‘Unprecedented, Wasteful, and Obscene’: House Approves $1.48 Trillion Pentagon Budget

“For the love of God, can we all stop pretending like this is somehow anything other than a continued orgy of unprecedented, wasteful, and obscene spending at the Pentagon.”
—Stephen Miles, Win Without War

Source

Common Dreams

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

Friday, July 26, 2019

“Wanna know how broken and captured Washington is by the Pentagon and the corruption of our nation’s ‘defense’ budget? Well, look no further than the soon to be enacted budget ‘deal.'”

 

President Donald Trump arrives to speak after touring the Lima Army Tank Plant at Joint Systems Manufacturing in Lima, Ohio, March 20, 2019. (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

In a bipartisan deal that one anti-war critic said demonstrates how thoroughly “broken and captured Washington is by the Pentagon,” 219 House Democrats and 65 Republicans on Thursday voted to approve a budget agreement that includes $1.48 trillion in military spending over the next two years.

Just 16 Democrats—including Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.)—voted against the two-year, $2.7 trillion budget agreement. Largely due to expressed concerns about the deficit, 132 Republicans and Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.) also voted no.

The final vote was 284-149. (See the full roll call.)

“For the love of God, can we all stop pretending like this is somehow anything other than a continued orgy of unprecedented, wasteful, and obscene spending at the Pentagon.”
—Stephen Miles, Win Without War

The House passage of the budget deal, which President Donald Trump quickly applauded on Twitter as a victory for the military, comes after the Congressional Progressive Caucus threatened in April to tank the measure in opposition to its out-of-control Pentagon outlays.

But most of the Progressive Caucus voted for the agreement on Thursday, pointing to increases in domestic spending.

“It’s not a perfect deal by any means,” Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), co-chairs of the Progressive Caucus, said in a statement ahead of the vote. “This deal does not address the bloated Pentagon budget, but it does begin to close the gap in funding for families, by allocating more new non-defense spending than defense spending for the first time in many years.”

Stephen Miles, executive director of Win Without War, took issue with the latter claim in a series of tweets Thursday.

“You’re no doubt hearing a lot of crowing from Democrats about how the deal they struck with Trump gives more money to ‘non-defense’ spending than to ‘defense,'” Miles wrote. “Let’s be clear that by every measure, save the one they’re using, that’s simply not true.”

“Under this deal, the Pentagon and its affiliated programs will get $1.48 trillion over the next two years. The entire rest of gov’t, including the VA btw, will get $1.30 trillion. That’s $178.6 billion more for the Pentagon than the whole rest of gov’t,” Miles wrote. “So, for the love of God, can we all stop pretending like this is somehow anything other than a continued orgy of unprecedented, wasteful, and obscene spending at the Pentagon.”

William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, wrote for Forbes this week that the budget deal “vastly overpays for the Pentagon.”

“At $738 billion for Fiscal Year 2020 and $740 billion for Fiscal Year 2021,” wrote Hartung, “the agreement sets the table for two of the highest budgets for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy since World War II.”

“The agreement sets the table for two of the highest budgets for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy since World War II.”
—William Hartung, Center for International Policy

“The proposed figures are higher than spending at the height of the Vietnam and Korean Wars, and substantially more than the high point of the Reagan buildup of the 1980s,” Hartung added. “And the Fiscal Year 2020 and Fiscal Year 2021 numbers are only slightly less than spending in 2010, when the United States had 180,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, roughly nine times the number currently deployed.”

The sweeping 2020 budget agreement is expected to pass the Senate next week, and Trump has signaled he will sign the measure.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) joined the president in celebrating the increase in military spending, which is significantly more than the Pentagon requested.

The deal, McConnell said, “achieves the No. 1 goal of the Republican side of the aisle, providing for the common defense.”

As Common Dreams reported on Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) came under fire from progressives for striking the budget agreement with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Specifically, critics highlighted the deal to suspend the debt ceiling until 2021, a move that could give Republicans power to cripple the next president’s agenda.

“If you really listen,” wrote Splinter‘s Paul Blest, “you can almost hear [Texas Sen.] Ted Cruz yelling on the floor of the Senate that Congress shouldn’t raise the debt limit by one more dollar unless President Bernie Sanders promises to drop his demand for Medicare for All.”

War Profiteers and the Demise of the US Military-Industrial Complex

Source

Within the vast bureaucratic sprawl of the Pentagon there is a group in charge of monitoring the general state of the military-industrial complex and its continued ability to fulfill the requirements of the national defense strategy. Office for acquisition and sustainment and office for industrial policy spends some $100,000 a year producing an Annual Report to Congress. It is available to the general public. It is even available to the general public in Russia, and Russian experts had a really good time poring over it.

In fact, it filled them with optimism. You see, Russia wants peace but the US seems to want war and keeps making threatening gestures against a longish list of countries that refuse to do its bidding or simply don’t share its “universal values.” But now it turns out that threats (and the increasingly toothless economic sanctions) are pretty much all that the US is still capable of dishing out—this in spite of absolutely astronomical levels of defense spending. Let’s see what the US military-industrial complex looks like through a Russian lens.

It is important to note that the report’s authors were not aiming to force legislators to finance some specific project. This makes it more valuable than numerous other sources, whose authors’ main objective was to belly up to the federal feeding trough, and which therefore tend to be light on facts and heavy on hype. No doubt, politics still played a part in how various details are portrayed, but there seems to be a limit to the number of problems its authors can airbrush out of the picture and still do a reasonable job in analyzing the situation and in formulating their recommendations.

What knocked Russian analysis over with a feather is the fact that these INDPOL experts (who, like the rest of the US DOD, love acronyms) evaluate the US military-industrial complex from a… market-based perspective! You see, the Russian military-industrial complex is fully owned by the Russian government and works exclusively in its interests; anything else would be considered treason. But the US military-industrial complex is evaluated based on its… profitability! According to INDPOL, it must not only produce products for the military but also acquire market share in the global weapons trade and, perhaps most importantly, maximize profitability for private investors. By this standard, it is doing well: for 2017 the gross margin (EBITDA) for US defense contractors ranged from 15 to 17%, and some subcontractors—Transdigm, for example—managed to deliver no less than 42-45%. “Ah!” cry the Russian experts, “We’ve found the problem! The Americans have legalized war profiteering!” (This, by the way, is but one of many instances of something called systemic corruption, which is rife in the US.)

It would be one thing if each defense contractor simply took its cut off the top, but instead there is an entire food chain of defense contractors, all of which are legally required, no less, to maximize profits for their shareholders. More than 28,000 companies are involved, but the actual first-tier defense contractors with which the Pentagon places 2/3 of all defense contracts are just the Big Six: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynmics, BAE Systems and Boeing. All the other companies are organized into a pyramid of subcontractors with five levels of hierarchy, and at each level they do their best to milk the tier above them.

The insistence on market-based methods and the requirement of maximizing profitability turns out to be incompatible with defense spending on a very basic level: defense spending is intermittent and cyclical, with long fallow intervals between major orders. This has forced even the Big Six to make cuts to their defense-directed departments in favor of expanding civilian production. Also, in spite of the huge size of the US defense budget, it is of finite size (there being just one planet to blow up), as is the global weapons market. Since, in a market economy, every company faces the choice of grow or get bought out, this has precipitated scores of mergers and acquisitions, resulting in a highly consolidated marketplace with a few major players in each space.

As a result, in most spaces, of which the report’s authors discuss 17, including the Navy, land forces, air force, electronics, nuclear weapons, space technology and so on, at least a third of the time the Pentagon has a choice of exactly one contractor for any given contract, causing quality and timeliness to suffer and driving up prices.

In a number of cases, in spite of its industrial and financial might, the Pentagon has encountered insoluble problems. Specifically, it turns out that the US has only one shipyard left that is capable of building nuclear aircraft carriers (at all, that is; the USS Gerald Ford is not exactly a success). That is Northrop Grumman Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport, Virginia. In theory, it could work on three ships in parallel, but two of the slips are permanently occupied by existing aircraft carriers that require maintenance. This is not a unique case: the number of shipyards capable of building nuclear submarines, destroyers and other types of vessels is also exactly one. Thus, in case of a protracted conflict with a serious adversary in which a significant portion of the US Navy has been sunk, ships will be impossible to replace within any reasonable amount of time.

America’s Military-Industrial Addiction

The situation is somewhat better with regard to aircraft manufacturing. The plants that exist can produce 40 planes a month and could produce 130 a month if pressed. On the other hand, the situation with tanks and artillery is absolutely dismal. According to this report, the US has completely lost the competency for building the new generation of tanks. It is no longer even a question of missing plant and equipment; in the US, a second generation of engineers who have never designed a tank is currently going into retirement. Their replacements have no one to learn from and only know about modern tanks from movies and video games. As far as artillery, there is just one remaining production line in the US that can produce barrels larger than 40mm; it is fully booked up and would be unable to ramp up production in case of war. The contractor is unwilling to expand production without the Pentagon guaranteeing at least 45% utilization, since that would be unprofitable.

The situation is similar for the entire list of areas; it is better for dual-use technologies that can be sourced from civilian companies and significantly worse for highly specialized ones. Unit cost for every type of military equipment goes up year after year while the volumes being acquired continuously trend lower—sometimes all the way to zero. Over the past 15 years the US hasn’t acquired a single new tank. They keep modernizing the old ones, but at a rate that’s no higher than 100 a year.

Because of all these tendencies and trends, the defense industry continues to lose not only qualified personnel but also the very ability to perform the work. INDPOL experts estimate that the deficit in machine tools has reached 27%. Over the past quarter-century the US has stopped manufacturing a wide variety of manufacturing equipment. Only half of these tools can be imported from allies or friendly nations; for the rest, there is just one source: China. They analyzed the supply chains for 600 of the most important types of weapons and found that a third of them have breaks in them while another third have completely broken down. In the Pentagon’s five-tier subcontractor pyramid, component manufacturers are almost always relegated to the bottommost tier, and the notices they issue when they terminate production or shut down completely tend to drown in the Pentagon’s bureaucratic swamp.

The end result of all this is that theoretically the Pentagon is still capable of doing small production runs of weapons to compensate for ongoing losses in localized, low-intensity conflicts during a general time of peace, but even today this is at the extreme end of its capabilities. In case of a serious conflict with any well-armed nation, all it will be able to rely on is the existing stockpile of ordnance and spare parts, which will be quickly depleted.

A similar situation prevails in the area of rare earth elements and other materials for producing electronics. At the moment, the accumulated stockpile of these supplies needed for producing missiles and space technology—most importantly, satellites—is sufficient for five years at the current rate of use.

The report specifically calls out the dire situation in the area of strategic nuclear weapons. Almost all the technology for communications, targeting, trajectory calculations and arming of the ICBM warheads was developed in the 1960s and 70s. To this day, data is loaded from 5-inch floppy diskettes, which were last mass-produced 15 years ago. There are no replacements for them and the people who designed them are busy pushing up daisies. The choice is between buying tiny production runs of all the consumables at an extravagant expense and developing from scratch the entire land-based strategic triad component at the cost of three annual Pentagon budgets.

There are lots of specific problems in each area described in the report, but the main one is loss of competence among technical and engineering staff caused by a low level of orders for replacements or for new product development. The situation is such that promising new theoretical developments coming out of research centers such as DARPA cannot be realized given the present set of technical competencies. For a number of key specializations there are fewer than three dozen trained, experienced specialists.

This situation is expected to continue to deteriorate, with the number of personnel employed in the defense sector declining 11-16% over the next decade, mainly due to a shortage of young candidates qualified to replace those who are retiring. A specific example: development work on the F-35 is nearing completion and there won’t be a need to develop a new jet fighter until 2035-2040; in the meantime, the personnel who were involved in its development will be idled and their level of competence will deteriorate.

Although at the moment the US still leads the world in defense spending ($610 billion of $1.7 trillion in 2017, which is roughly 36% of all the military spending on the planet) the US economy is no longer able to support the entire technology pyramid even in a time of relative peace and prosperity. On paper the US still looks like a leader in military technology, but the foundations of its military supremacy have eroded. Results of this are plainly visible:

• The US threatened North Korea with military action but was then forced to back off because it has no ability to fight a war against it.
• The US threatened Iran with military action but was then forced to back off because it has no ability to fight a war against it.
• The US lost the war in Afghanistan to the Taliban, and once the longest military conflict in US history is finally over the political situation there will return to status quo ante with the Taliban in charge and Islamic terrorist training camps back in operation.
• US proxies (Saudi Arabia, mostly) fighting in Yemen have produced a humanitarian disaster but have been unable to prevail militarily.
• US actions in Syria have led to a consolidation of power and territory by the Syrian government and newly dominant regional position for Russia, Iran and Turkey.
• The second-largest NATO power Turkey has purchased Russian S-400 air defense systems. The US alternative is the Patriot system, which is twice as expensive and doesn’t really work.

All of this points to the fact that the US is no longer much a military power at all. This is good news for at least the following four reasons.

First, the US is by far the most belligerent country on Earth, having invaded scores of nations and continuing to occupy many of them. The fact that it can’t fight any more means that opportunities for peace are bound to increase.

Second, once the news sinks in that the Pentagon is nothing more than a flush toilet for public funds its funding will be cut off and the population of the US might see the money that is currently fattening up war profiteers being spent on some roads and bridges, although it’s looking far more likely that it will all go into paying interest expense on federal debt (while supplies last).

Third, US politicians will lose the ability to keep the populace in a state of permanent anxiety about “national security.” In fact, the US has “natural security”—two oceans—and doesn’t need much national defense at all (provided it keeps to itself and doesn’t try to make trouble for others). The Canadians aren’t going to invade, and while the southern border does need some guarding, that can be taken care of at the state/county level by some good ol’ boys using weapons and ammo they already happen to have on hand. Once this $1.7 trillion “national defense” monkey is off their backs, ordinary American citizens will be able to work less, play more and feel less aggressive, anxious, depressed and paranoid.

Last but not least, it will be wonderful to see the war profiteers reduced to scraping under sofa cushions for loose change. All that the US military has been able to produce for a long time now is misery, the technical term for which is “humanitarian disaster.” Look at the aftermath of US military involvement in Serbia/Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, and what do you see? You see misery—both for the locals and for US citizens who lost their family members, had their limbs blown off, or are now suffering from PTSD or brain injury. It would be only fair if that misery were to circle back to those who had profited from it.

*

The original source of this article is Club Orlov

Copyright © Cluborlov, Club Orlov, 2019

Social Psychopathy and Tyranny

Source

journal-neo.org

Author: Gordon Duff

06.07.2019

Something spoken of only in whispers is talk of a military coup in Washington. Few are aware of the factions in America’s military such as “Dominionists” who run the Air Force or did until former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Chairman JCOS Marty Dempsey “eliminated them.”

You see, since the 1980s, religious extremism took root in America’s service academies and today’s most senior Pentagon brass is deeply infiltrated with members of an apocalypse cult that took root in America’s South during the 1930s, now thinly disguised as “Evangelical Christianity.”

Though most at the head of this movement are simply charlatans and deceivers, among their number are some who could accurately be described as psychopaths, a term that a number of medical professionals have applied to Donald Trump.

The issue of Trump is more complicated than many would have it, with power bases inside the US that few if any ever see manipulating Trump, playing on his fears and grandiosity. Trump well recognized that the CIA could not be trusted and turned to the conspiracy media, perhaps not recognizing that it too was under the control of intelligence agency factions, though not necessarily American in origin.

America has not been made “great” again, no parade can undo the blithering, the incompetence, the embarrassing idiocy and the generous dose of insanity that now is the American “brand.”

To succinctly describe the point, we turn to America’s most defining July 4th event, the year is 1863, the place is Gettysburg, a town in Pennsylvania, where a battle ensued that made the world we know today. Here, a fictional quote attributed to General Longstreet, one of General Lee’s corps commanders:

“Southern women like their men religious and a little mad.” 
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

Let’s go back to the Bush 43 presidency and an incident pushed from the history books, now veiled in lies or simply censored out of existence. Lies are the norm in America, the USS Liberty, the Tonkin Gulf, the search for imaginary WMDs or the equally imaginary “underground terror cities” former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said existed “in dozens” across Afghanistan.

Today, we think “Skripal” or “MH17.” No lie is too big. Thus, we are drawn to the summer of 2007 when an engineered try for Armageddon nearly succeeded.

On August 29, 2007, in an America at war with the world under neocon rule, an America deeply influenced by a Washington awash with Southern men, very religious and more than a bit mad, an incident now forgotten, occurred.

A B 52 aircraft, loaded with 6 AGM cruise missiles, each tipped with a 150-kiloton thermonuclear warhead, simply disappeared. It had taken off from Minot AFB in North Dakota, a base that also commanded much of America’s ICBM strike capability as well.

It was next spotted over Puerto Rico, heading for the Middle East, and sources tell us the eventual target was Iran.

The plane was intercepted by F15’s and turned back, landing at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana.

Eventually, in response, all nuclear missile crews were replaced and all nuclear authority for the entire United States Air Force was removed and placed under the US Army. Those involved, some were “retired,” others demoted, transferred, some charged with crimes like fraud or sexual assault. Others died in accidents or killed themselves, or so we are told.

Under Donald Trump and John Bolton, a war within the military command structure is now underway as presidential orders to use nuclear weapons against Syria and Iran have been countermanded by the military. Reports that “Trump changed his mind” are false.

July 4, 2019, America celebrates its independence. Along America’s borders, as the public is seeing in the endless photographs hitting the media, families with small children are piled into cages, fed garbage, taunted and abused, not a few people but thousands. We call this tyranny. Those who allow this are evil.

Some time ago, however, those who do such things, medical professionals intended to cure or those of us trained in “profiling,” created a methodology for expression of paradigm, a tool of analysis of what we call the “spectrum of social psychopathy.

In the business of intelligence and forecasting, such tools were applied to leaders. Which ones are crazy? How can we force this or that leader to self-destruct, using the controlled press, false flag terrorism, sanctions or even covert administration of psychotropic drugs. The few interested in such things, often self-proclaimed watchdogs, know of MK Ultra or Operation Northwoods, two names of hundreds of such endeavours.

At the heart of the problem is the nature of those who see themselves as leaders. Truth be told, no natural leader would choose American politics or even the military where “sucking up” and “selling out” is the only path to succeed. There have been exceptions, like George Patton or John Kennedy, but wait, weren’t they both murdered?

Natural leaders coach sports teams, some excel in commercial ventures. More likely, however, they will remain unseen and unknown. Perhaps there is no one worth leading and no place worth leading anyone to anymore.

This brings to mind the term Colonel David Hackworth used to describe America’s military leadership, “the perfumed princes of the Pentagon,” their chests bestrewn with medals and award for honors achieved at cocktail parties.

Crazy is as Crazy Does

As we have set things forth here, we then turn to behavioral analysis, the pseudoscience of predicting the future based on analysis of the unstable and incompetent and their actions when faced with chaos.

The toolsets used by such individuals, and I assure you there are detailed profiles out there, endless millions spent compiling them, blind rage, guesswork, blaming others, pathological deception and, as we see in Trump, likely early stage dementia.

Who are the “crazies?”

There are some notoriously sane leaders out there, Putin for one, Netanyahu for another. Many won’t like what they do or say but they aren’t insane.

Theresa May, Boris Johnson, certainly no overt signs of personality disorder but analysis of their historical reactions to issues yields a very different answer.

In the US, we find fertile ground, even Donald Trump cites Bolton and Pompeo as delusional.

With Bush 43 there were factors of substance abuse and a private life rumored to be very much at odds with his espoused values, this and extremely limited ability.

As for Trump, despite his endless efforts to prove himself unstable every time he speaks, his moments of clarity, his attacks on the press, the CIA and obvious inequities in the world’s economic system, are among the few accurate statements ever to come out of Washington.

Those who would have him turn to the “real leaders” instead of his son in law and daughter are themselves obviously insane.

“You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.” Harry S Truman

Conclusion

Would the military overthrow Trump to prevent a war with Iran that all military experts around the world agree that America would lose? Who gains if America is pushed into obscurity, Russia, China or even Israel?

America’s fragile economy, ever accelerating levels of debt, declining standard of living, rising taxes, internal strife, this is not a nation capable of a ground conflict in the Middle East with a nation whose military is a thousand times stronger than Iraq was in 2003.

Yet there are even those in America who would see their own nation laid low, stripped bare. There is nothing more dangerous than a wounded predator, in this case, a nation in collapse with a massive arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons.

These are the “mad” we speak of, they infect Washington like a virus and no institution remains that can stand against them, perhaps a “cult of sanity” in the military that none have seen or can prove exists?

To what extent do Putin and Netanyahu influence Trump? Neither are guided by love of America and little is known of their vision of a world with America “on the ropes.”

The fear many Americans have is that a powerful America may well not be such a good thing, that whatever “Americans” are, the control of America long ago fell under what is now termed the Deep State.

Past this is the real “wild card,” the madness that manifests itself each day wherever we turn.

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of  Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

US gears up for World War III with largest defense contract in history

“At a projected total program cost of $1.5 trillion, this one weapons system alone would finance the US Department of Education for a quarter-century.”

Source

http://www.wsws.org

Andre Damon

13 June 2019

The Pentagon announced Monday the single largest arms purchase in its history, agreeing to buy nearly 500 F-35 fighter aircraft at a total cost of $34 billion.

This purchase is only a down payment on the Pentagon’s acquisition of the notoriously wasteful and failure-prone aircraft, whose design is based on two overarching priorities: fighting a war with a “great power” such as Russia and China and lining the pockets of Lockheed Martin and the horde of former congressmen and retired generals on its payroll.

The agreement covers the 12th, 13th and 14th batches of F-35s ordered by the Pentagon, which eventually plans to field thousands of the aircraft. Billed in 2001 as a program to save money, each plane eventually ended up costing four times the initial estimate.

A US Air Force F-22 aircraft [Credit: US Air Force]

At a projected total program cost of $1.5 trillion, this one weapons system alone would finance the US Department of Education for a quarter-century.

The F-35 has no greater advocate than President Donald Trump, who promotes it like one of his golfing properties. Trump turned a Wednesday afternoon joint press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda into a photo-op to promote the war plane. As an F-35 carried out a low-speed flyover of the White House, he praised Poland for its agreement to purchase 32 of the aircraft.

At speeches before military audiences, Trump routinely brags about the massive military budgets he has pushed through Congress, touting in particular the Pentagon’s vast spending on the F-35. Speaking at the Air Force Academy commencement ceremony last month, the American president responded to resounding applause from the graduating officers by declaring, “You just like all those brand new, beautiful airplanes that we’re buying.”

Trump continued: “Last year… we secured $700 billion to support our war fighters, followed by another $716 billion—not million—billion. That’s with a ‘B.’”

Both of these Pentagon budgets, entailing the largest increases in defense spending since the end of the Cold War, were passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Eighty-nine percent of Senate Democrats voted to pass the most recent defense budget, whose explicit aim is to prepare the US military for “great power” conflict with Russia and China.

This year the White House is aiming even higher. Next Monday, the administration plans to submit a $750 billion Defense Department budget proposal, a figure $18 billion higher than the amount requested by the Pentagon.

A small army of defense industry executives, former generals serving as “consultants” and congressmen turned lobbyists for the military-industrial complex is salivating at the infusion of cash into a military notorious for paying $7,622 for coffee makers and $640 for toilet seats.

Even by the normal standards of US war profiteering, the F-35 program takes the cake for sheer corruption—so much so that the warmonger and military yes man John McCain called it a “poster child for acquisition malpractice,” a “scandal” and a “tragedy.”

According to the Project on Government Oversight, “By design, the [US military] services can’t independently perform many of the most basic functions needed to properly employ the most expensive weapon system in history.” It added that Lockheed Martin “keeps the government from even knowing the costs of any of the spare parts it has to buy from the company.”

The hundreds of aircraft already delivered are plagued with failures that make them largely inoperable. As Defense News recently reported, “F-35B and F-35C pilots [are] compelled to observe limitations on airspeed to avoid damage to the F-35’s airframe or stealth coating,” while the aircraft remains prone to “cockpit pressure spikes” that cause “excruciating ear and sinus pain.”

But the graft, incompetence and corruption that mark the F-35 program should not distract from its fundamental purpose: to fight a “near-peer” competitor in the form of Russia or China.

Earlier this month, Vice President Mike Pence, addressing the graduating class at West Point, predicted war in the Pacific, Europe and the Americas within the graduates’ lifetimes.

“It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life,” he declared. “Some of you will join the fight on the Korean Peninsula and in the Indo-Pacific, where North Korea continues to threaten the peace and an increasingly militarized China challenges our presence in the region. Some of you will join the fight in Europe, where an aggressive Russia seeks to redraw international boundaries by force. And some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere.

“And when that day comes, I know you will move to the sound of the guns and do your duty, and you will fight, and you will win.”

These blood-curdling sentiments, far from being unique to the Trump administration, are broadly shared on a bipartisan basis. Speaking in Iowa on Tuesday, former naval intelligence officer-turned-Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg said: “Our military capabilities exist for a reason… we stand ready to use force.” He added that the US must prepare for the “wars of the future.”

Even as Trump rips up fundamental constitutional protections, imprisoning immigrant children on military bases and ruling by executive fiat, the Democrats hail the value of an external enemy to enforce political unity at home, with Buttigieg declaring: “The new China challenge provides us with an opportunity to come together across the political divide.” This is essential, he suggests, since, “At least half the battle is at home.”

Some three decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the proclamation of a “unipolar moment” of US dominance, America’s efforts to preserve its global hegemony through military means have produced a debacle. In the lead article in the current edition of Foreign Affairs, Fareed Zakaria writes of “The Self-Destruction of American Power,” concluding that, “Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died.”

But every failure, setback and disaster has only led the United States to double down on its economic bullying and military aggression. After the debacles of the “war on terror,” including the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the wars in Libya and Syria, Washington has set its sights on a conflict with Russia and China. The results of such wars will be a disaster on an incomparably greater scale than the bloodletting in the Middle East, threatening a nuclear Third World War.

The homicidal eruption of American militarism that began with the first Gulf War, coinciding with the Stalinist regime’s dissolution of the Soviet Union, will not simply peter out. Unless halted by the emergence of a mass socialist movement of the working class, it will only intensify.

 

The truth IS out there! Pentagon admits it conducted ‘UFO’ investigations

Source

http://www.rt.com

24 May, 2019

©  Global Look Press / CTK / Ludek Perina

The Pentagon has finally admitted it had “researched and investigated” UFOs – or UAPs, as it calls them – and may have even dropped hints about ongoing extraterrestrial operations.

Someone better call Fox Mulder, because after years of denial and cover-ups, the Department of Defense spokesperson Christopher Sherwood finally blew the lid on the secret agency tasked with “UFO” investigations.

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8:21 AM – May 23, 2019

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The existence of a secret government initiative, called the “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” (AATIP) had already been revealed in 2017, but the Pentagon’s most recent statement marks the first time the government has admitted it was concerned with what could properly be considered “UFO phenomena.“
In an unprecedentedly candid admission, Sherwood told the New York Post the agency “did pursue research and investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena [UAP].” Although he steered clear of the term UFO (“Unidentified Flying Object“), likely due to its pop-cultural baggage, those in the know understood what he REALLY meant.

Nick Pope

✔@nickpopemod

An important new admission by the Pentagon, confirming to @MiddleOfMayhem at @nypost that AATIP “did pursue research and investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena”. So it’s not just next-generation aviation threats from aircraft, missiles & drones. https://nypost.com/2019/05/22/the-pentagon-finally-admits-it-investigates-ufos/ …

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6:50 AM – May 22, 2019

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The Pentagon finally admits it investigates UFOs

The Pentagon has finally uttered the words it always avoided when discussing the possible existence of UFOs — “unidentified aerial phenomena” — and admits that it still investigates

nypost.com

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While the AATIP got the axe in 2012, Sherwood acknowledged – however cryptically – that the government does still have a department to handle alleged sightings of alien aircraft.

The Department of Defense is always concerned about maintaining positive identification of all aircraft in our operating environment, as well as identifying any foreign capability that may be a threat to the homeland.

John Greenewald Jr, who runs the “Black Vault” website dedicated to publishing declassified government documents about UFOs, called the admission “new and shocking,” saying authorities had always beat around the bush with its statements on the topic, until now.

Twitter was slightly less impressed with Sherwood’s ambiguity, with many users offering up their own evidence that alien ships are already among us.

LEMN@M8king_Lemonade

Replying to @nypost

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6:45 AM – May 22, 2019

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Jeff Smith@CPCUDA65

Replying to @nypost

LIARS! They have investigated UFOs for DECADES!
They are REAL… here is an image I TOOK! #QArmy #QAnon #QPost #Pain #TheStormIsHere #TrumpTrain #TheGreatAwakening #MAGA #DrainTheSwamp #TheStorm #Pain [WEareHERE] #Indictments @JusticeDems #BuildTheWall #EndTheFed #WWG1WGA

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6:02 AM – May 22, 2019

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Looks like there may be a need for President Donald Trump’s Space Force after all!

NOD@NOD008

Pentagon admits that they’re still investigating UFO’s
(Space Force working hard for us..)

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6:04 AM – May 23, 2019

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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.”