have had fatal outcomes.

Right or Wrong Person to Ask?

Giorgadze has asked Donald Trump to launch an investigation into the experiments conducted by the laboratory. This really has some in Georgia concerned, as Trump is no fan of Big Pharma. He recently stated that the much touted flu shot is the greatest scam in medical history, created by Big Pharma to make money off vulnerable people and make them sick.

US-government funded media watchdogs and strong-arm agencies have fought back by using Homeland Security to harass Silverman when he travelled to and from the United States earlier this year, when he was finally allowed to make his first trip home in over 14 years. On both arrival and departure he was subjected to repeated body and bag searches, including seizures of his phone and personal documents, in direct violation of the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution.

Such frontal attacks on this journalist date back to when the first stories about the Lugar lab, and the nefarious research linked with it, broke in Georgia in 2013. As he has since backed up many of his allegations with actual documents, there has been a concerted effort to discredit him, not only in Georgia but in the international media.

Silverman continues to publish in the Georgian language media, and has described how the concentration camp patients of Nazi Doctor Joseph Mengele can be compared to the civilians residing close to the Lugar laboratory, as they [too] did not understand the threat they were under until they were placed in the medical experiment section death camps—when it was too late.

“I am warning those who live near the Lugar Laboratory that they are under a big risk. The locals who settled there were misled that this was an ordinary laboratory and nothing else. 

Georgy Iremidze, head of the Georgian based Patriot news agency, which is labelled pro Russian by the same detractors, adds to the debate:

“On paper, the lab is run by the Georgian government, or rather the Ministry of Health. But in reality, it is operated by the American government. The idea is that, if something goes wrong, the Georgian government will take the blame so that the American government can stay under the radar”.

A Lot for Nothing

The United States has provided a total of USD 350 million for the construction and technical equipping of the laboratory. In 2013 the laboratory was allegedly subordinated to the National Center for Disease Control and Public Health (NCDC), and from 2018 the Government of Georgia will assume responsibility for the full funding and operation of the Lugar center and laboratory network, or so we are told.

However it is only the US which has an interest in building such laboratories. Other countries would face sanctions from more powerful neighbours, who can build worse facilities of their own, for doing so. The US wants to flout the Biological Weapons Convention and then claim, if caught, that this is something only dubious, less-developed, “ignorant” countries do, as it usually does when questions are asked in places like Syria and Iraq.

The Lugar Laboratory is located not far from Tbilisi International Airport. This means that loading weaponised agents and moving viruses and bacteria around the world is expedited. It is conceivable that the United States may be trying to continue its losing battle in Syria by using biological and chemical weapons, as military planes, which are based at NATO airfields, have been landing at the airport with increasing regularity for no other apparent reason.

The same deadly and especially dangerous pathogens could also be targeted, as an aggressive act, against Turkey and the Russian Federation. The US has a history of doing this, and we might recall the Swine Flu outbreak in Russia 12 years ago.

Even unsuspecting humans could be weaponized and board civilian fights, just as was described in Station 11, a work of fiction, and how the Georgian flu killed over 95 percent of the world’s population. Emily St. John Mandel’s fourth novel, “Station Eleven,” begins with a spectacular tragedy on a considerably vaster scale arrives in the form of a flu pandemic so lethal that, within weeks, most of the world’s population has been killed.

It is standard medical practice that nothing that is injected into the body should be used past its expiration date. But the US military, and other organisations like MARFOREUR, USAMRIID, ClinicalRM, WRAIR, and DTRA, are being accused of giving many such preparations to allied countries as “aid”. They have been widely used on the general population in Georgia, even children, without the victims’ full knowledge and informed consent.

When questions are asked, it funnels this aid not through medical bodies but TMC Global Professional Services. This company has overseas offices in nine countries throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and two offices in the US, in Virginia and New Mexico. Most of its work is as a US Government contractor on Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) programmes, with national laboratories and other DoD customers. For example, it manages an international project at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant site (ChNPP).

Too Many Roads Lead to Rome

The Myth Detector claims to have debunked “disinformation” spread around the Hepatitis C elimination programme on several occasions—but it fails to mention the nexus of this programme to TMC. Nor does it give, or investigate, the technical backgrounds of those doing the debunking, who just post pre-written statements provided by their Embassy contacts or PR staff working in the Lugar lab.

It is not difficult to expose those actually working in these military projects at the management level. Silverman was once hired by International Crisis Group, ICG, and the French government to look at the links of these researchers. He soon discovered how the Lugar and partner projects are connected to American, European and other scientific centres.

All the highly skilled professionals in the TMC office in Georgia left in 2010 to form a new organisation, Sigma. The most high profile of these was Richard Mah, who had worked at Los Alamos. You do not leave the golden handcuffs, and diamond pension, of a USD defence contractor to start a company from scratch unless you feel too compromised to stay with that contractor. But nobody is interviewing Mah, or the main TMC person in Georgia nowadays, Giorgi Begiashvili, before claiming “disinformation”.

Day Late and Fact Short

The US can get away with violations of treaty law because what it addresses has been superceded by new developments and changed beyond recognition. It has often been observed that when a certain narcotic is made illegal, another one comes along which is equally deadly but gets round the laws as written. Claims that any treaty violations are accidental are difficult to disprove because such violations are so widespread as to be unavoidable.

The US bio weapons legislation is codified in Section 817 of the Patriot Act. It effectively gives the US immunity from violating its own bioweapons laws, despite the fact that such a national law cannot override an international treaty that country is bound by. Specifically, it states that “the prohibitions contained in this section shall NOT apply to any duly authorised US governmental activity.”

Prior to enactment of the Patriot Act, federal law proscribed the use of biological agents or toxins as weapons, in 18 U.S.C. 175. This outlaws possession of a type or quantity of biological agents or toxins that cannot be justified for peaceful purposes. In short, what is being done for the purpose of military use, offensive, is now being justified under the guise of peaceful purposes.

Regardless of the ledger of truth and innocence, a public debate has begun which is cross cultural and beyond borders. As a result of it, some of what goes on behind closed doors, under the flimsy disguise of public health protection and non-proliferation of bio weapons and especially dangerous pathogens, is now out in the open.

One only needs to look more closely at what has been done in Georgia at various DOD funded labs and medical project. There is a long list to explore, including deaths from experimental TB antibiotics, a succession of dodgy programmes doctors refuse to talk about, and various experimental treatments on what is often an unsuspecting population.

If you do not wish to believe Silverman or the Russian media, enough can be gleaned from open sourced academic materials which clearly demonstrate that proper procedures for informed consent are not being implemented. These shine light on what appear to be “backhanders” paid by and to various funding agencies, the UN, the US State Department, Big Pharma and various partner organisations, including the Ministry of Health, various American universities and the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta Georgia.

Information is now being shared with the Congressional Oversight Budget Office, about the apparent planting of false and misleading information. However, all this demonstrate is that US-funded disinformation oversight is in fact blatant disinformation itself, as anyone who has lived in a country on which the US has an “official narrative”, such as Georgia, has always known.

Not only are some of these new generation bacteria agents and especially dangerous pathogens so evolved that there is no antibiotic or other treatment that can save a patient. Often the cure is only available in the form of bacteriophage preparations, as also is being produced in Tbilisi Georgia on the first floor of Building B at Eliava Institute.

It comes as no coincidence that the US Department of Defense and other agencies have also poured money into improvement of infrastructure at the laboratories on the second and third floors, where the planned production area is housed. These laboratories are used to produce bacteriophage on short notice and will be used for phage concentrate production that is used in the final phage product

Founded in 1923, the Eliava Institute is a world known institution working in the field of Applied Microbiology, Virology and Infectious Immunology.

Bacteriophage research and application is its main direction.

Henry Kamens, columnist, expert on Central Asia and Caucasus, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
https://journal-neo.org/2018/10/09/us-funded-disinformation-oversight-of-bio-weapons-prevention-programmes-in-georgia/

Addendum:

Russia does not rule out ‘military measures’ against Georgia in new threats over Tbilisi biolab

The Lugar Center in Tbilisi. (NCDC.)

TBILISI, DFWatch–Russia launched new threats and accusation against Georgia on Thursday over a US-funded laboratory in Tbilisi, warning that even ‘military measures’ are not ruled out.

The move was ostensibly triggered by a former KGB general who served as Georgia’s security chief in the 1990s but fled the country after being accused of assassination attempt against then president Eduard Shevardnadze.

“We cannot just turn a blind eye, realizing that some things are happening there that directly affect the state of security on [our] southern frontiers. We will resort to diplomatic and military measures,” Vladimir Shamanov, Chairman of the Defense Committee of the Russian State Duma, was quoted by TASS as saying on Thursday. Shamanov was one of the key generals during the Chechen wars in the 1990s and was strongly criticized by human rights groups for alleged war crimes against civilians.

The same day, Chief of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops Major General Igor Kirillov stated the Ministry of Defense expected answers from the US and Georgia on why toxic agents and biological weapons are being stored at the Richard Lugar Public Health Research Center.

Earlier, on September 25 Vladimir Yermakov, Director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Department, told reporters that Russia won’t let the Americans carry out biological experiments near its borders.
Russia suspects the US military are working on Georgian soil with biological materials and are using Georgians “guinea pigs”, he said.

Igor Giorgadze. (Sputnik Georgia.)

The barrage came after a press conference September 11 in Moscow where Igor Giorgadze, Georgia’s former security chief with close ties with the Kremlin, told reporters that he had evidence that the Richard Lugar Public Health Research Center near Tbilisi international airport has carried out dangerous experiments and called on US President Donald Trump to investigate the laboratory’s activity. Giorgadze claimed that US military and private contractors might be engaging in secret experiments on humans there.

The documents leaked to him from the lab where clear evidence of this, he claimed.

Both the Pentagon and Georgia angrily rejected the accusations.

Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon called the accusations “an invention of the imaginative and false Russian disinformation campaign against the West” and “obvious attempts to divert attention from Russia’s bad behavior on many fronts.”

“The U.S. is not developing biological weapons in the Lugar Center,” Pahon said.

Similar speculations have appeared in Russian media from time to time since work began on the Lugar Center in 2004. However, the last wave of accusations involve high ranking officials from Moscow, which Tbilisi views as a potential pretext for a hostile move by Russia.

Amiran Gamkrelidze, the director of Georgia’s National Center for Disease Control and Public Health, called the accusations ‘drivel’. The NCDC effectively owns and operates the Lugar Lab, not the US. Since 2018, the center is fully funded by the Georgian government, he said.

The center’s work is transparent, Russian journalists and experts had had opportunities to visit it and even practice, he added.

Igor Giorgadze, who seems to have triggered the current wave of accusations, is in exile in Russia and is believed to reside in Moscow. He fled Georgia in 1995 after being accused of having organized an assassination attempt on President Eduard Shevardnadze on August 29.

From his exile in Moscow, Giorgadze, a former KGB general, has railed against Georgian authorities and their western orientation, which earned him a status as a bogeyman in the domestic politics of his country of origin, a symbol for the ‘Russian hand’ of hidden control.

He founded an ‘anti-Soros’ organization with a clear aim to overthrow the government of then president Mikheil Saakashvili, 13 members of whom were arrested in 2006, charged with sedition.

Igor Giorgadze, who is viewed in Georgia as an extremely controversial person in the country’s modern history, has sued DFWatch for an article in which he was referred to as ‘public enemy number one’.

Tbilisi City Court held its first hearing in the lawsuit in June, but is was postponed indefinitely.

Finian Cunningham: US ‘Super Spy’ Program May Explain Mysterious Diplomat Brain Injuries

“…It seems strange that the mysterious brain injuries are only reported by US diplomats. No other country has reported similar incidents among their diplomatic staff.”

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With permission

http://www.strategic-culture.org

Finian CUNNINGHAM

July 16, 2018

US ‘Super Spy’ Program May Explain Mysterious Diplomat Brain Injuries

Over the past two years there have been increasing reports of supposed “sonic injuries” among US diplomats. First in Cuba and more recently in China. Controversial implications are that the US officials may have been maliciously targeted by a “sonic weapon” in host countries. However, a more likely explanation is that the alleged victims are the result of US attempts to create “super spies”.

The number of American diplomats reportedly suffering from suspected “sonic injuries” is increasing, with 11 officials evacuated earlier this month from China. Initially, the mysterious incident was reported at just one US consular location in the city of Guangzhou. Now the suspicion of brain injuries has spread to American diplomats stationed in Beijing and Shanghai.

Some 250 US diplomats in China are reportedly undergoing neurological medical tests to ascertain if they have succumbed to the same kind of brain trauma diagnosed in other colleagues. A study of 21 diplomats evacuated from Cuba found last year that they had incurred brain injuries, but, it was diagnosed, not from physical impact to their heads.

Typically, the symptoms reported include cognitive impairment, visual impairment, hearing of strange sounds, dizziness and sleeplessness.

US doctors have so far been confounded by what may have caused the apparent injuries. Last week, the State Department said that ongoing investigations had not established a causal link to the cited medical problems among diplomats.

However, previously President Donald Trump had explicitly blamed Cuba for being responsible for the reported injuries to diplomatic staff. Trump’s accusation has no evidential foundation. The Cuban government denied having any involvement in presumed sonic attacks on American envoys. It has offered to assist any US investigation. Nevertheless, the evacuation of US staff from Cuba and Trump’s accusations have set back the recent detente in relations between the two Cold War foes which former President Obama had embarked on.

With regard to China, the US has been more circumspect in dealing with the reported cases of apparent sonic injuries, refraining from accusing Beijing of malicious activity. China has previously dismissed any suspicion of sonic attacks as “inconceivable”. Beijing has also hit out the US State Department issuing “health warnings” to its staff in China because such notifications convey an implication of wrongdoing by the host country.

In the context of Trump’s escalating trade war with China, there is the danger that reported cases of injury among diplomats could be politicized by Washington, thus adding to the already acrimonious relations.

Some factors so far missing from the subject need to be addressed. First, it seems strange that the mysterious brain injuries are only reported by US diplomats. No other country has reported similar incidents among their diplomatic staff.

Secondly, the American brain-injury cases have happened in two countries which could be deemed as politically sensitive. Why have similar cases not been reported among staff based in territories belonging to allied nations?

Thirdly, when US staff are described as “diplomats”, as they invariably are in Western media reporting, we should perhaps be more precise than this innocuous-sounding terminology. If we think of the personnel as “spies” then a more skeptical inference comes into play. Especially, given the sensitive nature of the two countries involved. If the concerned US staff were indeed serving as spies that raises the question about what sort of training and preparation programs they were subjected to ahead of their assignments.

The speculation that Cuban and Chinese state agents could have used some kind of sonic weapon to attack US diplomats is more in the realm of science-fiction fantasy. Both countries deny any such activity. There is no such weapon known to exist. Also, the US doctors who examined the diplomats evacuated from Cuba could not find any casual explanation. The absence of an external source for the injuries appears to be the official US position too, according to the State Department last week.

Significantly, the US doctors studying the Cuban cases said that all the individuals may have undergone a common experience related to their brain injuries.

Rather than speculating about a foreign agency being responsible for the injuries among American diplomats, or rather spies, perhaps the focus should be put on their own side. Were these individuals subjected to some form of hi-tech training run by the Pentagon or the CIA?

It is known that the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) is investigating brain stimulation devices to greatly enhance learning ability in subjects.

DARPA, as recently as last year, reported the successful use of trans-cranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) devices to boost the cognitive skills among experimental monkeys. It was claimed that subjects given treatment from such devices strapped to the head would later display a significant increase in learning and intelligence compared with control individuals receiving no treatment. DARPA reported a 40 per cent increase in learning ability among macaque monkeys subjected to the brain stimulation device.

One of the lead doctors in the program is quoted as saying: “In this experiment, we targeted the prefrontal cortex [of the brain] with individualized non-invasive stimulation montages.”

The researcher goes on to explain: “That is the region [of the brain] that controls many executive functions, including decision-making, cognitive control, and contextual memory retrieval. It is connected to almost all the other cortical areas of the brain, and stimulating it has widespread effects.”

Please note the parting caveat from the Pentagon-contracted scientist, viz., “stimulating has widespread effects”.

On the positive side, the Pentagon is evidently searching for a way to boost intelligence and learning in humans. This is by no means a new pursuit. For decades, American military intelligence agencies, as well as Hollywood science fiction, have been in thrall to the idea of harnessing the human brain and exploiting ever-higher levels of intelligence. The CIA is known to have run various drug programs and hypnosis – the notorious MK-ULTRA – as early as the 1950s and 60s. The holy grail was to find “super spies” and “super assassins”.

So, the history of the Pentagon and the CIA conducting systematic experiments in order to produce high-performance in humans is well documented.

We also know from recent Pentagon research that it is indeed using electronic brain stimulation devices to greatly enhance the cognitive performance among monkeys. It is therefore conceivable that the Pentagon has conducted unpublished research experiments on human subjects as well.

On the negative side, the sought-after higher intelligence may very well come with unforeseen injurious side-effects. Note again the Pentagon researcher above saying that stimulating the prefrontal cortex of the brain could have “wide-ranging effects”. These effects, in addition to increased intelligence and learning skills, could include deleterious consequences. Especially because the target area of the brain is crucial for the control of “executive functions”.

It is not disclosed by the Pentagon if its brain devices had any injurious impact on the experimental monkeys.

We also do not know the precise work assignments of the affected “diplomats” in Cuba and China. Were there any routine secretarial staff among the reported casualties, or were they all “field staff”, that is, most likely involved in sensitive spying tasks?

It seems unlikely that the Pentagon or affected staff would ever go public in declaring that they were subjected to some form of brain-stimulation device. In any case, the staff could be easily silenced through warnings over career prospects and future earnings or health insurance cover. It may be more convenient for the Pentagon to foment the suspicion of “sonic attack” by foreign agents. That scapegoating could have serious impact on international tensions, especially between the US and China over its trade war and territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

Nevertheless, despite the unknowns, from what we do know already, it seems a plausible posit that the recent upsurge in brain injuries among US diplomatic staff may have been caused not by “sonic attacks” in their host countries, but by their own superiors at the Pentagon or CIA conducting some form of clandestine program to create “super spies”.

What Could Go Wrong? U.S. Army Planning to Deploy Autonomous Killer Robots on Battlefield by 2028

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thefreethoughtproject.com

By Jay Syrmopoulos

June 11, 2018

U.S. officials are openly discussing the military’s vision for implementing autonomous and semi-autonomous unmanned vehicles in the next decade.

 

Washington, D.C. – United States Army Secretary Mark Esper recently revealed that the military has a strategic vision of utilizing autonomous and semi-autonomous unmanned vehicles on the battlefield by 2028.“I think robotics has the potential of fundamentally changing the character of warfare. And I think whoever gets there first will have a unique advantage on the modern battlefield,” Esper said during a Brookings Institute event.

“My ambition is by 2028, to begin fielding autonomous and certainly semi-autonomous vehicles that can fight on the battlefield,” he added. “Fight, sustain us, provide those things we need and we’ll continue to evolve from there.”

In a preview of the U.S. Army’s strategic vision, released on June 6, Esper said the integration of these forces would become a critical strategic component, quoting from the document:

“The Army of 2028 will be able to deploy, fight, and win decisively against any adversary, anytime, and anywhere … through the employment of modern manned and unmanned ground combat systems aircraft, sustainment systems and weapons.”

When Esper was reportedly asked about concerns regarding autonomous robots being a threat to humanity, he replied in jest, “Well, we’re not doing a T-3000 yet,” referencing the Terminator movie series about self-aware AI threatening the existence of humanity.

Of course, while he jokes about the threat of autonomous killer robots, polymath inventor Elon Musk clearly takes the potential of such a threat much more seriously, as evidenced by his comments at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference and festival on March 11, in which he said that “AI is far more dangerous than nukes.”

“I’m very close to the cutting edge in AI and it scares the hell out of me,” Musk told the SXSW crowd. “Narrow AI is not a species-level risk. It will result in dislocation… lost jobs… better weaponry and that sort of thing. It is not a fundamental, species-level risk, but digital super-intelligence is.”

“I think the danger of AI is much bigger than the danger of nuclear warheads by a lot. Nobody would suggest we allow the world to just build nuclear warheads if they want, that would be insane. And mark my words: AI is far more dangerous than nukes,” Musk added.

As The Free Thought Project reported last month, the Pentagon reportedly plans to spend more than $1 billion over the next few years developing advanced robots for military applications that are expected to complement soldiers on the battlefield, and potentially even replace some of them.

While the development of this tech by the Army sounds like a movement toward better weaponry, and not a digital super-intelligence, as discussed by Musk—the creation of fully autonomous unmanned weapons systems clearly has implications given the potential future development of some type of “digital super-intelligence.”

Esper attempted to allay fears by noting that the Army’s unmanned vehicle program would be akin to the Air Force’s use of Predator drones and clarified that the idea would be to protect soldiers by removing them from direct combat. In turn, he said, this would enhance tactical ability and mobility, thus paving the way for cheaper tanks due to not having a crew inside in need of protection.

However, due to the complexity of the modern battlefield, a human element would remain part of the process.

“In my vision, at least, there will be a soldier in the loop. There needs to be. The battlefield is too complex as is,” Esper said.

The nuance in Esper’s statement seemingly leaves lots of ambiguity when he says, “In my vision, at least…” which by default likely implies other competing visions that almost certainly include the use of autonomous systems that don’t have a “solider in the loop.”

During his SXSW commentary, Musk noted that rapid advancements in artificial intelligence are far outpacing regulation of the burgeoning technology, thus creating a dangerous paradigm. He explained that while he is usually against governmental regulation and oversight, the potentially catastrophic implications for humanity create a need for regulation.

“I’m not normally an advocate of regulation and oversight,” Musk said. “There needs to be a public body that has insight and oversight to confirm that everyone is developing AI safely.”

While some experts in the field have attempted to dismiss the threat posed to humanity by the development of AI, Musk said these “experts” are victims of their own delusions of intellectual superiority over machines, calling their thought process “fundamentally flawed.”

“The biggest issue I have with AI experts… is that they think they’re smarter than they are. This tends to plague smart people,” Musk said. “They’re defining themselves by their intelligence… and they don’t like the idea that a machine could be smarter than them, so they discount the idea. And that’s fundamentally flawed.”

The billionaire inventor pointed to Google’s AlphaGo, an AI-powered software that can play the ancient Chinese board game Go as evidence of exponential learning capacity of machines. Although it was reputedly the world’s most demanding strategy game, in early 2017, the AlphaGo AI clinched a decisive victory over the top Go player in the world.

While current semi-autonomous systems keep humans marginally in the loop, the advent of fully autonomous systems that operate without any human input creates serious ethical implications in terms of the morality of using killer robots to slaughter human combatants on the battlefield.

Although Esper’s stated preference for keeping soldiers in the loop is noble, the larger U.S. war machine will undoubtedly find some type of efficiency in eliminating the human component altogether to make killing on the battlefield even more “efficient.”

We are clearly on an extremely slippery slope when it comes to killer robots and AI. Intellectual giants like Elon Musk and Steven Hawking have continually attempted to sound the civilizational alarm regarding the extreme dangers inherent to AI.

As an article in the Guardian on Monday pointed out, killer robots are only a threat if we are stupid enough to create them. Now, the only question is: Will anyone heed all these warnings?

Pentagon Spends $1 Billion To Acquire More War Robots

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http://www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden

Tue, 05/22/2018

According to a new report from Bloomberg, the Pentagon is spending approximately $1 billion over the next several years for a variety of robots designed to complement combat troops on the modern battlefield.

In addition to scouting and explosives disposal, these new war robots will reportedly be able to perform more complex tasks, including surveillance missions, detection of chemical or nuclear agents, and even have the ability to transport soldiers’ rucksacks.

“Within five years, I have no doubt there will be robots in every Army formation,” said Bryan McVeigh, the Army’s project manager for force protection. He applauded the efforts of the Pentagon to field more than 800 robots over the past 18 months.

“We’re going from talking about robots to actually building and fielding programs,” he said. “This is an exciting time to be working on robots with the Army,” McVeigh added.

Bloomberg says the Pentagon has classified its robot platforms into light, medium and heavy categories.

Last month, the Army awarded a $429.1 million contract to two Massachusetts robotic defense companies, Endeavor Robotics and QinetiQ North America, for miniature size war robots weighing less than 25 pounds. Not too long ago, Endeavor Robotics was awarded two other contracts worth roughly $34 million from the Marine Corps for medium size robots.

Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System. (Source: QinetiQ) 

In 4Q17, the Army awarded Endeavor a $158.5 million contract for 1,200 medium size war robots, called the Man-Transportable Robotic System (MTRS), Increment II, weighing around 165 pounds. Bloomberg said the MTRS is designed to detect “explosives as well as chemical, biological, radioactive and nuclear threats,” with a deployment date set for the second half of 2019.

Endeavor Robotics Product Overview. (Source: Endeavor Robotics)

“It’s a recognition that ground robots can do a lot more, and there’s a lot of capabilities that can and should be exploited,” said Sean Bielat, Endeavor’s chief executive officer. He points out “the dull, the dirty and the dangerous” infantry tasks are being supplemented by war robots.

The introduction of war robots onto the modern battlefield is undoubtedly intended to streamline tasks in combat situations for infantry troops, but the primary objective is to increase the survivability rate of America’s bravest warriors.

“The Army’s current approach is to field more inter-operable robots with a common chassis, allowing different sensors and payloads to be attached, along with standardized controllers for various platforms,” McVeigh explained to Bloomberg.

While Trump signed the record-setting defense spending bill earlier this year, Bloomberg says the addition of robots on the battlefield is geared towards affordability. “If we want to change payloads, then we can spend our money on changing the payloads and not having to change the whole system,” McVeigh said.

The Army will have a ramp-up period to field the use of its newer, more advanced robots; indications point to more than 2,500 of the medium and small robots will enter the modern battlefield in the next several years.

Line-up of QinetiQ robots. (Source: QinetiQ) 

“Just strapping a conventional weapon onto a robot doesn’t necessarily give you that much” for ground troops, said Bielat, the Endeavor Robotics CEO. “There is occasional interest in weaponizing robots, but it’s not particularly strong interest. What is envisioned in these discussions is always man-in-the-loop, definitely not autonomous use of weapons.”

There are significant concerns about the rapid development and deployment of advanced robotic technologies on the battlefield, especially the use of autonomous weapon systems.

Last year, a group of the world’s leading AI researchers and humanitarian organizations warned about lethal autonomous weapons systems, or killer robots, that select and kill targets without human control. About two dozen countries have called for the ban on fully autonomous weapons, though the U.S. failed to join.

Killer robots are closer than you think

“It seems inevitable that technology is taking us to a point where countries will face the question of whether to delegate lethal decision-making to machines,” said Paul Scharre, a senior fellow and director of the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security.

Last August, Tesla’s Elon Musk and over 100 experts sent a letter to the United Nations demanding the organization ban lethal autonomous weapons.

“Once developed, lethal autonomous weapons will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend,” the letter warned. “These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways.”

Peter W. Singer, a leading strategist on 21st-century warfare, chatted with Business Insider about the “the killer robots debate,” and said, “it sounds like science fiction, but it is a very real debate right now in international relations. There have been multiple UN meetings on this.”

As Singer put it, advanced robotic technologies have opened countless discussions about legal and ethical questions for which “we’re really not all that ready.”

“This really comes down to, who is responsible if something goes bad?” Singer said, explaining that this applies to everything from war robots to autonomous vehicles.

“We’re entering a new frontier of war and technology and it’s not quite clear if the laws are ready.”

It seems like the new frontier of war and technology is ushering in a “Terminator”-style dystopic evolution of warfare. It is inevitable that this new generation of weaponry could quickly make its way out of the military and into the hands of terrorist organizations. Nevertheless, with the Pentagon throwing billions of dollars at defense companies to manufacture war robots, we ask one simple question: what could go wrong?