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Pentagon

A Typical Democratic Official On The Pentagon And War

November 18, 2020 W. J. Astore, Bracing Views. , , ,
Jeh Johnson, formerly homeland security secretary under President Obama, showed how a typical Democratic official approaches the Pentagon and war as he spoke on ABC’s This Week on Sunday (11/15).  For Johnson, the Pentagon “is typically an island of stability” in the U.S. government, but President Trump was destabilizing that island because of recent changes to Pentagon personnel.  Trump’s changes could be driven by his desire to get U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, speculated Johnson, which was not a good thing:

New Report: More Than $1Billion From War Industry And Government Going To Think Tanks

October 23, 2020 Cassandra Simpson, Responsible Statecraft. , , ,
It’s well known that Pentagon contractors spend hundreds of millions each year on lobbying, but the other powerful weapon contractors wield to influence U.S. national security priorities — think tanks — is often ignored. A report released today from the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative, or FITI, at the Center for International Policy, where I work, reveals more than $1 billion in defense contractor and U.S. government funds flowing to the top 50 most influential U.S. think tanks from 2014-2019. It is part of a think tank’s role to recommend policy, and putting ideas forth into debate can be a public good.

Fortress On A Hill: Understanding The War Industry

October 1, 2020 Danny Sjursen, Fortress on a Hill. , , ,
Christian Sorenson stops by the podcast to discuss his new book “Understanding the War Industry”, a detailed look at contracting within the U.S. military industrial complex and how its giant war chest gets funneled to an endless list of contractors, without question to its necessity or what could have been purchased in its place. Everyone from libertarians to mainstream liberals to anarchists utters the words “military-industrial complex,” often as a catchall for murky forces that press the U.S. government into war. But what is this complex?

Artificial (Un)intelligence And The US Military

August 27, 2020 Michael Klare, Tom Dispatch. , , ,
With Covid-19 incapacitating startling numbers of U.S. service members and modern weapons proving increasingly lethal, the American military is relying ever more frequently on intelligent robots to conduct hazardous combat operations. Such devices, known in the military as “autonomous weapons systems,” include robotic sentries, battlefield-surveillance drones, and autonomous submarines. So far, in other words, robotic devices are merely replacing standard weaponry on conventional battlefields.

Saying Iran Is Paying Bounties To Kill Americans Is Pure Parody

August 20, 2020 Scott Ritter, RT. , , ,
It was Russia in June, now it’s Tehran. Don’t US analysts understand that Taliban fighters really don’t need any more motivation to target American troops? This is simply politicized (un)intelligence that isn’t fooling anyone. According to CNN, the Iranian government has paid “bounties” to the Haqqani network, a terrorist group with close links to the Taliban, for six attacks on US and coalition forces in Afghanistan in 2019, including one on December 11 which targeted Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, which wounded four US personnel.

US Empire Of Bases Is Spreader Of US COVID-19 Disaster

August 4, 2020 Andrea Mazzarino, Tom Dispatch. , , ,
American military personnel are getting sick in significant numbers in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. As The New York Times reported in a piece buried in the back pages of its July 21st edition, “The infection rate in the services has tripled over the past six weeks as the United States military has emerged as a potential source of transmission both domestically and abroad.” Indeed, the military is sick and I think of it as both a personal and an imperial disaster. As the wife of a naval officer, I bear witness to the unexpected ways that disasters of all sorts play out among military families and lately I’ve been bracing for the Covid-19 version of just such a disaster.

Ten Reasons Why Defunding Police Should Lead To Defunding War

July 21, 2020 By Medea Benjamin and Zoltán Grossman, CODEPINK. , , ,
Since George Floyd was murdered, we have seen an increasing convergence of the “war at home” against Black and brown people with the “wars abroad” that the U.S. has waged against people in other countries. Army and National Guard troops have been deployed in U.S. cities, as militarized police treat our cities as occupied war zones. In response to this “endless war” at home, the growing and thunderous cries for defunding the police have been echoed by calls for defunding the Pentagon’s wars. Instead of seeing these as two separate but related demands, we should see them as intimately linked, since the racialized police violence on our streets and the racialized violence the U.S. has long inflicted on people around the world are mirror reflections of each other.

Let’s Defund The Pentagon, Too

July 11, 2020 John Horgan, Scientific American. , , ,
Toward the end of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr., after agonizing about the Vietnam War in private, began denouncing it in public. Liberal politicians and media, including The New York Times, castigated him, telling him to stick to civil rights. In a 1967 speech at New York City’s Riverside Church, King rejected this criticism and explained how he arrived at his antiwar stance. He had realized, he said, that the U.S. “would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”

De-Militarizing The United States

July 2, 2020 Melvin Goodman, Counterpunch. , , ,
The reliance on military instruments of power to implement foreign policy has expanded the role of the Department of Defense at the expense of the Department of State.  The State Department’s budget is less than one-tenth of the defense budget, and smaller than the budget of the intelligence community.  There are more soldiers and sailors in military marching bands than there are Foreign Service Officers.  The decline of the Agency for International Development, and President Bill Clinton’s dissolution of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the United States Information Service have contributed to the overall decline of civilian influence in national security policy.

New NDAA Omits COVID19, Escalates Great Power Conflict

June 18, 2020 Brandon Valeriano, Lauren Sander and Eric Gomez, Defense One. , , ,
A summary report of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s proposed version of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act reveals a disconcerting disconnect between the U.S. government’s approach to national security and the impact of COVID-19 on America’s economy and society. The novel coronavirus has killed more Americans than all but two of the country’s wars. It has undermined the prosperity of most of the rest of its population. It has laid bare the country’s racial inequalities and devastated the global economy. Relief efforts are incurring federal debt on a scale certain to reduce funding for other purposes. And yet the SASC’s 20-page report barely mentions the coronavirus.

Black Lives Matter Everywhere: Its Time To Defund The US Military

June 11, 2020 By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies, Popular Resistance. , , ,
While the U.S. war on the black population at home is now exposed for all of America–and the world–to see, the victims of U.S. wars abroad continue to be hidden. Trump has escalated the horrific wars he inherited from Obama, dropping more bombs and missiles in 3 years than either Bush II or Obama did in their first terms. When retired generals speak out against Trump’s desire to deploy active-duty troops on America’s streets, we should understand that they are defending precisely this double standard. Just as we are exposing the rot in U.S. police forces and calling for defunding the police, so we must expose the rot in U.S. foreign policy and call for defunding the Pentagon. U.S. wars on people in other countries are driven by the same racism and ruling class economic interests as the war against African-Americans in our cities.

The End Of War As We Know It?

May 27, 2020 Danny Sjursen, Tom Dispatch. , , , ,
Covid-19, an ongoing global human tragedy, may have at least one silver lining. It has led millions of people to question America’s most malignant policies at home and abroad. Regarding Washington’s war policies abroad, there’s been speculation that the coronavirus might, in the end, put a dent in such conflicts, if not prove an unintended peacemaker -- and with good reason, since a cash-flush Pentagon has proven impotent as a virus challenger. Meanwhile, it’s become ever more obvious that, had a fraction of “defense” spending been invested in chronically underfunded disease control agencies, this country’s response to the coronavirus crisis might have been so much better. Curiously enough, though, despite President Trump’s periodic complaints about America’s “ridiculous endless wars,” his administration has proven remarkably unwilling to agree to even a modest rollback in U.S. imperial ambitions.

Why China Is Not The Aggressor

May 26, 2020 Walter Smolarek, Liberation. , , ,
To reverse the Pentagon’s reckless drive towards potentially catastrophic confrontation, people in this country need to be aware of the true nature of relations between the United States and China. In fact, it is the United States that is engaged in a comprehensive push to encircle and isolate China using military, economic and political aggression.  The result of this atmosphere of non-stop hostility has been a marked increase in instances of discrimination and racist violence towards Chinese-Americans and other Asian communities within the United States.    The war hawks want you to believe that China is bullying and threatening the United States. Don’t fall for it — the truth is just the opposite. Now more than ever the world needs international cooperation and dialogue, not “great power competition” leading to potentially devastating conflict.

Why So Many Nuclear-Capable Hypersonic Missiles?

May 22, 2020 By Karl Grossman, Nation of Change. , , ,
The United States is seeking to acquire “volumes of hundreds or even thousands” of nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles that are “stealthy” and can fly undetected at 3,600 miles per hour, five times faster than the speed of sound.  Why so many? A Pentagon official is quoted in the current issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology as saying “we have to be careful we’re not building boutique weapons. If we build boutique weapons, we won’t—we’ll be very reluctant to—use them.” The article in the aerospace industry trade journal is headlined: “Hypersonic Mass Production.” A subhead reads: “Pentagon Forms Hypersonic Industry ‘War Room.’”

The Green New Deal Is The Key To Ending Forever Wars

May 10, 2020 Lindsay Koshgarian, Truthout. , , ,
The fossil fuel industry is a current casualty of the coronavirus pandemic, with oil prices briefly dipping below zero at the end of April. With the oil industry on the ropes, progressives see a path toward a green economic renewal. Could that spell a whole new approach to international conflict and the U.S. military endeavor, too? Oil is the leading cause of interstate wars, but the connections between war and oil don’t stop there. From the Pentagon’s fossil fuel emissions to militarized responses to climate refugees, the U.S. military endeavor and our dependence on fossil fuels are intricately tied, as Lorah Steichen and I explain in a new report. Recognizing those ties could be the key to a whole new world.
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