Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced new restrictions on journalists’ access while inside the Pentagon complex in Arlington, Virginia, on May 23, 2025.

In a memo, Hegseth said journalists would now be required to have official approval and escorts from the Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs to enter certain areas, including the offices of the secretary, his top aides and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Those areas had previously been freely accessible to credentialed reporters.

Hegseth cited the protection of national security and classified national intelligence information as the justification for the changes. “While the Department remains committed to transparency, the Department is equally obligated to protect CNSI and sensitive information — the unauthorized disclosure of which could put the lives of U.S. Service members in danger.”

The Pentagon Press Association in a statement condemned the changes, saying it “is extremely concerned by the decision to restrict movement of accredited journalists within the Pentagon through non-secured, unclassified hallways.”

It noted that its members have “had access to non-secured, unclassified spaces in the Pentagon for decades, under Republican and Democratic administrations, including in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks,” without any security issues arising.

“This decision eliminates the media’s freedom to freely access press officers for the military services who are specifically hired to respond to press queries,” the association added.

On January 31, the Defense Department had announced a new media “rotation” policy that removed major news outlets — including The New York Times and Politico — from their dedicated office space in the Pentagon and replaced them with primarily conservative outlets, such as One America News Network and Breitbart.

The White House has also sought to restrict press access by taking over the presidential press pool and attempting to ban the Associated Press from covering the president in retaliation for its editorial policy.

Since taking office, Hegseth has joined President Donald Trump and other members of his administration in taking steps to intimidate leakers and news outlets that have produced critical coverage.

The Defense Department did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

As federal agencies face crippling cuts and are forced to cut essential services, President Trump has announced he will seek a $1 trillion budget for the Pentagon, a record-setting number that would mark the highest level of U.S. defense spending since World War II. William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, blasts the promised budget as “completely unnecessary” and says that “almost the only beneficiaries are going to be the weapons manufacturers.” Hartung also discusses the growing political influence of Silicon Valley defense technology startups, including Alex Karp’s Palantir and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The Panama Canal has become a focal point of geopolitical tension, as China’s involvement in its ports raises U.S. concerns over control and influence in a key global trade route.

U.S. President Donald Trump repeatedly said that the United States is being overcharged to use the Panama Canal and that China has influence over its operations.

Speaking at a ribbon cutting for a new U.S.-funded dock at the Vasco Nuñez de Balboa Naval Base after a meeting with Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino, Hegseth said the U.S. will not allow China or any other country to threaten the canal’s operations.

“To this end, the United States and Panama have done more in recent weeks to strengthen our defence and security cooperation than we have in decades,” he said.

China-based companies, Hegseth said, continue to control critical infrastructure in the canal area.

“That gives China the potential to conduct surveillance activities across Panama. This makes Panama and the United States less secure, less prosperous and less sovereign. And as President Donald Trump has pointed out, that situation is not acceptable.”

In response to Hegseth’s remarks, the Chinese embassy in Panama slammed the U.S. government in a statement on X.

It said the U.S. has used “blackmail” to further its own interests and that who Panama carries out business with is a “sovereign decision of Panama … and something the U.S. doesn’t have the right to interfere in.”

“The US has carried out a sensationalistic campaign about the ‘theoretical Chinese threat’ in an attempt to sabotage Chinese-Panamanian cooperation, which is all just rooted in the United States’ own geopolitical interests,” the embassy said.

(Matias Delacroix/AP)

There have been growing calls in Washington for action to loosen Beijing’s influence stemming from Chinese and Hong Kong companies’ control over ports in Panama and elsewhere in the Western hemisphere.

China and the U.S. are also waging a tit-for-tat trade battle, which threatens to stunt the global economy. The U.S. now imposes a 104% tariff on Chinese imports after a series of tariff hikes this year.

On Feb. 3, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened the Panamanian leader with potential American retaliation if his country didn’t immediately reduce Chinese influence over the canal.

The Panamanian government said that it was auditing the lease held by the Hong Kong consortium, which operates ports at both ends of the canal, and late on Monday concluded that there were irregularities.

The Hong Kong consortium, however, had already announced that CK Hutchison Holdings would be selling its controlling stake in the ports to a consortium including BlackRock Inc., effectively putting the ports under American control once the sale is complete.

​CK Hutchison Holdings, a Hong Kong-based conglomerate, has operated the Balboa and Cristóbal ports at the Pacific and Atlantic ends of the Panama Canal through its subsidiary, Panama Ports Company, since the late 1990s.

In March 2025, CK Hutchison agreed to sell a 90% stake in Panama Ports Company to a consortium led by U.S. investment firm BlackRock Inc., as part of a US$22.8 billion deal that includes control over 43 ports in 23 countries.

At that time, Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee said concerns about the deal “deserve serious attention,” possibly hinting at some form of legal action.

“We oppose the abusive use of coercion or bullying tactics in international, economic and trade relations,” Lee told journalists in Hong Kong. The Chinese territory would handle any commercial transaction “according to the law,” he said.

“The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government urges foreign governments to provide a fair and just environment for enterprises, including enterprises from Hong Kong,” Lee said.

Edited by Mike Firn and Stephen Wright.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Taejun Kang for RFA.

He is scheduled to arrive on Friday amid heightened territorial tensions in the South China Sea between Manila and Beijing over Chinese coast guard encroachments in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.

In Manila, Hegseth is to meet with his Philippine counterpart, Gilberto Teodoro Jr., to discuss their nations’ long-standing defense alliance.

“In a few days, my counterpart, the honorable Pete Hegseth, secretary of defense of the United States of America, will be paying a visit to the president and to myself where we will discuss ways to enhance our bilateral and trilateral and squad partnership,” Teodoro told reporters on Monday.

Apart from its 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty with Washington, the Philippines has a year-old trilateral defense pact with the United States and Japan. It is also a member of the “Squad,” an informal grouping of countries including the U.S., Australia, and Japan that have staged joint maritime activities in the South China Sea since last year.

After a two-day stay in the Philippines, Hegseth will go to Japan to attend the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Iwo Jima and meet with Japanese officials.

The American defense chief’s first official visit to Asia comes on the heels of controversy over his and other senior U.S. government officials discussing top-secret plans for a military operation on an encrypted messaging app with a journalist present. Critics are calling it a flagrant violation of information security protocols.

Hegseth, who was in Hawaii on Tuesday meeting officials of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, will stop in Guam before traveling on to Manila.

In the Philippine capital, Hegseth “will advance security objectives with Philippine leaders and meet with U.S. and Philippine forces,” Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement last week.

Reacting to Hegseth’s visit, Beijing warned that any security agreement involving Manila and other nations “should not target any third party” or escalate regional tensions.

“Facts have repeatedly proven that nothing good could come out of opening the door to a predator. Those who willingly serve as chess pieces will be deserted in the end,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said on Tuesday.

“Our message to some in the Philippines: [S]top serving as other countries’ mouthpiece and no more stunt[s] for personal political agenda[s].”

Questions about American commitment

Asia-Pacific defense experts have been keeping an eye on the Trump administration’s stances on geopolitical developments in Europe, and what this could mean to Manila in terms of Washington’s support.

However, since President Donald Trump took office in January, both U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Hegseth have separately issued statements to assure Manila that Washington’s commitment to the defense of Philippine territorial waters remains “ironclad.”

Hegseth’s visit to Manila is a good opportunity to “reinforce these commitments amid doubts in its security policies,” according to Filipino security and geopolitical analyst Sherwin Ona.

“For the Philippines, it is crucial to get Washington’s renewed commitment and support for its armed forces modernization program,” Ona, who teaches at De La Salle University in Manila, told BenarNews. “The U.S. also plays a vital role in strengthening mini-lateral security arrangements.”

The Trump administration has begun holding talks with Moscow and Kyiv aimed at ending the Ukraine war.

“With the shift in U.S. policy in Europe, I think allies in the Indo-Pacific are anxious to hear the secretary’s view,” Ona said. “For Manila, how does this translate to actual assistance and presence in the SCS [South China Sea], Taiwan and the region.”

(Jason Gutierrez/BenarNews)

For geopolitical analyst Julio Amador III, Hegseth’s trip is a “good sign” showing that the new Trump administration is giving priority to America’s close ally in Southeast Asia.

Amador noted that President Trump had a “history” of supporting the alliance between the two nations. It dates back to 1951 when both sides signed the Mutual Defense Treaty, which calls on the two allies to support each other in times of war.

“Trump 2.0 is a welcome development for the Philippines for two reasons,” he said. “First, there is a sense of familiarity as the Philippines already has experience managing relations positively with the previous Trump administration.”

Amador also said that many of those in the Trump 2.0 cabinet were “hawkish on China” in disposition. The “deterrence umbrella against China is all expected to increase in intensity and volume,” Amador said. This includes the joint military drills that are annually carried out between the two nations.

Hegseth will arrive in the Philippines as Manila and Washington prepare for their annual large-scale military exercises here next month.

The Balikatan, or shoulder-to-shoulder, Exercise, which will kick off on April 21 and last until May 9, will feature a joint sail between the allies and Japan.

(Capt. Ryan DeBooy/U.S. Army)

There will also be live-fire exercises in the north, as well as an amphibious landing drill in the Batanes archipelago to defend it against imaginary invaders. Facing Taiwan, Batanes is the Philippines’ northernmost group of islands.

This week, the United States and the Philippine armies launched their own exercises, called Sabak. About 2,000 U.S. Army Pacific personnel joined their 3,000 Philippine Army counterparts in various drills designed to showcase their commitment to “safeguarding the Philippines’ territorial integrity.”

Second Typhon system

Meanwhile, Filipino military officials welcomed news that the U.S. was sending a second Typhon mid-range missile system to the Asia-Pacific region.

While exact details have yet to be released, U.S.-based Defense News said that the U.S. Army’s 3rd Multidomain Task Force was “readying its Typhon battery for deployment in the Pacific theater.”

In April 2024, the missile system was brought to the Philippines as part of joint military exercises with the United States.

It was the first time the U.S. had deployed the mid-range system in the Asia-Pacific region – a move that angered rival superpower China.

Beijing said the move “gravely threatens regional countries’ security, incites geopolitical confrontation and arouses high vigilance and concerns of countries in the region.”

BenarNews is an online news organization affiliated with Radio Free Asia.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Jason Gutierrez for BenarNews.

Image by Getty and Unsplash+.

America’s military budget is more than just numbers on a page—it’s a reflection of the priorities that shape our society. Right now, that nearly trillion dollar budget is bloated, inefficient, and far removed from the needs of everyday Americans. We’ve identified six simple yet effective ways to cut at least $100 billion from the Pentagon’s budget—without sacrificing even the most hawkish of war hawk’s sense of national security. Ready to take the scissors to that excess spending? Here’s how we can do it.

1. Halt the F-35 Program (Save $12B+ per year)

The F-35 is the poster child for military mismanagement. It’s a fighter jet that was supposed to revolutionize our military—except it’s plagued by cost overruns, delays, and underperformance. Despite a projected lifetime cost of over $2 trillion, this aircraft only meets mission requirements about 30% of the time. If we ended or paused the F-35 program now, we’d free up $12 billion annually. The military-industrial complex can afford a few less fancy jets that destroy land and lives, especially when they don’t even do their job right.

2. Reassess Long-Range Missile Defense (Save $9.3B+ per year)

For over half a century, we’ve sunk an eye-watering $400 billion into long-range missile defense systems that have never delivered. The cold, hard truth is these systems are ineffective against real-world threats. In fact, no missile defense technology has ever proven capable of neutralizing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) attack. Cutting back on these programs would save us $9.3 billion per year—money that could be better spent on diplomacy initiatives that actually work.

3. Cut the Sentinel ICBM Program (Save $3.7B+ per year)

ICBMs were once the crown jewels of our nuclear deterrence strategy, but they’re outdated in today’s geopolitical climate. With more reliable and flexible platforms like submarines, bombers, and emerging hypersonic technologies, maintaining an expensive, high-risk ICBM arsenal makes little sense. Ending the Sentinel ICBM program would save taxpayers $3.7 billion annually, and even more in the long run, with total savings over its lifespan estimated at $310 billion. It’s time to face facts: we don’t need to keep pouring money into a strategy that no longer aligns with modern defense needs. Especially when the best nuclear deterrence system is ending nuclear weapons programs to begin with.

4. Cease Procurement of Aircraft Carriers (Save $2.3B+ per year)

Aircraft carriers are relics of a bygone era, costing billions to build and maintain, while becoming increasingly vulnerable to modern missile technology. These floating cities are no longer the symbols of naval power they once were. By halting new aircraft carrier procurements, we can save $2.3 billion a year—money that could be better allocated to ways that actually keep us safe in the 21st century like housing, healthcare or climate justice.

5. Cut Redundant Contracts by 15% (Save $26B per year)

The Pentagon’s bureaucracy is a cash cow for contractors—more than 500,000 private sector workers are paid to do redundant and often wasteful work. Many contracts overlap or go toward projects that are, frankly, unnecessary. Cutting back just 15% on these contracts would save $26 billion annually. That’s a massive chunk of change that could be reallocated to more efficient and effective defense projects. Want a starting point? Look no further than SpaceX’s lucrative contracts—it’s time we hold these companies accountable.Maybe DOGE knows a guy there?

6. Prioritize Diplomacy (Save $50B+ per year)

The best way to avoid unnecessary military spending is to prevent conflicts from happening in the first place. By focusing on diplomatic solutions instead of military interventions, we can scale back expensive overseas bases, reduce troop deployments, and use reserves and National Guard units more effectively. This shift could save up to $50 billion a year—and possibly as much as $100 billion in the long term. It’s about time we put our resources into creating peaceful solutions rather than preparing for endless wars.

What Could We Do with the $100 Billion in Savings?

The possibilities are endless when we take a more practical approach to national security spending. What could we do with the $100 billion we save? Here’s a snapshot of just some of the incredible investments we could make in American society:

787,255 Registered Nurses: Filling critical healthcare gaps nationwide.

10.39 million Public Housing Units: Making affordable housing a reality for families across the country.

2.29 million Jobs at $15/hour: Providing good jobs with benefits, boosting the economy.

1.03 million Elementary School Teachers: Giving our children the education they deserve.

579,999 Clean Energy Jobs: Building a sustainable, green future for the next generation.

7.81 million Head Start Slots: Giving young children a foundation for lifelong success.

5.88 million Military Veterans receiving VA medical care: Ensuring those who served our country receive the care they earned.

The Bottom Line?

Cutting $100 billion from the Pentagon budget isn’t just a pipe dream—it’s a tangible, achievable plan that could deliver real benefits to everyday Americans. While it’s just a starting point, this reduction would allow us to prioritize what truly matters: healthcare, education, infrastructure, and the well-being of our people. If we’re going to spend taxpayer dollars, let’s make sure they go toward initiatives that directly benefit the lives of the citizens who fund them.

The post Dear DOGE: Here’s how to Cut the Pentagon Budget by $100 Billion in 6 Easy Steps appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melissa Garriga.

Photograph Source: rochelle hartman – CC BY 2.0

The paper sheet crinkled under me as I shifted on the vinyl examination table. The doctor paused. “Hmm,” she said quietly.

This was January 2021. I’d patched together a few gigs since completing a masters degree program the previous year, but was still struggling to find full-time work at the height of the pandemic.

A nagging feeling told me not to delay my annual well-woman exam again, having skipped it in 2020 due to COVID-19 and being uninsured. And I’m glad I went — the doctor found a concerning level of precancerous cervical cells.

Cervical cancer was once a common cause of cancer death in the U.S., but increased access to preventive care over the last several decades has cut death rates by more than half. Federal funding for Medicaid, which helps states expand health care services to low-income populations, has contributed to this success.

So it was for me, too. Although I was unemployed, I was able to access the initial screening and follow-up treatments through Medicaid. (State Medicaid programs can have different names. In my state, Wisconsin, it’s BadgerCare.)

Thanks to this coverage, my case was detected early. I made a full recovery and subsequently landed a job with health care benefits. However, if it had been up to Republican lawmakers, this story may have had a very different ending. With Trump’s support, nearly every single House Republican voted to pass a budget resolution that cuts an unimaginable $2 trillion from social services, especially Medicaid.

They’ve packaged this attack on Medicaid as an effort to cut “wasteful” spending and punish the “parasite class.” That’s how billionaire Elon Musk — who was raised with a silver spoon in an affluent, all-white suburb in apartheid South Africa — refers to Americans who use federal benefits.

We are not parasites. We are your family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers.

The vast majority of Medicaid recipients are working or in school. Others have jobs that don’t provide health insurance or are temporarily unemployed, as I was. Medicaid is also a critical lifeline for 10 million people with disabilities, two-thirds of seniors in nursing homes, 14 million adults who have a mental health condition or substance use disorder, and tens of thousands of children who receive mental health services in public schools.

More than 72 million U.S. citizens — over 20 percent of the population — rely on Medicaid.

That includes over 33 million people nationwide living in congressional districts represented by Republican lawmakers who are pushing for these devastating cuts.

Medicaid is an example of government success — access to health care like the screening and treatments I received saves lives and money. What’s so great about going back to an era where people die from preventable diseases?

That’s not all. While slashing Medicaid, the GOP budget blueprint boosts spending for Pentagon contractors, a disastrous mass deportation policy that rips apart families and would forcibly displace millions of taxpayers, and$4.5 trillion in tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy.

I now study that spending for my work. And talk about waste and fraud.

If Trump and the GOP were truly interested in saving taxpayer dollars, they wouldn’t be increasing the near-trillion dollar Pentagon budget, which has never passed an audit. Half or more of that spending goes to war profiteers — for-profit Pentagon contractors whose business models rely on government handouts and who routinely overcharge taxpayers.

Elon Musk’s businesses alone have received at least $38 billion in government funding from the Pentagon and other agencies. What was that again about a parasite class?

Cutting effective, life-saving services to further enrich billionaires and Pentagon contractors like  Musk is the worst possible option. These things don’t save lives — Medicaid does.

We still have time to fight back against this dangerous budget. And we must. Our health and futures depend on it.

The post Pentagon Contractors Don’t Save Lives or Money–Medicaid Does appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Hanna Homestead.

“About 46% of DoD workers are veterans who joined the civil service to continue serving their country. This proposed layoff would directly affect tens of thousands of veterans and their families. This is a slap in the face to veterans and military families everywhere that will not soon be forgotten.

“Firing tens of thousands of civilian employees at the Department of Defense would greatly diminish our nation’s military readiness. Civilian employees perform mission-critical tasks and support our nation’s military in myriad ways. They are tank and aircraft mechanics, commissary workers, ship inspectors, factory workers who manufacture artillery and weapons for our service members, auditors, electricians, firefighters, police officers, and more. Cutting their jobs would push their work onto soldiers, taking them away from their critical warfighting missions.

“Civilian employees are less costly than either service members or contractors, so if the administration is actually serious about saving money it will put a stop to any civilian workforce cuts.

“Title 10 of U.S. Code requires the Pentagon to analyze the effect that any civilian workforce cuts would have on military readiness. It’s clear that this analysis has not taken place.

“This week, AFGE joined with other unions in filing a lawsuit challenging the mass firing of probationary federal employees.

“As the union representing more than 800,000 federal employees – including 250,000 in the Department of Defense – I call on the administration to put an immediate stop to these across-the-board cuts.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Established on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration via executive order, the new department is charged with implementing “the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity”.  Trump made it clear that virtually no agency or department would be exempt.  “Pentagon, [the Department of] Education, just everything.  We’re going to go through everything.”  In an interview with Fox News, Trump was convinced that, “We’re going to find billions, hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud and abuse.”

When it comes to Musk’s hungry intentions regarding the US Defense Department, things start getting cloudily confusing.  In the first place, letting this “special government employee” loose on a department with which his own companies, notably SpaceX, have contracts with, sounds like a recipe for self-interested slashing.

The broader premise of cutting back on wasteful Pentagon spending, however, is nigh irrefutable.  And as much as he is loathed by establishment wonks in the Pentagon, that other Trump ally-in-cutting, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, is merely stating the wondrously obvious in noting that many programs at the Pentagon “don’t have the impact you want them to.”

Much to the horror of defence mandarins, Hegseth has also insisted that the Pentagon pass “a clean audit.”  That, at the very least, was what the US taxpayers deserved.  “They deserve to know where their $850 billion go, how it’s spent, and make sure it’s spent wisely.”

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has already identified an area of interest for the DOGE razor gang: shipbuilding.  “Everything there seems to cost too much, take too long and deliver too little to the soldiers… We need business leaders to go in there and absolutely reform the Pentagon’s acquisition process.”

Defence departments the world over specialise in innovative, fantastic, even fraudulent accounting in justifying projects that will either never see fruition or, if they do, will only do so at vast cost to the taxpayer.  From the outset, the question of necessity is almost never asked in any serious way, let alone the need to coherently identify the relevant threat against which, presumably, the weapons system is intended to combat.

The unaccountable costs and expenditures associated with US defence place it in an almost peerless category.  When one can fork out money to the value of $5 trillion for failed and catastrophic conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan, something is rotten in the state of budgetary economics.  Much of this can be put down to post-9/11 spending, which dramatically departed from the previous model which focused on raising the marginal tax rate and reducing non-war expenditure.  Taxes were actually cut in 2001, 2003 and 2017, while expenditure ballooned.  Huge borrowings for war were made and emergency funds, which do not fall within standard processes of oversight, became the norm.

What emerged was the phenomenon Linda Bilmes describes as the “Ghost Budget”.  It was aided by abundant capital markets the US Treasury could readily draw upon, a dysfunctional budget system typified by hobbling federal government shutdowns, and a Pentagon determined to reverse the post-Cold War budget cuts it had suffered.  Money flowed in the nature of funding for emergency and Overseas Contingency Operations, passing under the radar of the Planning, Programming, Budgeting & Execution Process.  This incentive for underwriting permanent wars was also a license for permanent waste, characterised by the continuous resort by administrations to supplemental emergency funds (assistance to Ukraine being a case in point) with minimal administrative and Congressional scrutiny.

This situation is further complicated by the entanglements governments have with self-interested weapons companies and arms manufacturers, whose boards are very often packed by former government employees and civil servants who identify their own profits with the security of the nation.

Defence budgets the world over would seem to be subject to a more elastic treatment than those of other departments.  The $400 billion deal for the transfer and construction of nuclear-powered submarines to the Royal Australian Navy by the United States is a case in point, a project criminally needless as to demand those overseeing it to be charged with sedition and baleful stupidity.  It has all the ingredients that should make it a prime target for trimming, if not culling altogether: the absence of a genuine security threat (China is lazily designated as the primary one); the presence of self-interested former politicians who quaff and gobble from a seemingly endless gravy train; and military fatuity.

Defence departments also tend to behave like powers unto themselves.  Criticism, however accurate, can be weathered with arrogant reserve.  The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), to take that other paragon of dedicated waste, has dutifully ignored criticism from Parliament’s watchdog, the National Audit Office (NAO), to commit a string of budgetary howlers.  It would be hard to forget the £6 billion blow out on the aircraft carriers, Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales, described by Lord David Richards, former chief of defence staff, as “behemoths … unaffordable vulnerable metal cans”.  Another former senior naval officer told national security reporter Richard Norton-Taylor that the carrier project involved a “combination of naval vanity and pork barrel politics”.

Since making it to sea, both vessels have been dogged by mechanical maladies (flooding and defective propeller shafts have featured), requiring them to spend lengthy sessions in dry dock for repairs.  Instead of participating in NATO exercises intended to show British prowess at sea, wasteful, inefficient indulgence has been on offer.

Trump, then, aided by the furniture breaking teams at DOGE, are onto something – but only up to a point.  Any proper slimming of the Pentagon must come with broader reforms to its funding agenda and how projects are accounted for.  Those arrangements were, after all, aided by previous US presidents convinced that the Republic, to survive, must be doing permanent battle across the globe.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The Senate has confirmed former Fox News host Pete Hegseth as Trump’s defense secretary by just one vote. Hegseth has “very clear” ties to extreme Christian nationalism, as well as a history of alleged sexual assault and abuse. Logan Davis, a reporter in Denver, Colorado, who grew up in the same classical Christian educational movement that Hegseth is raising his family in, explains the problematic ideology that shapes it. Hegseth has endorsed leaders in the community and their beliefs that the church possesses supremacy over worldly affairs, antebellum slavery was a “beneficent American institution” and the U.S.'s global war on terror is a modern-day iteration of the medieval Crusades. Davis says Hegseth's lack of qualifications for his new role means he will likely be “leaning on these controversial faith leaders in his life more than someone with adequate experience” would be — bringing this extremist Christian nationalism into the mainstream.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Darpa creates LifeLog turns into Facebook
“Voyeurism, Celebrity and Surveillance: A Straight Line”

The Pentagon wants to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person’s life, index it, and make it searchable.
“Big Brother: DARPA’s Control Freak Technology“

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Darpa creates LifeLog turns into Facebook
“Voyeurism, Celebrity and Surveillance: A Straight Line”

The Pentagon wants to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person’s life, index it, and make it searchable.
“Big Brother: DARPA’s Control Freak Technology“

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

But the claim is misleading. The Pentagon did not criticize the commander’s remarks. Instead, it released a statement that echoed his sentiments.

The claim was shared on Weibo on Sep. 1, 2024.

“U.S. Commander’s threat to send ships to escort Filipino ships was quickly and embarrassingly met with a slap in the face by the Pentagon!” the claim reads in part.

“The U.S. Indo-Pacific Commander, Samuel Paparo, has just made a statement about ‘sending warships to escort Philippine ships’, to which the Pentagon quickly responded by saying that it was only an option in the context of the consultation. It seems that the Pentagon is not in favor of Paparo's proposal,” it reads further. 

The claim came after the U.S. Indo-Pacific Commander, Samuel Paparo,  attended a conference in Manila with the Philippine military chief, Romeo Brawner in late August. According to media reports, Paparo was talking to reporters on the sidelines of a military forum organized by the Indo-Pacific Command.

At the conference, Paparo responded to a question about the possibility of U.S. convoys accompanying Philippine ships.

Confrontations between the Philippines and China over territorial disputes in the South China Sea have recently intensified, with the two sides trading blame for several ship collisions. 

In a statement released in late August, the U.S. Department of State condemned Chinese maneuvers in the sea and reaffirmed its commitment to assist the Philippines in the event of an armed attack from another nation in the area.

But the claim about the Pentagon criticizing Paparo is misleading.

Paparo’s remarks

Keyword searches found several media reports of Paparo’s remarks in August here, here and here.

“Escort of one vessel to the other is an entirely reasonable option within our Mutual Defense Treaty,” Paparo told reporters, as cited by Reuters, in response to a query whether Washington would consider providing escorts to ships from the Philippines taking supplies to disputed geographical features in the waterway.

“I mean certainly, within the context of consultations,” Paparo added.

Defense ministry reaction

Pentagon press secretary Pat Ryder responded to a question about Paparo’s comment at a press conference on Aug. 27 that while the Philippines leads its own operations, the U.S. would consider convoying Philippine ships if requested to do so. 

Ryder and Paparo’s statements both emphasized that while the U.S. Navy could possibly convoy Philippine ships, such a move would first be forwarded by bilateral consultations. 

Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Shen Ke and Taejun Kang.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Zhuang Jing for Asia Fact Check Lab.

Reuters (6/14/24) reported that the US military was behind social media messages like ““COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!”

Canada-based news agency Reuters (6/14/24) revealed that the Pentagon, beginning in spring 2020, carried out a year-long anti-vax messaging campaign on social media. Reuters reported that the purpose of the clandestine psychological operation was to discredit China’s pandemic relief efforts across Southeast and Central Asia, as well as in parts of the Middle East.

“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” a “senior military officer involved in the program” told Reuters. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”

The Reuters report straightforwardly implicated the US military in a lethal propaganda operation targeting vulnerable populations, centrally including the Filipino public, to the end of scoring geostrategic points against China:

To Washington’s alarm, China’s offers of assistance were tilting the geopolitical playing field across the developing world, including in the Philippines, where the government faced upwards of 100,000 infections in the early months of the pandemic.

The findings were unequivocal. In conjunction with private contractors, the US military created and employed fake social media profiles across popular platforms in multiple countries in order to sow doubt, not only about China’s Sinovac immunization, but also about the country’s humanitarian motivations with respect to their dispersal of pandemic-related aid. The news agency quoted “a senior US military officer directly involved in the campaign in Southeast Asia”:  “We didn’t do a good job sharing vaccines with partners…. So what was left to us was to throw shade on China’s.”

Failure to pounce

This New York Times headline (7/3/24), pointedly critical of the Pentagon’s anti-vaccine disinformation, did not appear in the Times newspaper, but only in a subscriber-only newsletter.

One might be forgiven for assuming that US news media editors would pounce on the fact that the most powerful institution in the US, and quite possibly the world, promulgated anti-vax material on social media over the course of a year. However, nearly a month later, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Politico, CNN and MSNBC have yet to cover the news.

The New York Times, which has consistently covered anti-vaccine disinformation (7/24/21, 8/1/21, 12/28/22, 3/16/24) and extremism (3/26/21, 4/5/21, 8/31/21, 6/14/24), has yet to cover the Pentagon’s unparalleled anti-vax indoctrination efforts in its news section; it ran one subscriber-only newsletter opinion piece (7/3/24) on the story nearly three weeks after Reuters‘ revelations.

Meanwhile, independent (Common Dreams, 6/14/24; WSWS, 6/16/24) and international sources (Al Jazeera, 6/14/24; South China Morning Post,  6/16/24, 6/17/24, 6/18/24) immediately relayed the revelations.

‘Amplifying the contagion’

Given the Times’ track record in the fight against vaccine disinformation, one might expect to see that paper in particular give this blockbuster news front-page status. After all, the Pentagon was busy secretly inculcating anti-vax attitudes in its targets when Neil MacFarquhar of the Times (3/26/21) warned that “extremist organizations are now bashing the safety and efficacy of coronavirus vaccines in an effort to try to undermine the government.”

In a New York Times Magazine thinkpiece (5/25/22), Moises Velasquez-Manoff took stock of the “nightmarish and bizarre” conspiratorial “skullduggery swirling around vaccines”:

The process of swaying people with messaging that questions vaccines is how disinformation—deliberately fabricated falsehoods and half-truths—becomes misinformation, or incorrect information passed along unwittingly. Motivated by the best intentions, these people nonetheless end up amplifying the contagion, and the damaging impact, of half-truths and distortions.

Anxiety and doubt around immunizations, readers were told, “may be seeping into their relationship with medical science—or governmental mandates—in general.”

Surely this line of reasoning applies as much if not more so to the Pentagon’s anti-vaccine propaganda offensive in Asia and the Middle East: The US military’s own skullduggery has primed countless victims around the world to be more skeptical of medical technology in general.

Even if Americans weren’t targeted by the Pentagon’s scheme, their tax dollars were employed to materially endanger people throughout Asia and the Middle East, and to undermine public health mandates in general. And in the midst of a global pandemic, infections anywhere threaten peoples’ lives everywhere. But the threat of anti-vax disinformation is apparently not a high priority for the establishment press if the US military is implicated.

In keeping with a rich history of obsequious editorial decision-making when it comes to the Pentagon’s activities abroad, this remarkable lack of attention on the part of the Times and the rest of the corporate US press serves as yet another example of corporate media’s timorous attitude towards structural power in this country.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Tyler Poisson.

The U.S. military ran a secret anti-vaccination campaign at the height of the pandemic in the Philippines and other nations to sow doubt about COVID vaccines made by China, according to a new investigation by Reuters. The clandestine Pentagon campaign, which began in 2020 under Donald Trump and continued into mid-2021 after Joe Biden took office, relied on fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to target local populations in Southeast Asia and beyond. The campaign also aimed to discredit masks and test kits made in China. “Within the Pentagon, within Washington, there was this fear that they were going to lose the Philippines” to Chinese influence, says Joel Schectman, one of the reporters who broke the story. Schectman says that while it’s impossible to measure the impact of the propaganda effort, it came at a time when the Chinese-made Sinovac shot was the only one available in the Philippines, making distrust of the vaccine “incredibly harmful.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Daniel Boguslaw.

One year since Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went to San Diego to unveil the AUKUS deal the news came that the first of three second-hand Virginia class nuclear-powered submarines supposed to arrive in 2032 may not happen.

Former coalition prime minister Scott Morrison announced AUKUS in September 2021 and Albanese continued to champion the pact between the US, Britain and Australia.

Phase one involves Australia acquiring eight nuclear-powered submarines as tensions in the Indo-Pacific are growing.

• READ MORE: Other AUKUS reports

Concerns about the submarines ever materialising are not new, despite the US passing its National Defence Bill 2024 which facilitates the transfer of the nuclear-powered warships.

However, the Pentagon’s 2025 fiscal year budget only set aside funding to build one Virginia submarine. This affects the AUKUS deal as the US had promised to lift production from around 1.3 submarines a year to 2.3 to meet all requirements.

Australia’s acquisition of the first of three second-hand SSNs were to bridge the submarine gap, as talk about a US-led war on China continues.

US Democratic congressperson Joe Courtney told The Sydney Morning Herald on March 12 the US was struggling with its own shipbuilding capacity, meaning promises to Australia were being deprioritised.

Production downturn
Courtney said that the downturn in production “will remove one more attack submarine from a fleet that is already 17 submarines below the navy’s long-stated requirement of 66”.

The US needs to produce 18 more submarines by 2032 to be able to pass one on to Australia.

After passing laws permitting the transfer of nuclear technology, the deal is running a year at least behind schedule.

Greens Senator David Shoebridge said on X that “When the US passed the law to set up AUKUS they put in kill switches, one of which allowed the US to decide not [to] transfer the submarines if doing so would ‘degrade the US undersea capabilities’”.

Pat Conroy, Labor’s Defence Industry Minister, retorted that the government was confident the submarines would appear.

The White House seems unfazed; it would have been aware of the problems for some time.

Meanwhile the USS Annapolis, a US nuclear-powered submarine (SSN) has docked in Boorloo/Perth.

AUKUS still under way
Regardless of whether Australia acquires any nuclear-powered vessels, the rest of the AUKUS deal, including interoperability with the US, is already underway.

Andrew Hastie, Liberal Party spokesperson, confirmed that construction at HMAS Stirling will start next year for “Submarine Rotational Force-West (SRF-West)”, the permanent US-British nuclear-powered submarine base in WA, which is due to be completed in 2027.

SRF-West includes 700 US army personnel and their families being stationed in WA. If the second-hand nuclear submarines do not materialise, the US submarines will be on hand.

SRF-West may also serve as an alternative to the five British-designed AUKUS SSNs, slated to be built in Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide over coming decades.

Australia respects the Pentagon’s warhead ambiguity policy, meaning that any US military equipment stationed here could be carrying nuclear weapons: we will never know.

Shoebridge said on March 13 he was entering a hearing to decide where the AUKUS powers can dump their nuclear waste. Local waste dumps are being considered, as the US and Britain do not have permanent radioactive waste dumps.

The waste to be dumped is said to have a low-level radioactivity. However, as former Senator Rex Patrick pointed out, SSNs produce high-level radioactive waste at the end of their shelf lives that will need to be stored somewhere, underground, forever.

‘Radioactive waste management’
The Australian Naval Nuclear Power Safety Bill 2023, tabled last November, allows for the AUKUS SSNs to be constructed and also provides for “a radioactive waste management facility”.

The Australian public is spending US$3 billion on helping the US submarine industrial base expand capacity. An initial US$2 billion will be spent next year, followed by $100 million annually from 2026 through to 2033.

The Pentagon has budgeted US$4 billion for its submarine industry next year, with an extra US$11 billion over the following five years.

The removal of the Virginia subs, and even the AUKUS submarines from the agreement, would be in keeping with the terms of the 2014 Force Posture Agreement, signed off by then prime minister Tony Abbott.

As part of the Barack Obama administration’s 2011 “pivot to Asia”, the US-Australia Force Posture Agreement allows for 2500 Marines to be stationed in the Northern Territory.

It sets up increasing interoperability between both countries’ air forces and allows the US unimpeded access to dozens of “agreed-to facilities and areas”.

These agreed bases remain classified.

US takes full control
However, as the recent US overhaul of RAAF Base Tindall in the NT reveals, when the US decides to do that it takes full control.

Tindall has been upgraded to allow for six US B-52 bombers that may be carrying nuclear warheads.

US laws that facilitate the transfer of Virginia-class submarines also make clear that as Australia is now classified as a US domestic military source this allows the US privileged access to critical minerals, such as lithium.

Paul Gregoire writes for Sydney Criminal Lawyers where a version of this article was first published. The article has also been published at Green Left magazine and is republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Brittany A. Chase – Public Domain

In an age when American presidents routinely boast of having the world’s finest military, where nearly trillion-dollar war budgets are now a new version of routine, let me bring up one vitally important but seldom mentioned fact: making major cuts to military spending would increase U.S. national security.

Why? Because real national security can neither be measured nor safeguarded solely by military power (especially the might of a military that hasn’t won a major war since 1945). Economic vitality matters so much more, as does the availability and affordability of health care, education, housing, and other crucial aspects of life unrelated to weaponry and war. Add to that the importance of a Congress responsive to the needs of the working poor, the hungry and the homeless among us. And don’t forget that the moral fabric of our nation should be based not on a military eternally ready to make war but on a determination to uphold international law and defend human rights. It’s high time for America to put aside its conveniently generic “rules-based order” anchored in imperial imperatives and face its real problems. A frank look in the mirror is what’s most needed here.

It should be simple really: national security is best advanced not by endlessly preparing for war, but by fostering peace. Yet, despite their all-too-loud disagreements, Washington’s politicians share a remarkably bipartisan consensus when it comes to genuflecting before and wildly overfunding the military-industrial complex. In truth, ever-rising military spending and yet more wars are a measure of how profoundly unhealthy our country actually is.

“The Scholarly Junior Senator from South Dakota”

Such insights are anything but new and, once upon a time, could even be heard in the halls of Congress. They were, in fact, being aired there within a month of my birth as, on August 2, 1963, Democratic Senator George McGovern of South Dakota — later a hero of mine — rose to address his fellow senators about “New Perspectives on American Security.”

Nine years later, he (and his vision of the military) would, of course, lose badly to Republican Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election. No matter that he had been the one who served in combat with distinction in World War II, piloting a B-24 bomber on 35 missions over enemy territory, even as Nixon, then a Navy officer, amassed a tidy sum playing poker. Somehow, McGovern, a decorated hero, became associated with “weakness” because he opposed this country’s disastrous Vietnam War, while Nixon manufactured a self-image as the staunchest Cold Warrior around, never missing a chance to pose as tough on communism (until, as president, he memorably visited Communist China, opening relations with that country).

But back to 1963, when McGovern gave that speech (which you can read in the online Senate Congressional Record, volume 109, pages 13,986-94). At that time, the government was already dedicating more than half of all federal discretionary spending to the Pentagon, roughly the same percentage as today. Yet was it spending all that money wisely? McGovern’s answer was a resounding no. Congress, he argued, could instantly cut 10% of the Pentagon budget without compromising national security one bit. Indeed, security would be enhanced by investing in this country instead of buying yet more overpriced weaponry. The senator and former bomber pilot was especially critical of the massive amounts then being spent on the U.S. nuclear arsenal and the absurd planetary “overkill” it represented vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, America’s main competitor in the nuclear arms race. As he put it then:

“What possible advantage [can be had] in appropriating additional billions of dollars to build more [nuclear] missiles and bombs when we already have excess capacity to destroy the potential enemy? How many times is it necessary to kill a man or kill a nation?”

How many, indeed? Think about that question as today’s Congress continues to ramp up spending, now estimated at nearly $2 trillion over the next 30 years, on — and yes, this really is the phrase — “modernizing” the country’s nuclear triad of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), as well as its ultra-expensive nuclear-missile-firing submarines and stealth bombers. And keep in mind that the U.S. already has an arsenal quite capable of wiping out life on several Earth-sized planets.

What, according to McGovern, was this country sacrificing in its boundless pursuit of mass death? In arguments that should resonate strongly today, he noted that America’s manufacturing base was losing vigor and vitality compared to those of countries like Germany and Japan, while the economy was weakening, thanks to trade imbalances and the exploding costs of that nuclear arms race. Mind you, back then, this country was still on the gold standard and unburdened by an almost inconceivable national debt, 60 years later, of more than $34 trillion, significant parts of it thanks to this country’s failed “war on terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere across all too much of the planet.

McGovern did recognize that, given how the economy was (and still is) organized, meaningful cuts to military spending could hurt in the short term. So, he suggested that Congress create an Economic Conversion Commission to ensure a smoother transition from guns to butter. His goal was simple: to make the economy “less dependent upon arms spending.” Excess military spending, he noted, was “wasting” this country’s human resources, while “restricting” its political leadership in the world.

In short, that distinguished veteran of World War II, then serving as “the scholarly junior Senator from South Dakota” (in the words of Senator Jennings Randolph of West Virginia), was anything but proud of America’s “arsenal of democracy.” He wasn’t, in fact, a fan of arsenals at all. Rather, he wanted to foster a democracy worthy of the American people, while freeing us as much as possible from the presence of just such an arsenal.

To that end, he explained what he meant by defending democracy:

“When a major percentage of the public resources of our society is devoted to the accumulation of devastating weapons of war, the spirit of democracy suffers. When our laboratories and our universities and our scientists and our youth are caught up in war preparations, the spirit of [freedom] is hampered.

“America must, of course, maintain a fully adequate military defense. But we have a rich heritage and a glorious future that are too precious to risk in an arms race that goes beyond any reasonable criteria of need.

“We need to remind ourselves that we have sources of strength, of prestige, and international leadership based on other than nuclear bombs.”

Imagine if his call had been heeded. This country might today be a far less militaristicplace.

Something was, in fact, afoot in the early 1960s in America. In 1962, despite the wishes of the Pentagon, President John F. Kennedy used diplomacy to get us out of the Cuban Missile Crisis with the Soviet Union and then, in June 1963, made a classic commencement address about peace at American University. Similarly, in support of his call for substantial reductions in military spending, McGovern cited the farewell address of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961 during which he introduced the now-classic phrase “military-industrial complex,” warning that “we must never let the weight of this combination [of the military with industry, abetted by Congress] endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

Echoing Ike’s warning in what truly seems like another age, McGovern earned the approbation of his Senate peers. His vision of a better, more just, more humane America seemed, however briefly, to resonate. He wanted to spend money not on more nuclear bombs and missiles but on “more classrooms, laboratories, libraries, and capable teachers.” On better hospitals and expanded nursing-home care. On a cleaner environment, with rivers and streams saved from pollution related to excessive military production. And he hoped as well that, as military bases were closed, they would be converted to vocational schools or healthcare centers.

McGovern’s vision, in other words, was aspirational and inspirational. He saw a future America increasingly at peace with the world, eschewing arms races for investments in our own country and each other. It was a vision of the future that went down fast in the Vietnam War era to come, yet one that’s even more needed today.

Praise from Senate Peers

Here’s another way in which times have changed: McGovern’s vision won high praise from his Senate peers in the Democratic Party. Jennings Randolph of West Virginia agreed that “unsurpassed military power in combination with areas of grave economic weakness is not a manifestation of sound security policy.” Like McGovern, he called for a reinvestment in America, especially in underdeveloped rural areas like those in his home state. Joseph Clark, Jr., of Pennsylvania, also a World War II veteran, “thoroughly” agreed that the Pentagon budget “needs most careful scrutiny on the floor of the Senate, and that in former years it has not received that scrutiny.” Stephen Young of Ohio, who served in both World War I and World War II, looked ahead toward an age of peace, expressing hope that “perhaps the necessity for these stupendous appropriations [for weaponry] will not be as real in the future.”

Possibly the strongest response came from Frank Church of Idaho, who reminded his fellow senators of their duty to the Constitution. That sacred document, he noted, “vests in Congress the power to determine the size of our military budget, and I feel we have tended too much to rubberstamp the recommendations that come to us from the Pentagon, without making the kind of critical analysis that the Senator from South Dakota has attempted… We cannot any longer shirk this responsibility.” Church saluted McGovern as someone who “dared to look a sacred cow [the Pentagon budget] in the teeth.”

A final word came from Wayne Morse of Oregon. Very much a gadfly, Morse shifted the topic to U.S. foreign aid, noting that too much of that aid was military-related, constituting a “shocking waste” to the taxpayer even as it proved detrimental to the development of democracy abroad, most notably in Latin America. “We should be spending the money for bread, rather than for military aid,” he concluded.

Imagine that! Bread instead of bullets and bombs for the world. Of course, even then, it didn’t happen, but in the 60 years since then, the rhetoric of the Senate has certainly changed. A McGovern-style speech today would undoubtedly be booed down on both sides of the aisle. Consider, for example, consistent presidential and Congressional clamoring now for more military aid to Israel during a genocide in Gaza. So far, U.S. government actions are more consistent with letting starving children in Gaza eat lead instead of bread.

Peace Must Be Our Profession

What was true then remains true today. Real national defense should not be synonymous with massive spending on wars and weaponry. Quite the reverse: whenever possible, wars should be avoided; whenever possible, weapons should be beaten into plowshares, and those plowshares used to improve the health and well-being of people everywhere.

Oh, and that Biblical reference of mine (swords into plowshares) is intentional. It’s meant to highlight the ancient roots of the wisdom of avoiding war, of converting weapons into useful tools to sustain and provide for the rest of us.

Yet America’s leaders on both sides of the aisle have long lost the vision of George McGovern, of John F. Kennedy, of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Today’s president and today’s Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, boast of spending vast sums on weapons, not only to strengthen America’s imperial power but to defeat Russia and deter China, while bragging all the while of the “good” jobs they’re allegedly creatinghere in America in the process. (This country’s major weapons makers would agreewith them, of course!)

McGovern had a telling rejoinder to such thinking. “Building weapons,” he noted in 1963, “is a seriously limited device for building the economy,” while an “excessive reliance on arms,” as well as overly “rigid diplomacy,” serve only to torpedo promising opportunities for peace.

Back then, it seemed to politicians like McGovern, as well as President Kennedy, that clearing a path toward peace was not only possible but imperative, especially considering the previous year’s near-cataclysmic Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet just a few months after McGovern’s inspiring address in the Senate, Kennedy had been assassinated and his calls for peace put on ice as a new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, succumbed to pressure by escalating U.S. military involvement in what mushroomed into the catastrophic Vietnam War.

In today’s climate of perpetual war, the dream of peace continues to wither. Still, despite worsening odds, it’s important that it must not be allowed to die. The high ground must be wrested away from our self-styled “warriors,” who aim to keep the factories of death churning, no matter the cost to humanity and the planet.

My fellow Americans, we need to wake up from the nightmare of forever war. This country’s wars aren’t simply being fought “over there” in faraway and, at least to us, seemingly forgettable places like Syria and Somalia. In some grim fashion, our wars are already very much being fought right here in this deeply over-armed country of ours.

George McGovern, a bomber pilot from World War II, knew the harsh face of war and fought in the Senate for a more peaceful future, one no longer haunted by debilitating arms races and the prospect of a doomsday version of overkill. Joining him in that fight was John F. Kennedy, who, in 1963, suggested that “this generation of Americans has already had enough, more than enough, of war, and hate, and oppression.”

If only.

Today’s generation of “leaders” seems not yet to have had their fill of war, hate, and oppression. That tragic fact — not China, not Russia, not any foreign power — is now the greatest threat to this country’s “national security.” And it’s a threat only aggravated by ever more colossal Pentagon budgets still being rubberstamped by a spinelessly complicit Congress.

The post Pentagon Spending and National (In)Security appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by William J. Astore.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

The Department of Justice asked a U.S. district judge in South Carolina to dismiss the lawsuits last month, arguing that the government can’t be held liable for PFAS contamination. Lawyers for the plaintiffs called the move “misguided” and said that dismissing the lawsuits would extend an ongoing environmental catastrophe the Pentagon helped create. 

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly known by the acronym PFAS (pronounced PEA’-fass), were invented by the chemical giant DuPont in the 1940s. DuPont trademarked the chemical as “Teflon,” which many Americans came to know and love for its use in nonstick cookware in the back half of the 20th century. 3M, another industry behemoth, quickly surpassed DuPont as the world’s largest manufacturer of PFAS, which have also been used in makeup, food packaging, clothing, and many industrial applications such as plastics, lubricants, and coolants. 

Unfortunately, PFAS cause a host of health problems. PFAS have been linked to testicular, kidney and thyroid cancers; cardiovascular disease; and immune deficiencies.

The Department of Defense became involved in PFAS development in the 1960s. In response to a number of deadly infernos on military ship decks, the Navy’s research arm, the Naval Research Laboratory, collaborated with 3M on a new kind of firefighting foam that could put out high-temperature fires. The foam’s active ingredient was “fluorinated surfactant,” otherwise known as perfluorooctane sulfonic acid or PFOS — one of thousands of chemicals under the PFAS umbrella. Internal studies and memos show that 3M became aware that its PFAS products could be harmful to animal test subjects not long after the foam was patented.  

Starting in the 1970s, every Navy ship — and, soon, almost every U.S. military base, civilian airport, local fire training facility, and firefighting station — had AFFF on site in the event of a fire and to use for training. Year after year, the foam was dumped into the ocean and on the bare ground at these sites, where it contaminated the earth and migrated into nearby waterways. The chemicals, which do not break down naturally in the environment, are still there today. According to the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, there are 710 military sites with known or suspected PFAS contamination across the country, including Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. 

The Department of Defense, or DOD, has been under growing pressure from states and Congress to clean up these contaminated sites. But it has been slow to do so, or even to acknowledge that PFAS, which has been found in the blood of thousands of military service members, pose a threat to human health. Instead, the DOD, which is required by Congress to phase out AFFF in some of its systems, doubled down on the usefulness of the chemicals as recently as 2023. “Losing access to PFAS due to overly broad regulations or severe market contractions would greatly impact national security and DOD’s ability to fulfill its mission,” defense officials wrote in a report to Congress last year. 

Meanwhile, people living near military bases — and members of the military — have been getting sick. The lawsuits filed in the U.S. District Court in South Carolina, which were brought by farmers and several states, seek to make the government pay for the water and property contamination the DOD allegedly caused. 

Even if these lawsuits are allowed to proceed, experts told Grist they are not likely to be successful. That’s because they rely on the 1946 Federal Tort Claims Act, a law that allows individuals to sue the federal government for wrongful acts committed by people working on behalf of the U.S. if the government has breached specific, compulsory policies.

But the Federal Tort Claims Act has loopholes. One of these loopholes, called the “discretionary function” exemption, states that federal personnel using their own personal judgment to make decisions should not be held liable for harms caused. The U.S. government is arguing that members of the military were using their discretion when they began requiring the use of AFFF and that no “mandatory or specific” restrictions on the foam were violated. “For decades military policy encouraged — rather than prohibited — the use of AFFF,” the Department of Justice wrote in its motion to dismiss the cases. 

“Every decision has some discretion to it,” said Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, noting that the discretionary function exemption could be applied to virtually any decision made by a federal employee. “But I don’t think anyone, except maybe the manufacturers of PFAS, had much of an inkling that it was so harmful,” he said. 3M and DuPont did not reply to Grist’s requests for comment.

In its motion to dismiss, the government made another argument that experts told Grist is likely to be successful. The Pentagon has the authority under the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act — better known as the Superfund Act — to clean up its own contaminated sites. The Environmental Protection Agency hasn’t classified PFAS contamination as “hazardous contamination” yet, but the DOD says it is already spending billions to investigate and control PFAS at some of its bases. Because the military is voluntarily exercising its cleanup authority under the Superfund Act, its lawyers said in the motion, it should not be held liable for PFAS contamination. 

Lawyers for the plaintiffs and the defendants declined requests for comment, citing the ongoing legal proceedings. 

The U.S. government is the only defendant involved in the PFAS lawsuits that is likely to enjoy immunity. Already, 3M, DuPont, and other chemical companies, faced with the threat of high-profile trials, have opted to pay out historic, multi-billion-dollar settlements to water providers that alleged the companies knowingly contaminated public drinking water supplies with forever chemicals. And the judge presiding over the enormous group of AFFF lawsuits has hundreds of other cases to get through that were not brought by water providers. These include personal injury and property damage cases, as well as those seeking to make PFAS manufacturers pay for medical monitoring for exposed populations. 

The scale of the litigation is a clear indication that communities around the U.S. are desperate to find the money to pay for PFAS cleanup — the full cost of which is not yet clear, but could be as much as $400 billion. “We can’t even imagine what it would cost,” Tobias said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Pentagon tries to dodge PFAS lawsuits over a product it helped invent on Mar 12, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

The Pentagon has known of fundamental flaws with U.S. military operations in the Horn of Africa for nearly 20 years but has nonetheless forged ahead, failing to address glaring problems, according to a 2007 study obtained exclusively by The Intercept.

“There is no useful, shared conception of the conflict,” says the Pentagon study, which was obtained via the Freedom of Information Act and has not previously been made public. “The instruments of national power are not balanced, which results in excessive reliance on the military instrument. There is imbalance within the military instrument as well.”

The 50-page analysis, conducted by the Institute for Defense Analyses, a private think tank that works solely for the U.S. government, is based on anonymized interviews with key U.S. government officials from across various departments and agencies. It found America’s nascent war in the Horn of Africa was plagued by a failure to define the parameters of the conflict or its aims; an overemphasis on military measures without a clear definition of the optimal military strategy; and barriers to coordination between the military and other government agencies like the State Department and local allies like the Somali government.

“Damn, this almost could have been written yesterday.”

After more than 20 years of U.S. efforts, the Pentagon’s own metrics show that America’s war in the region was never effectively prosecuted, remains in a stalemate or worse, and has been especially ruinous for Somalis.

“Damn, this almost could have been written yesterday,” said Elizabeth Shackelford, a former State Department Foreign Service officer who served in Somalia, after The Intercept shared the full IDA analysis with her. “I’ve known these problems have persisted throughout my career with the U.S. government, but I didn’t quite expect this has been thoroughly studied, by DoD, with these issues conclusively identified and yet not addressed for two decades now.”

From the Vietnam War of the 1960s and ’70s to the U.S. war in Afghanistan from the 2000s to the 2020s, the Pentagon — and the Office of the Secretary of Defense in particular — has taken an active interest in investigating its failures, even as it has publicly claimed progress. Like the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret history of the Vietnam War commissioned by then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and the Afghanistan Papers, a collection of internal interviews and memos documenting problems with the U.S. effort in Afghanistan, the IDA study demonstrates that U.S. officials were aware of structural defects in American efforts in Africa from the earliest days of the conflict.

In 2002, the U.S. military established the Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa, or CJTF-HOA, to conduct operations in support of the global war on terror in the region. That same year, U.S. Special Operations forces were dispatched to Somalia. They were followed by conventional forces, helicopters, surveillance aircraft, outposts, and drones.

Commissioned by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and conducted from 2003 to 2007, the IDA analysis, “Achieving Unity of Effort: A Case Study of US Government Operations in the Horn of Africa,” was designed to understand the “national security challenges” faced by the U.S. government writ large in the Horn of Africa and improve policies and their implementation. 

In 2007, the year the IDA report was completed and U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, began operations, the U.S. conducted its first declared airstrike in Somalia. Since then, it has carried out more than 280 air attacks and commando raids, aimed primarily at the terrorist group al-Shabab, while the CIA and elite troops created local proxy forces to conduct low-profile operations on behalf of the United States. At the same time, the U.S. has provided Somalia with billions of dollars in counterterrorism assistance.

All this went on despite deep-seated problems identified by IDA researchers at the beginning of the conflict. Interviews with senior U.S. government officials about the Global War on Terror convinced the IDA team of flawed coordination between U.S. government agencies and a need for a unified strategy.

The IDA study team “could not find documentation for a ‘whole of government’ U.S. strategy that would compel the coordination of all USG efforts in the region of the Horn.” Lacking an “organizing principle” for U.S. efforts there, roles and missions were murky, and agencies were sometimes “in conflict over ends, ways, and means” to prosecute the war. The team also found that counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies were “competing rather than complementary in the Horn.”

“Establishing a combatant command in Africa puts too much emphasis on the military arm of U.S. foreign policy.”

The IDA researchers not only interviewed senior government officials but also rank and file personnel working on the ground in the Horn of Africa for the military, the State Department, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Some interviewees told the research team that “establishing a combatant command in Africa puts too much emphasis on the military arm of U.S. foreign policy.” But the Pentagon pressed ahead, establishing AFRICOM “to work with Africans to bring peace and security to their continent.”

In 2010, the Government Accountability Office examined CJTF-HOA and found a host of problems akin to those mentioned in the IDA study. The task force was “generally not setting specific, achievable, and measurable goals for activities”; had made “cultural missteps” that undermined U.S. efforts and put additional burdens on other government agencies; and was not doing enough to determine whether its efforts were “having their intended effects or whether modifications are needed to best align with AFRICOM’s mission.”

In a 2016 interview with researchers for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, James Dobbins, a former senior U.S. diplomat who served as a special envoy to Afghanistan under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, offered a frank assessment of U.S. military aims there. “We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich,” he said. “We don’t invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful and we clearly failed in Afghanistan.”

The same could be said of Somalia. The IDA study lamented the “presence of al-Qaeda” in the Horn of Africa and the “failed state of Somalia.” Both remain realities despite two decades of forever war. Twenty years after the IDA’s research began, AFRICOM called al-Shabab “the largest and most kinetically active al-Qaeda network in the world.” The Fund for Peace’s most recent “fragile states index,” which effectively measures “failed state” status, ranked Somalia first.

America’s “objective is to produce a level of security and stability that denies sanctuary and opportunity to our enemies,” said the IDA study. But two decades into the conflict, security and stability have been in short supply for Somalis. Death and destruction have, however, been on the rise. Last year, deaths in Somalia from Islamist violence hit a record high of 7,643 — triple the number in 2020, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution.

In addition to a 22 percent rise in fatalities from terrorism in Somalia from 2022 to 2023, violence has increasingly bled across the border into Kenya which saw deaths from al-Shabab attacks double over the same span.

In a conference call with The Intercept and other reporters last month, the Biden administration’s special envoy for the Horn of Africa, Michael Hammer, said the United States is “focused on trying to alleviate the suffering that we’ve seen throughout the Horn,” adding that “we are prepared to remain very much engaged, not only to end the conflicts but also to help Africans in the Horn of Africa build a better future for themselves.”

The IDA study offers answers about why the United States is still “trying” to alleviate suffering and end conflicts in the Horn of Africa after 20 years of effort and billions of U.S. tax dollars. Experts say that lawmakers in both parties need to come together to end America’s failed campaign there.

“It will surprise no one to hear that the U.S. lacked an achievable or coherent strategy in this region from the beginning. But it’s still stunning when new information reveals just how adrift the policy has been,” said Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy, an advocacy group critical of mainstream Washington foreign policy. “With so many pressing crises in the world, it’s deeply disturbing that this failed and counterproductive approach could easily continue for another decade or more. Hopefully, after 20 years, there can be some bipartisan consensus to rein in this war and bring it to a close.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Nick Turse.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Nick Turse.

The post Hollywood’s Pentagon Propaganda, Deconstructing Disinformation, and Critical Media Literacy Education in the US appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Nick Turse.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Nick Turse.

The Pentagon is working to expedite weapons exports to Israel by deploying a so-called Tiger Team of experts to facilitate the transfers, according to procurement records reviewed by The Intercept. Some of the arms sales will be carried out through a new Army initiative designed specifically for the provision of weapons to Israel.

The Israel-specific program, called the Israel Significant Initiatives Group, is located within the Army’s Defense Exports and Cooperation office, which oversees policy for U.S. arms sales.

The Tiger Team meets daily with the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, or DSCA, which executes U.S. arms sales, to overcome barriers to arms sales to Israel. The “tiger team,” a crisis rapid response team involving a diverse set of experts, is supposed to examine potential bottlenecks and delays in weapons transfers and offer advice for alleviating the issues.

The existence of both the Tiger Team and the Israel Significant Initiatives Group have not been previously reported.

“As implementer of the vast majority of both State and Defense Department security assistance, DSCA sits at the center of our arms transfers to Israel,” said Josh Paul, a former director for the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, which oversees U.S. arms transfers. He said the creation of a Tiger Team is a policy choice by President Joe Biden to get weapons to Israel as fast as possible.

“This shows that at all levels of government, from policy to implementation, the Biden Administration is doing all it can to rush arms to Israel despite President Biden’s recent explicit statement that Israel’s bombing of Gaza is ‘indiscriminate,’ and despite extensive reporting that the arms we are providing are causing massive civilian casualties,” said Paul, who resigned from the State Department in protest of the Biden administration’s ongoing weapons assistance to Israel. “This will not be a proud moment for the Biden Administration, the State Department – or for DSCA.”

The Defense Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the Tiger Team and the Israel Significant Initiatives Group.

According to a source familiar with the Tiger Team, who asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations, the group of experts has raised harm to civilians in Gaza as a potential issue with U.S. weapons sales to Israel.

“The Tiger Team is looking at issues of civilian harm, and is raising those issues, but is being met with absolute lack of interest and direction from the top to keep the process moving,” the source said.

“The Tiger Team is looking at issues of civilian harm, and is raising those issues, but is being met with absolute lack of interest.”

Both the Tiger Team and the Israel Significant Initiatives Group are using defense contractors to staff up. Reference to the Tiger Team appears in a job posting by the Hoplite Group.

“In response to the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas on Israel, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency has served as the implementer of the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) process with Israel,” the job listing says. “There is a desire to generate real-time Lessons Learned to assess major bottlenecks, anticipate major hurdles to overcome, and analyze the limits of FMS support to Partner Nations.”

Another defense contractor, Sigmatech, listed a position for an “operations support specialist” to work on the Israel Significant Initiatives Group. The listing has since been removed.

The White House convened a Tiger Team in preparation for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to the Washington Post. After the invasion, the Tiger Team reportedly developed contingency plans for how to respond in the event that Russian President Vladimir Putin resorted to chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.

According to Paul, the new Tiger Team for Israel shows that the arms sales system, already supercharged after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is still not fast enough for the administration.

“The assembling of a Tiger Team demonstrates that the Biden administration believes that all of the existing mechanisms of arms transfer — mechanisms which have proved their extreme ability to expedite arms transfers to Ukraine for the past two years — do not work fast enough,” Paul said.

The Defense Exports and Cooperation office has previously touted its work providing security assistance to allied countries. Over the past year, for example, it has posted copies of several Defense Department press releases detailing security assistance to Ukraine, as well as other partner countries like Colombia and the Philippines. 

“U.S. Sends Ukraine $400 Million in Military Equipment,” a March press release is titled. The release includes a picture of a tank unit billowing smoke from its howitzers. Another press release, from December of last year, detailed a security package to Ukraine, right down to the specific numbers of munitions like artillery, tank, and mortar rounds. 

When it comes to Israel, the Defense Exports and Cooperation office has not posted a single press release this year. Secrecy has been a hallmark of the Biden administration’s weapons transfers to Israel, as The Intercept has previously reported.

White House spokesperson John Kirby acknowledged the secrecy in October. “We’re being careful not to quantify or get into too much detail about what they’re getting — for their own operational security purposes, of course,” he told reporters. 

Shortly after the October 7 Hamas attack against Israel, the White House asked Congress to remove key restrictions on Israel’s ability to access U.S. weapons stockpiles in the country, as The Intercept reported last month. The White House request sought to “allow for the transfer of all categories of defense articles” from the stockpiles, as well as to remove requirements that such weapons be obsolete or surplus in nature.

In other instances of weapons sales to Israel, the administration has cut out Congress entirely. Last week, the Biden administration bypassed Congress to authorize the sale of 13,000 tank shells to Israel.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

Photograph Source: Air Force – Public Domain

The Pentagon just failed its audit — again. For the sixth time in a row, the agency that accounts for half the money Congress approves each year can’t figure out what it did with all that money.

For a brief recap, the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Until 2018, it had never even completed one.

Since then, the Pentagon has done an audit every year and given itself a participation prize each time. Yet despite this year’s triumphant press release — titled “DOD Makes Incremental Progress Towards Clean Audit” — it has failed every time.

In its most recent audit, the Pentagon was able to account for just half of its $3.8 trillion in assets (including equipment, facilities, etc). That means $1.9 trillion is unaccounted for — more than the entire budget Congress agreed to for the current fiscal year.

No other federal agency could get away with this. There would be congressional hearings. There would be demands to remove agency leaders, or to defund those agencies. Every other major federal agency has passed an audit, proving that it knows where taxpayer dollars it is entrusted with are going.

Yet Congress is poised to approve another $840 billion for the Pentagon despite its failures.

In fact, by my count Congress has approved $3.9 trillion in Pentagon spending since the first failed audit in 2018. Tens of billions have gone through the Pentagon to fund wars in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and now Israel. Accountability for those “assets” — including weapons and equipment — is also in question.

At this point, lawmakers surely know those funds may never be accounted for. And year after year, half of the Pentagon budgetgoes to corporate weapons contractors and other corporations who profiteer from this lack of accountability.

There is an entity whose job it is to prevent this sort of abuse: Congress. With each failure at the Pentagon, Congress is failing, too. Every year that members of Congress vote to boost Pentagon spending with no strings attached, they choose to spend untold billions on weapons and war with no accountability.

Meanwhile, all those other agencies that have passed their audits could put those funds to much better use serving the public. Too many Americans are struggling to afford necessities like housing, heat, health care, and child care, and meanwhile our country is grappling with homelessness, the opioid epidemic, and increasingly common catastrophic weather events.

With another government shutdown debate looming in early 2024, you’ll hear lawmakers say we need to cut those already inadequate investments in working families. But if they’re worried about spending, they should start with the agency that has somehow lost track of nearly $2 trillion worth of publicly funded resources.

The post The Pentagon Just Can’t Pass an Audit appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lindsay Koshgarian.

North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un thoroughly reviewed the “photographs of the White House, the Pentagon, and other targets in Washington D.C.,” taken by its newly-launched satellite at around 11:35 pm Pyongyang time Monday, according to the North’s official Rodong Sinmun.

The state-run newspaper said on Tuesday that the satellite also captured images of U.S. military bases including the Naval Station Norfolk, the Newport News Shipyard, and the surrounding airport area – highlighting it surveilled four U.S. Navy nuclear aircraft carriers and a British aircraft carrier.

However, the paper did not release images taken by the satellite.

Likewise, North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency claimed on Saturday that its satellite passed over Hawaii and observed “a naval base in the Pearl Harbor, the Hickam air-force base in Honolulu,” but no satellite photos were published. 

A lack of supporting evidence makes the North’s claims questionable, but such a move could be seen as its latest act of provocation towards the U.S., given that Pyongyang claims to possess nuclear weapons and is actively refining its miniaturization and delivery technologies, aiming to deliver its nuclear warheads to reach the U.S. mainland.

North Korea has repeatedly issued threats against the U.S., specifically targeting the White House, declaring that it would turn it into an “inferno” and “ashes.” 

The recent assertion could be an attempt to demonstrate North Korea’s ability to surveil key U.S. locations, showcasing the advanced capabilities it deems necessary as a self-proclaimed nuclear state.

North Korea launched a satellite last week, despite international warnings. Rocket technology can be used for both launching satellites and missiles. For that reason, the U.N. bans North Korea from launching a ballistic rocket, even if it claims to be a satellite launch.

Trading Barbs 

With North Korea ramping up its provocation, the envoys of the U.S. and North Korea traded barbs at the U.N. Security Council in New York on Monday.

North Korean Ambassador Kim Song criticized the U.S. for being hostile to his country, as he defended Pyongyang’s launch of its satellite.

“One belligerent party, the United States, is threatening us with a nuclear weapon,” said Kim.

Referring to North Korea’s formal name, Kim continued: “It is [a] legitimate right for the DPRK, as another belligerent party, to develop, test, manufacture and possess weapons systems equivalent to those that the United States already possess and, or [are] developing right now.”

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, however, said that the U.S. and its allies’ joint military exercises – which Pyongyang claims as hostile – are defensive in nature, emphasizing that these exercises cannot justify the North’s violation of Security Council resolutions.

“We reject strongly the disingenuous DPRK claim that its missile launches are merely defensive in nature, in response to our bilateral and trilateral military exercises,” said Thomas-Greenfield, noting the U.S. drills with South Korea and Japan are announced in advance, and are purely defensive in nature.

“Once again, I’d like to express sincerely our offer of dialogue without preconditions, the DPRK only needs to accept,” she added.

Edited by Elaine Chan and Taejun Kang.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lee Jeong-Ho for RFA.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

The US is backpedaling its support for Israel’s brutal invasion of Gaza; destruction of the entire northern half (or third) of the walled-off and blockaded territory that is home and prison for 2.3 million trapped Palestinians is occurring now that the IDF has achieved its objective of gaining control of the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The reason is that Israel has not been able to convincingly display the “underground command center” that it has been for weeks claiming justified its siege and eventual attack on that hospital.

The pointed declarations that Israeli and US “intelligence” had made both governments, in Jerusalem and Washington, “confident” that there was a Hamas “command and control center” operating in a Hamas-constructed bunker under the hospital connected to a network of reinforced tunnels leading into and out of the hospital, have not been borne out. Instead, what the so-called Israel Defense Force (IDF) has offered up is a cellar constructed 40 years ago under Israeli supervision in a “Building 2” addition, according to a Newsweek report and a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. This basement, put in place well before the founding of Hamas, was long known as it was included in the hospital addition plan and meant to serve as a laundry room.

No Hamas-constructed access and escape tunnels have been reported as found so far; only an above-ground room in one of the main hospital buildings that allegedly was found to contain a small cache of arms such as 15 automatic weapons and grenades, and a computer allegedly containing images of Israeli hostages on its hard drive — both find said to be evidence that Hamas fighters were using the hospital, or at least to store weapons, and possibly to hold some hostages at some point, but hardly evidence of the hospital’s hiding the Hamas “command and control center” which Israel had been claiming, with certainty, to be the justification for its attack and takeover of the hospital and for the “collateral” deaths of hundreds of patients, medical personnel, and even premie babies on incubators that failed once deprived of electricity.

Further contributing to the growing skepticism of some news organizations in the US and Britain regarding Israeli claims are indications that the IDF was careful not to allow the few journalists permitted to enter the hospital with its troops yesterday to look in the boxes labeled “baby food” which they claimed to have found in the “bunker.”  Instead, the weapons were presented and laid out on a tarp as an exhibit.

This has led many US news outlets to start using qualifiers like “the IDF claimed to have found” the weapons in the hospital, and even, in the case of the alleged Hamas computer, “claimed to have images of hostages on them.” Some journalists and editors, perhaps having adopted this change of wording after being offered it by Israeli sources, are now referring to the IDF as having found a command and control “node” rather than a command and control “center,” the latter term implying something like a buried Hamas “Pentagon” while the former sounds more like a minor link in a network of local command headquarters.

Now, it’s certainly possible that the IDF did “find” a longstanding basement that Hamas fighters had appropriated before being emptied in the days before the Israeli troops entered the hospital. But even if that is were the case, news reports are speculating  (perhaps also at the suggestion of ISF or Israeli government sources), that since no tunnels have yet been found, perhaps  Hamas control center personnel purportedly in the basement may have escaped by ‘blending in” with the staff and refugees who were allowed to leave at the end of the siege of the hospital facility. In any case, as Israel had the plans for the hospital complex, they didn’t “find” that basement. They knew where it was and went to it.

But one would think, given the growing global outrage, including among a growing number of US citizens, including many young Jewish Americans, and among some Israelis too, over the IDF’s massive bombardment of Gaza (now being described as the largest in this century, including the US bombardments of Iraq’s cities, and the collective punishment visited upon all Gazans with the cutoff of food, water, electricity and medicine that is still ongoing, that the Netanyahu government and the IDF, would have wanted reporters to accompany them in finding that bunker and any weapons and computers that might turn up, and would have wanted them to watch as those computers were checked out to find out what was on them, to prevent the kind of skeptical coverage that is now dogging them.

All of this is critically important because the Israeli blitzkrieg on Gaza, which has killed over 12,000 people (a quarter of them children), with an unknown number buried and impossible to rescue under the rubble of the IDF’s leveling of Gaza City and other population centers, was launched explicitly in response to the Hamas break-out attack on Oct. 7. That was when some thousand or more Israeli civilians and troops living and working in settlements and bases outside of the wall surrounding  Gaza were killed, including children, and when some 200 were kidnapped and brought back to Gaza as hostages.

To be sure, the deliberate killing of civilians in Israel by Hamas fighters that day was, by definition, a war crime, but under the laws of war, a crime by one side in a conflict does not justify a war crime in response by the other side. To make matters worse, Israeli’s invasion and blockade are much more severe war crimes, both in the scale of the killing and injuring of civilians and because its leaders have openly called for collective “punishment” of all Palestinians in Gaza, and in practice have been doing precisely that. So the seeming imperative for Israel to come up with some kind of evidence to justify its indiscriminate violence against the residents of Gazas and its attacks on hospitals ought to have led them to offer up incontrovertible proof of Hamas perfidy.

If what the IDF has come up with so far at the Al Shifa Hospital is all it has to show for the epic violence and death it has wrought, it has come up short.

This failure thus far for Israel and its vaunted “humanitarian” military to come up with evidence of a Hamas underground army and hospital-based command and control center or network of command and control “nodes” has led to the frankly infuriating behind-the-scenes spectacle of US emissaries like Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and other top Biden administration cheerleaders for Israel’s war on Gaza now begging the Netanyahu government to realize that, as a CNN report puts it, “There is limited time for Israel to try to accomplish its stated objective of taking out Hamas in its current operation before uproar over the humanitarian suffering and civilian casualties – and calls for a ceasefire – reaches a tipping point.”

I say infuriating because this has been classic (and usually failed) US policy throughout its whole series of unrelenting wars over the nearly eight decades since the end of WWII: Go in big, do your bloody mass destruction and killing thing, or in the case of Vietnam, your brutal attacks on peasant villages and your search-and-destroy missions and relocation of populations into fenced-in “strategic hamlets” guarded by troops, your My Lai massacres and your “secret” and B-53 bombings of Cambodia, as quickly as you can, and hope you can win before losing the support of the American people.

(It is a strategy that in practice has not worked very well for the US, as Nixon learned with his Christmas B-52 carpet bombing or North Vietnam, or as George Bush learned with his “Shock and Awe” attack on Iraq.  But hope springs eternal for US leaders with their imperialist, ‘exceptional nation” chutzpah., so we’ve had the disastrous Obama-backed overthrow of Muammar Gaddafy in Libya and, more recently, Biden’s propping up of Ukraine’s attempt to reclaim majority ethnic Russian parts of that former Soviet “state” including Crimea. These are examples of US military adventures that went in big and have turned into dragged-out failures that Americans gradually turned against in large numbers.

In Israel’s case, this bloody calculus is slightly different: Netanyahu and/or his Likud party coalition might well be able to rely on continued support from their hard-core zionist supporters (for whom no amount of violence against Palestinians is too much to stomach) to cling to power. But in the US, upon which Israel relies for $3.8 billion a year in free military weapons and ammunition, and diplomatic support in the UN, where the US reliably blocks any Security Council actions that target Israel, the public is becoming increasingly disenchanted with Israel’s brutal treatment of Palestinians under its control, whether in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, or within the original borders of pre-’67 War Israel.

That is to say, President Biden, who has called himself a “zionist” and solid backer of Israel but who is facing an increasingly tough-looking re-election campaign in less than a year, is beginning to wonder if his support of a long, bloody Israeli war on and occupation of Gaza, not to mention the continuing and increasingly violent occupation of the West Bank by the IDF and the continued expansion of violent land-grabbing settlers in that region, is such a great idea.

The post The IDF is Coming Up Almost Empty in Search for Underground Hamas ‘Pentagon’ appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dave Lindorff.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

Photograph Source: Petty Officer 2nd Class Cameron Edy – Public Domain

America’s Global War on Terror has seen its share of stalemates, disasters, and outright defeats. During 20-plus years of armed interventions, the United States has watched its efforts implode in spectacular fashion, from Iraq in 2014 to Afghanistan in 2021. The greatest failure of its “Forever Wars,” however, may not be in the Middle East, but in Africa.

“Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated,” President George W. Bush told the American people in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks, noting specifically that such militants had designs on “vast regions” of Africa.

To shore up that front, the U.S. began a decades-long effort to provide copious amounts of security assistance, train many thousands of African military officers, set up dozens of outposts, dispatch its own commandos on all manner of missions, create proxy forces, launch drone strikes, and even engage in direct ground combat with militants in Africa. Most Americans, including members of Congress, are unaware of the extent of these operations. As a result, few realize how dramatically America’s shadow war there has failed.

The raw numbers alone speak to the depths of the disaster. As the United States was beginning its Forever Wars in 2002 and 2003, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks in Africa. This year, militant Islamist groups on that continent have, according to the Pentagon, already conducted 6,756 attacks. In other words, since the United States ramped up its counterterrorism operations in Africa, terrorism has spiked 75,000%.

Let that sink in for a moment.

75,000%.

A Conflict that Will Live in Infamy

The U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq opened to military successes in 2001 and 2003that quickly devolved into sputtering occupations. In both countries, Washington’s plans hinged on its ability to create national armies that could assist and eventually take over the fight against enemy forces. Both U.S.-created militaries would, in the end, crumble. In Afghanistan, a two-decade-long war ended in 2021 with the rout of an American-built, -funded, -trained, and -armed military as the Taliban recaptured the country. In Iraq, the Islamic State nearly triumphed over a U.S.-created Iraqi army in 2014, forcing Washington to reenter the conflict. U.S. troops remain embattled in Iraq and neighboring Syria to this very day.

In Africa, the U.S. launched a parallel campaign in the early 2000s, supporting and training African troops from Mali in the west to Somalia in the east and creating proxy forces that would fight alongside American commandos. To carry out its missions, the U.S. military set up a network of outposts across the northern tier of the continent, including significant drone bases – from Camp Lemonnier and its satellite outpost Chabelley Airfield in the sun-bleached nation of Djibouti to Air Base 201 in Agadez, Niger — and tiny facilities with small contingents of American special operations troops in nations ranging from Libya and Niger to the Central African Republic and South Sudan.

For almost a decade, Washington’s war in Africa stayed largely under wraps. Then came a decision that sent Libya and the vast Sahel region into a tailspin from which they have never recovered.

“We came, we saw, he died,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked after a U.S.-led NATO air campaign helped overthrow Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the longtime Libyan dictator, in 2011. President Barack Obama hailed the intervention as a success, but Libya slipped into near-failed-state status. Obama would later admit that “failing to plan for the day after” Qaddafi’s defeat was the “worst mistake” of his presidency.

As the Libyan leader fell, Tuareg fighters in his service looted his regime’s weapons caches, returned to their native Mali, and began to take over the northern part of that nation. Anger in Mali’s armed forces over the government’s ineffective response resulted in a 2012 military coup. It was led by Amadou Sanogo, an officer who learned English in Texas and underwent infantry-officer basic training in Georgia, military-intelligence instruction in Arizona, and was mentored by U.S. Marines in Virginia.

Having overthrown Mali’s democratic government, Sanogo and his junta proved hapless in battling terrorists. With the country in turmoil, those Tuareg fighters declared an independent state, only to be muscled aside by heavily armed Islamists who instituted a harsh brand of Shariah law, causing a humanitarian crisis. A joint Franco-American-African mission prevented Mali’s complete collapse but pushed the militants into areas near the borders of both Burkina Faso and Niger.

Since then, those nations of the West African Sahel have been plagued by terrorist groups that have evolved, splintered, and reconstituted themselves. Under the black banners of jihadist militancy, men on motorcycles — two to a bike, wearing sunglasses and turbans, and armed with Kalashnikovs — regularly roar into villages to impose zakat (an Islamic tax); steal animals; and terrorize, assault, and kill civilians. Such relentless attacks have destabilized Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger and are now affecting their southern neighbors along the Gulf of Guinea. Violence in Togo and Benin has, for example, jumped 633% and 718% over the last year, according to the Pentagon.

U.S.-trained militaries in the region have been unable to stop the onslaught and civilians have suffered horrifically. During 2002 and 2003, terrorists caused just 23 casualties in Africa. This year, according to the Pentagon, terrorist attacks in the Sahel region alone have resulted in 9,818 deaths — a 42,500% increase.

At the same time, during their counterterrorism campaigns, America’s military partners in the region have committed gross atrocities of their own, including extrajudicial killings. In 2020, for example, a top political leader in Burkina Faso admitted that his country’s security forces were carrying out targeted executions. “We’re doing this, but we’re not shouting it from the rooftops,” he told me, noting that such murders were good for military morale.

American-mentored military personnel in that region have had only one type of demonstrable “success”: overthrowing governments the United States trained them to protect. At least 15 officers who benefited from such assistance have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the war on terror. The list includes officers from Burkina Faso (2014, 2015, and twice in 2022); Chad (2021); Gambia (2014); Guinea (2021); Mali (2012, 2020, and 2021); Mauritania (2008); and Niger (2023). At least five leaders of a July coup in Niger, for example, received American assistance, according to a U.S. official. They, in turn, appointed five U.S.-trained members of the Nigerien security forces to serve as that country’s governors.

Military coups of that sort have even super-charged atrocities while undermining American aims, yet the United States continues to provide such regimes with counterterrorism support. Take Colonel Assimi Goïta, who worked with U.S. Special Operations forces, participated in U.S. training exercises, and attended the Joint Special Operations University in Florida before overthrowing Mali’s government in 2020. Goïta then took the job of vice president in a transitional government officially charged with returning the country to civilian rule, only to seize power again in 2021.

That same year, his junta reportedly authorized the deployment of the Russia-linked Wagner mercenary forces to fight Islamist militants after close to two decades of failed Western-backed counterterrorism efforts. Since then, Wagner — a paramilitary group founded by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former hot-dog vendor turned warlord — has been implicated in hundreds of human rights abuses alongside the longtime U.S.-backed Malian military, including a 2022 massacre that killed 500 civilians.

Despite all of this, American military aid for Mali has never ended. While Goïta’s 2020 and 2021 coups triggered prohibitions on some forms of U.S. security assistance, American tax dollars have continued to fund his forces. According to the State Department, the U.S. provided more than $16 million in security aid to Mali in 2020 and almost $5 million in 2021. As of July, the department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism was waiting on congressional approval to transfer an additional $2 million to Mali. (The State Department did not reply to TomDispatch’s request for an update on the status of that funding.)

The Two-Decade Stalemate

On the opposite side of the continent, in Somalia, stagnation and stalemate have been the watchwords for U.S. military efforts.

“Terrorists associated with Al Qaeda and indigenous terrorist groups have been and continue to be a presence in this region,” a senior Pentagon official claimed in 2002. “These terrorists will, of course, threaten U.S. personnel and facilities.” But when pressed about an actual spreading threat, the official admitted that even the most extreme Islamists “really have not engaged in acts of terrorism outside Somalia.” Despite that, U.S. Special Operations forces were dispatched there in 2002, followed by military aid, advisers, trainers, and private contractors.

More than 20 years later, U.S. troops are still conducting counterterrorism operations in Somalia, primarily against the Islamist militant group al-Shabaab. To this end, Washington has provided billions of dollars in counterterrorism assistance, according to a recent report by the Costs of War Project. Americans have also conducted more than 280 air strikes and commando raids there, while the CIA and special operators built up local proxy forces to conduct low-profile military operations.

Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the U.S. has launched 31 declared airstrikes in Somalia, six times the number carried out during President Obama’s first term, though far fewer than the record high set by President Trump, whose administration launched 208 attacks from 2017 to 2021.

America’s long-running, undeclared war in Somalia has become a key driver of violence in that country, according to the Costs of War Project. “The U.S. is not simply contributing to conflict in Somalia, but has, rather, become integral to the inevitable continuation of conflict in Somalia,” reported Ẹniọlá Ànúolúwapọ Ṣóyẹmí, a lecturer in political philosophy and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. “U.S. counterterrorism policies are,” she wrote, “ensuring that the conflict continues in perpetuity.”

The Epicenter of International Terrorism

“Supporting the development of professional and capable militaries contributes to increasing security and stability in Africa,” said General William Ward, the first chief of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) — the umbrella organization overseeing U.S. military efforts on the continent — in 2010, before he was demoted for profligate travel and spending. His predictions of “increasing security and stability” have, of course, never come to pass.

While the 75,000% increase in terror attacks and 42,500% increase in fatalities over the last two decades are nothing less than astounding, the most recent increases are no less devastating. “A 50-percent spike in fatalities tied to militant Islamist groups in the Sahel and Somalia over the past year has eclipsed the previous high in 2015,” according to a July report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research institution. “Africa has experienced a nearly four-fold increase in reported violent events linked to militant Islamist groups over the past decade… Almost half of that growth happened in the last 3 years.”

Twenty-two years ago, George W. Bush announced the beginning of a Global War on Terror. “The Taliban must act, and act immediately,” he insisted. “They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.” Today, of course, the Taliban reigns supreme in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda was never “stopped and defeated,” and other terror groups have spread across Africa (and elsewhere). The only way “to defeat terrorism,” Bush asserted, was to “eliminate it and destroy it where it grows.” Yet it has grown, and spread, and a plethora of new militant groups have emerged.

Bush warned that terrorists had designs on “vast regions” of Africa but was “confident of the victories to come,” assuring Americans that “we will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.” In country after country on that continent, the U.S. has, indeed, faltered and its failures have been paid for by ordinary Africans killed, wounded, and displaced by the terror groups that Bush pledged to “defeat.” Earlier this year, General Michael Langley, the current AFRICOM commander, offered what may be the ultimate verdict on America’s Forever Wars on that continent. “Africa,” he declared, “is now the epicenter of international terrorism.”

This column is distributed by TomDispatch.

The post The Pentagon Proclaims Failure in its War on Terror in Africa appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nick Turse.

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

Mogadishu, SOMALIA — Mariam Shilow Muse was born in the springtime. When relatives dropped by, the bright-eyed 4-year-old bolted through the yard and beyond the fence to greet them. When her father came home, she smothered him with hugs.

In late March 2018, Mariam’s mother, 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed, planned to visit her brother to see his children for the first time, and Mariam insisted on coming along to meet her young cousins. Luul’s brother had planned to pick them up, but Luul couldn’t reach him by phone, so on the morning of April 1, she and Mariam caught a ride with some men in a maroon Toyota Hilux pickup.

That same afternoon, as Luul’s brother Qasim Dahir Mohamed was on his way to pick up his sister and niece, he passed the maroon Toyota pickup. He noticed mattresses and pillows in the bed and, at the last second, caught sight of Luul, with Mariam on her lap, in the passenger seat. He waved and honked, but the truck kept going. 

Qasim’s phone wasn’t working, so he decided to drive on to El Buur, where Luul and Mariam had just spent the night, to see other relatives before returning home to welcome his sister and niece. Seconds after he reached the house, Qasim heard the first explosion, followed by another and, after a pause, one more blast.

This is a story about missed connections, flawed intelligence, and fatal blindness, about Americans misreading what they saw and obliterating civilians they didn’t intend to kill but didn’t care enough to save. In rural Somalia, cellphones often fail because the militant group al-Shabab forces the local carrier to suspend service to thwart informants and government eavesdropping. But after the explosions, the telecom immediately restored service. Qasim began calling Luul, but her phone rang endlessly.

The news spread fast: A drone strike had hit a pickup carrying mattresses. Qasim and one of his brothers started driving toward the site of the attack. They were the only ones on the road and his brother demanded they stop, Qasim told me when we met recently in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. It was too dangerous, the brother said. What if they were targeted by another strike? “I told him that I didn’t care,” Qasim recalled.

Qasim wasn’t the only person to spot the Toyota pickup that day. In a military joint operations center that the U.S. government refuses to identify, members of a Special Operations task force that officials won’t name watched live footage that they declined to release of everyone who entered the Hilux. They recorded and scrutinized it, chronicling when each “ADM” — or adult male — got in or out, where they walked and what they did. The Americans logged these minute details with a pretense of precision, but they never understood what they were seeing.

For all their technology and supposed expertise, the Americans were confused, and some were inexperienced, according to a Pentagon investigation obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act. The inquiry is the first such document to be made public about a U.S. drone strike in Africa. It reveals that after months of “target development,” the Americans suddenly found themselves in a mad rush to kill people who posed no threat to the United States in a war that Congress never declared. They argued among themselves about even the most basic details, like how many passengers were in the vehicle. And in the end, they got it wrong. The Americans couldn’t tell a man from a woman, which might have affected their decision to conduct the strike. They also missed the 4-year-old child whose presence should have caused them to stand down.

In the joint operations center, the Americans quickly realized their initial strike had failed to kill all the passengers and decided to eliminate what the investigation file refers to as a sole “survivor running away from vehicle post the first engagement.” But the “survivor” was actually two people: Luul and Mariam. Seconds later, another missile screamed down from the sky.

“It seemed like they did everything wrong,” said an American drone pilot who worked in Somalia and examined the investigation file at The Intercept’s request.

When Qasim found the Toyota, the roof was torn open, the bed was smashed, and the mattresses and pillows were aflame. Four men were dead inside and another young man lay lifeless in the dirt nearby. There was no sign of Luul or Mariam.

About 200 feet away, Qasim found what remained of Luul. Her left leg was mangled, and the top of her head was missing. She died clutching Mariam, whose body was peppered with tiny shards of shrapnel.

Qasim tore off a swath of his sarong and began gathering up small pieces of his sister. Stunned and grieving, he spent hours searching for fragments of her body along the dirt road, working by the glare of his car’s headlights as the sky darkened. Finally, he bundled Luul’s and Mariam’s remains and brought them home. Luul’s body was so mutilated that it was impossible to properly wash, as is required in Islam. Instead, he wrapped her with care in a shroud and buried Luul and Mariam together in a village cemetery. The next day, locals living near the strike site called Qasim. They had found the top of Luul’s skull, complete with hair and a delicate gold teardrop dangling from one ear.

That same day — April 2 — U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, announced it had killed “five terrorists” and destroyed one vehicle and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike.” The Somali press immediately said otherwise. By the following month, the task force had appointed an investigating officer to sort it all out. He quickly determined that his unit had killed an “adult female and child” but expressed doubt that their identities would ever be known. 

From left to right: Shilow Muse Ali, the father of 4-year-old Mariam Shilow Muse and husband of 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed, both of whom were killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2018; Luul’s father and Mariam’s grandfather, Dahir Mohamed Abdi; and Luul’s brothers and Mariam’s uncles Qasim Dahir Mohamed, Ahmed Dahir Mohamed, Hussein Dahir Mohamed, and Abdi Dahir Mohamed, in Mogadishu, Somalia, on May 10, 2023.

“We Can Do Whatever We Want”

The exclusive documents and interviews with more than 45 current and former U.S. and Somali military personnel and government officials, victims’ relatives, and experts offer an unprecedented window into the U.S. drone war in Somalia, an investigator’s efforts to excuse the killing of a woman and child, and a “reporting error” that kept those deaths secret for more than a year from Congress, the press, and the American people. The Intercept’s investigation reveals that the strike was conducted under loosened rules of engagement sought by the Pentagon and approved by the Trump White House, and that no one was ever held accountable for the civilian deaths.

“Ultimately, this is just one of many tragedies caused by the U.S. military’s systemic failure to adequately distinguish civilians from combatants, to own up to its deadly mistakes, to learn from them, and to provide assistance to survivors,” Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security With Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, told The Intercept. “The failure to adequately distinguish civilians from combatants isn’t just tragic. It’s also a violation of international law and completely undermines U.S. counterterrorism strategy.” 

More than five years after the strike, Mariam and Luul’s family has not been contacted by any U.S. official or received a condolence payment. Over two days this spring, I met with eight of their relatives in Mogadishu. They spoke about Mariam’s wide smile, Luul’s nurturing role as a sister and mother of two, and the terror that haunts Luul’s surviving son. Their anguish and outrage were palpable, particularly when I showed them the findings of the formerly secret U.S. investigation.

If the Somali military had killed Americans in similar circumstances, Abdi Dahir Mohammed, another of Luul’s brothers, told The Intercept, “the United States would have reacted and the Somali government would have reacted. The pain that Americans would feel is the pain that we feel. They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized. No one has been held accountable. We’ve been hurt — and humiliated.”

The attack was the product of faulty intelligence as well as rushed and imprecise targeting carried out by a Special Operations strike cell whose members considered themselves inexperienced, according to the documents. The secret investigation led to an admission that civilians were killed and a strong suggestion of confirmation bias: a psychological phenomenon that leads people to cherry-pick information that confirms their preexisting beliefs. Despite this, the investigation exonerated the team involved.

“The strike complied with the applicable rules of engagement,” wrote the investigator. “[N]othing in the strike procedures caused this inaccurate [redacted] call.” Luul’s husband and Mariam’s father, Shilow Muse Ali, seemed staggered as he tried to process those words. “The attack was horrible and their response was horrible. I lost a wife and a child,” he told The Intercept. “But I cannot understand the explanation in the investigation. How can you admit that you killed two civilians and also say the rules were followed?”

“How can you admit that you killed two civilians and also say the rules were followed?”

AFRICOM declined to answer The Intercept’s questions about the attack or civilian casualties in general. When the command finally admitted the killings in 2019, AFRICOM’s then-commander, Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, said it was “critically important that people understand we adhere to exacting standards and when we fall short, we acknowledge shortcomings and take appropriate action.”

Some who took part in America’s drone war in Somalia dispute that. “When I went to Africa, it seemed like no one was paying attention,” the drone pilot and strike cell analyst, who served in Somalia the year Luul and Mariam were killed, told The Intercept. He spoke on the condition of anonymity due to government secrecy surrounding U.S. drone operations. “It was like ‘We can do whatever we want.’ It was a different mindset from the Special Forces I worked with in Afghanistan. There was almost no quality control on the vetting of the strikes. A lot of safeguards got left out.”

Those safeguards began to evaporate once Donald Trump took office in 2017, and their absence was soon felt across Africa and the Middle East. Under international law, governments cannot kill people they deem to be enemies outside of recognized battlefields if they do not pose an imminent danger or can be stopped another way. But just days after Trump entered the White House, the Pentagon reportedly asked for parts of Somalia to be declared an “area of active hostilities,” allowing the military to employ looser, war-zone targeting despite the lack of a congressional declaration of war. “It allows us to prosecute targets in a more rapid fashion,” Waldhauser said that March, emphasizing the need for a “little more flexibility, a little bit more timeliness in terms of [the] decision-making process.”

In response, Trump, now the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, secretly issued rules for counterterrorism “direct action” operations, including drone strikes in places like Somalia, according to a redacted copy of the document. By the end of March 2017, the number of U.S. airstrikes in Somalia skyrocketed.

“The burden of proof as to who could be targeted and for what reason changed dramatically,” Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa at the time, told The Intercept. During the Obama administration, strikes required high-level approval, the strike cell analyst said. “Giving strike authority down to a ground commander was a massive difference,” he explained. “It had a big effect.”

Attacks in Somalia tripled after Trump relaxed targeting principles, while U.S. military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across U.S. war zones, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, spiked. The U.S. conducted 208 declared attacks in Somalia during Trump’s single term in the White House, a 460 percent increase over the eight years of the Obama presidency. (The Biden administration has conducted 31 declared strikes there, including 13 so far in 2023.)

A review of Trump-era rules by the Biden administration found that, in some countries, “operating principles,” including a “near certainty” that civilians would “not be injured or killed in the course of operations,” were reportedly enforced only for women and children, while a lower standard applied to civilian adult men. All military-age males were considered legitimate targets if they were observed with suspected al-Shabab members in the group’s territory, Bolduc said.

There was another possible contributing factor to civilian casualties. During 2017 and 2018, commanders within Task Force 111, the Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC-led unit responsible for drone attacks in Somalia, Libya, and Yemen, competed to produce high body counts, raising red flags in the intelligence community, according to a U.S. intelligence source who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the topic.

Further down the chain of command, new awards — special “remote” devices on medals to recognize the work of drone operators in combat zones — encouraged attacks, according to the strike cell analyst. “That made some people want to do more strikes,” the analyst said. “They want to brag about being in combat.”

Left/Top: People stand next to destroyed walls at the scene of an al-Shabab car bombing attack in Mogadishu, Somalia, on Dec. 22, 2018. Right/Bottom: Somali soldiers at Sanguuni military base, where an American special operations soldier was killed by a mortar attack on June 13, 2018. Photos: AFP via Getty Images

“The United States Failed Us”

Less than a month before Luul and Mariam were killed, Waldhauser praised AFRICOM’s efforts to avoid civilian casualties before the House Armed Services Committee. He specifically referenced procedures meant to ensure “levels of certainty” to prevent harm to noncombatants. Days later, he emphasized that it was “very important … that we know exactly who we are attacking on the ground.”

Yet the Pentagon investigation found that the Americans had no idea who they were targeting. “During the post-strike review,” according to the investigator, “it was assessed that one of the ADM that loaded into the vehicle … was an Adult Female and child.”

Three Somali government sources — including Nur Gutale, a Somali official on the front lines of the conflict against al-Shabab in El Buur, where the drone strike took place — said there were seven people in the pickup truck that day, not the four or five the Americans argued about before the strike or the six their most seasoned analyst counted after numerous post-strike reviews of drone footage.

The men in the truck included members of al-Shabab: Alas Jango’an, the driver and the local head of Jaysh Al-Hisbah, al-Shabab’s police force; a tax collector with the militant group; and a poet associated with the group, who was identified in local press reports as Yusuf Dhegay. Others said a community elder in the car, identified as Ali Hared, also had relations with the militants, but they were unsure if he and the poet were “real” members or simply — like most civilians living in Shabab-controlled areas — compelled to deal with an armed group that functioned as the local government.

But the young man whose body Qasim found sprawled beside the pickup after the strike, 20-year-old Yusuf Dahir Ali, was a civilian, Gutale and others said. “He was a student in Mogadishu. It was school break, and he was just traveling home,” Gutale told The Intercept. “He was innocent.”

The Pentagon redacted all images of Luul and Mariam in the documents they released. The former U.S. strike cell analyst said those still frames from the drone footage — known as “snaps” — “would seal the deal on how blatantly obvious it was. If you got a snap of the woman and child running from the vehicle, you would be able to go: ‘How don’t you see that as a female and child?’” the analyst told The Intercept. “Typically, males in Somalia wear a dress-type thing. But women still look very different. If it’s during the day, you can tell.”

Nur Gutale agreed, insisting that even if the Americans confused a woman for a man when she entered the vehicle, there was no way to mistake her as she ran down the road with her child. Qasim noted that Luul was wearing a flowing green jilbab: a garment more voluminous than a hijab, covering the entire body and leaving only the face, hands, and feet exposed. “Because al-Shabab is there in the area, she had to wear it,” Luul’s brother Mohamed Dahir Mohamed explained of the terror group’s strict dress code. He likened Luul’s garb to a huge umbrella.

“Her death isn’t only what makes me angry. It’s that they say that they mistakenly killed her. That hurts me deeply. It was no mistake,” said Qasim, a formidable man with a hard stare, close-cropped hair, and a bright orange, henna-dyed goatee. “She wasn’t killed in the car where they couldn’t see her. She was hit out in the open. There is no way they could mistake her for a man. It’s a lie and it makes me sick.”

“This wasn’t top leadership. These were low-ranking guys. I don’t understand their priorities.”

Gutale said he “had a good relationship with AFRICOM” and provided intelligence on high-ranking Shabab officials, but he found American targeting choices puzzling — especially the strike that killed Luul and Mariam.

“This wasn’t top leadership. These were low-ranking guys. I don’t understand their priorities,” he told The Intercept. “There was no reason to kill a woman and child in a big strike. They know that they did this. The U.S. is at fault.”

“It’s heartbreaking,” he added in exasperation. “The United States failed us.”

Qasim Dahir Mohamed, who found his sister Luul’s body after the U.S. drone strike, poses for a photo in Mogadishu, Somalia, on May. 10, 2023.

Even under the Trump administration’s loosened rules of engagement, Sarah Harrison, who worked as a lawyer in the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel at the time of the attack, questioned the follow-up strike that killed Luul and Mariam. “U.S. forces were required by policy to take ‘extraordinary measures to ensure with near certainty’ that there would be no civilians injured or killed,” Harrison told The Intercept. She wondered why the U.S. hadn’t made another “near certainty assessment” before the second strike was carried out.

The investigator found that “some members did not have any FMV experience.”

The Pentagon investigator concluded that “time was the biggest factor” in misidentifying Luul. For reasons that are explained nowhere in the unredacted portion of the documents, the strike cell found itself “under perceived pressure” to launch the attack “as quickly as possible.” Experience levels also loom large in the investigation file. The most senior team member on duty had eight years of experience analyzing full motion video, or FMV, as live feeds from drones are known — a significant track record, according to experts. But the youngest member had spent just six months with the task force and the same amount of time analyzing such feeds. Elsewhere, the investigator asserts that “some members did not have any FMV experience.” One team member noted that “due to a contracting issue, they have lost a lot of experienced personnel.”

“For those without much experience as well as contractors working with a task force, the pressure to say ‘yes’ to get to the commander’s perceived desired outcome is pretty great,” said Todd Huntley, a former Staff Judge Advocate who served as a legal adviser on Joint Special Operations task forces conducting drone strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere and now directs the national security law program at Georgetown University Law Center. “The combination of confirmation bias and the pressure to move quickly and achieve results is already tough to overcome. When you have less experienced people, that pressure is even greater.”

The investigator determined that no one tracked how much time strike cell members spent in a particular geographic area of responsibility, known in military jargon as an AOR. “This could lead to a very inexperienced crew working in an AOR due to a lack of a Checks and Balance system,” he wrote.

Another of Luul’s brothers, 38-year-old Abubakar Dahir Mohamed, had a succinct response: “If you admit that you assign someone with no experience then you have to take responsibility for what they do.”

The Pentagon investigator urged procedural changes that would affect every subsequent mission: “I recommend that each senior analyst has a brief with their team prior to going on shift to ensure the entire team has the correct mindset and highlights that accuracy is more important than speed.” There is no indication that that recommendation or any others were implemented. 

Qaali Dahir Mohamed shows a picture of her nephew Mohamed Shilow Muse, far right, on her cellphone in Mogadishu, Somalia, on May. 10, 2023.

Erased From Existence

Living in al-Shabab territory in the 2010s, Luul inhabited a world almost devoid of smartphones and social media. Her family has no photographs to remember her by.

The U.S. government, meanwhile, has countless images of Luul. Its cameras captured video of her and Mariam entering the pickup truck, and analysts had eyes on her through her last moments. Luul’s visage now exists only in classified files and in the memories of those who knew her — and in the face of her younger sister, to whom she bore an uncanny, almost identical, resemblance.

“If you want to see Luul, it’s me,” Qaali Dahir Mohamed, Luul’s sad-eyed, soft-spoken, 18-year-old sister, told me when we spoke in a deserted rooftop lounge in Mogadishu. As the only two girls in their household, they shared a tight bond that extended past childhood when, in keeping with local custom, Qaali moved into Luul and Shilow’s home after they married. “When I was young, she used to carry me, protect me, tell me traditional stories to prepare me for life,” said Qaali, who hunched her tall, lithe form as she talked about her sister. “After she had her children, she had me look after them and continued to teach me about how to be responsible, how to be a good mother.” Qaali spoke with her hands, her fingers slowly twisting in the air as she talked about Luul. “She loved her children so much. She couldn’t bear to see them cry,” Qaali said before she sank down in her chair and started wiping away tears.

The entire family has been traumatized by the airstrike. Luul’s brothers say their elderly father never recovered from his daughter’s traumatic death and has been in failing health ever since. When Qasim’s son saw a “normal airplane” flying over their farm, he began running around, trying to hide, convinced it might kill him. The family told Luul’s son, Mohamed Shilow Muse, the truth about his mother’s death: “The Americans killed her with their airplane.” When he sees or hears a drone, they said, “he rushes under a tree to hide.” 

A 2012 study of civilians in Pakistan found that the constant presence of drones, the fear that a strike might occur at any time, and people’s inability to protect themselves “terrorize[d] men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities.”   

Mohamed, now 6 years old and living with his grandmother, constantly asks why Luul left him. He’s terrified of being alone. “If I or my mother leave him,” said Qaali, “he cries all day. He won’t stop. He feels abandoned.” Unable to continue, Qaali grasped her blue-veiled head with both hands, laid it on the glass table, and sobbed.

A June 12, 2018 email from a member of the Joint Task Force that conducted a drone strike that killed 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse to the investigator who found that the rules of engagement and standard operating procedures were followed. 

“The Height of Disrespect”

On April 5, 2019, Qasim was listening to the radio at a tea shop when he heard a BBC news report about the U.S. military acknowledging that it had killed a woman and child in a drone strike the previous April, the first admission of a civilian casualty by AFRICOM.

The announcement came more than a year after the attack, a delay AFRICOM blamed on a “reporting error,” claiming that its headquarters was only notified of the investigation months after it concluded. Four days later, in response to questions about compensating the family, then-spokesperson John Manley told The Intercept that AFRICOM was “working with our embassy in Somalia on a way forward.” 

On April 12, 2019, Luul’s brother Abubakar wrote a letter to the Somali Ministry of Justice asking for help in obtaining compensation from the United States. Four days later, he wrote to AFRICOM via the “Contact Us” function on the command’s website, noting the family’s appreciation for acknowledging the deaths and asking the military to “take appropriate action toward the case as restitution for the lost lives.” After AFRICOM added a new online portal to file civilian casualty claims, Abubakar did so using this method as well. Abubakar, who lives part-time in Mogadishu and speaks and writes English, shared copies of his letters and screenshots of his submissions with The Intercept. Five years after the strike, the family has yet to be contacted, much less compensated, by AFRICOM.

“It is unacceptable that AFRICOM would resign itself to such total ignorance,” Amnesty’s Eviatar told The Intercept, noting the Pentagon’s repeated failures to contact survivors or offer condolence payments. “It is the height of disrespect for the local populations where the U.S. operates for the military to completely ignore the direct victims of lethal strikes, even when the U.S. knows they were civilians and the strikes were in error.”

After almost 17 years of drone strikes and commando raids in Somalia, the U.S. has carried out 282 declared attacks as well as an undisclosed number of CIA strikes. AFRICOM claims to have killed just five civilians in that period, including Luul and Mariam — although the command has never referred to them by name. But since nothing about the April 2018 attack was out of the ordinary, according to members of the task force, there is good reason to believe that the real number is far higher. Airwars, the U.K.-based airstrike monitoring organization, says the actual count of civilians killed by U.S. strikes in Somalia may be more than 3,000 percent higher than the official tally. 

Over the last two decades, investigative reporters and human rights groups have increasingly documented America’s killing of civilians, underreporting of noncombatant casualties, failures of accountability, and outright impunity in Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. A 2021 investigation by New York Times reporter Azmat Khan revealed that the U.S. air war in Iraq and Syria was marked by flawed intelligence and inaccurate targeting, resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocent people. Out of 1,311 military reports analyzed by Khan, only one cited a “possible violation” of the rules of engagement; none included a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action; and fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made. 

Last year, in the wake of these damning findings, the Pentagon pledged reforms. The 36-page Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan provides a blueprint for improving how the Pentagon addresses noncombatant deaths but lacks mechanisms for addressing past civilian harm. 

The Defense Department has publicly confirmed five civilian harm incidents in Somalia and maintains a $3 million annual budget to compensate survivors, but there is no evidence that any Somali victims or their families have ever received amends. The Pentagon has also been clear that it isn’t interested in looking back. “At this point we don’t have an intent to re-litigate cases,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., when she asked last year whether the Pentagon was planning to revisit past civilian harm allegations. 

There’s no re-litigation necessary, however, in the case of Luul Dahir Mohamed and Mariam Shilow Muse. More than four years ago, AFRICOM admitted killing them. “Credibility, transparency, and accountability are fundamental to military operations,” Waldhauser said in a press release taking responsibility for the strike. To date, however, AFRICOM won’t even discuss reparations with a journalist, much less provide compensation to relatives of the dead.

Experts say that the deaths of Luul and Mariam offer AFRICOM the chance to finally live up to Waldhauser’s rhetoric. “This case is a real opportunity for AFRICOM, since they’ve acknowledged that this is a credible report of civilian harm,” said Joanna Naples-Mitchell, a human rights attorney and director of the nonprofit Zomia Center’s Redress Program, which helps survivors of U.S. airstrikes submit requests for compensation. “Given that there’s an English-speaking member of the family in Mogadishu, it would not be hard for the Pentagon to offer amends.”

Shilow Muse Ali, Luul’s husband, poses for a photo in Mogadishu, Somalia, on May. 10, 2023.

“They Don’t Know Who They Killed”

For most of the day I spent with Shilow Muse Ali in an outdoor restaurant in Mogadishu, he sat slack-jawed and blank-eyed, with a dazed look on his face. Sometimes he seemed confused, sometimes confounded. He answered my questions, but it was difficult to elicit much detail about the wife and child he’d lost. When I decided to end the interview and asked if there was anything else he wanted to say, his eyes narrowed and his demeanor changed.

“I was bewildered at the beginning when my daughter and wife were killed. I expected an apology and compensation considering the Americans’ mistake. But we received nothing,” he said in a voice with an increasingly hard edge. “They admitted there were civilian casualties, but this investigation shows that they don’t even know who they killed.”

For the first time all afternoon, Shilow looked me square in the eye and fury seemed to surge through him. “We aren’t the people they are targeting. We are not supposed to be treated like we’re enemies. Does the U.S. military even see a difference between enemies and civilians?” he asked, his voice rising and his hands slicing through the air. “They said they were following the car from the beginning. How could someone following the car, watching everything, not see a woman with a child?”

I had no answer.

“We want the truth from the American government. But we already know it,” he told me. “This attack shows that there’s no distinction, none at all. The Americans see enemies and civilians as the same.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Nick Turse.

The Congress-mandated 2023 China Military Power Report said that last year, China’s capability building exceeded previous U.S. projections in some areas.

The Department of Defense (DoD) “estimates that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] possessed more than 500 operational nuclear warheads as of May 2023,” up from 400 last year and more than was predicted by U.S. military planners. 

“DoD estimates that the PRC will probably have over 1,000 operational nuclear warheads by 2030,” the 200-page report said.

The pace is striking even if China’s nuclear stockpile is still much smaller than those of Russia or the United States.

Moreover, the PRC “may be exploring development of conventionally armed intercontinental range missile systems that would allow the PRC to threaten conventional strikes against targets in the continental United States.”

“What we would highlight about that is it would give them a conventional capability to strike the U.S. for the first time … to threaten targets in the continental U.S. and Hawaii and Alaska,” said a senior U.S. defense official speaking on background, hence remaining anonymous.

American strategists already identified China as their number one challenge.

The 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy named Beijing as “the only competitor with the intent and increasingly the capability to reshape the international order.” The Pentagon also identified the PRC “as the department's top pacing challenge.”

Coercion in the Indo-Pacific

“In 2022, the PRC turned to the PLA as an increasingly capable instrument of statecraft, adopting more coercive actions in the Indo-Pacific region against the United States and U.S. allies and partners,” the report said.

“PLA coercive and risky operational activities targeting foreign aircraft and maritime vessels throughout 2022 included: lasing; reckless maneuvers; close approaches in the air or at sea; high rates of closure; discharging chaff or flares in close proximity to aircraft; and ballistic missile overflights of Taiwan,” it added.

One day before the launch of the report, the DoD also released photos and video clips documenting 15 of more than 180 cases of what it calls China’s “coercive and risky operational behavior” against U.S. aircraft in the East China and South China seas in the last two years.

Beijing is believed to aim “to restrict the U.S. from having a presence in China’s immediate periphery and limit U.S. access in the broader Indo-Pacific region.”

Throughout 2022, the PRC conducted large-scale joint military exercises focused on training to deter further U.S. and allied operations in the region.

It also amplified diplomatic, political, and military pressure against Taiwan, the report said, adding that the PLA is continuing to prepare for “a contingency to unify Taiwan with the PRC.” 

The findings of the report were accurate, said a Taiwanese senior analyst, but should be seen in the context of China’s domestic politics.

“In 2022 the Communist Party of China held its 20th Congress in which Xi Jinping needed to reassert his power and ensure a third term as China’s paramount leader,” said Shen Ming-Shih, acting deputy chief executive officer at Taiwan's Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR), a government think-tank.

“I expect the PLA’s approach for 2023 will be less vocal but more realistic in terms of military maneuvers around Taiwan,” he added.

Looking ahead

China already has numerically the largest navy in the world with an overall battle force of over 370 ships and submarines, compared to the U.S.’s 293 ships and submarines. It also has the largest coast guard fleet in the world, besides a powerful maritime militia.

The report was compiled over the last year, before the latest Israel-Hamas war.

Analysts say ongoing developments in Ukraine and the Middle East may embolden China’s actions in the Indo-Pacific region.

“I think they are watching to see what the U.S. is doing in both Ukraine and now the Middle East, and from Beijing's perspective, they are hoping that the U.S. support for both Israel and Ukraine will leave them weakened and unable to support allies in the Indo-Pacific,” said Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

“So I'd see Beijing continue to employ provocations, and potentially ramp those up if the U.S. becomes more and more committed to supporting a fast developing war in the Middle East, which could become quite large in geographic scope – well beyond the Gaza strip – quite quickly,” he said.

“I suspect that Beijing will be disappointed though, as the U.S. is very cognizant of its responsibilities and the risks posed by Chinese actions, so I don't see the U.S. de-prioritizing Indo-Pacific issues in favor of Europe and Middle East challenges,” the analyst said.

At a press briefing this week, the Commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Navy Adm. John Aquilino said, despite the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, “as it applies to the Indo-Pacific and my responsibilities … I haven’t had one piece of equipment or force structure depart.”

“The United States is a global power. That means we can deliver effects and execute our deterrence responsibilities across the globe,” he said. 

The Indo-Pacific Command has two aircraft carriers at sea at the moment – the forward-deployed USS Ronald Reagan and the USS Carl Vinson which left for a deployment last week.

They are, “along with a large portion of the Joint Force, executing deterrence missions in my theater,” said Adm. Aquilino. 

The admiral also said that his requests to speak with Chinese counterparts in the last two and a half years have been refused. 

There are unconfirmed reports that Chinese leader Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden may meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco next month.

Edited by Mike Firn and Elaine Chan.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.

On the night of March 23, 1971, New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan excitedly called Max Frankel, the Times’s Washington bureau chief, to give him the news he had been waiting weeks to hear. “I got it all,” Sheehan told Frankel.

Sheehan had just accomplished one of the greatest journalistic coups of the 20th century. He had obtained the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s 7,000-page secret history of the Vietnam War, which revealed that the government had been lying to the American people about the brutal conflict since it began. It was the first mass leak of classified documents in modern American journalism, four decades before WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden.

But Sheehan had lied to his source, Daniel Ellsberg, a disillusioned former defense analyst turned whistleblower, to get the documents. He had secretly copied them after he had promised Ellsberg he wouldn’t.

Sheehan confessed to his editors that he had “Xeroxed the materials without permission and the source was unaware that he had done so,” according to a remarkable and previously unpublished 1971 legal memo obtained by The Intercept. When confronted by an anxious Times lawyer, Sheehan insisted that the Pentagon Papers “were not stolen, but copied,” according to the memo.

The long-buried memo contains Sheehan’s contemporaneous and confidential account of his relationship with Ellsberg, as well as Sheehan’s version of events inside the Times as it prepared to publish the Pentagon Papers. It offers an unprecedented, real-time depiction of Sheehan’s actions — including his phone call to Frankel and his admission to his editors that he had lied to his source.

Daniel Ellsberg, charged with leaking the secret Pentagon papers, talks with press as he arrives for arraignment at court in Los Angeles, on Aug. 16, 1971.

“He Stole Our Glory”

For decades after the Times published the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg quietly seethed about what he saw as the deceitful way he was treated by Sheehan and the newspaper. He was furious when he discovered that Sheehan had lied to him repeatedly, and he remained mystified as to why Sheehan had misled him in ways that Ellsberg felt violated the basic tenets of a reporter-source relationship. To Ellsberg, the lies seemed gratuitous, as when Sheehan told him that the Times hadn’t decided whether it was really interested in the Pentagon Papers, even as Sheehan and other reporters were furiously drafting stories based on the documents that Sheehan had secretly copied. He only found out that Sheehan had been lying to him when he was alerted by someone else at the Times the day before the first Pentagon Papers stories were splashed across the front page of the June 13, 1971, edition.

Sheehan’s behavior has been “a great puzzle for me for 50 years,” Ellsberg said in an interview conducted just months before he died in June at the age of 92. “Why did Neil Sheehan not tell me that the Times was coming out with this stuff?”

In his final months, Ellsberg was eager to talk — at greater length and in far more detail than ever before — about the dramatic backstory of the Pentagon Papers, and especially about his intense and volatile relationship with Sheehan and the newspaper. That relationship is further detailed in the newly unearthed memo, which is historically significant because it is based on confidential conversations between Sheehan and his lawyer in the days immediately after the Pentagon Papers were published.

Mitchell Rogovin, Sheehan’s lawyer in 1971, wrote the 14-page memo describing how Sheehan had obtained the documents, based on Rogovin’s discussions with Sheehan right after the publication of the Pentagon Papers. At the time the memo was drafted, a federal grand jury in Boston was considering whether to indict Sheehan and the Times in connection with the publication of the classified documents. Rogovin wrote the memo for James Goodale, then the Times’s general counsel, while both the Times and Sheehan were fighting the government’s efforts to charge them. The Boston grand jury was disbanded without ever charging Sheehan or the Times, but the memo has survived, buried in legal files, and is only now being made public, long after the deaths of both Sheehan and Rogovin. Goodale mentioned the Rogovin memo and briefly quoted from it in his 2013 memoir, “Fighting for the Press,” but The Intercept is publishing the full document here for the first time.

“In February of 1971 Neil Sheehan was offered what has since been called the ‘Pentagon Papers,’” the memo begins. “His source would make these materials available to the Times if it ‘would handle it properly’ — certain conditions were set forth.” One Times editor told Sheehan that he was trying to obtain “the journalistic hydrogen bomb.”

The Rogovin memo and Ellsberg’s extensive interviews in his final months offer competing views of what happened from the two main protagonists in the Pentagon Papers saga. Along with new interviews with other key figures, they offer a clearer and more nuanced view of the story behind one of the most significant events in American journalism.

One Times editor told Sheehan that he was trying to obtain “the journalistic hydrogen bomb.”

The publication of the Pentagon Papers is the origin story of the modern New York Times in the same way that Watergate is the origin story of the modern Washington Post. The decision to publish the classified documents transformed the Times from a staid centerpiece of the American establishment to a far more aggressive and professional news organization that no longer saw itself solely as a purveyor of official statements and authorized leaks. With the Pentagon Papers, adversarial journalism became the Times’s ambition, rather than just an accidental byproduct of its conventional reportage. The backstory of how the Pentagon Papers ended up at the Times — and particularly the fraught relationships between Ellsberg, Sheehan, and the Times — has never been fully told. That is due in part to the fact that the Times, like most news organizations, has long resisted thoroughly recounting its own history. The newspaper is reluctant to shatter the myths that have grown up around its most famous act of journalism.

That hidden backstory is complicated and messy, and for many years, none of the people involved wanted to speak publicly about what really happened. For his part, Ellsberg was happy that the Times actually published the documents, and he forgave Sheehan for his lies, even though he did not quite forget them.

Despite his age, Ellsberg’s memory was sharp during interviews conducted near the end of his life both for The Intercept and for my book, “The Last Honest Man,” as he recounted the stunning story behind the historic leak, one that revealed his risk-taking and persistence as he stubbornly navigated the analog world of the late 1960s and early 1970s to reveal government secrets. Ellsberg did this in an era of rigid orthodoxy, when the idea of revealing classified material was considered heresy and terrified every political leader in Washington, even those deeply opposed to the Vietnam War. The defining moment in Ellsberg’s life came when he finally succeeded in getting the story out and found himself at the center of a political firestorm sparked by the first mass leak of classified documents by a whistleblower in American history.

Ultimately, Ellsberg became an iconic figure, an activist for democracy and press freedom; his fame was enhanced by the Nixon administration’s decision to prosecute him for leaking the Pentagon Papers, followed by the revelation of the burglary of his psychiatrist’s office by the infamous White House Plumbers, which led to the dismissal of his legal case and was a precursor to the Watergate scandal. Yet his prominence only served to worsen his ragged relationship with the Times, which didn’t want to share the spotlight with its source.

For decades after the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the Times distanced itself from Ellsberg. The newspaper’s identity and status became so wrapped up in the groundbreaking stories that some at the paper were angry that Ellsberg’s fame overshadowed the Times’s and diluted the credit they thought was due the newspaper for its decision to publish the documents.

“He stole our glory,” Goodale said in an interview. 

Lawrence McKay, Floyd Abrams, Alexander Bickel, James Goodale, and William Hegarty, lawyers for the New York Times, leave the U.S. Supreme Court after arguing the right to publish the Pentagon Papers.

An Accidental Source

At first, Daniel Ellsberg didn’t intend to go to the press. For the man who would be remembered as one of the greatest sources in the history of American journalism, the press was a last resort.

Before he became a world-famous rebel, Ellsberg was in the process of building a blue-chip career that easily could have taken him to the top of the American establishment. Born in Chicago in 1931, Ellsberg grew up in Detroit, went to Harvard, and served as an officer in the Marines before joining the RAND Corporation, an influential defense-oriented think tank, where he worked as an analyst focusing on nuclear strategy. He earned a doctorate in economics, specializing in decision theory, and by 1964, he was a staffer at the Pentagon under the ultimate technocrat, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. He later spent two years in South Vietnam working under Gen. Edward Lansdale, who tried and failed to apply the counterinsurgency and psychological warfare tactics he had used in the Philippines in the 1950s to the Vietnam War. His time in Vietnam convinced Ellsberg that the murderous war could not be won.

After returning to RAND in 1967, Ellsberg joined other analysts to work on a secret, 47-volume history of the war commissioned by McNamara. To help write the history, Ellsberg gained access to highly classified documents that revealed in stunning detail the deceit at the heart of U.S. policy in Vietnam.

Ellsberg realized that the American people needed to know the truth. He came to believe that exposing the secret history could help end the war. In September 1969, he covertly took a copy of the Pentagon Papers from RAND. Along with his friend Anthony Russo and Russo’s girlfriend, Linda Sinay, Ellsberg began to copy the Pentagon Papers, while trying to decide how best to publicize their findings.

After talking with a lawyer about the odds that he would be prosecuted for leaking the documents, Ellsberg said that he calculated that he was less likely to be charged for giving the papers to a member of Congress than he would be if he gave them to the press. He also believed that congressional hearings would give the Pentagon Papers greater credibility and have a bigger impact than stories in a newspaper.

Democratic Sen. George McGovern tells a crowded news conference at the Capitol on Jan. 19, 1971 that President Richard Nixon has violated the “spirit and letter” of a congressional ban on military intervention in Cambodia.

He first turned to Sen. J. William Fulbright. Ellsberg sought out the Arkansas Democrat in November 1969 because he was the powerful chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and had led congressional hearings that gave voice to the war’s skeptics. Ellsberg took the risk of providing some of the Pentagon Papers to Fulbright in a meeting with the senator’s staff present. “I wanted them all to witness that [Fulbright] had held some of these papers, so he couldn’t say afterwards, ‘Oh, that was some staff thing’” that the senator didn’t personally know about, Ellsberg recalled in an interview. “So, in front of everybody, I hand him this thing.” Ellsberg gave Fulbright highly classified sections of the Pentagon Papers relating to U.S. diplomacy that he later refused to give Sheehan and the Times because he thought they were too sensitive to be published in a newspaper, according to the Rogovin memo. But after initially expressing interest, Fulbright backed off, fearful of the consequences of going public with stolen classified material. In December 1970, Fulbright finally told Ellsberg he wasn’t going to do anything with the documents.

Ellsberg tried other lawmakers in early 1971, believing that Congress was the safest and most effective place for him to make the Pentagon Papers public, but he was repeatedly rebuffed, including by Sen. George McGovern, the anti-war liberal Democrat from South Dakota who later ran for president; Sen. Gaylord Nelson, a liberal Democrat from Wisconsin; and Sen. Charles Mathias, a liberal Democrat from Maryland.

Ellsberg had naïvely hoped that his efforts to publicize the documents would remain secret even as he was rather recklessly talking to so many different senators. But inevitably, his conversations on Capitol Hill were soon shared. When Ellsberg talked with McGovern again a week after their initial meeting, McGovern told him that he and Nelson had compared notes and found that they were both talking to Ellsberg about the Pentagon Papers. “He tells me he’s talked to Gaylord Nelson,” Ellsberg recalled. McGovern said that when he’d told Nelson about the classified documents he had been offered, Nelson responded: “Was that Ellsberg?”

Discouraged, Ellsberg was having lunch in the Senate cafeteria by himself when he recognized I.F. Stone, the famous independent journalist, sitting at a nearby table. Ellsberg was a fan of Stone. “I recognized [Stone] by his bottle glasses,” Ellsberg recalled. “And so I decided to tell him what I was doing. ‘I have these top-secret documents, the whole history of the war.’” Ellsberg poured out his frustrations to Stone about his inability to get any prominent senator to go public with the Pentagon Papers. “He looked at me, and he did have tears in his eyes, and he said, ‘God bless you for what you’re doing.’”

Demonstrators cheer while blocking the entrance to Congress in massive protests against the war in Vietnam on May Day in 1971.

A Secret Deal

Even as he continued to try to get someone in Congress to take action, Ellsberg turned to a left-wing Washington-based think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies. In August 1970, he gave the group about 1,000 pages of the 7,000-page history. One of the organization’s leaders was Marcus Raskin — the father of Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who played a leading role in the House investigation of the January 6, 2021, insurrection. Ellsberg agreed to let Marcus Raskin and two others at IPS — Richard Barnet and Ralph Stavins — use the documents for a book they were working on about the Vietnam War, as long as they did so only on background, meaning they wouldn’t acknowledge publicly that they possessed the classified history or quote from it directly.

Without Ellsberg’s knowledge, the IPS researchers gave a copy of the 1,000 pages to Neil Sheehan.

Rep. Jamie Raskin said in an interview that his father gave Sheehan copies of the Pentagon Papers because he was frustrated that Ellsberg was being too cautious and taking too long to make them public. “I recall my dad telling me that he urged Dan to go public as quickly as possible,” Raskin said. “At a certain point my dad decided to share the Pentagon Papers with New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan to hasten public exposure of the criminality of the war.”

Without Ellsberg’s knowledge, the researchers gave a copy of the 1,000 pages to Neil Sheehan.

Decades later, Marcus Raskin finally told Ellsberg what had happened: Raskin said that he and the other IPS researchers thought they had secretly reached a deal with Sheehan.

In return for giving the Times the documents, Sheehan had told Raskin and the other IPS researchers that the Times would agree to coordinate the publication of its stories based on the documents with the release of the think tank’s book on Vietnam. In addition, Sheehan agreed to two other conditions: On the same day that the Times published its stories on the documents, it would also publish a review of the think tank’s book and a column by Raskin about U.S. war crimes in Vietnam. 

Raskin, Barnet, and Stavins had originally proposed the deal to Sheehan, who said that he would have to check with his editors before he could agree to the conditions. Sheehan later told Raskin and the others that the Times editors had approved the deal, so the IPS researchers gave him the documents. 

But the Times did not abide by that deal, and there is no evidence that Sheehan ever actually talked to any of his editors about it. 

By the time Raskin and Barnet finally told Ellsberg about their supposed deal with Sheehan, he had long known that the IPS researchers had given Sheehan the documents, and he had been angry for years that they had done so behind his back. But Ellsberg found that they were also bitter over what they saw as Sheehan’s betrayal.

“I learned from Raskin and Barnet, bit by bit, but then, all of it, the story” of what had happened, Ellsberg said. “They gave [the documents] to him, both Raskin and Barnet told me, on a deal that probably no newspaper had ever made, before or since.”

Ellsberg said he was flabbergasted. “‘Jeez,’ I said to Raskin, ‘is there any newspaper that ever made a deal like that?’ And he said, ‘No, but those were our conditions for giving him the stuff.’”

“Raskin was very firm on this point,” Ellsberg said. “He said, ‘Absolutely, we had those conditions, he agreed, and they betrayed us.’”

A young Marcus Raskin leaving court in Boston, on June 14, 1968.

When he asked why they had not told him about this supposed deal decades earlier, Ellsberg said that Barnet admitted that they had felt humiliated by the entire episode. “I learned this 30 years later,” Ellsberg said. “I said, ‘Dick, how could you not have told me this stuff?’ He said, ‘We were embarrassed. I was embarrassed at the way we treated you.’” 

“When he told me the story, Marcus was very angry,” Ellsberg recalled. Sheehan “simply lied to them as a reporter,” Ellsberg said. That was “totally in line with my dealings with Sheehan.” (Marcus Raskin died in 2017, Barnet died in 2004, and Stavins died earlier this year.)

Former New York Times editors who were directly involved in the publication of the Pentagon Papers said in interviews that Sheehan never told them he had agreed to a deal with Raskin and IPS. In fact, they said, they didn’t even know at the time that Sheehan had first obtained a portion of the Pentagon Papers from IPS, rather than from Ellsberg.

“Sheehan never told me he got some of the documents from Raskin and IPS,” said Frankel, Sheehan’s boss when the outlet published the Pentagon Papers and one of the handful of senior editors directly involved in the project. “I never heard of any deal that Sheehan had made with IPS and Raskin. They would have to have been very naïve to believe that Sheehan could make that deal.”

“At the time, I was under the assumption that all 7,000 pages were all from Ellsberg,” added James Greenfield, the Times’s foreign news editor in 1971 and the project manager for the Pentagon Papers.

The Rogovin memo doesn’t provide conclusive answers about Sheehan’s interactions with IPS or reveal exactly what Sheehan told his editors about IPS’s role. The references to IPS in the memo are intriguing, but fragmentary.

On April 2, 1971, according to the memo, Sheehan told Frankel about “the book that IPS was working on and how this could be used as a lever against the source.” That suggests that Sheehan told Frankel that IPS had some of the documents and that he thought he could somehow use that knowledge to pressure Ellsberg to the Times’s advantage. But it doesn’t indicate that he told Frankel that he had obtained those documents from IPS. Later, during an April 21, 1971, meeting with Times editors, Sheehan mentioned “the involvement of the Institute for Policy Studies,” but the memo doesn’t say whether Sheehan said anything more about IPS than what he had previously told Frankel, whom the memo shows also attended the meeting. The memo’s final reference to IPS indicates that at some point not long before the Pentagon Papers were published, Sheehan arranged for a Times secretary to travel from New York to Washington “to deliver some materials” to Sheehan’s wife. Susan Sheehan then “in turn, gave them to IPS,” the memo states. It seems likely that after he obtained the full set of the Pentagon Papers from Ellsberg, Sheehan asked his wife to return the portion of the Pentagon Papers he had obtained from IPS. But it is not clear from the memo whether anyone else at the Times knew that’s what he was doing.

Susan Sheehan said in an interview that she doesn’t recall the episode involving her and the delivery of materials to IPS that is described in the memo. She also said that she doesn’t recall any sort of deal between her husband and the IPS researchers, adding that they all remained on good terms after the Pentagon Papers were published.     

Yet it is easy to see why Neil Sheehan might not have been completely forthcoming with his editors about the role of IPS. At the time, Raskin, Barnet, Stavins, and other IPS researchers were considered wild-eyed leftist activists by the Washington establishment, and Times management might have been concerned if they had known that some of the documents were coming from the group.

“They did not want to be associated with IPS,” Ellsberg said.

In early 1971, Raskin, Barnet, and Stavins met with Ellsberg and urged him to meet with Sheehan. Ellsberg, frustrated by the failure of his other plans for making the documents public, agreed.

Neil Sheehan seated at his typewriter in Saigon, South Vietnam, in 1963.

“They Won’t Let Me Cover Vietnam”

By the time they began to discuss the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg and Sheehan had known each other for several years. Ellsberg said in an interview that he had secretly leaked some information to Sheehan for a story about Vietnam in 1968; they met again two years later at a dinner party hosted by Tony Lake, a former aide to Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. Lake had recently resigned from Kissinger’s staff in response to the June 1970 invasion of Cambodia. (Lake later served as national security adviser for President Bill Clinton.)

At the time of the dinner in the fall of 1970, Sheehan was working as a reporter in the Washington bureau of the Times. He had spent years in Vietnam covering the war, first for UPI and later for the Times, and had gained a stellar reputation; along with Times reporter David Halberstam, Sheehan had been among the first American reporters to write skeptical stories about the war.

But at the dinner, Sheehan seemed adrift. He told Ellsberg he was frustrated with the Times, complaining that he couldn’t get the newspaper’s editors interested in the stories he wanted to write about the ongoing war, Ellsberg recalled. Sheehan told Ellsberg that the paper “is done with Vietnam.”

Ellsberg did not mention the Pentagon Papers to Sheehan at the dinner; instead, he came away from their conversation convinced that the Times would not be interested in them. Sheehan “says, ‘They won’t let me cover Vietnam. They’ve got me covering other domestic stuff. They’re just not interested.’ And so I had the feeling from that, well, no use giving them top-secret stuff,” Ellsberg said in an interview.

So when Raskin and the other IPS researchers later recommended that Ellsberg meet with Sheehan — still not revealing that they had already given the reporter a portion of the documents — Ellsberg was skeptical. “I had lunch or dinner with Stavins and Raskin and Barnet, and they say I should put this out in the New York Times,” Ellsberg recalled. “And they say, ‘Do you know Neil Sheehan?’ I say, ‘Yes,’ but that I had gotten the impression from him that [the Times] are not … promising. And they say, ‘We think you ought to try him again.’”

“I wouldn’t have done it if they hadn’t suggested it.”

“You Have Clearance”

Early in 1971, Ellsberg came to Washington for dinner with some friends. He was planning to stay with his friend John Paul Vann, whom he knew from Vietnam, where Vann had served as a senior civilian adviser. But Ellsberg couldn’t find Vann that night, so he called Sheehan to see if he could spend the night at his house. (Sheehan later wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “A Bright Shining Lie,” about Vann and his role in Vietnam.)

Sheehan set up a cot for Ellsberg in his basement, and they stayed up all night talking about Vietnam. Sheehan showed Ellsberg the galleys of a review he had written for the Times of books about American war crimes there. “He said, ‘I’m having a lot of trouble with the editors on this,’” Ellsberg recalled. “I read it in his D.C. basement. Very good! This is very good stuff. So I thought, ‘OK, he’s the guy.’”

So that night, Ellsberg began to tell Sheehan about the Pentagon Papers. “And I mention to him that Dick Barnet and Marcus Raskin had suggested [that I talk to him], and I told him that I had given [the documents] to IPS. He said, ‘I had some inkling that IPS had some of this material, I have heard of it before.’ He didn’t admit at all that they had given [him] any” of the documents.

Ellsberg offered to show Sheehan the Pentagon Papers, and Sheehan agreed to come to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ellsberg was then living, to read them.

“He could have told me, ‘I’ve got some of this already, and we’re going with it,’” Ellsberg said. “He didn’t tell me. He didn’t say he had it, or that they were going full speed with the 1,000 pages.”

“Around March 3, 1971,” Sheehan first told his editors at the Times about the possibility of “publishing the D.O.D.’s history of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War,” the Rogovin memo states. A few days later, the memo adds, James Reston, the legendary Times Washington columnist and editor, “walked up to Neil as he was entering the elevator and told him ‘You have clearance, young man.’”

On March 13, at the Gridiron Club dinner, an annual gathering of politicians and journalists in Washington, Frankel “called Jim Goodale aside and told him to read the law on classified documents because they might have a story involving a lot of classified documents,” the memo states.

Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg leave the U.S. District Court during Pentagon Papers trial in Washington, D.C., on May 10, 1973.

“He Lied”

About two weeks after their all-night talk in Washington, Sheehan went to Cambridge to read through the full set of the Pentagon Papers. But Ellsberg imposed some conditions on the reporter. He told Sheehan that he didn’t want him to just write a quick daily story based on the documents, but instead wanted the Times to do a big, deep dive into the secret history. “I don’t want it to be a one-day story,” Ellsberg recalled telling Sheehan. He said he wanted the Times to “give a lot of space to it.” Ellsberg said in an interview that he didn’t want to go to prison for a news story that came and went without much impact.

Frankel told Sheehan that the Times would probably go along with that demand, according to the Rogovin memo. “We might well take it under the conditions your source wants, i.e. using it all or very large chunks. We’re very interested,” Frankel said, according to the memo.

But Ellsberg’s other big condition was more difficult. He told Sheehan that he could read the documents — but not make copies. “You can read as much as you want, you can take notes as much as you need, but I’m asking you not to copy them until we have an agreement, an interest at the Times” in publishing stories about them, Ellsberg recalled telling Sheehan. “Because I had gotten the impression from Neil earlier that they were very unlikely to print this top-secret stuff.”

By that time, Ellsberg had discovered to his horror that IPS had copies of the Pentagon Papers openly lying around “all over the place” in its Washington office. He feared that if he let Sheehan copy the documents before the Times had agreed to publish stories about them, they might wind up lying around openly at the newspaper as well, and that someone might discover them there and call the FBI. So Ellsberg wanted an assurance from Sheehan that the Times was serious about publishing before he agreed to let him copy the documents. Sheehan wouldn’t give him that assurance and in fact, misled him into thinking that the Times was still on the fence.

“I said, ‘I don’t want this stuff sitting around the Times indefinitely,’” Ellsberg said he told Sheehan. “‘If they are really interested and think they would like to use them, you got it, you got the whole thing.’ He wouldn’t tell me that. He never did. He could have said, ‘Yes, they intend to do it.’ They were already working on it. He didn’t tell me that. He lied.”

When Sheehan arrived in Cambridge, Ellsberg and his wife, Patricia, were frazzled and burned out by an unexpected development. While they had waited for Sheehan to arrive, Ellsberg had met with Tom Oliphant, a reporter for the Boston Globe, and mentioned the Pentagon Papers. Oliphant quickly wrote a story in the Globe about the secret history, which thus became the first news story disclosing the documents’ existence. When he read the Globe story, Ellsberg panicked. Even though he had not leaked the papers to the Globe, he feared that the story might convince the government that he was about to leak them to the press.

In an interview, Oliphant said that Ellsberg’s recollection about his story for the Globe was accurate, adding that the response he got to his story suggests that Ellsberg was right to worry about the government. “The day after my story ran, I was contacted by Kissinger’s office,” Oliphant recalled. “They wanted multiple copies of it.”

“Patricia and I started making more copies, literally without sleep. … For five or six days, we had hardly any sleep, waiting for the FBI.”

Ellsberg and his wife worked around the clock to make as many copies of the documents as they could. “Patricia and I started making more copies, literally without sleep. … We start putting them in more places around Harvard Square” in the apartments of people Ellsberg trusted. “For five or six days, we had hardly any sleep, waiting for the FBI,” he recalled. When Sheehan arrived, Ellsberg was jittery and off-kilter.

“Looking back, I knew he regarded me somehow as kind of wild,” Ellsberg said. “Patricia and I hadn’t slept for a week, and we were both on caffeine.” What’s more, when Ellsberg showed Sheehan the Globe story, “he seemed scared.” With Ellsberg talking openly about the Pentagon Papers to another reporter, Sheehan may have feared that his source was out of control.

Ellsberg then made a puzzling decision. He went on vacation and left Sheehan with a key to the apartment in Cambridge where the Pentagon Papers were stored, telling Sheehan he could continue reading them while Ellsberg was gone. “I gave the key to Neil and said, ‘Neil, I’m counting on you not to copy this. Just, you know, you can make notes, but no Xerox.’ And he says, ‘Absolutely, absolutely, no problem.’”

On their vacation, Ellsberg recalled, his wife told him: “He’ll copy it.” “And I said, ‘I don’t think so, he promised me he wouldn’t.’”

But that is exactly what Sheehan did.

“On March 20 or 21st, Neil called [Times editor] Bill Kovacs and asked him to obtain a Xeroxer for him,” under an assumed name and to “get money from New York to pay for reproduction,” the Rogovin memo states. “The following day, when Kovacs brought [$400] to Neil, he was told in very general terms why Neil was in Boston.”

On the night of March 23, Sheehan made his call to Frankel to tell him he “got it all,” according to the Rogovin memo. The next day, Sheehan met with his editors in Washington and “told them what he had and why he had handled it the way he did. Neil stressed his obligation to protect his source.”

Frankel asked Sheehan to write a memo “on what the materials contained and how the stories might be written.” Sheehan gave him the memo on March 28, which Frankel delivered to the newspaper’s top brass. Frankel told Sheehan that “New York was excited.”

Left: The cover of the paperback edition of “The Pentagon Papers” in 1971. Right: The Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin displays one of the half-dozen known original sets of the Pentagon Papers.

Deadlines

Weeks before the Times published the Pentagon Papers, Sheehan called Ellsberg and told him that the Times had still not decided whether it was interested in the documents. “He phoned me from New York,” Ellsberg recalled. “He said, ‘They have not made a decision, they are waffling on this.’ False.”

Ellsberg recalled that Sheehan then told him that “‘they have me working on other things, but I want to be ready to use it if they ever do make a decision on this, so I want to continue to read it, so I need a copy for that.’”

That was when Ellsberg finally agreed to let Sheehan copy the Pentagon Papers, telling him to go to Patricia’s New York apartment, where he had stored a copy. Ellsberg said he would arrange for the doorman at the apartment building to let Sheehan in.

“I said, ‘All right, you can have a copy.’ I said to him, ‘When I give you a copy, I understand it is out of my hands. I know I don’t have any control over it.’”

Ellsberg recalled that the phone conversation was in April 1971, but Rogovin’s memo states that “on May 27th Neil’s source gave him ‘official permission’ to possess the papers.” 

(While the memo never mentions Ellsberg by name in order to protect his identity, it is clear that whenever Sheehan talks about the “source,” he is referring to Ellsberg. In the memo, Sheehan described the “source” as someone who had “seen a number of senators in an effort to have them publicly reveal the content of the papers but to date had been unsuccessful.”)

When Ellsberg gave Sheehan permission to copy the documents, Ellsberg still didn’t know that Sheehan had long since done so.

When Ellsberg gave Sheehan permission to copy the documents, Ellsberg still didn’t know that Sheehan had long since done so, or that Sheehan and other reporters and editors were holed up at a New York hotel writing stories about them. Based on what Sheehan told him, Ellsberg still believed that the Times wasn’t interested in the documents, so he kept searching for other ways to make them public, even after he told Sheehan to go to Patricia’s apartment to pick up a set of the papers.

Why did Sheehan take the risk that Ellsberg would find another outlet for the documents, Ellsberg wondered, decades later. “If he’d said, ‘Dan, I have to tell you, I have a copy of it,’ I would have said, ‘You know, OK, fine,’” Ellsberg said, just so long as the Times was committed to writing about the secret history.

In fact, the Rogovin memo shows that the Times was worried that Ellsberg was still distributing the documents to other people, and that other news organizations might soon get them. As it scrambled to publish its stories, the Times discovered that Ellsberg had given some documents to Rep. Pete McCloskey, a liberal, anti-war Republican from California, and Times editors feared that McCloskey would give the documents to the Los Angeles Times, according to the Rogovin memo. To determine McCloskey’s plans, Bob Phelps, an editor in the New York Times’s Washington bureau, met with the politician, who promised that “he would not turn over what he had to another paper,” the memo states.

While Sheehan tried to keep Ellsberg at bay and the Times prepared to publish the documents, the newspaper was grappling with other problems.

The Times editors felt they had to be careful in choosing which reporters to bring onto the project to work with Sheehan, according to the Rogovin memo. “The people selected were picked for competence and loyalty,” the memo states. “One reporter was rejected because his wife was a ‘peacenik,’ he wasn’t considered discreet and she might talk.”

The reporters and editors worked in secret in the New York Hilton, which was chosen after the editors rejected proposals to move the operation to either Tarrytown, New York, or Charlottesville, Virginia, according to the memo. By late April, they had two copies of the Pentagon Papers at the hotel, where the Times had also moved typewriters, filing cabinets, a safe, and other supplies. A third copy of the papers was stored at Greenfield’s apartment after Goodale insisted that none of the copies be kept inside the Times building, according to the memo. “During the next month work began, additional people joined the Hilton group and the pressure to meet deadlines started to build,” the Rogovin memo says.

But even as the Times built a large Pentagon Papers team, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the Times publisher known by his nickname, Punch, still hadn’t given his final approval to publish. He was under pressure from some Times executives, as well as the paper’s outside law firm, which strongly urged against any publication at all, even of stories about the documents, according to Goodale, Greenfield, and Frankel. (The outside firm, Lord Day & Lord, dropped the Times as a client right after the publication of the Pentagon Papers.)

Sulzberger was especially hesitant about publishing the actual documents. “He tried to split the baby in half, and only publish stories without publishing the documents,” recalled Frankel in an interview. “We said that you have to publish the documents to provide strong evidence of what the Pentagon was thinking. He finally agreed, after I made it clear to him that there were no real secrets in these papers. They were policy studies, not military secrets.” Punch Sulzberger died in 2012. His son, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who succeeded him and served as publisher until 2018, declined to comment for this story.

In the end, Punch Sulzberger agreed with his editors. The Rogovin memo states that “by June 6 Neil finished his second piece [in the Pentagon Papers series] … around that time Greenfield came over to report on the publisher’s decision regarding publication.”

“The Place Is Locked Down”

On Saturday, June 12, 1971, Ellsberg got a call from Tony Austin, who worked on the New York Times Magazine. Ellsberg had given Austin the volume of the Pentagon Papers that dealt with the Gulf of Tonkin incident for a book Austin was writing. In August 1964, when U.S. Navy ships ventured into North Vietnamese territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin, President Lyndon Johnson and the Pentagon lied about the North Vietnamese response, falsely claiming the North Vietnamese had assaulted the ships. Johnson then used the trumped-up incident to win congressional passage of what became known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which became Johnson’s justification to dramatically escalate the war by sending in conventional combat forces.

“So on Saturday, June 12, I get a call from Tony Austin, and he’s almost in tears,” recalled Ellsberg. “He says, ‘Dan, my book is ruined. You know that study you gave me? They have the whole study, and they are going to publish starting tonight. They are totally going to scoop my book.’”

“I asked him how he knew what the Times was planning. He says, ‘The place is locked down.’”

Ellsberg had not heard anything from Sheehan. He tried to call but couldn’t reach him. Sheehan later confessed that he was avoiding Ellsberg.

But Ellsberg did reach Greenfield that day. “He got me on the phone, and he expressed some doubts about what was happening,” Greenfield recalled. “He seemed rattled.”

“I said, ‘It’s too late now. It’s all in print.’”

“At 6 p.m. June 12th, the presses began rolling,” the Rogovin memo states.

That night in Cambridge, Ellsberg, his wife, and some friends smoked marijuana and went to see the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” “We got stoned out of our minds to see ‘Butch Cassidy’ for about the fourth time, and it was most enjoyable,” Ellsberg recalled. After the movie, he went to the kiosk in Harvard Square where the early editions of the next morning’s New York Times were on sale. 

“Of course, I’m furious at Neil for not telling me. But when I go and there is the paper at midnight, wow, great, all is forgiven, you know, no problem.”

Months later, Ellsberg ran into Sheehan walking on Fifth Avenue in New York. It was the first time they had spoken since the Pentagon Papers had been published. “So we go into a doorway, and I grill him a little bit,” Ellsberg said. “And he said, ‘Dan, it was bigger than both of us, you know, I had to do what I had to do,’” Ellsberg recalled.

“So, OK.”

A secret White House memo under Richard Nixon from Charles Colson to John Ehrlichman plotting to prosecute Daniel Ellsberg over the Pentagon Papers leak in 1971.

The Most Dangerous Man in America

After Neil Sheehan died in 2021, the Times published an interview he had done with the paper six years earlier on the condition that it not be released until after his death. In it, Sheehan acknowledged that he had kept Ellsberg at arm’s length because he didn’t think he could trust him with the knowledge that the Times was going ahead with the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Sheehan knew that Ellsberg had already talked to a wide range of people both in Congress and elsewhere about the documents, and that it was only a matter of time before the Nixon administration discovered what Ellsberg was doing. That would lead the government to the Times.

“There’s no way The Times can protect this guy,” Sheehan told the Times in the interview. Ellsberg had “left tracks on the ceiling, on the walls, everywhere … sooner or later, I was afraid he was going to run into a politician who’d go right to the Justice Department.” 

The relationship between Ellsberg and the Times following the publication of the Pentagon Papers was equally messy. In particular, Ellsberg complained that the Times was sloppy in its efforts to protect him as a source. Soon after the newspaper began publishing the Pentagon Papers, Sidney Zion, a freelance writer who had previously worked for the Times, went on a New York radio show and revealed that Ellsberg was the source of the documents. “The only person I had dealt with was Neil Sheehan, and no one else at the paper was supposed to know,” Ellsberg said — a statement at odds with Greenfield’s recollection that Ellsberg called him the day before the documents were published. Zion, who died in 2009, said that Ellsberg’s identity was common knowledge in New York media circles.

Former New York Times reporter Sidney Zion, who publicly said Daniel Ellsberg was the source for the the New York Times, in his New York apartment on June 18, 1971.

More recently, Ellsberg was angered by the 2021 Times story based on the interview with Sheehan. He especially took issue with Sheehan’s claim that “contrary to what is generally believed, Mr. Ellsberg never ‘gave’ the papers to The Times. … Mr. Ellsberg told Mr. Sheehan that he could read them but not make copies.” The Rogovin memo shows that account to be inaccurate, since the memo says that Ellsberg ultimately gave Sheehan “permission to possess the papers.”

“Never gave it to them?” Ellsberg said in an interview. “That’s crazy.”

Nixon initially didn’t plan to take any action to stop the publication of the Pentagon Papers once it had begun because the secret history was primarily about Vietnam policy during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, rather than his own. But Kissinger convinced Nixon that the leak represented a major national security breach and that the president couldn’t ignore it. So Nixon ordered the Justice Department to seek a court-ordered injunction against further publication by the Times.

On June 14, 1971, the day after the Times began publishing the papers, Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell warned the newspaper to halt further publication of the documents. The Times refused, and the government obtained an injunction. Ellsberg went into hiding, while a small team of his supporters, led by historian Gar Alperovitz, acted quickly to covertly get copies of the Pentagon Papers to the Washington Post, which was then hit with an injunction as well. Ellsberg then directed the team to get more documents to an expanding list of other newspapers to try to continue their publication. In the process, they were creating their own version of the internet, trying to make the documents so widely available that the court injunctions would be moot.

Ellsberg turned himself in to face charges in connection with the leak and suddenly became one of the most famous people in America.

On June 28, Ellsberg turned himself in to face charges in connection with the leak, making him the public face of the Pentagon Papers. He was mobbed by reporters in Boston and suddenly became one of the most famous people in America. Two days later, the Supreme Court, in a landmark decision, lifted the government’s injunction against further publication by the Times and the Post. 

For Nixon, the aftereffects of the Pentagon Papers case continued to reverberate. The president became obsessed with leaks and created the infamous White House Plumbers to go after them. In September 1971, the Plumbers broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in Los Angeles to search for material they could use to smear him. The burglary was a precursor to the Watergate break-in a year later, which was also conducted by the White House Plumbers and which led to Nixon’s downfall.

In May 1973, the judge in Ellsberg’s trial in Los Angeles dismissed the government’s case against him after the Justice Department turned over a memo written by the Watergate special prosecutor disclosing the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. (Ironically, Ellsberg learned some of the details of Sheehan’s betrayal during his trial, when Ellsberg’s lawyers obtained notes written by White House Plumber E. Howard Hunt showing that Sheehan and his wife had checked into Cambridge hotels under assumed names and taken the Pentagon Papers to copy shops in Boston and Medford, Massachusetts. The White House Plumbers clearly knew more about what Sheehan was doing than did Ellsberg, who later wrote about Hunt’s notes in his 2002 memoir, “Secrets.”)

The Nixon administration’s obsession with Ellsberg — whom Kissinger called “the most dangerous man in America” — turned Ellsberg into an international icon. His fame lasted the rest of his life, long after the secrets revealed in the Pentagon Papers had faded from memory. 

Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg leave court after a federal judge dismissed the Pentagon Papers case on May 11, 1973.

“Why Would They Hate Me?”

Ellsberg waited many years to talk publicly about his relationship with the Times, and even then, he only rarely expressed bitterness toward Sheehan and the newspaper.

After all, the Times had ultimately published the Pentagon Papers, which is what Ellsberg wanted. “I didn’t want to make the Times my enemy,” he said. In fact, he said that after the Pentagon Papers, he eventually reconciled with Sheehan and agreed to be interviewed for his book, “A Bright Shining Lie.” Susan Sheehan said in an interview that over the years after the Pentagon Papers were published, she and her husband developed a good relationship with Ellsberg and his wife.

The Times won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for publishing the Pentagon Papers, but the paper still quietly resented the fact that Ellsberg had garnered so much attention for his role in making the secret history public. Ellsberg said that a Times reporter once told him told him that Abe Rosenthal, the newspaper’s managing editor when the Pentagon Papers were published and later its executive editor, hated Ellsberg. (Rosenthal died in 2006.)

“Why would he hate me?” Ellsberg asked.

“Because you took the story away from the Times,” the reporter replied. “It wasn’t just the Times, it was Ellsberg.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by James Risen.

The claim is false. Airplane debris was found at the Pentagon, as confirmed by images and videos from the scene and an array of eyewitness accounts. The Pentagon also released security camera footage from the attack in 2006.

The claim was shared here on the popular Chinese social media platform Weibo on Sept. 10 by a user with more than 3 million followers. 

“Today in history: Who is responsible for the 911 incident? / Media won’t tell the truth,” the claim reads in part.

The claim was shared alongside a two-minute, 39-second clip that shows an old lecture given by Ai Yuejin, a former professor of military thinking at China’s Nankai University. 

Citing the bestselling book “9/11: The Big Lie” written by the far-left French journalist Thierry Meyssan, Ai claimed that no wreckage or witnesses at the scene of the Pentagon attack were found and that the U.S. government anticipated and allowed 9/11 to happen as a means to justify its later invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. 

The 9/11 attacks were a series of coordinated terrorist suicide plane hijackings by al-Qaeda operatives on Sept. 11, 2001, targeting landmarks in New York and Washington, leading to the deaths of nearly 3,000 people. 

Most were killed when two passenger planes were flown into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers on the southern tip of Manhattan. A third jet, American Airlines Flight 77, was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon, killing all onboard and many inside the building. And a fourth jet that appeared to be bound for Washington crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers broke into the cockpit, where the hijackers had taken control of the plane.

However, the claims by Meyssan and other conspiracy theorists are false.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation released several photos of the Pentagon wreckage, while a Department of Defence investigative report released in 2007 published Flight 77’s entire course, along with records showing that three F-16 military aircraft deployed to intercept the hijacked plane were unable to prevent it from crashing into the Pentagon. 

The DOD also released footage from car park monitors at the site which captured the actual collision of the plane into the Pentagon. 

The claim about Flight 77 has been debunked by other international media outlets as seen here, here and here. 

Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Taejun Kang and Malcolm Foster.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) is a branch of RFA established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. Our journalists publish both daily and special reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of public issues.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Rita Cheng for Asia Fact Check Lab.

Since a cadre of U.S.-trained officers joined a junta that overthrew Niger’s democratically elected president in late July, more than 1,000 U.S. troops have been largely confined to their Nigerien outposts, including America’s largest drone base in the region, Air Base 201 in Agadez.

The base, which has cost the U.S. a total of $250 million since construction began in 2016, is the key U.S. surveillance hub in West Africa. But in testimony before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in March, the chief of U.S. Africa Command described Air Base 201 as “minimal” and “low cost.”

Gen. Michael Langley, the AFRICOM chief, told Congress about just two “enduring” U.S. forward operating sites in Africa: Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti and a longtime logistics hub on Ascension Island in the south Atlantic Ocean. “The Command also operates out of 12 other posture locations throughout Africa,” he said in his prepared testimony. “These locations have minimal permanent U.S. presence and have low-cost facilities and limited supplies for these dedicated Americans to perform critical missions and quickly respond to emergencies.”

Experts say that Langley misled Congress, downplaying the size and scope of the U.S. footprint in Africa. AFRICOM’s “posture” on the continent actually consists of no fewer than 18 outposts, in addition to Camp Lemonnier and Ascension Island, according to information from AFRICOM’s secret 2022 theater posture plan, which was seen by The Intercept. A U.S. official with knowledge of AFRICOM’s current footprint on the continent confirmed that the same 20 bases are still in operation. Another two locations in Somalia and Ghana were also, according to the 2022 document, “under evaluation.”

Of the 20, Langley apparently failed to mention six so-called contingency locations in Africa, including a longtime drone base in Tunisia and other outposts used to wage U.S. shadow wars in Niger and Somalia. The U.S. military has often claimed that contingency locations are little more than spartan staging areas, but according to the joint chiefs of staff, such bases are critical to sustaining operations and may even be “semi-permanent.”

“This is a case of the U.S. military showing a marked lack of transparency by using technicalities to avoid conveying an accurate understanding of the extent of U.S. bases in Africa.”

“This is a case of the U.S. military showing a marked lack of transparency by using technicalities to avoid conveying an accurate understanding of the extent of U.S. bases in Africa,” Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War project at Brown University, told The Intercept. “I’ve done field research near the sites of some of the ‘contingency locations’ that don’t seem to be part of the general’s official count, and in practice, if not in name, they serve as significant hubs of U.S. military operations. To not include them in an official count is to pull wool over the eyes of Congress and the U.S. public.”

Last week, a coalition of 20 progressive, humanitarian, and antiwar organizations called on the leadership of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees to keep New York Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s cost of war amendment, which would require “more transparency around the price of our military presence overseas and public information about our military footprint” in the final version of the 2024 defense spending bill.  

Annee Lorentzen of the Washington-based Just Foreign Policy, who helped lead advocacy efforts around the amendment, sees it as critical for Pentagon accountability. “It is nearly impossible for U.S. taxpayers and even members of Congress to keep track of the vast U.S. military presence in the world. Without basic transparency about the location and costs of U.S. military engagement abroad, including information on the cost of our hundreds of bases and countless partnerships with foreign militaries, legislators cannot have an informed debate about national security priorities,” she told The Intercept. “In a democratic system, voters and their elected representatives should not be in the dark about where their money and military are sent.”

AFRICOM refused to clarify Langley’s testimony. “AFRICOM has no statement in response to your questions,” Timothy Pietrack, the deputy chief of AFRICOM Public Affairs, told The Intercept.

A staff sergeant fuels a plane at Air Base 101 in Niamey, Niger, on June, 30, 2021.

AFRICOM claims that Air Base 201 in Agadez is not an “enduring” forward operating site but, according to the command’s 2022 posture plan, a “cooperative security location,” presumably one of the 12 “minimal permanent U.S. presence” and “low-cost” facilities mentioned by Langley.

Observations by this reporter, who scrutinized Air Base 201 from its perimeter and overhead earlier this year, put the lie to Langley’s characterizations. The linchpin of the U.S. military’s archipelago of bases in North and West Africa, Air Base 201 consists of a 6,200-foot runway (composed of 1.1 million square feet of asphalt), aprons, taxiways, massive aircraft hangars, multistory living quarters, roads, utilities, munitions storage, and an aircraft rescue and firefighting station, all within a 25-kilometer “base security zone.” U.S. troops eat in a 13,000-square-foot dining facility, work out in a gym, play on basketball and volleyball courts, and spend leisure time at a recreation center with “bookcases full of movies and games, Wi-Fi, snacks,” according to the Air Force, all of it protected by fences, barriers, and upgraded air-conditioned guard towers with custom-made firing ports. Only the Pentagon could call Air Base 201, the largest “airman-built” project in Air Force history, a “low-cost” facility, since it cost $110 million to build and is maintained to the tune of $20 to $30 million U.S. taxpayer dollars each year.

“When I went to Agadez on a research trip, I saw a large U.S. drone base that was the opposite of transitory,” said Savell, who has mapped U.S. counterterrorism efforts around the world, noting large-scale infrastructure like drone hangars and conspicuous operations that included a burn pit belching black smoke into the air. “None of the base’s neighbors — who see drones flying above their houses every day, and who have seen foreign contracting companies, rather than themselves, reap the profits of servicing a multimillion-dollar facility — would even remotely consider this a minor outpost.”

Officially, so-called cooperative security locations, known as CSLs, have “little or no permanent U.S. presence,” but Air Base 201 can currently accommodate about 1,000 U.S. military personnel, according to a spokesperson for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Air Forces Africa. The access agreement governing the base has been in effect for nearly a decade, cannot be terminated with less than a year’s notice, and has no end date. “The agreement continues in force automatically after its initial ten-year term,” AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan told The Intercept.

In the wake of the July coup, the Pentagon looks to be doing everything it can to hold on to that access. On Thursday, the Pentagon announced that “out of an abundance of caution,” a small number of “non-essential personnel” would depart Niger and other troops would be repositioned but that the overall effects were minor. “This does not change our overall force posture in Niger,” a Defense Department spokesperson told The Intercept.

“[T]he goal is to stay,” said Air Force Gen. James Hecker, the commander of U.S. air forces in Europe and Africa, when asked last month if the U.S. was planning to evacuate troops from Niger. “Preparing to stay might be a better way to say it because that’s what we’re hoping we’re going to do.” 

Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh voiced similar sentiments. “Niger is a partner, and we don’t want to see that partnership go,” she said. “We’ve invested, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars into bases there, trained with the military there.”

In addition to Air Base 201, the U.S. military operates another CSL — a second drone facility known as Air Base 101 — at the main commercial airport in Niger’s capital, Niamey. A Pentagon spokesperson told The Intercept that they were now “repositioning some U.S. personnel and equipment in Niger from Air Base 101 in Niamey to Air Base 201 in Agadez” but did not respond to questions about how many personnel would be moved. The CIA also operates a drone base in the far north of the country near the town of Dirkou.

Niger’s servicemembers stand guard as supporters of Niger’s National Council for the Safeguarding of the Fatherland gather outside the Nigerien and French airbase in Niamey, Niger, on Sept. 3, 2023.

Camp Lemonnier, a former French Foreign Legion outpost in sun-bleached Djibouti, is the crown jewel of U.S. bases on the east side of the African continent. A longtime home for Special Operations forces and counterterrorism operations in Yemen and Somalia, it hosts around 4,000 U.S. and allied personnel. Since 2002, the base has expanded from 88 acres to nearly 600 and spun off a satellite outpost 10 kilometers to the southwest, where drone operations in the country were relocated in 2013. Chabelley Airfield has gone on to serve as an integral base for missions in Somalia and Yemen, as well as the drone war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

In 2020, a CSL at Manda Bay, Kenya, was attacked by members of the terrorist group al-Shabab, killing three Americans, wounding two others, and damaging or destroying six aircraft. In neighboring Somalia, a similar base at Baledogle Airfield is a key node in the U.S. drone war that has seen 30 declared strikes under President Joe Biden. The U.S. also has a CSL in the capital, Mogadishu. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., recently scoffed at Langley’s characterizations of these as “minimal” outposts. “Look at Somalia. We’re pretty enduring there,” he told The Intercept during a recent interview. “We’ve become the block captain of Mogadishu.”

Among the contingency locations listed in the 2022 posture plan that Langley failed to mention is a drone base located at Sidi Ahmed Air Base in Bizerte, Tunisia. As early as 2016, almost 70 Air Force personnel and more than 20 civilian contractors were deployed to “Camp Sidi,” according to documents obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act. “You know, flying intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance drones out of Tunisia has been taking place for quite some time,” said Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, the then-chief of AFRICOM, in 2017. “[W]e fly there, it’s not a secret, but we are very respectful to the Tunisians’ desires in terms of, you know, how we support them and the fact that we have [a] low profile.” 

The other contingency locations that Langley apparently failed to mention to members of Congress this spring include facilities located in Misrata, Libya; Thebephatshwa, Botswana; Kismayo, Somalia; as well as in Ouallam and Diffa, Niger. 

While AFRICOM prefers to gloss over the existence of these officially “non-enduring” outposts, contingency locations play a long-term and consequential role in U.S. operations. The Intercept first reported on a contingency location in Ouallam six years ago. After an October 2017 ambush in which ISIS fighters near the village of Tongo Tongo killed four U.S. soldiers and wounded two, AFRICOM announced that the ambushed troops — based in Ouallam — were providing “advice and assistance” to Nigerien forces. In truth, “Team Ouallam” was conducting operations with a larger Nigerien force under Operation Juniper Shield, a wide-ranging regional counterterrorism effort. Until bad weather intervened, that group was slated to support another team of American and Nigerien commandos based at a then-contingency location near the town of Arlit who were trying to kill or capture an ISIS leader as part of Obsidian Nomad II, a so-called 127e program that allows U.S. forces to use local troops as proxies.

“The framers of our Constitution didn’t intend for Congress and the American people to learn about U.S. military missions once servicemembers had already lost their lives,” said Lorentzen of Just Foreign Policy. “We need transparency both for our troops’ sake and to permit debate about this military-first approach that scatters hundreds of U.S. military outposts across Africa and the world.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Nick Turse.

The post The Pentagon is the Elephant In the Climate Activist Room appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melissa Garriga - Tim Biondo.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Nick Turse.

The post Why I Oppose the Pentagon Budget appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bernie Sanders.

The post Why I Oppose the Pentagon Budget appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bernie Sanders.

“There are no laptops at meetings in the Pentagon,” Navy official John Kroger warned (Wired, 8/20/20). “There are no whiteboards, either.“

Despite its immense power, the Pentagon is a relic of decades past.

Such was the argument by Navy official John Kroger, writing for Wired (8/20/20). Commenting on the daily operations of the Defense Department, Kroger depicted a workplace bereft of modernity: no WiFi, scant cell signals, workflows of “a glacial pace,” and a “hermetic closure” to talent from the private sector, amounting to a “retrograde” “1950s environment,” unprepared to sustain 21st-century national security.

Kroger’s warning wasn’t the first of its kind, nor was it the last. News outlets routinely caution that the US Department of Defense—the largest government agency of the world’s wealthiest country, with an $858 billion budget that can be exceeded with impunity—is sclerotic and inefficient. The only remedy, they tell their audiences, is billions more dollars’ worth of improvements to management systems, personnel, and weapons and intelligence technology.

‘Backward’ superpower

With such an antiquated Defense Department, the argument goes, the US will be “ill-equipped” (Wired, 5/2/22) for future war, trailing its most formidable adversaries.

Foreign Policy boosted this view in an op-ed (10/25/21) that described the Pentagon as a “living museum” plagued by “backward” working conditions. The piece, penned by fellows at the Truman National Security Project and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (both of which count weapons manufacturers among their top funders), pleaded for a program of modernization to help the DoD adapt to “the evolving character of war and an ongoing reframing of national security,” and counter “an increasingly aggressive China and a stubbornly revanchist Russia.” Without a comprehensive upgrade, the piece asserted, the United States would “at best muddle through the challenges it faces.”

The Pentagon “remains burdened by the strict adherence to slow, sequential processes,” Zachery Tyson Brown complained in Foreign Policy (10/25/21), “while more contemporary workplaces have learned that parallel, simultaneous, and asynchronous methods dramatically speed their delivery of value.”

Politico (6/27/23) echoed these concerns when it bemoaned the Pentagon’s “endless struggle with AI,” reporting that “the military needs more AI technology, faster.” According to the piece, the DoD can’t keep up with the tech industry’s pace of military technology development, imperiling “American dominance” as China ascends. Citing “defense pundits,” the article promoted additional funding for autonomous weapons and surveillance, among other forms of contemporary warfare, framing the Department’s request for $1.8 billion in AI research and development funding as modest: “a record, but still just a fraction of the nearly $900 billion defense budget.”

Considering the enormous sum—which grows considerably every year—at the Pentagon’s disposal, one might question the notion that the US military is underresourced or in imminent danger of being militarily eclipsed. In 2022, for instance, the US outspent the next ten highest-spending countries combined on war preparation, accounting for 39% of the world’s military expenditure that year. (China, whose population outnumbers that of the entire Western Hemisphere, came in second at 13%, with Russia in third at 4%.)

Additionally, available data—even from US-based institutions—indicate that the US far outspends China and Russia on defense-related AI research and development.

Georgetown University’s Center for Security & Emerging Technology found that the US planned to devote $5 billion to military AI for fiscal year 2020, compared to estimates ranging from $0.3 billion–$2.7 billion for China in 2018. “The numbers directly oppose the prevailing narrative” that the US was losing the “so-called AI arms race,” reported MIT Technology Review (12/5/19). Though publicly accessible information on Russia’s spending is limited and of questionable accuracy, sources like Defense One (4/4/18) and the RAND Corporation placed Russia’s total AI spending at $12 to $36 million annually in 2017 and 2018.

But failing to include such pertinent context—let alone moral critiques—about global government spending continues media’s long history of presenting a “lagging empire” narrative that frames the US as a floundering underdog in need of additional defense funding (FAIR.org, 9/1/15). “To keep up with China, the Defense Department is trying to lure private capital,” reported the Wall Street Journal (3/26/23), in yet another example. One of the article’s sources, a co-founder of a “national security innovation” center at Stanford University, likened China to “Silicon Valley,” and the US to a “Detroit auto maker,” concluding: “That’s not a fair fight.”

‘Struggling’ weapon-makers

High-tech systems are “getting real-world testing in the war in Ukraine,” the New York Times (5/21/23) reported, “earning praise from top government officials there and validating investors who have been pouring money into the field.”

In order to strengthen their case, some media shine a spotlight on the military startups aspiring to sign lucrative DoD contracts, characterizing firms that seek to facilitate mass violence throughout the world as hapless victims of a hamstrung bureaucracy.

Financial Times (3/17/22) advocated for tech businesses that “struggle to break into the Pentagon,” suggesting they’re being deprived of the long-term software contracts they deserve. The paper went further, tacitly supporting Silicon Valley founders’ accusations of “innovation theater,” which FT defined as “paying lip service to the importance of disruptive technology while holding back the vast bulk of their budgets for traditional, large-scale programs from incumbent contractors.”

More recently, the New York Times (5/21/23) lamented the Department’s apparently inadequate catalog of contracts with scrappy, enterprising military-systems companies. Assessing the military-industrial complex as “lumbering” and the DoD as “risk-averse,” the Times portrayed a Pentagon too conservative with expenses, requiring “years of planning and congressional funding decisions” before it would buy enough product to keep afloat startups that specialize in logistics, weapons technology and intelligence.

Among the casualties, according to the Times: Primer and Capella Space, both of which laid off employees while awaiting decisions from the Pentagon. (Both Primer and Capella, bankrolled in part by billionaire Thomas Tull, have raised approximately $250 million.) “Many other tech start-ups struggl[e] to pay bills” while in the same holding pattern, the Times added.

Recruiting more ‘nerds’

Wired (5/2/22): “Technology is fundamentally changing the nature of war, and the US needs to adapt in order to maintain its edge.”

Keen on Silicon Valley’s technical expertise, media in some cases propose that the Defense Department be awarded additional funding to attract and hire tech workers from the private sector.

Wired (5/2/22) exemplified this with the disconcertingly twee headline, “To Win the Next War, the Pentagon Needs Nerds.” Echoing Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, the piece fretted that the Pentagon lacked the talent to develop cutting-edge war technology, in part because the DoD couldn’t “compete” with the salaries offered by the private sector.

Years earlier, Wired (2/16/19) presented this thesis in an opinion piece urging the Pentagon to lure tech workers away from high-paid, prestigious posts at such Silicon Valley staples as Google, Facebook (now Meta), Amazon and Apple. Its author, consultant and “futurist” Amy Webb, made her prescriptions plain:

The government can allocate significant funding—several billion to start—for basic and advanced research in AI. It can use some of that money for better compensation packages, to build capacity among existing staff, and to fund projects allowing the tech giants and public sector to start working much more closely together.

Conveniently enough, as of June 2023, the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act would give the DoD a record $886 billion, highlighting “increased funding for cutting-edge technologies,” including “the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning tools.” It seems that Webb’s—and much of corporate media’s—wish has come true.

The post ‘Ill-Equipped,’ ‘1950s’ Pentagon Needs an Expensive Upgrade, Media Insist  appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julianne Tveten.

A technology wish list circulated by the U.S. military’s elite Joint Special Operations Command suggests the country’s most secretive war-fighting component shares an anxiety with the world’s richest man: Too many people can see where they’re flying their planes.

The Joint Special Operations Air Component, responsible for ferrying commandos and their gear around the world, is seeking help keeping these flights out of the public eye through a “‘Big Data’ Analysis & Feedback Tool,” according to a procurement document obtained by The Intercept. The document is one of a series of periodic releases of lists of technologies that special operations units would like to see created by the private sector.

The listing specifically calls out the risk of social media “tail watchers” and other online observers who might identify a mystery plane as a military flight. According to the document, the Joint Special Operations Air Component needs software to “leverage historical and real-time data, such as the travel histories and details of specific aircraft with correlation to open-source information, social media, and flight reporting.”

Armed with this data, the tool would help the special operations gauge how much scrutiny a given plane has received in the past and how likely it is to be connected to them by prying eyes online.

“It just gives them better information on how to blend in. It’s like the police deciding to use the most common make of local car as an undercover car.”

Rather than providing the ability to fake or anonymize flight data, the tool seems to be aimed at letting sensitive military flights hide in plain sight. “It just gives them better information on how to blend in,” Scott Lowe, a longtime tail watcher and aviation photographer told The Intercept. “It’s like the police deciding to use the most common make of local car as an undercover car.”

While plane tracking has long been a niche hobby among aviation enthusiasts who enjoy cataloging the comings and goings of aircraft, the public availability of midair transponder data also affords journalists, researchers, and other observers an effective means of tracking the movements and activities of the world’s richest and most powerful. The aggregation and analysis of public flight data has shed light on CIA torture flights, movements of Russian oligarchs, and Google’s chummy relationship with NASA.

More recently, these sleuthing techniques gained international attention after they drew the ire of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. After he purchased the social media giant Twitter, Musk banned an account that shared the movements of his private jet. Despite repeated promises to protect free speech — and a specific pledge to not ban the @ElonJet account — on the platform, Musk proceeded to censor anyone sharing his plane’s whereabouts, claiming the entirely legally obtained and fully public data amounted to “assassination coordinates.”

The Joint Special Operations Air Component’s desire for more discreet air travel, published six months after Musk’s jet data meltdown, is likely more firmly grounded in reality.

The Joint Special Operations Air Component provides a hypothetical scenario in which special forces need to travel with a “reduced profile” — that is to say, quietly — and use this tool.

“When determining if the planned movement is suitable and appropriate,” the procurement document says, “the ‘Aircraft Flight Profile Management Database Tool’ reveals that the aircraft is primarily associated with a distinctly different geographic area” — a frequent tip-off to civilian plane trackers that something interesting is afoot. “Additionally, ‘tail watchers’ have posted on social media pictures of the aircraft at various airfields. Based on the information available, the commander decides to utilize a different airframe for the mission. With the aircraft in flight, the tool is monitored for any indication of increased scrutiny or mission compromise.”

The request is part of a broad-ranging list of technologies sought by the Joint Special Operations Command, from advanced radios and portable blood pumps to drones that can fly months at a time. The 85-page list essentially advertises these technologies for private-sector contractors, who may be able to sell them to the Pentagon in the near future.

“What will be interesting is seeing how they change their operations after having this information.”

The document — marked unclassified but for “Further dissemination only as directed by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) Joint Capability and Technology Expo (JCTE) Team” — is part of an annual effort by Joint Special Operations Command to “inform and influence industry’s internal investment decisions in areas that address SOF’s most sensitive and urgent interest areas.”

The anti-plane-tracking tool fits into a broader pattern of the military attempting to minimize the visibility of its flights, according to Ian Servin, a pilot and plane-tracking enthusiast. In March, the military removed tail numbers and other identifying marks from its planes.

“What will be interesting is seeing how they change their operations after having this information,” Servin said. From a transparency standpoint, he added, “Those changes could be problematic or concerning.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Sam Biddle.

The disclosure of 7,000 pages of documents, and subsequent legal battles to stop further publication by the New York Times and Washington Post, helped to bring the war to a close a few years later.

As an adviser to US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara in the 1960s, Ellsberg had seen first-hand the Pentagon’s brutal military operations that caused mass civilian casualties. Entire villages had been burned, while captured Vietnamese were tortured or executed. Deceptively, the US referred to these as “pacification programmes”.

But most of those today loudly hailing Ellsberg as an “American hero” have been far more reluctant to champion the Ellsberg of our times: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

For years, Assange has been rotting in a London high-security prison while the Biden administration seeks his extradition on charges that ludicrously equate his publication of the Afghan and Iraq war logs – a modern Pentagon Papers – with “espionage”.

Like Ellsberg, Assange exposed the way western states had been systematically lying while they perpetrated war crimes. Like Ellsberg, he was fraudulently labelled a threat to national security and charged with espionage. Like Ellsberg, if found guilty, he faces more than 100 years in jail. Like Ellsberg, Assange has learned that the US Congress is unwilling to exercise its powers to curb governmental abuses.

But unlike Ellsberg’s case, the courts have consistently sided with Assange’s persecutors, not with him for shining a light on state criminality. And, in a further contrast, the western media have stayed largely silent as the noose has tightened around Assange’s neck.

The similarities in Assange’s and Ellsberg’s deeds – and the stark differences in outcomes – are hard to ignore. The very journalists and publications now extolling Ellsberg for his historic act of bravery have been enabling, if only through years of muteness, western capitals’ moves to demonise Assange for his contemporary act of heroism.

Docile lapdogs

The hypocrisy did not go unnoticed by Ellsberg. He was one of the noisiest defenders of Assange. So noisy, in fact, that most media outlets felt obliged in their obituaries to make reference to the fact, even if in passing.

Ellsberg testified on Assange’s behalf at a London extradition hearing in 2020, observing that the pair’s actions were identical. That was not entirely right, however.

Assange published classified documents passed to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning, just as the New York Times published the secrets handed to them by Ellsberg. Given that media freedoms are protected by the US First Amendment, whereas whistleblowing by an official is not, Assange’s treatment is even more perverse and abusive than Ellsberg’s.

In contrast to his case, Ellsberg added, the WikiLeaks founder could never receive a fair hearing in the US. His trial has already been assigned to a court in the eastern district of Virginia, home to the US intelligence agencies.

Late last year, as Assange’s prospects of extradition to the US increased, Ellsberg admitted that he had been secretly given a backup copy of the leaked Afghan and Iraq war logs, in case WikiLeaks was prevented from making public the details of US and UK criminality.

Ellsberg pointed out that his possession of the documents made him equally culpable with Assange under the justice department’s draconian “espionage” charges. During a BBC interview, he demanded that he be indicted too.

If the praise being lavished on Ellsberg in death demonstrates anything, it is the degree to which the self-professed watchdogs of western state power have been tamed over subsequent decades into being the most docile of lapdogs.

In the Assange case, the courts and establishment media have clearly acted as adjuncts of power, not checks on it. And for that reason, if no other, western states are gaining greater and greater control over their citizenry in an age when mass digital surveillance is easier than ever.

Spied on day and night

For those reluctant to confer on Assange the praise being heaped on Ellsberg, it is worth remembering how similarly each was viewed by US officials in their respective eras.

Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and then secretary of state, called Ellsberg the “most dangerous man in America”.

Mike Pompeo, President Donald Trump’s director of the Central Intelligence Agency, declared Assange and WikiLeaks a “non-state, hostile intelligence service”. Pompeo’s CIA also secretly plotted ways to kidnap or assassinate Assange in London.

Both Ellsberg and Assange were illegally surveilled by government agencies.

In Ellsberg’s case, Nixon’s officials wiretapped his conversations and tried to dig up dirt by stealing files from his psychiatrist’s office. The same team carried out the Watergate break-in, famously exposed by the US media, that ultimately brought Nixon down.

In Assange’s case, the CIA spied on him day and night after he was given political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, even violating his privileged conversations with his lawyers. Astonishingly, this law-breaking has barely been remarked on by the media, even though it should have been grounds alone for throwing out the extradition case against him.

Nixon officials tried to rig Ellsberg’s trial by offering the judge in his hearings the directorship of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In Assange’s case, a series of judicial irregularities and apparent conflicts of interest have plagued the proceedings, again ignored by the establishment media.

This month, High Court judge Jonathan Swift rejected what may amount to a last-ditch attempt by Assange’s legal team to halt his extradition. Swift’s previous career was as a government lawyer. Looking back on his time there, he noted that his “favourite clients were the security and intelligence agencies”.

Above the law

But if the modern White House is as hostile to transparency as its predecessors – and armed with more secret tools to surveil critics than ever before – the media and the courts are offering far less remedy than they did in Ellsberg’s time.

Even the Obama administration understood the dangers of targeting Assange. His relationship to Manning was no different from the New York Times’ to Ellsberg. Each publicised state wrongdoing after classified documents were divulged to them by a disenchanted official.

Prosecuting Assange was seen as setting a precedent that could ensnare any publisher or media outlet that made public state secrets, however egregious the crimes being exposed.

For that reason, Obama went full guns blazing against whistleblowers, locking up more of them than all his predecessors combined. Whistleblowers were denied any right to claim a public-interest defence. State secrecy was sacrosanct, even when it was being abused to shield evidence of criminality from public view.

Asked whether Obama would have pursued him through the courts, as Nixon did, Ellsberg answered: “I’m sure that President Obama would have sought a life sentence in my case.”

It took a reckless Trump administration to go further, casting aside the long-standing legal distinction between an official who leaks classified documents in violation of their employment contract, and a publisher-journalist who exposes those documents in accordance with their duty to hold the powerful to account.

Now Biden has chosen to follow Trump’s lead by continuing Assange’s show trial. The new presumption is that it is illegal for anyone – state official, media outlet, ordinary citizen – to disclose criminal activity by an all-powerful state.

In Assange’s case, the White House is openly manoeuvring to win recognition for itself as officially above the law.

Disappeared from view

In the circumstances, one might have assumed that the courts and media would be rallying to uphold basic democratic rights, such as a free press, and impose accountability on state officials shown to have broken the law.

In the 1970s, however imperfectly, the US media gradually unravelled the threads of the Watergate scandal till they exposed the unconstitutional behaviour of the Nixon administration. At the same time, the liberal press rallied behind Ellsberg, making common cause with him in a fight to hold the executive branch to account.

Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, charged Ellsberg with espionage and accused the New York Times of the same. Claiming the paper had undermined national security, he threatened it with ruinous legal action. The Times ignored the threats and carried on publishing, forcing the justice department to obtain an injunction.

The courts, meanwhile, took the side of both Ellsberg and the media in their legal battles. In 1973, the federal court in Los Angeles threw out the case against Ellsberg before it could be put to a jury, accusing the government of gross misconduct and illegal evidence gathering against him.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court prioritised freedom of the press, denying the government prior restraint. Ultimately, these cases and others forced Nixon from office in disgrace.

The contrast with Assange’s treatment by the media and the courts could not be starker.

The media, even “liberal” outlets he worked with on the Afghan and Iraq logs, including the New York Times and the Guardian, have struggled to show even the most rudimentary kind of solidarity, preferring instead to distance themselves from him. They have largely conspired in US and UK efforts to suggest Assange is not a “proper journalist” and therefore does not deserve First Amendment protections.

These media outlets have effectively partnered with Washington in suggesting that their collaboration with Assange in no way implicates them in his supposed “crimes”.

As a result, the media has barely bothered to cover his hearings or explain how the courts have twisted themselves into knots by ignoring the most glaring legal obstacles to his extradition: such as the specific exclusion in the UK’s 2007 Extradition Treaty with the US of extraditions for political cases.

Unlike Ellsberg, who became a cause celebre, Assange has been disappeared from public view by the states he exposed and largely forgotten by the media that should be championing his cause.

Shortening Odds

Ellsberg emerged from his court victory over the Pentagon Papers to argue: “The demystification and de-sanctification of the president has begun. It’s like the defrocking of the Wizard of Oz.”

In this assessment, time has proved him sadly wrong, as he came to recognise.

In recent months, Ellsberg had become an increasingly voluble critic of US conduct in the Ukraine war. He drew parallels with the lies told by four administrations – those of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson – to hide the extent of Washington’s involvement in Vietnam before the US went public with its ground war.

Ellsberg warned that the US was waging a similarly undeclared war in Ukraine – a proxy one, using Ukrainians as cannon fodder – to  “weaken the Russians“.  As in Vietnam, the White House was gradually and secretly escalating US involvement.

As also in Vietnam, western leaders were concealing the fact that the war had reached a stalemate, with the inevitable result that large numbers of Ukrainians and Russians were losing their lives in fruitless combat.

He called former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s hidden, early role in stymying peace talks between Russia and Ukraine “a crime against humanity.”

Referring to history repeating itself, he observed: “It’s an awakening that’s in many ways painful.”

Most of all, Ellsberg feared that the West’s war machine – addicted to Cold War belligerence, obscured under the supposedly “defensive” umbrella of Nato – wanted once again to confront China.

In 2021, as the Biden administration intensified its hostile posturing towards Beijing, Ellsberg revealed that back in 1958 Eisenhower’s officials had drawn up secret plans to attack China with nuclear weapons. That was during an earlier crisis over the Taiwan Strait.

“At this point, I’m much more aware of… how little has changed in these critical aspects of the danger of nuclear war, and how limited the effectiveness has been to curtail what we’ve done,” he told an interviewer shortly before he died.

What Ellsberg understood most keenly was the desperate need – if humanity was to survive – both for more whistleblowers to come forward to expose their states’ crimes, and for a tenacious, watchdog media to give their full backing.

Watching the media abandon Assange to his persecutors, Ellsberg could draw only one possible conclusion: that humanity’s odds were shortening by the day.

• First published in Middle East Eye

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

One Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), voted with Republicans to attach an amendment to roll back the Pentagon's policy of reimbursing service members who travel to obtain abortion care. The amendment was sponsored by Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), who previously served as former President Donald Trump's chief medical adviser.

Cuellar also backed Rep. Matt Rosendale's (R-Mont.) amendment to block the Department of Defense from covering gender-affirming care.

“House Republicans have turned what should be a meaningful investment in our men and women in uniform into an extreme and reckless legislative joyride," Jeffries, Clark, and Aguilar said Thursday. "The bill undermines a woman's freedom to seek abortion care, targets the rights of LGBTQ+ service members, and bans books that should otherwise be available to military families."

In opposing final passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the top Democrats are joining progressive lawmakers who usually vote no on the annual military policy bill due to its sky-high and ever-rising topline. The NDAA for the coming fiscal year would authorize $886 billion in total military spending, with $842 billion going to the Pentagon.

"I was the only person to vote no on committee out of 59 on the bloated defense bill," Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) tweeted Thursday, referring to the House Armed Service's Committee's vote last month. "After amendments attacking abortion rights and trans rights, looks like my Dem colleagues may join me. Sometimes, it's okay to stand alone on principle."

Mounting Democratic opposition to the NDAA means Republicans could have to secure enough votes to pass the bill out of the House along party lines, a potentially difficult task given the intransigence of far-right members. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said Thursday that she intends to vote no after her amendment to strike $300 million in Ukraine aid from the NDAA failed to pass.

Another amendment led by Greene—a proposal to ban the U.S. government from selling or transferring cluster munitions to Ukraine—also failed Thursday, though it did receive the support of 49 Democrats, including Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Jim McGovern (D-Mass.).

The failure of Greene's cluster bombs amendment came after Republicans on the House Rules Committee blocked consideration of a broader proposal led by Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) and Omar that would have prohibited the U.S. from transferring cluster munitions worldwide.

The Pentagon said Thursday that U.S. cluster munitions have arrived in Ukraine, days after President Joe Biden approved their transfer in the face of protests from human rights groups and members of his own party.

"Kevin McCarthy may be the MAGA ringmaster, but it is clear that the clowns have taken over the circus."

A final House vote on the NDAA is expected Friday. The Senate still needs to pass its version of the bill, and the two chambers must reconcile the differences.

Progressives voiced outrage over House Republicans' decision to turn the NDAA into another vehicle for their broader war on reproductive rights and LGBTQ people.

"They showed their complete disregard for our LGBTQ+ service members by adopting amendments that strip medically necessary care from transgender service members and their families, censor LGBTQ+ service members by prohibiting the display of Pride flags, and ban books that include transgender people or discuss gender identity," said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus. "These riders cannot stand, and my colleagues and I will use every tool to get them removed during conference."

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) noted on Twitter that Rules Committee Republicans prevented a House vote on her proposals to cut the Pentagon budget by $100 billion, rein in rampant price gouging by defense contractors, and repeal the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq as they advanced their attacks on abortion access, gender-affirming care, diversity programs, climate action, and more.

In scathing remarks on the House floor ahead of Thursday's votes, McGovern—the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee—blasted "MAGA wingnuts" who "threw a fit and hijacked" the NDAA to advance their far-right agenda.

"It's outrageous that a tiny minority of Republicans is getting to dictate exactly what amendments come to the floor," McGovern said. "Kevin McCarthy may be the MAGA ringmaster, but it is clear that the clowns have taken over the circus."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

We speak with Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California about several topics. He has reintroduced a bill in the House to limit Supreme Court justices to 18-year terms, which he says would help rebalance the high court, now dominated by a 6-3 conservative majority, and is especially needed after several controversial Supreme Court rulings striking down President Biden’s student debt relief plan, giving businesses the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people on religious grounds, rolling back environmental protections and more. “Most Americans have seen that the Supreme Court is just wildly out of touch with the facts of modern life,” he says. Khanna also talks about his lone vote against the Pentagon budget, and he responds to critics of the key role he played in welcoming Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a state visit at the White House, which was roundly condemned by human rights advocates, given Modi’s track record of violence and bigotry.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

In a special broadcast, we remember the life and legacy of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who died in June at the age of 92, just months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, then a top military strategist working for the RAND Corporation, risked life in prison by secretly copying and then leaking 7,000 pages of top-secret documents outlining the secret history of the U.S. War in Vietnam. The leak would end up helping to take down President Nixon, accelerate the end of the War in Vietnam and lead to a major victory for press freedom. Henry Kissinger once called Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America.” Over the past 50 years, Ellsberg remained an antiwar and anti-nuclear activist who inspired a new generation of whistleblowers. We mark his death with excerpts from some of our interviews with Ellsberg over the years about Vietnam, as well as Ukraine, tensions with China, the threat of nuclear war and working toward a more honest discourse about U.S. policy. “To this day, the very idea that the U.S. is … an empire is a taboo, and a very unfortunate one, because it makes it impossible to understand what’s going on,” Ellsberg said.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Last month, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni signed off on one of the most draconian pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the world.

Homosexuality has been illegal in Uganda, a conservative East African nation, since 1950, but Ugandans now face life imprisonment for gay sex. Anyone attempting to have same-sex relations could be sentenced to 10 years in prison. Advocates for the rights of LGBTQ+ people, including human rights campaigners or those funding advocacy organizations, could face up to 20 years’ imprisonment for the “promotion of homosexuality.”

“The enactment of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act is a tragic violation of universal human rights — one that is not worthy of the Ugandan people,” President Joe Biden announced last month. “This shameful Act is the latest development in an alarming trend of human rights abuses and corruption in Uganda.”

Nonetheless, the United States is slated to give Uganda close to $20 million in security assistance this year, according to Donovan Satchell, a spokesperson with the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs. 

“The situation for LGBTQI+ people in Uganda is a matter of life or death. As attacks against the LGBTQI+ community continue to spread around the world, it’s clear we have an obligation to stand up against the targeted violence toward the Ugandan LGBTQI+ community,” Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., told The Intercept. “The United States cannot continue to support countries that actively persecute and criminalize LGBTQI+ people.” Balint is currently working on an amendment to next year’s defense authorization bill that would restrict or cut off security assistance to Uganda due to the anti-gay law.

Balint is just one of several members of Congress who have expressed alarm at the continued flow of military aid to the increasingly repressive country the State Department calls a “reliable partner for the United States in promoting stability in the Horn and East/Central Africa and in combatting terror.”

“Congressman McGovern condemns Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act in the strongest of terms,“ Matthew Bonaccorsi, a spokesperson for Rep. James P. McGovern of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the House Rules Committee, told The Intercept. “He believes that the United States government should respond not only by imposing individual sanctions on those responsible for this violation of human rights, but also by suspending military and security assistance until this law is repealed and the rights of innocent LGTBQI+ Ugandans are restored.”

The Defense Department has spent more than $280 million on equipment and training for Uganda since 2011, according to the Congressional Research Service. That does not include about $18 million in funds for international military education and training and peacekeeping operations scheduled to be doled out this year. Uganda has also been the largest recipient of U.S. funding for the African Union Mission in Somalia, or AMISOM, which has cost the U.S. roughly $2.5 billion overall. That includes “train and equip” funding, of which Uganda has been among the largest recipients on the African continent.

A Ugandan gay man packs his bags to vacate the city in Kampala, Uganda, on May 30, 2023.

Photo: AFP via Getty Images

“The law has been widely condemned in the U.S. press, but few have noted the critical role the U.S. has played in bolstering this regime’s military capacity.”

“Uganda’s horrific new law targeting LGBTQ people is just the latest reminder of how unchecked funneling of weapons and training to brutal regimes abroad can inadvertently enable crimes against humanity,” Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy, an advocacy group critical of mainstream Washington foreign policy, told The Intercept. “The law has been widely condemned in the U.S. press, but few have noted the critical role the U.S. has played in bolstering this regime’s military capacity. It’s too late to rescind the hundreds of millions in weapons and training already provided to Ugandan forces, but any future aid should be suspended indefinitely.”

U.S. Africa Command provided boilerplate responses that did not address the substance of The Intercept’s questions. “U.S. Africa Command focuses on building African partner nation capabilities primarily through security force assistance programs, exercises, military-to-military and key leader engagements, and operations,” AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan told The Intercept by email.

Research by The Intercept turned up copious evidence of significant and enduring assistance to the East African nation. 

The United States has employed Ugandan commandos as U.S. proxies — dispatched on U.S.-directed missions, targeting U.S. enemies to achieve U.S. aims — in Somalia under the shadowy 127e authority as part of a counterterrorism program code-named Ultimate Hunter.

U.S. Special Operations forces have also repeatedly traveled to Uganda to train alongside members of the Uganda People’s Defense Force, or UPDF, and other security forces as part of the Joint Combined Exchange Training program. As recently as April, U.S. troops conducted a JCET there.

The United States also has a long-standing base in Entebbe, Uganda. Over many years, it has served as a staging area for “essential” airlift and evacuation missions; a sometime home away from home for Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force, Crisis Response, or SPMAGTF-CR; and the headquarters for a Special Operations unit that spearheaded the failed mission to capture or kill warlord Joseph Kony.

In 2017, according to exclusive documents obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act, AFRICOM launched an investigation into “allegations of rape, sexual assault, and abuse … allegedly committed by Ugandan military forces” in the Central African Republic during the hunt for Kony. The results of the inquiry have never been made public.

U.S. training exercises are regularly held in Uganda and Ugandan forces also travel overseas for U.S. schooling and other activities. Since 2007, according to data from the State Department and the Security Assistance Monitor, a program of the nonprofit Center for International Policy, the U.S. has provided more than 62,000 trainings for Uganda’s security forces. That includes more than 5,000 in 2020, the last year for which we have comprehensive figures.

In 2019, for example, U.S. Marines and sailors with SPMAGTF-CR advised local forces at the Uganda Rapid Deployment Capability Center in Jinja, Uganda, and Peace Operations Training Center in Singo, Uganda. “We started training alongside the UPDF members by covering weapons handling and safety rules, land navigation, and reaction of enemy contact, to lead us to the main focus of this iteration which is patrolling tactics,” explained U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Wade, a team leader with SPMAGTF-CR at the time.

In 2020, U.S. soldiers conducted a training course on leadership skills with Uganda Wildlife Authority rangers. In 2022, Bob Paciesky Ogiki, the chief of staff of the Ugandan military’s land forces, traveled to the U.S.-run African Land Forces Colloquium in Grafenwöhr, Germany, where top leaders discussed security challenges and, according to U.S. military press releases, “ways to ‘Train to Fight.’” Earlier this year, portions of AFRICOM’s Justified Accord 23, a long-running multinational exercise involving more than 20 countries, were held in Uganda.

Uganda has been an especially important U.S. partner, according to a 2020 inspector general’s report, because it is the only one of five troop-contributing countries to the AMISOM mission to have “engaged in joint combat operations with [Somali] troops.” The largest African Union contingent in Somalia force for many years, Uganda has suffered grave losses there. Last month, fighters from the terror group al-Shabab attacked Ugandan troops at a base for the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia. Uganda put its death toll at 54; al-Shabab said the coordinated assault killed 137.

According to the 2020 inspector general’s report, “Uganda sent two UH-1 ‘Huey’ helicopters, purchased by the U.S. Government, and two Bell-412 helicopters to … [Somalia’s] Baledogle Military Airfield to provide airlift and reconnaissance capabilities to AMISOM operations.” That year, the State Department also awarded a $14.7 million grant to Bancroft Global Development, a private military contractor, “to mentor and train both [Somalia’s] Danab Brigade and Ugandan forces.” In addition to all the military support, the United States also provides significant humanitarian and economic assistance to Uganda, with the total amount approaching $1 billion per year.

“This draconian new legislation deprives LGBTQ+ Ugandans of their basic human rights. It is shocking and shameful,” Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., told The Intercept by email. “I hope that the Ugandan courts will act to protect the basic human rights of all Ugandans, regardless of their sexual identity.”

AFRICOM did not respond to questions about whether cutting military aid to Uganda would affect its mission or if its reluctance to answer questions about Uganda was linked to its anti-LGBTQ+ law.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Nick Turse.

Photo by Erwan Hesry

On June 3rd, President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that lifted the government’s debt ceiling and capped some categories of government spending. The big winner was — surprise, surprise! — the Pentagon.

Congress spared military-related programs any cuts while freezing all other categories of discretionary spending at the fiscal year 2023 level (except support for veterans). Indeed, lawmakers set the budget for the Pentagon and for other national security programs like nuclear-related work developing nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy at the level requested in the administration’s Fiscal Year 2024 budget proposal — a 3.3% increase in military spending to a whopping total of $886 billion. Consider that preferential treatment of the first order and, mind you, for the only government agency that’s failed to pass a single financial audit!

Even so, that $886 billion hike in Pentagon and related spending is likely to prove just a floor, not a ceiling, on what will be allocated for “national defense” next year. An analysis of the deal by the Wall Street Journal found that spending on the Pentagon and veterans’ care — neither of which is frozen in the agreement — is likely to pass $1 trillion next year.

Compare that to the $637 billion left for the rest of the government’s discretionary budget. In other words, public health, environmental protection, housing, transportation, and almost everything else the government undertakes will have to make do with not even 45% of the federal government’s discretionary budget, less than what would be needed to keep up with inflation. (Forget addressing unmet needs in this country.)

And count on one thing: national security spending is likely to increase even more, thanks to a huge (if little-noticed) loophole in that budget deal, one that hawks in Congress are already salivating over how best to exploit. Yes, that loophole is easy to miss, given the bureaucratese used to explain it, but its potential impact on soaring military budgets couldn’t be clearer. In its analysis of the budget deal, the Congressional Budget Office noted that “funding designated as an emergency requirement or for overseas contingency operations would not be constrained” by anything the senators and House congressional representatives had agreed to.

As we should have learned from the 20 years of all-American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the term “overseas contingency” can be stretched to cover almost anything the Pentagon wants to spend your tax dollars on. In fact, there was even an “Overseas Contingency Operations” (OCO) account supposedly reserved for funding this country’s seemingly never-ending post-9/11 wars. And it certainly was used to fund them, but hundreds of billions of dollars of Pentagon projects that had nothing to do with the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan were funded that way as well. The critics of Pentagon overspending quickly dubbed it that department’s “slush fund.”

So, prepare yourself for “Slush Fund II” (coming soon to a theater near you). This time the vehicle for padding the Pentagon budget is likely to be the next military aid package for Ukraine, which will likely be put forward as an emergency bill later this year.  Expect that package to include not only aid to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s ongoing brutal invasion but tens of billions of dollars more to — yes, of course! — pump up the Pentagon’s already bloated budget.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) made just such a point in talking with reporters shortly after the debt-ceiling deal was passed by Congress. “There will be a day before too long,” he told them, “where we’ll have to deal with the Ukrainian situation. And that will create an opportunity for me and others to fill in the deficiencies that exist from this budget deal.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) made a similar point in a statement on the Senate floor during the debate over that deal. “The debt ceiling deal,” he said, “does nothing to limit the Senate’s ability to appropriate emergency/supplemental funds to ensure our military capabilities are sufficient to deter China, Russia, and our other adversaries and respond to ongoing and growing national security threats.”

One potential (and surprising) snag in the future plans of those Pentagon budget boosters in both parties may be the position of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). He has, in fact, described efforts to increase Pentagon spending beyond the level set in the recent budget deal as “part of the problem.” For the moment at least, he openly opposes producing an emergency package to increase the Pentagon budget, saying:

“The last five audits the Department of Defense [have] failed. So there’s a lot of places for reform [where] we can have a lot of savings. We’ve plussed it up. This is the most money we’ve ever spent on defense — this is the most money anyone in the world has ever spent on defense. So I don’t think the first answer is to do a supplemental.”

The Massive Overfunding of the Pentagon

The Department of Defense is, of course, already massively overfunded. That $886 billion figure is among the highest ever — hundreds of billions of dollars more than at the peak of the Korean or Vietnam wars or during the most intensely combative years of the Cold War. It’s higher than the combined military budgets of the next 10 countries combined, most of whom are, in any case, U.S. allies. And it’s estimated to be three times what the Chinese military, the Pentagon’s “pacing threat,” receives annually. Consider it an irony that actually “keeping pace” with China would involve a massive cut in military spending, not an increase in the Pentagon’s bloated budget.

It also should go without saying that preparations to effectively defend the United States and its allies could be achieved for so much less than is currently lavished on the Pentagon.  A new approach could easily save significantly more than $100 billion in fiscal year 2024, as proposed by Representatives Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) in the People Over Pentagon Act, the preeminent budget-cut proposal in Congress. An illustrative report released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in late 2021 sketched out three scenarios, all involving a less interventionist, more restrained approach to defense that would include greater reliance on allies. Each option would reduce America’s 1.3-million-strong active military force (by up to one-fifth in one scenario). Total savings from the CBO’s proposed changes would, over a decade, be $1 trillion.

And a more comprehensive approach that shifted away from the current “cover the globe” strategy of being able to fight (though, as the history of this century shows, not always win) wars virtually anywhere on Earth on short notice — without allies, if necessary — could save hundreds of billions more over the next decade. Cutting bureaucracy and making other changes in defense policy could also yield yet more savings. To cite just two examples, reducing the Pentagon’s cohort of more than half-a-million private contract employees and scaling back its nuclear weapons “modernization” program would save significantly more than $300 billion extra over a decade.

But none of this is even remotely likely without concerted public pressure to, as a start, keep members of Congress from adding tens of billions of dollars in spending on parochial military projects that channel funding into their states or districts. And it would also mean pushing back against the propaganda of Pentagon contractors who claim they need ever more money to provide adequate tools to defend the country.

Contractors Crying Wolf

While demanding ever more of our tax dollars, the giant military-industrial corporations are spending all too much of their time simply stuffing the pockets of their shareholders rather than investing in the tools needed to actually defend this country. A recent Department of Defense report found that, from 2010-2019, such companies increased by 73% over the previous decade what they paid their shareholders. Meanwhile, their investment in research, development, and capital assets declined significantly. Still, such corporations claim that, without further Pentagon funding, they can’t afford to invest enough in their businesses to meet future national security challenges, which include ramping up weapons production to provide arms for Ukraine.

In reality, however, the financial data suggests that they simply chose to reward their shareholders over everything and everyone else, even as they experienced steadily improving profit margins and cash generation. In fact, the report pointed out that those companies “generate substantial amounts of cash beyond their needs for operations or capital investment.” So instead of investing further in their businesses, they choose to eat their “seed corn” by prioritizing short-term gains over long-term investments and by “investing” additional profits in their shareholders. And when you eat your seed corn, you have nothing left to plant next year.

Never fear, though, since Congress seems eternally prepared to bail them out. Their businesses, in fact, continue to thrive because Congress authorizes funding for the Pentagon to repeatedly grant them massive contracts, no matter their performance or lack of internal investment. No other industry could get away with such maximalist thinking.

Military contractors outperform similarly sized companies in non-defense industries in eight out of nine key financial metrics — including higher total returns to shareholders (a category where they leave much of the rest of the S&P 500 in the dust). They financially outshine their commercial counterparts for two obvious reasons: first, the government subsidizes so many of their costs; second, the weapons industry is so concentrated that its major firms have little or no competition.

Adding insult to injury, contractors are overcharging the government for the basic weaponry they produce while they rake in cash to enrich their shareholders. In the past 15 years, the Pentagon’s internal watchdog has exposed price gouging by contractors ranging from Boeing and Lockheed Martin to lesser-known companies like TransDigm Group. In 2011, Boeing made about $13 million in excess profits by overcharging the Army for 18 spare parts used in Apache and Chinook helicopters. To put that in perspective, the Army paid $1,678.61 each for a tiny helicopter part that the Pentagon already had in stock at its own warehouse for only $7.71.

The Pentagon found Lockheed Martin and Boeing price gouging together in 2015. They overcharged the military by “hundreds of millions of dollars” for missiles.TransDigm similarly made $16 million by overcharging for spare parts between 2015 and 2017 and even more in the following two years, generating nearly $21 million in excess profits. If you can believe it, there is no legal requirement for such companies to refund the government if they’re exposed for price gouging.

Of course, there’s nothing new about such corporate price gouging, nor is it unique to the arms industry. But it’s especially egregious there, given how heavily the major military contractors depend on the government’s business. Lockheed Martin, the biggest of them, got a staggering 73% of its $66 billion in net sales from the government in 2022. Boeing, which does far more commercial business, still generated 40% of its revenue from the government that year. (Down from 51% in 2020.)

Despite their reliance on government contracts, companies like Boeing seem to be doubling down on practices that often lead to price gouging. According to Bloomberg News, between 2020 and 2021, Boeing refused to provide the Pentagon with certified cost and pricing data for nearly 11,000 spare parts on a single Air Force contract. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative John Garamendi (D-CA) have demanded that the Pentagon investigate since, without such information, the department will continue to be hard-pressed to ensure that it’s paying anything like a fair price, whatever its purchases.

Curbing the Special Interest Politics of “Defense”

Reining in rip-offs and corruption on the part of weapons contractors large and small could save the American taxpayer untold billions of dollars. And curbing special-interest politics on the part of the denizens of the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) could help open the way towards the development of a truly defensive global military strategy rather than the current interventionist approach that has embroiled the United States in the devastating and counterproductive wars of this century.

One modest step towards reining in the power of the arms lobby would be to revamp the campaign finance system by providing federal matching funds, thereby diluting the influential nature of the tens of millions in campaign contributions the arms industry makes every election cycle. In addition, prohibiting retiring top military officers from going to work for arms-making companies — or, at least, extending the cooling off period to at least four years before they can do so, as proposed by Senator Warren — would also help reduce the undue influence exerted by the MICC.

Last but not least, steps could be taken to prevent the military services from giving Congress their annual wish lists — officially known as “unfunded priorities lists” — of items they want added to the Pentagon budget. After all, those are but another tool allowing members of Congress to add billions more than what the Pentagon has even asked for to that department’s budget.

Whether such reforms alone, if adopted, would be enough to truly roll back excess Pentagon spending remains to be seen. Without them, however, count on one thing: the department’s budget will almost certainly continue to soar, undoubtedly reaching $1 trillion or more annually within just the next few years.  Americans can’t afford to let that happen.

This column is distributed by TomDispatch.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Julia Gledhill – William D. Hartung.

Photo by Erwan Hesry

On June 3rd, President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that lifted the government’s debt ceiling and capped some categories of government spending. The big winner was — surprise, surprise! — the Pentagon.

Congress spared military-related programs any cuts while freezing all other categories of discretionary spending at the fiscal year 2023 level (except support for veterans). Indeed, lawmakers set the budget for the Pentagon and for other national security programs like nuclear-related work developing nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy at the level requested in the administration’s Fiscal Year 2024 budget proposal — a 3.3% increase in military spending to a whopping total of $886 billion. Consider that preferential treatment of the first order and, mind you, for the only government agency that’s failed to pass a single financial audit!

Even so, that $886 billion hike in Pentagon and related spending is likely to prove just a floor, not a ceiling, on what will be allocated for “national defense” next year. An analysis of the deal by the Wall Street Journal found that spending on the Pentagon and veterans’ care — neither of which is frozen in the agreement — is likely to pass $1 trillion next year.

Compare that to the $637 billion left for the rest of the government’s discretionary budget. In other words, public health, environmental protection, housing, transportation, and almost everything else the government undertakes will have to make do with not even 45% of the federal government’s discretionary budget, less than what would be needed to keep up with inflation. (Forget addressing unmet needs in this country.)

And count on one thing: national security spending is likely to increase even more, thanks to a huge (if little-noticed) loophole in that budget deal, one that hawks in Congress are already salivating over how best to exploit. Yes, that loophole is easy to miss, given the bureaucratese used to explain it, but its potential impact on soaring military budgets couldn’t be clearer. In its analysis of the budget deal, the Congressional Budget Office noted that “funding designated as an emergency requirement or for overseas contingency operations would not be constrained” by anything the senators and House congressional representatives had agreed to.

As we should have learned from the 20 years of all-American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the term “overseas contingency” can be stretched to cover almost anything the Pentagon wants to spend your tax dollars on. In fact, there was even an “Overseas Contingency Operations” (OCO) account supposedly reserved for funding this country’s seemingly never-ending post-9/11 wars. And it certainly was used to fund them, but hundreds of billions of dollars of Pentagon projects that had nothing to do with the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan were funded that way as well. The critics of Pentagon overspending quickly dubbed it that department’s “slush fund.”

So, prepare yourself for “Slush Fund II” (coming soon to a theater near you). This time the vehicle for padding the Pentagon budget is likely to be the next military aid package for Ukraine, which will likely be put forward as an emergency bill later this year.  Expect that package to include not only aid to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s ongoing brutal invasion but tens of billions of dollars more to — yes, of course! — pump up the Pentagon’s already bloated budget.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) made just such a point in talking with reporters shortly after the debt-ceiling deal was passed by Congress. “There will be a day before too long,” he told them, “where we’ll have to deal with the Ukrainian situation. And that will create an opportunity for me and others to fill in the deficiencies that exist from this budget deal.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) made a similar point in a statement on the Senate floor during the debate over that deal. “The debt ceiling deal,” he said, “does nothing to limit the Senate’s ability to appropriate emergency/supplemental funds to ensure our military capabilities are sufficient to deter China, Russia, and our other adversaries and respond to ongoing and growing national security threats.”

One potential (and surprising) snag in the future plans of those Pentagon budget boosters in both parties may be the position of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). He has, in fact, described efforts to increase Pentagon spending beyond the level set in the recent budget deal as “part of the problem.” For the moment at least, he openly opposes producing an emergency package to increase the Pentagon budget, saying:

“The last five audits the Department of Defense [have] failed. So there’s a lot of places for reform [where] we can have a lot of savings. We’ve plussed it up. This is the most money we’ve ever spent on defense — this is the most money anyone in the world has ever spent on defense. So I don’t think the first answer is to do a supplemental.”

The Massive Overfunding of the Pentagon

The Department of Defense is, of course, already massively overfunded. That $886 billion figure is among the highest ever — hundreds of billions of dollars more than at the peak of the Korean or Vietnam wars or during the most intensely combative years of the Cold War. It’s higher than the combined military budgets of the next 10 countries combined, most of whom are, in any case, U.S. allies. And it’s estimated to be three times what the Chinese military, the Pentagon’s “pacing threat,” receives annually. Consider it an irony that actually “keeping pace” with China would involve a massive cut in military spending, not an increase in the Pentagon’s bloated budget.

It also should go without saying that preparations to effectively defend the United States and its allies could be achieved for so much less than is currently lavished on the Pentagon.  A new approach could easily save significantly more than $100 billion in fiscal year 2024, as proposed by Representatives Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) in the People Over Pentagon Act, the preeminent budget-cut proposal in Congress. An illustrative report released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in late 2021 sketched out three scenarios, all involving a less interventionist, more restrained approach to defense that would include greater reliance on allies. Each option would reduce America’s 1.3-million-strong active military force (by up to one-fifth in one scenario). Total savings from the CBO’s proposed changes would, over a decade, be $1 trillion.

And a more comprehensive approach that shifted away from the current “cover the globe” strategy of being able to fight (though, as the history of this century shows, not always win) wars virtually anywhere on Earth on short notice — without allies, if necessary — could save hundreds of billions more over the next decade. Cutting bureaucracy and making other changes in defense policy could also yield yet more savings. To cite just two examples, reducing the Pentagon’s cohort of more than half-a-million private contract employees and scaling back its nuclear weapons “modernization” program would save significantly more than $300 billion extra over a decade.

But none of this is even remotely likely without concerted public pressure to, as a start, keep members of Congress from adding tens of billions of dollars in spending on parochial military projects that channel funding into their states or districts. And it would also mean pushing back against the propaganda of Pentagon contractors who claim they need ever more money to provide adequate tools to defend the country.

Contractors Crying Wolf

While demanding ever more of our tax dollars, the giant military-industrial corporations are spending all too much of their time simply stuffing the pockets of their shareholders rather than investing in the tools needed to actually defend this country. A recent Department of Defense report found that, from 2010-2019, such companies increased by 73% over the previous decade what they paid their shareholders. Meanwhile, their investment in research, development, and capital assets declined significantly. Still, such corporations claim that, without further Pentagon funding, they can’t afford to invest enough in their businesses to meet future national security challenges, which include ramping up weapons production to provide arms for Ukraine.

In reality, however, the financial data suggests that they simply chose to reward their shareholders over everything and everyone else, even as they experienced steadily improving profit margins and cash generation. In fact, the report pointed out that those companies “generate substantial amounts of cash beyond their needs for operations or capital investment.” So instead of investing further in their businesses, they choose to eat their “seed corn” by prioritizing short-term gains over long-term investments and by “investing” additional profits in their shareholders. And when you eat your seed corn, you have nothing left to plant next year.

Never fear, though, since Congress seems eternally prepared to bail them out. Their businesses, in fact, continue to thrive because Congress authorizes funding for the Pentagon to repeatedly grant them massive contracts, no matter their performance or lack of internal investment. No other industry could get away with such maximalist thinking.

Military contractors outperform similarly sized companies in non-defense industries in eight out of nine key financial metrics — including higher total returns to shareholders (a category where they leave much of the rest of the S&P 500 in the dust). They financially outshine their commercial counterparts for two obvious reasons: first, the government subsidizes so many of their costs; second, the weapons industry is so concentrated that its major firms have little or no competition.

Adding insult to injury, contractors are overcharging the government for the basic weaponry they produce while they rake in cash to enrich their shareholders. In the past 15 years, the Pentagon’s internal watchdog has exposed price gouging by contractors ranging from Boeing and Lockheed Martin to lesser-known companies like TransDigm Group. In 2011, Boeing made about $13 million in excess profits by overcharging the Army for 18 spare parts used in Apache and Chinook helicopters. To put that in perspective, the Army paid $1,678.61 each for a tiny helicopter part that the Pentagon already had in stock at its own warehouse for only $7.71.

The Pentagon found Lockheed Martin and Boeing price gouging together in 2015. They overcharged the military by “hundreds of millions of dollars” for missiles.TransDigm similarly made $16 million by overcharging for spare parts between 2015 and 2017 and even more in the following two years, generating nearly $21 million in excess profits. If you can believe it, there is no legal requirement for such companies to refund the government if they’re exposed for price gouging.

Of course, there’s nothing new about such corporate price gouging, nor is it unique to the arms industry. But it’s especially egregious there, given how heavily the major military contractors depend on the government’s business. Lockheed Martin, the biggest of them, got a staggering 73% of its $66 billion in net sales from the government in 2022. Boeing, which does far more commercial business, still generated 40% of its revenue from the government that year. (Down from 51% in 2020.)

Despite their reliance on government contracts, companies like Boeing seem to be doubling down on practices that often lead to price gouging. According to Bloomberg News, between 2020 and 2021, Boeing refused to provide the Pentagon with certified cost and pricing data for nearly 11,000 spare parts on a single Air Force contract. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative John Garamendi (D-CA) have demanded that the Pentagon investigate since, without such information, the department will continue to be hard-pressed to ensure that it’s paying anything like a fair price, whatever its purchases.

Curbing the Special Interest Politics of “Defense”

Reining in rip-offs and corruption on the part of weapons contractors large and small could save the American taxpayer untold billions of dollars. And curbing special-interest politics on the part of the denizens of the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) could help open the way towards the development of a truly defensive global military strategy rather than the current interventionist approach that has embroiled the United States in the devastating and counterproductive wars of this century.

One modest step towards reining in the power of the arms lobby would be to revamp the campaign finance system by providing federal matching funds, thereby diluting the influential nature of the tens of millions in campaign contributions the arms industry makes every election cycle. In addition, prohibiting retiring top military officers from going to work for arms-making companies — or, at least, extending the cooling off period to at least four years before they can do so, as proposed by Senator Warren — would also help reduce the undue influence exerted by the MICC.

Last but not least, steps could be taken to prevent the military services from giving Congress their annual wish lists — officially known as “unfunded priorities lists” — of items they want added to the Pentagon budget. After all, those are but another tool allowing members of Congress to add billions more than what the Pentagon has even asked for to that department’s budget.

Whether such reforms alone, if adopted, would be enough to truly roll back excess Pentagon spending remains to be seen. Without them, however, count on one thing: the department’s budget will almost certainly continue to soar, undoubtedly reaching $1 trillion or more annually within just the next few years.  Americans can’t afford to let that happen.

This column is distributed by TomDispatch.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Julia Gledhill – William D. Hartung.

We remember the life and legacy of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who died Friday at the age of 92, just months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, then a top military strategist working for the RAND Corporation, risked life in prison by secretly copying and then leaking 7,000 pages of top-secret documents outlining the secret history of the U.S. War in Vietnam. The leak would end up helping to take down President Nixon, accelerate the end of the War in Vietnam and lead to a major victory for press freedom. Henry Kissinger once called Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America.” Over the past 50 years, Ellsberg remained an antiwar and anti-nuclear activist who inspired a new generation of whistleblowers. We mark his death with excerpts from some of our interviews with Ellsberg over the years about Vietnam, as well as Ukraine, tensions with China, the threat of nuclear war and working toward a more honest discourse about U.S. policy. “To this day, the very idea that the U.S. is … an empire is a taboo, and a very unfortunate one, because it makes it impossible to understand what’s going on,” Ellsberg said.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Photograph Source: Carl-Henrik Skårstedt – CC BY 2.0

Once again, while other needs are squeezed, a federal budget deal will literally starve the poor to feed the military. While new work requirements are placed on SNAP recipients that will drive some from the food support program, the military budget (never call it defense) remains untouched. The recent debt ceiling deal leaves Joe Biden’s $886 billion 2024 Pentagon budget request intact while domestic programs are slashed.

In real terms it is the largest military budget in U.S. history, the only exceptions being World War II and the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that came after 9-11. Larger by far than during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, or the Reagan military buildup.

The real military budget is even higher. Adding in nuclear weapons, foreign military aid and “intelligence,” the project puts the current 2023 budget at $920 billion. That is still an undercount. William Hartung, an expert on military spending, calculates that even in fiscal year 2020 the total military expenditure was $1.25 trillion, adding in other costs such as support for veterans and debt service. It’s easily pushing $1.5 trillion by now.

The U.S. by far is the biggest military spender on Earth, with 39% of the total, exceeding the next 10 nations combined, as this chart shows:

Most warlike nation

So why is the military budget so unassailable? Why, no matter how often bloated military spending is denounced, does the budget climb toward ever greater heights? Even after Dwight Eisenhower made the famous warning in his farewell address:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Ike would have known, being one of the progenitors of that complex as the general leading U.S. forces that invaded Europe during D-Day and as the president during the nuclear buildup of much of the early Cold War. One clue as to why his warning went unheeded is in the fact he originally wanted to call it the military-industrial-congressional complex, the “iron triangle” that keeps pumping up military expenditures. As Hartung writes, Congress is bought by the weapons industry. It is a kind of money laundering scheme where increased military spending comes back as campaign donations, a perfect example of the legalized bribery that is the real governing system of the U.S.

But there are deeper reasons, explaining why that “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” for which Ike called has never appeared, at least to the level able to tie back the power of the complex. War and militarism are rooted deep in the U.S. of American experience. As former President Jimmy Carter said, “If you go around the world and ask people which is the most warlike country on Earth, which one do you think they would respond? The United States. Since we left the Second World War, and even before, the United States has constantly been at war in some part of the world. We’ve been in about 30 combats with other countries since the Second World War . . .  So I would say that the military-industrial complex, the manufacturers of all kinds of weapons, are very influential in the country and the Congress as well.”

Carter noted that the U.S. hasn’t been at war with someone only 16 years of its 242-year history. (Even that is doubtful since even during Carter’s so-called peaceful years the U.S. was stirring up trouble in Afghanistan in a successful effort to give the Soviets “their own Vietnam,” as his National Security Adviser, Zbignew Brzezinski, has confessed.) The list is extensive. If the U.S. was not fighting with some European or Asian power, it was warring on some native nation or another on the frontier.  War has worked for the United States, historian Geoffrey Perrett noted in his 1989 history of major U.S. conflicts, Country Made by War.

“Since 1775 no nation on Earth has had as much experience of war as the United States: nine major wars in nine generations. And in between the wars have come other armed conflicts such as the Philippine insurgency and clashes in the Persian Gulf. America’s wars have been like the rungs on a ladder by which it rose to greatness. No other nation has triumphed so long, so consistently, or on such as vast scale, through force of arms.”

Although conflicts since World War II have not been so successful, nonetheless they failed to dislodge the fundamental U.S triumph in that war, which left it overwhelmingly dominant over all other powers, each of which had been ravaged in the war. As historian Alfred McCoy noted in his recent work, To Govern the Globe, it left the U.S. in the unprecedented position of holding sway on both European and Asian ends of Eurasia. If this hegemony is eroding with the rise of China and other powers, the U.S. still remains in a powerful position.

“Born and bred of empire”

To all this one must ask the more fundamental question. Why has the U.S. been the most warlike, most continually at war? For the answer we can look to historian William Appleman Williams and the title of his final book which summarized his substantial life work, published in 1980, Empire as a Way of Life. Williams was the dean of what came to be known as the revisionist school of U.S. history that penetrated the myth of American exceptionalism with the facts of history, that the U.S. was an empire from its colonial roots, and behaved much as any other empire.

First let Williams define his terms. “ . . . a way of life is the combination of patterns of thought and action that, as it becomes habitual and institutionalized, defines the thrust and character of a culture and society.” Then, empire, a system in which, “The will, and power, of one element asserts its superiority.” In some cases empire “concerns the forcible subjugation of formerly independent people by a wholly external power.” Such as native peoples or those who lived in the former northern half of Mexico.

Williams does not let the mass of U.S. of Americans off. We are enmeshed in the ways of empire.

“Empire became so intrinsically our American way of life that we rationalized and suppressed the nature of our means in the euphoria of the enjoyment of the ends . . . It is perhaps a bit too extreme, but only by a whisker, to say that imperialism has been the opiate of the American people.”

The U.S. was “born and bred” of another empire, the British. “The 19^th– and 20^th-century empire known as the United States of America began as a gleam in the eyes of various 16^th century critics of, and advisers to, Elizabeth I,” Williams explains. At that time, “England was then a backward and underdeveloped small island” outclassed by other powers emerging in the Atlantic fringe, Portugal, Spain, France and The Netherlands, who were already commencing the age of European world conquest.

England concluded that “domestic welfare and social peace required vigorous imperial expansion,” and began first by consolidating the internal empire on the British Isles in Scotland and Ireland, and then in the 1600s expanding to the North American coast. “ . . . the most significant aspect of the empire was the success in transforming the American colonies from tiny, insecure outposts into dynamic societies generating their own progress . . . It produced another culture based on the proposition that expansion was the key to freedom, prosperity, and social peace.”

Inevitably, tensions rose between the ruling class of the home isles and the rising elites of the colonies. Benjamin Franklin believed the weight of development would eventually move the center of the British Empire to North America (which it finally did in 1945, but that comes later in the story), and until nearly the time of the split recommended that course. “But the British feared that such a policy would lead to the loss of control and profits, and Americans increasingly asserted their own claims to their own empire,” Williams writes.

That culminated in the Revolutionary War and the successful creation of the United States. But a weak central government seemed unable to fully press forward what George Washington would call “a rising empire” – the founders were not shy about using that kind of language. It appeared the union would fray into two or more nations, while uprisings such as Shay’s Rebellion threatened to shatter social peace. So the new national elites came together to create a framework to ensure continued expansion under a strong central government, the Constitution. Writes Williams, “ . . . the Constitution was an instrument of imperial government at home and abroad.”

“Extend the sphere”

The Constitution was founded on a clever turnaround of a fundamental political understanding architected by one of its key authors, James Madison. The general belief to that point had been exposited by French political philosopher Montesquieu “that liberty could only exist in a small state. Madison boldly argued the opposite: that empire was essential for freedom.” Madison needed to make that argument because many citizens of the new nation, burned by their experience with Britain, wanted nothing to do with a strong central government.

Madison made his case in a letter to Thomas Jefferson. “This form of government, in order to effect its purpose, must operate not within a small but extensive sphere . . . Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or in such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all to feel it . . . to act in unison with each other.”

Williams writes, “He was arguing that surplus social space and surplus resources were necessary to maintain economic welfare, social stability, freedom and representative government.” A strong central government would be needed to expand land for agriculture, to expand and protect exports, and to promote manufacturing.

With the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis & Clark Expedition to the Pacific, Jefferson fully embraced Madison’s understanding. “I am persuaded that no constitution was ever before as well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government,” he said as he left the presidency. “Jeffersonian Democracy, as it came to be called, was a creature of imperial expansion,” Williams writes. “He, perhaps even more than Madison, established it as a way of life, and most Americans embraced it because it gave them personal and social rewards.”

So much for the “alert and knowledgeable citizenry.”

“ . . . once people begin to acquire and enjoy and take for granted and waste surplus resources and space as a routine part of their lives,” Williams writes, “and to view them as a sign of God’s favor, then it requires a genius to make a career – let alone a culture – on the basis of agreeing upon limits. Especially when several continents lie largely naked off your shores.”

The myth of empty continents and the racism it embodies has always been part of the story. “Racism . . . began and survived as a psychologically justifying and economically profitable fairy tale. It provided the gloss for the harsh truth that empire . . . is the child of an inability or unwillingness to live within one’s own mans. Empire as a way of life is predicated upon having more than one needs.”

This originally appeared in The Raven.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Mazza.

Around 7:45 pm in the evening, the news channel, Republic, aired the visuals on television and invited a ‘strategic expert’ to shed some light on the incident. The tickers running at the bottom of the screen displayed messages such as, “RT reports explosion near Pentagon”, “Images show huge plumes of smoke”, and “More details awaited on Pentagon situation”.

Social media channels of Times Now Navbharat, News18 Madhya Pradesh, and First India News shared a newsflash to inform their followers about the incident.

Zee News initially published a video report on the incident, but subsequently removed it. However, a cached version of the report can be accessed through Bing.

Fact Check

Shortly after these visuals gained global attention, Nick Waters, a digital investigator associated with Bellingcat, an influential investigative news website, made a significant observation. Waters pointed out that the widely circulated photos exhibited distinct characteristics commonly found in images produced through the Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Confident that this picture claiming to show an “explosion near the pentagon” is AI generated.

Check out the frontage of the building, and the way the fence melds into the crowd barriers. There’s also no other images, videos or people posting as first hand witnesses. pic.twitter.com/t1YKQabuNL

— Nick Waters (@N_Waters89) May 22, 2023

Furthermore, it is worth noting that no other visuals documenting the alleged explosion were available in the public domain. In response to the online claims, the official Twitter account of Arlington Fire & EMS issued a statement to clarify the situation, emphasizing that there was no explosion or incident occurring in or around the Pentagon. Pentagon, the headquarters of the US department of defence, is situated in Arlington County, Virginia.

The tweet explicitly stated, “There is NO explosion or incident taking place at or near the Pentagon reservation, and there is no immediate danger or hazards to the public.”

@PFPAOfficial and the ACFD are aware of a social media report circulating online about an explosion near the Pentagon. There is NO explosion or incident taking place at or near the Pentagon reservation, and there is no immediate danger or hazards to the public. pic.twitter.com/uznY0s7deL

— Arlington Fire & EMS (@ArlingtonVaFD) May 22, 2023

According to reports, the synthetic image in question was initially shared and amplified by various sources. These sources include RT, a Russian state media outlet, a verified Twitter account named Bloomberg Feed, an individual known as Walter Bloomberg, and an account called ZeroHedge.

It is worth noting that ZeroHedge frequently shares conspiracy theories that attract significant attention. The account was previously suspended by Twitter and has been reinstated under the Musk regime. After the AI-generated image went viral, a spokesperson from Bloomberg News clarified that the two accounts using the name “Bloomberg” were not associated with Bloomberg News.

Subsequently, RT deleted its tweet; Twitter suspended the account “Bloomberg Feed” and Republic issued a clarification on the same.

Republic had aired news of a possible explosion near the Pentagon citing a post & picture tweeted by RT. RT has deleted the post and Republic has pulled back the newsbreak

— Republic (@republic) May 22, 2023

It is pertinent to mention here that the rapid progress in AI has revolutionized the creation of synthetic images, making it possible to generate such content within minutes. Barely a week ago, Alt News published a fact check exposing the usage of AI-generated images featuring former Pakistan PM Imran Khan. These images were aired on Indian television news channels as ‘exclusive’ visuals of Khan in prison.

The post News outlets show AI-generated image, falsely report blast near Pentagon, USA appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Kalim Ahmed.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Daniel Boguslaw.

World military spending has reached a new record high of $2.24 trillion in 2022, according to new data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). That’s up 3.7% since the previous year, including the steepest increase among European nations since the end of the Cold War over 30 years ago.

The United States remains the world’s largest military spender by far, with its $877 billion representing 39% of global military spending. That’s three times as much as the second largest spender, China, which spent $292 billion in 2022. And it’s about ten times as much as the next largest spender, Russia, which spent about $86 billion in the same year.

U.S. spending is more than the next ten countries combined, more than last year when it was larger than the next nine. Many of these next ten countries are geopolitically aligned with the U.S. — including Ukraine, which had the highest single-year increase in military spending SIPRI has ever recorded, rising 640% to $44 billion since Russia invaded.

U.S. military aid to Ukraine amounted to $19.9 billion in 2022, but this was only 2.3% of total U.S. military spending. Military spending by NATO members, including the U.S., totalled $1.232 trillion in 2022, up 0.9% since 2021. Many analysts have predicted a long-term war of attrition, with no victory in sight for either side – it remains unclear how continuously increasing militarization can end this war.

Meanwhile, basic needs continue to go unmet for hundreds of millions of people around the world. The climate crisis continues to wreak havoc, and the U.S. has barely begun to address its historical responsibility in contributing to global fossil fuel emissions. The nations of the world are dangerously unprepared to secure our collective planetary future.

The full U.S. military budget is much more than the $514 billion spent by the rest of the world’s 144 nations combined. That’s a difference of $363 billion, which would be enough to fund solar power for nearly every household in the U.S. for 10 years.

$363 billion would be enough to fund 43 million public housing units – more than the 38 million people displaced as refugees in the post-9/11 wars waged by the U.S. over the past two decades.

Just 10% of the U.S. military budget would go a long way toward meeting any number of societal needs.

It’s worth noting that it’s not inevitable for countries to keep perpetually increasing their military budgets – a number of large nations, like Nigeria and Turkey, have significantly decreased military spending in the past year.

Over-investment in the military is a major cause of the crises we face today. But it’s possible to reinvest in real solutions and begin to repair the harm caused by many decades of war.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Ashik Siddique.

As automated text generators have rapidly, dazzlingly advanced from fantasy to novelty to genuine tool, they are starting to reach the inevitable next phase: weapon. The Pentagon and intelligence agencies are openly planning to use tools like ChatGPT to advance their mission — but the company behind the mega-popular chatbot is silent.

OpenAI, the nearly $30 billion R&D titan behind ChatGPT, provides a public list of ethical lines it will not cross, business it will not pursue no matter how lucrative, on the grounds that it could harm humanity. Among many forbidden use cases, OpenAI says it has preemptively ruled out military and other “high risk” government applications. Like its rivals, Google and Microsoft, OpenAI is eager to declare its lofty values but unwilling to earnestly discuss what these purported values mean in practice, or how — or even if — they’d be enforced.

“If there’s one thing to take away from what you’re looking at here, it’s the weakness of leaving it to companies to police themselves.”

The Pentagon seen from above in Washington, D.C, on May 25, 2016.

Photo: U.S. Army

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Sam Biddle.

In the 1983 movie “WarGames,” a young hacker played by Matthew Broderick inadvertently accesses a fictional supercomputer belonging to the U.S. military. Before realizing he has found a system the North American Aerospace Defense Command uses for war simulations, he searches for computer games. The list he gets back starts with classic games like checkers and bridge, but to his surprise, it also includes games called “Guerrilla Engagement” and “Theaterwide Biotoxic and Chemical Warfare.”

Turns out the Department of Defense likes to play computer games in real life too.

More than 40 “security awareness” games are available for anyone to play on the website of the Center for Development of Security Excellence, or CDSE, a directorate within the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, the largest security agency within the U.S. government. The DCSA, which refers to itself as “America’s Gatekeeper,” specializes in security of government personnel and infrastructure as well as counterintelligence and insider threat detection. (The Defense Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The Department of Defense’s “Who Is the Risk?” game.

Screenshot: The Intercept

The opening screen for the “Whodunit” game.

Screenshot: The Intercept

The Special Access Program hidden object game.

Screenshot: The Intercept

A Department of Defense poster advising against submitting confidential news tips.

Screenshot: The Intercept

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Nikita Mazurov.

We need glimmers of imagination about the worldwide potential for accomplishing good results by choosing the “works of mercy” over “the works of war.” Why not brainstorm about how resources devoted to military goals of domination and destruction could be put to use defending people against the greatest threats we all face—the looming terror of ecological collapse, the ongoing potential for new pandemics, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and threats to use them?

But a crucial first step entails fact-based education about the global infrastructure of the American military empire. What is the cost of maintaining each base, how much environmental damage does each base cause (consider depleted uranium poison, water contamination, noise pollution, and risks of nuclear weapon storage). We also need analysis about ways the bases exacerbate the likelihood of war and prolong the vicious spirals of violence attendant on all wars. How does the U.S. military justify the base, and what is the human rights record of the government the U.S. negotiated with to build the base?

The unique concept shows all U.S. bases along with their negative impacts in one database that is easy to navigate. This allows people to grasp the intensifying toll of U.S. militarism, and also provides information useful for taking action to close bases.

Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tom Dispatch, notes the paucity of discussion about the expanse of U.S. military bases, some of which he calls MIA because the U.S. military manipulates information and neglects to even name various forwarding operating bases. With very little oversight or discussion on the subject domestically, Engelhardt warns that the “massive (and massively expensive) base structure remains firmly in place.”

Thanks to the tenacious work of researchers who formed the No Bases campaign, World Beyond War (WBW) now presents the many-faced hydra of U.S. militarism, worldwide, in a visual database.

Researchers, scholars, journalists, students, and activists can consult this tool for help in exploring vital questions about the cost and impact of the bases.

It’s a unique and challenging resource.

At the helm of daily exploration enabling the mapping project’s growth is Mohammad Abunahel.

On almost any given day in Abunahel’s busy life, he sets aside time, far more than he is compensated for, to work on the mapping project. He and his wife are both Ph.D. students in Mysore, India. They share caring for their infant son, Munir. He takes care of the baby while she studies, and then they trade roles. For years, Abunahel has devoted skill and energy to create a map which now draws the most “hits” of any section on the WBW website. He considers the map as a step in addressing wider problems of militarism. The unique concept shows all U.S. bases along with their negative impacts in one database that is easy to navigate. This allows people to grasp the intensifying toll of U.S. militarism, and also provides information useful for taking action to close bases.

Abunahel has good reason to resist military dominance and the threats of destroying cities and towns with overwhelming weaponry. He grew up in Gaza. Throughout his young life, before he finally managed to obtain visas and scholarships to study in India, he experienced constant violence and deprivation. As one of ten children in an impoverished family, he readily applied himself in classroom studies, hoping to improve his chances for a normal life, but, along with the constant threats of Israeli military violence, Abunahel faced closed doors, dwindling options, and rising anger, his own and that of most other people he knew. He wanted out. Having lived through successive Israeli Occupation Force onslaughts that killed and maimed hundreds of innocent people of Gaza, including children, and destroyed homes, schools, roadways, electrical infrastructure, fisheries, and farms, Abunahel grew certain that no country has a right to destroy another.

He's also adamant about our collective responsibility to question justifications for the U.S. network of military bases. Abunahel rejects the notion that the bases are necessary to protect U.S. people. He sees clear patterns showing the base network being used to impose U.S. national interests on people in other countries. The threat is clear: If you do not submit yourselves to fulfill U.S. national interests, the United States could eliminate you. And if you don’t believe this, look at other countries that were surrounded by U.S. bases. Consider Iraq, or Afghanistan.

David Swanson, the executive director of World Beyond War, reviewing David Vine’s book, The United States of War, notes that “since the 1950s, a U.S. military presence has correlated with the U.S. military starting conflicts. Vine modifies a line from Field of Dreams to refer not to a baseball field but to bases: ‘If you build them, wars will come.’ Vine also chronicles countless examples of wars begetting bases begetting wars begetting bases that not only beget yet more wars but also serve to justify the expense of more weapons and troops to fill the bases, while simultaneously producing blowback—all of which factors build momentum toward more wars.”

Illustrating the extent of the USA’s network of military outposts deserves support. Calling attention to the WBW website and using it to help resist all wars are vital ways to expand the potential for expanding and organizing resistance to U.S. militarism. WBW will also welcome financial contributions to assist Mohammad Abunahel and his wife who are, by the way, excitedly awaiting the birth of their second child. WBW would like to increase the small income he earns. It will be a way to support his growing family as he raises our awareness of warmaking and our resolve to build a world beyond war.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

America is a stratocracy, a form of government dominated by the military. It is axiomatic among the two ruling parties that there must be a constant preparation for war. The war machine’s massive budgets are sacrosanct. Its billions of dollars in waste and fraud are ignored. Its military fiascos in Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East have disappeared into the vast cavern of historical amnesia. This amnesia, which means there is never accountability, licenses the war machine to economically disembowel the country and drive the Empire into one self-defeating conflict after another. The militarists win every election. They cannot lose. It is impossible to vote against them. The war state is a Götterdämmerung, as Dwight Macdonald writes, “without the gods.”

Since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. Military systems are sold before they are produced with guarantees that huge cost overruns will be covered. Foreign aid is contingent on buying U.S. weapons. Egypt, which receives some $1.3 billion in foreign military financing, is required to devote it to buying and maintaining U.S. weapons systems. Israel has received $158 billion in bilateral assistance from the U.S. since 1949, almost all of it since 1971 in the form of military aid, with most of it going towards arms purchases from U.S. weapons manufacturers. The American public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buys these same weapons systems on behalf of foreign governments. It is a circular system of corporate welfare.

Between October 2021 and September 2022, the U.S. spent $877 billion on the military, that’s more than the next 10 countries, including China, Russia, Germany, France and the United Kingdom combined. These huge military expenditures, along with the rising costs of a for-profit healthcare system, have driven the U.S. national debt to over $31 trillion, nearly $5 trillion more than the U.S.’s entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This imbalance is not sustainable, especially once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency. As of January 2023, the U.S. spent a record $213 billion servicing the interest on its national debt.

The public, bombarded with war propaganda, cheers on their self-immolation. It revels in the despicable beauty of our military prowess. It speaks in the thought-terminating clichés spewed out by mass culture and mass media. It imbibes the illusion of omnipotence and wallows in self-adulation.

The intoxication of war is a plague. It imparts an emotional high that is impervious to logic, reason or fact. No nation is immune. The gravest mistake made by European socialists on the eve of the First World War was the belief that the working classes of France, Germany, Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia and Great Britain would not be divided into antagonistic tribes because of disputes between imperialist governments. They would not, the socialists assured themselves, sign on for the suicidal slaughter of millions of working men in the trenches. Instead, nearly every socialist leader walked away from their anti-war platform to back their nation’s entry into the war. The handful who did not, such as Rosa Luxemburg, were sent to prison.

A society dominated by militarists distorts its social, cultural, economic and political institutions to serve the interests of the war industry. The essence of the military is masked with subterfuges—using the military to carry out humanitarian relief missions, evacuating civilians in danger, as we see in the Sudan, defining military aggression as “humanitarian intervention” or a way to protect democracy and liberty, or lauding the military as carrying out a vital civic function by teaching leadership, responsibility, ethics and skills to young recruits. The true face of the military—industrial slaughter—is hidden.

The mantra of the militarized state is national security. If every discussion begins with a question of national security, every answer includes force or the threat of force. The preoccupation with internal and external threats divides the world into friend and foe, good and evil. Militarized societies are fertile ground for demagogues. Militarists, like demagogues, see other nations and cultures in their own image – threatening and aggressive. They seek only domination.

It was not in our national interest to wage war for two decades across the Middle East. It is not in our national interest to go to war with Russia or China. But militarists need war the way a vampire needs blood.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev and later Vladimir Putin lobbiedto be integrated into western economic and military alliances. An alliance that included Russia would have nullified the calls to expand NATO—which the U.S. had promised it would not do beyond the borders of a unified Germany—and have made it impossible to convince countries in eastern and central Europe to spend billions on U.S. military hardware. Moscow’s requests were rebuffed. Russia was made the enemy, whether it wanted to be or not. None of this made us more secure. Washington’s decision to interfere in Ukraine’s domestic affairs by backing a coup in 2014 triggered a civil war and Russia’s subsequent invasion.

But for those who profit from war, antagonizing Russia, like antagonizing China, is a good business model. Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin saw their stock prices increase by 40 percent and 37 percent respectively as a result of the Ukraine conflict.

A war with China, now an industrial giant, would disrupt the global supply chain with devastating effects on the U.S. and global economy. Apple produces 90 percent of its products in China. U.S. trade with China was $690.6 billion last year. In 2004, U.S. manufacturing output was more than twice China’s. China’s output is now nearly double that of the United States. China produces the largest number of ships, steel and smartphones in the world. It dominates the global production of chemicals, metals, heavy industrial equipment and electronics. It is the world’s largest rare earth mineral exporter, its greatest reserve holder and is responsible for 80 percent of its refining worldwide. Rare earth minerals are essential to the manufacture of computer chips, smartphones, television screens, medical equipment, fluorescent light bulbs, cars, wind turbines, smart bombs, fighter jets and satellite communications.

War with China would result in massive shortages of a variety of goods and resources, some vital to the war industry, paralyzing U.S. businesses. Inflation and unemployment would rocket upwards. Rationing would be implemented. The global stock exchanges, at least in the short term, would be shut down. It would trigger a global depression. If the U.S. Navy was able to block oil shipments to China and disrupt its sea lanes, the conflict could potentially become nuclear.

In “NATO 2030: Unified for a New Era,” the military alliance sees the future as a battle for hegemony with rival states, especially China. It calls for the preparation of prolonged global conflict. In October 2022, Air Force General Mike Minihan, head of Air Mobility Command, presented his “Mobility Manifesto” to a packed military conference. During this unhinged fearmongering diatribe, Minihan argued that if the U.S. does not dramatically escalate its preparations for a war with China, America’s children will find themselves “subservient to a rules based order that benefits only one country [China].”

According to the New York Times, the Marine Corps is training units for beach assaults, where the Pentagon believes the first battles with China may occur, across “the first island chain” that includes, “Okinawa and Taiwan down to Malaysia as well as the South China Sea and disputed islands in the Spratlys and the Paracels.”.

Militarists drain funds from social and infrastructure programs. They pour money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies. Bridges, roads, electrical grids and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. The public is impoverished. The harsh forms of control the militarists test and perfect abroad migrate back to the homeland. Militarized Police. Militarized drones. Surveillance. Vast prison complexes. Suspension of basic civil liberties. Censorship.

Those such as Julian Assange, who challenge the stratocracy, who expose its crimes and suicidal folly, are ruthlessly persecuted. But the war state harbors within it the seeds of its own destruction. It will cannibalize the nation until it collapses. Before then, it will lash out, like a blinded cyclops, seeking to restore its diminishing power through indiscriminate violence. The tragedy is not that the U.S. war state will self-destruct. The tragedy is that we will take down so many innocents with us.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Chris Hedges.

We spend the hour with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who recently announced that he has been diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer with only months left to live. Ellsberg, who turned 92 on April 7, may be the world’s most famous whistleblower. In 1971, The New York Times began publishing excerpts of the Pentagon Papers — 7,000 pages of top-secret documents outlining the secret history of the Vietnam War. The Times exposé was based on documents secretly photocopied by Ellsberg and Anthony Russo while they worked as Pentagon consultants at the RAND Corporation. The leak ultimately helped to take down President Nixon, turn public sentiment against the War in Vietnam and lead to a major victory for press freedom. The Nixon administration went to extraordinary lengths to silence and punish Ellsberg, including breaking into his psychiatrist’s office. But the government’s misconduct led to charges against him and Russo being dismissed. Over the past five decades, Ellsberg has remained a leading critic of U.S. militarism and U.S. nuclear weapons policy, as well as a prominent advocate for other whistleblowers. “Why in the world are we in this position, time after time, of fighting against the self-determination or the nationalism of other countries, and taking on those murderous tasks as opposed to dealing with problems at home?” says Ellsberg in an in-depth interview with Democracy Now!

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The United States' counterterrorism efforts in Somalia, which were ramped up after the emergence of the armed group al-Shabab in 2006, are worsening the East African country's instability, according to a new analysis released Thursday as progressives in Congress voted for a withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the nation.

As the Costs of War project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University said in the new report, the U.S. has spent at least $2.5 billion on counterterrorism operations in Somalia since 2007, including funding for the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) and the Somali National Army. This figure does not include the undisclosed amount of money the government has poured into intelligence and military operations there.

U.S. spending in Somalia, ostensibly to eliminate al-Shabab and a new armed group that emerged in 2016, amounts to more than the country's annual tax revenue, and according to the Costs of War report, has gone towards ineffective top-down conflict resolution tactics which only serve to perpetuate conflict.

As Oxford University lecturer Eniọlá Ànúolúwapọ́ Ṣóyẹmí explains:

The U.S. government’s top-down approach to counterterrorism has now come to be incorporated into the political motivations and objectives of high-level political operatives in Somalia, who have the greatest access both to the U.S.' financial resources and to control of U.S.-trained forces. The U.S. military's centralized approach reinforces the tendency among elites in the Somali federal government to, themselves, centralize power in opposition to more inclusive, bottom-up politics that aim genuinely to stabilize security in Somalia for the benefit of the wider population.

"Somali forces trained by the United States have been co-opted and misused by the Somali political elite for non-counterterrorism purposes like bodyguard duty, roadblock policing, or attacking political opponents," Ṣóyẹmí added. "These forces are also exacerbating conflict, leading many to fear the outbreak of full civil war."

The Pentagon recorded a 23% rise in violent activity involving al-Shabab between 2021 and 2022, and the group is "still on the rise," the report says, despite more than a decade of counterterrorism efforts by the United States.

There are currently about 500 U.S. troops in Somalia conducting counterterrorism operations, and the U.S. has completed more than 275 air strikes and raids in the country in the past 16 years.

The Biden administration, like its predecessors, has claimed U.S. military involvement in Somalia is permitted under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, but members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) including Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) joined 100 other House members in supporting a War Powers Resolution put forward by on Thursday calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

"House progressives remain principled in their commitment to upholding the constitutional authority of Congress's sole powers over war and peace, a check designed by the framers to limit needless conflicts led by the executive," a representative for the CPC told The Intercept ahead of the vote.

In voting for the resolution, progressives sought to end U.S. policies which Ṣóyẹmí says are "ensuring that the conflict continues in perpetuity."

"What the United States government is doing in Somalia is not peacekeeping, but warfighting," said Ṣóyẹmí.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Nearly 700 former Pentagon officials, congressional lawmakers and staffers, and other federal employees now work for major military contractors, primarily as lobbyists, confirming that the revolving door between the U.S. government and the weapons industry is "still spinning rapidly" and must be closed through "legislative and regulatory overhauls."

That's according to Pentagon Alchemy: How Defense Officials Pass Through the Revolving Door and Peddle Brass for Gold, a report published Wednesday by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), chair of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel.

"The abuse of the revolving door between government service and the private sector can corrupt government decision-making," says the report. "When government officials cash in on their public service by lobbying, advising, or serving as board members and executives for the companies they used to regulate, it undermines public officials' integrity and casts doubt on the fairness of government contracting. This problem is incredibly concerning and pronounced in the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and the United States' defense industry."

Warren's analysis found "672 cases in 2022 in which the top 20 defense contractors had former government officials, military officers, members of Congress, and senior legislative staff working for them as lobbyists, board members, or senior executives. In 91% of these cases, the individuals that went through the revolving door became registered lobbyists for big defense contractors."

"The sheer size of America's military budget provides ample and lucrative opportunities for former government officials," the report notes. "Last year Congress gave the DOD over $851 billion in total funding. The DOD is also the largest federal contracting agency: Of the total $692.3 billion in contracts awarded by the federal government in FY 2021, 61% were awarded by DOD amounting to $386.9 billion."

That almost 40% of Pentagon contracts were awarded to just 10 corporations is "unsurprising" given the consolidation of the arms-making business, states the report. "After waves of mergers and acquisitions, competition has decreased significantly—from over 50 firms to just five large rivals—decreasing DOD's ability to choose from a broad range of competitors."

It goes without saying that injecting more competition into the contracting process would not necessarily address the more fundamental problem of escalating military spending, which is what private companies—big and small alike—are feasting on.

The largest war profiteers, however, often hire the most revolving-door lobbyists and put the most ex-government officials on their boards, the analysis points out, increasing their chances of appropriating more public money.

According to the report, Boeing, Raytheon, and General Electric (GE) employed the most former government officials as of last year. Boeing has hired 85, including six high-ranking executives, two board members, and 77 registered lobbyists. Raytheon has hired 64, including one executive, three board members, and 60 registered lobbyists. GE, for its part, has hired 60 revolving-door lobbyists.

Those three corporations are far from alone. Pentagon contractors in general are hiring hundreds of former military and civilian officials from both major parties and across administrations into executive roles, board positions, and lobbyist jobs.

As the report makes clear, "This practice is widespread in the defense industry, giving, at minimum, the appearance of corruption and favoritism, and potentially increasing the chance that DOD spending results in ineffective weapons and programs, bad deals, and waste of taxpayer dollars."

Notably, the Pentagon recently failed its fifth consecutive annual audit while nearly 40 million people in the U.S. languish in poverty.

According to the report:

Current federal ethics laws that are supposed to regulate the revolving door are overly complex and often insufficient to prevent conflicts of interest. Indeed, even though the DOD has improved certain practices, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that DOD could further enhance its compliance efforts by amending regulations to require contractors to demonstrate their employees' compliance with post-government employment lobbying restrictions established in the National Defense Authorization Act. Post-government employment restrictions remain an impossibly confusing "tangled mess" that hinders effective implementation and compliance—and keeps the revolving door spinning.

The revolving door swings both ways. For instance, before U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was nominated by President Joe Biden to lead the Pentagon, the retired Army general was a member of Raytheon's board of directors.

During a Wednesday hearing of her Senate Armed Services subcommittee, Warren questioned Pentagon staff and ethics experts about revolving-door hiring, new revelations about former U.S. government officials working for foreign governments, and the problems posed by current executive branch personnel owning stock in companies affected by their decisions.

The lawmaker reiterated her demand for far-reaching ethics reforms at the Pentagon and across the federal government.

While Warren's Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act aims to increase transparency and combat conflicts of interest throughout Washington, her Department of Defense Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, introduced in 2019 and again in 2022, is tailored to cleaning up issues at the Pentagon.

As the report explains:

This legislation would impose a four-year ban on giant contractors from hiring DOD officials and prevent them from hiring former DOD employees who managed their contracts. The act would also require defense contractors to submit detailed annual reports to DOD regarding former senior DOD officials who are subsequently employed by contractors. The act also bans senior DOD officials from owning any stock in a major defense contractor and bans all DOD employees from owning any stock in contractors if the employee can use their official position to influence the stock's value. Lastly, the act raises the recusal standard for DOD employees by prohibiting them from participating in any matter that affects the financial interests of their former employer for four years.

"These safeguards would slow the revolving door, improving government ethics and bolstering the integrity of the DOD contracting process—actions that, as this investigation demonstrates, are desperately needed," the report concludes.

Last year, the Institute for Policy Studies' National Priorities Project published a report showing that the U.S. has spent more than $21 trillion on militarization since September 11, 2001.

Citing that analysis, Jacobin's Luke Savage argued at the time that the nation's military spending—now even higher than it was at the height of the Cold War—is not only wasteful but also inherently anti-democratic:

Military spending allocated for 2022 considerably exceeds the cost of five separate Green New Deal bills. For a miniscule fraction of what America spent on the two-decade-long "war on terror," it could have fully decarbonized its electricity grid, eradicated student debt, offered free preschool, and funded the wildly popular and effective Covid-era's anti-poverty child tax credit for at least a decade. Spending public funds so lavishly on war inevitably means not spending them elsewhere, and it's incredible to imagine what even a fraction of the money sucked up every year by America's bloated military-industrial complex could accomplish if invested differently.

Fundamentally, however, the case against the Pentagon's ever-expanding budget is a democratic one. Every year, the government of the world's most powerful country now allocates more than half of its discretionary funds to what is laughably called "defense spending"—regardless, it turns out, of whether the nation is at risk of attack or officially at war.

"Corporate capture of Congress is a problem in most major policy areas," wrote Savage, "but defense contractors and other military concerns have a stranglehold that is arguably unmatched."

Approximately 55% of all Pentagon spending went to private sector military contractors from FY 2002 to FY 2021, according to Stephen Semler of the Security Policy Reform Institute. If that privatization of funds rate continues this year, weapons dealers can expect to rake in well over $400 billion of the current $858 billion military budget.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke by phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky this week for the first time since Russia’s invasion last year. The call comes two months after China put forward a 12-point peace plan to end the war, and Xi reportedly said negotiations are “the only viable way out” of the conflict. The Chinese president also offered to send a special envoy to Ukraine to help resolve the crisis. To talk more about the war in Ukraine and growing calls for negotiations, we are joined by Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CodePink and co-author of the new book War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict. “The world is calling for negotiations, and the U.S. keeps saying no,” says Benjamin. “We are the ones who are holding up a peace process.” Her latest piece in The Progressive is headlined “Pentagon Leaks Punch a Hole in the U.S. Propaganda War.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The current Daniel Ellsberg Week celebrates the achievements and inspirational spirit of the most significant whistleblower of the 20th century. Daniel Ellsberg's recent announcement of a terminal diagnosis broke my heart, but his remarkable response gave me great hope. To quote Ellsberg: "As I just told my son Robert: He's long known (as my editor) that I work better under a deadline. It turns out that I live better under a deadline!"

Daniel Ellsberg has done just that; an avalanche of interviews and webinars have followed his announcement. And now the RootsAction Education Fund has teamed up with the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy to co-sponsor Daniel Ellsberg Week, April 24-30, to celebrate his life's work and "to honor peacemaking and whistleblowing."

Known as the insider who blew the whistle on U.S. government lying about the Vietnam War, Ellsberg's high level military planning experience began earlier. Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner during the 1950s and '60s. For decades he has put himself on the line to oppose those evil plans—writing, speaking, standing up, and sitting-in against the threat of nuclear annihilation. Ellsberg has been hauled off to jail for civil disobedience against war over 80 times. Here he offers chilling clarity about "the nuclear war planners, of which I was one, who have written plans to kill billions of people," calling it "a conspiracy to commit omnicide, near omnicide, the death of everyone." He asks us, "Can humanity survive the nuclear era? We don't know. I choose to act as if we have a chance."

"Can humanity survive the nuclear era? We don't know. I choose to act as if we have a chance."

This quote is from one of several eye-opening podcasts being released this week (which I directed in partnership with the RootsAction Education Fund), enabling people to hear Ellsberg directly. In these half dozen two-to-three-minute animated musings, Daniel Ellsberg offers up a succinct analysis of the calamity posed by nuclear weapons and a possible way to reduce their risk. You can watch and listen here.

When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, Henry Kissinger (then President Nixon's national security advisor) called him "the most dangerous man in America." But those closely held secrets of the war in Vietnam were less explosive than the nuclear secrets that Ellsberg held in his safe. Then a top strategist for the Defense Department, he had been party to plans for a nuclear holocaust. After being buried for safekeeping, those documents disappeared in a hurricane that literally blew away his secrets, but that didn't dampen Ellsberg's desire to share what he knew.

At 92, with mind sharp as ever, Ellsberg remains an undisputed expert on "national security." In this unusual illustrated podcast, he shares his unvarnished thoughts about the threat of nuclear annihilation and how it might be defused.

Can we simply ignore the reality of the world's largest nuclear arsenals on hair-trigger alert—amid escalation of a new cold war with heightened nuclear dangers? Indeed, the U.S. just enacted its biggest military budget in history, with unprecedented investment in weapons of mass destruction and their deployment.

We ignore this impending disaster and its impassioned opponent, Daniel Ellsberg, at our own peril.

Here's a chance to honor him by listening and heeding his words.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Judith Ehrlich.

Members of law enforcement assemble near the home of Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira on April 13, 2023, in Dighton, Mass.

Photo: Steven Senne/AP

Why, just because the leaker didn’t bring his material directly to a news outlet, wasn’t he deserving of either protection or being cultivated as a future source?

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Nikita Mazurov.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s debt limit bill unveiled Wednesday would slash $130 billion from a broad range of domestic programs, including clean-energy subsidies and student loan forgiveness. But one thing the bill would not cut is the military, which last month requested an $842 billion budget.

Buried in the Pentagon’s sprawling budget request is an ask for at least $36 million to respond to Havana syndrome, the mysterious symptoms alleged by U.S. spies and diplomats. Initially blamed on microwave weapons wielded by foreign powers like Russia, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded there is “no credible evidence that a foreign adversary has a weapon or collection device that is causing” the symptoms — opening the possibility that they may be psychogenic in nature.

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

In reading (and hearing) Wong’s speech, one must always assume the opposite, or something close to it. Whatever is said about strategic balance, don’t believe a word of it; such views are always uttered in the shadow of US power. From that vantage point, Occam’s Razor becomes a delicious blessing: nothing said by any Australian official in foreign policy should ever be taken as independently relevant. Best gaze across the Pacific for confirmation.

In Wong’s address, the ill-dressed cliché waltzes with the scantily clad platitude. “When Australians look out to the world, we see ourselves reflected in it – just as the world can see itself reflected in us.” (World, whatever you are, do tell.)

The basis for this strained nonsense is, at least, promising. Variety can, paradoxically, generate common ground. “This is a powerful natural asset for building alignment, for articulating our determination to see the interests of all the world’s peoples upheld, alongside our own.” Mightily aspirational, is Wong here, though such language seems pinched from the Non-Aligned Movement of the Cold War, one that Australia, US policing deputy of the Asia-Pacific, was never a part off. No informed listener would assume otherwise.

Like a lecture losing steam early, she finally gets to the point of her address: “how we avert war and maintain peace – and more than that, how we shape a region that reflects our national interests and our shared regional interests.” It does not take long to realise what this entails: talk about “rules, standards and norms – where a larger country does not determine the fate of the smaller country, where each country can pursue its own aspirations, its own prosperity.”

That the United States has determined the fate of Australia since the Second World War, manipulating, interfering and guiding its politics and its policies, makes this statement risible, but no less significant. We are on bullying terrain, and Wong is trying to pick the most preferable bully.

She can’t quite put it in those terms, so speaks about “the regional balance of power” instead, with Australia performing the role of handmaiden. She dons the sage’s hat, consumes the shaman’s herbal potion, insisting that commentators and strategists have gotten it wrong to talk about “great powers competing for primacy. They love a binary. And the appeal of a binary is obvious. Simple, clear choices. Black and white.”

It takes one, obviously, to know another, and Senator Wong, along with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, have shown little resistance to the very binary concept they supposedly repudiate. Far from opposing it, we might even go so far as to see their seduction by US power as a move towards the unitary: there is only one choice for the Canberra cocktail set.

Much of the speech seems trapped in this register. It rejects the “prism of great power.” It abhors the nature of great powers scrapping and squawking over territories. And yet, Wong is keen to point the finger to one great power’s behaviour: unstainable lending, political interference, disinformation, reshaping international rules and standards.

Finally, the dastardly feline is out of the bag – and it is not the United States. “China continues to modernise its military at a pace and scale not seen in the world for nearly a century with little transparency or assurance about its strategic intent.”

Oh, Penny, if only you could understand the actual premise of AUKUS and the US modernising strategy, given that Washington’s defence budget exceeds those of the next nine powers combined. Yes, you do say that a conflict over Taiwan “would be catastrophic for all”, but there is nothing to say what will restrain you, or your colleagues, from committing Australia to such a conflict. Given that the Albanese government has turned up its nose at war powers reform that would have given Parliament a greater say in committing national suicide, confidence can hardly be brimming.

The assessment of Australia’s own role in international relations is not just off the mark but off the reservation. “We deploy our own statecraft toward shaping a region that is open, stable and prosperous. A predictable region, operated by agreed rules, standards and laws. Where no country dominates, and no country is dominated. A region where sovereignty is respected, and all countries benefit from a strategic equilibrium.”

To this, one is reminded of the remarks of former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, who describes Wong’s alms-for-the-poor routine as, “Running around the Pacific Islands with a lei around your neck handing out money”. This could hardly count as foreign policy. “It’s a consular task. Foreign policy is what you do with the great powers: what you do with China, what you do with the United States.”

Much of the speech inhabits the realm of the speculative. Wong is delusionary in assuming that regional states will accept Australia’s observance of the Treaty of Rarotonga, whatever the stance taken by the AUKUS pact members. Otherwise known as the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, Wong has revealed Australia’s ambivalence in observing its provisions. For one, she is on record as accepting the position that the US need not confirm whether nuclear-capable assets visiting Australia have nuclear weapons. She merely says that Washington “confirmed that the nuclear-powered submarines visiting Australia on rotation will be conventionally-armed.”

This hardly squares with the assessments of her own minions in the Department of Trade and Foreign Affairs, who have confirmed that Australia will accept the deployment of nuclear weapons on its soil as long as they are not stationed.

The last word should be left to that great critic of the Albanese tilt towards Washington’s military-industrial pathology. “Wong,” observed Keating, “went on to eschew ‘black and white’ binary choices but then proceeded to make a choice herself – extolling the virtues of the United States, of it remaining ‘the central power’ – of ‘balancing the region’, while disparaging China as ‘intent on being China’, going on to say ‘countries don’t want to live in closed, hierarchical region, where rules are dictated by a single major power to suit its own interests’. Nothing too subtle about that.” The Washington establishment will be delighted.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Why is the Pentagon budget so high?

On March 13th, the Biden administration unveiled its $842 billion military budget request for 2024, the largest ask (in today’s dollars) since the peaks of the Afghan and Iraq wars. And mind you, that’s before the hawks in Congress get their hands on it. Last year, they added $35 billion to the administration’s request and, this year, their add-on is likely to prove at least that big. Given that American forces aren’t even officially at war right now (if you don’t count those engaged in counter-terror operations in Africa and elsewhere), what explains so much military spending?

The answer offered by senior Pentagon officials and echoed in mainstream Washington media coverage is that this country faces a growing risk of war with Russia or China (or both of them at once) and that the lesson of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is the need to stockpile vast numbers of bombs, missiles, and other munitions. “Pentagon, Juggling Russia, China, Seeks Billions for Long-Range Weapons” was a typical headline in the Washington Post about that 2024 budget request. Military leaders are overwhelmingly focused on a potential future conflict with either or both of those powers and are convinced that a lot more money should be spent now to prepare for such an outcome, which means buying extra tanks, ships, and planes, along with all the bombs, shells, and missiles they carry.

Even a quick look at the briefing materials for that future budget confirms such an assessment. Many of the billions of dollars being tacked onto it are intended to procure exactly the items you would expect to use in a war with those powers in the late 2020s or 2030s. Aside from personnel costs and operating expenses, the largest share of the proposed budget — $170 billion or 20% — is allocated for purchasing just such hardware.

But while preparations for such wars in the near future drive a significant part of that increase, a surprising share of it — $145 billion, or 17% — is aimed at possible conflicts in the 2040s and 2050s. Believing that our “strategic competition” with China is likely to persist for decades to come and that a conflict with that country could erupt at any moment along that future trajectory, the Pentagon is requesting its largest allocation ever for what’s called “research, development, test, and evaluation” (RDT&E), or the process of converting the latest scientific discoveries into weapons of war.

To put this in perspective, that $145 billion is more than any other country except what China spends on defense in toto and constitutes approximately half of China’s full military budget. So what’s that staggering sum of money, itself only a modest part of this country’s military budget, intended for?

Some of it, especially the “T&E” part, is designed for futuristic upgrades of existing weapons systems. For example, the B-52 bomber — at 70, the oldest model still flying — is being retrofitted to carry experimental AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapons (ARRWs), or advanced hypersonic missiles. But much of that sum, especially the “R&D” part, is aimed at developing weapons that may not see battlefield use until decades in the future, if ever. Spending on such systems is still onlyin the millions or low billions, but it will certainly balloon into the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in the years to come, ensuring that future Pentagon budgets soar into the trillions.

Weaponizing Emerging Technologies

Driving the Pentagon’s increased focus on future weapons development is the assumption that China and Russia will remain major adversaries for decades to come and that future wars with those, or other major powers, could largely be decided by the mastery of artificial intelligence (AI) along with other emerging technologies. Those would include robotics, hypersonics (projectiles that fly at more than five times the speed of sound), and quantum computing. As the Pentagon’s 2024 budget request put it:

“An increasing array of fast-evolving technologies and innovative applications of existing technology complicates the [Defense] Department’s ability to maintain an edge in combat credibility and deterrence. Newer capabilities such as counterspace weapons, hypersonic weapons, new and emerging payload and delivery systems… all create a heightened potential… for shifts in perceived deterrence of U.S. military power.”

To ensure that this country can overpower Chinese and/or Russian forces in any conceivable encounter, top officials insist, Washington must focus on investing in a major way in the advanced technologies likely to dominate future battlefields. Accordingly, $17.8 billion of that $145 billion RDT&E budget will be directly dedicated to military-related science and technology development. Those funds, the Pentagon explains, will be used to accelerate the weaponization of artificial intelligence and speed the growth of other emerging technologies, especially robotics, autonomous (or “unmanned”) weapons systems, and hypersonic missiles.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is of particular interest to the Department of Defense, given its wide range of potential military uses, including target identification and assessment, enhanced weapons navigation and targeting systems, and computer-assisted battlefield decision-making. Although there’s no total figure for AI research and development offered in the unclassified version of the 2024 budget, certain individual programs are highlighted. One of these is the Joint All-Domain Command-and-Control system (JADC2), an AI-enabled matrix of sensors, computers, and communications devices intended to collect and process data on enemy movements and convey that information at lightning speed to combat forces in every “domain” (air, sea, ground, and space). At $1.3 billion, JADC2 may not be “the biggest number in the budget,” said Under Secretary of Defense Michael J. McCord, but it constitutes “a very central organizing concept of how we’re trying to link information together.”

AI is also essential for the development of — and yes, nothing seems to lack an acronym in Pentagon documents — autonomous weapons systems, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and unmanned surface vessels (USVs). Such devices — far more bluntly called “killer robots” by their critics — typically combine a mobile platform of some sort (plane, tank, or ship), an onboard “kill mechanism” (gun or missile), and an ability to identify and attack targets with minimal human oversight. Believing that the future battlefield will become ever more lethal, Pentagon officials aim to replace as many of its crewed platforms as possible — think ships, planes, and artillery — with advanced UAVs, UGVs, and USVs.

The 2024 budget request doesn’t include a total dollar figure for research on future unmanned weapons systems but count on one thing: it will come to many billions of dollars. The budget does indicate that $2.2 billion is being sought for the early procurement of MQ-4 and MQ-25 unmanned aerial vehicles, and such figures are guaranteed to swell as experimental robotic systems move into large-scale production. Another $200 million was requested to design a large USV, essentially a crewless frigate or destroyer. Once prototype vessels of this type have been built and tested, the Navy plans to order dozens, perhaps hundreds of them, instantly creating a $100 billion-plus market for a naval force lacking the usual human crew.

Another area receiving extensive Pentagon attention is hypersonics, because such projectiles will fly so fast and maneuver with such skill (while skimming atop the atmosphere’s outer layer) that they should be essentially impossible to track and intercept. Both China and Russia already possess rudimentary weapons of this type, with Russia reportedly firing some of its hypersonic Kinzhal missiles into Ukraine in recent months.

As the Pentagon put it in its budget request:

“Hypersonic systems expand our ability to hold distant targets at risk, dramatically shorten the timeline to strike a target, and their maneuverability increases survivability and unpredictability. The Department will accelerate fielding of transformational capability enabled by air, land, and sea-based hypersonic strike weapon systems to overcome the challenges to our future battlefield domain dominance.”

Another 14% of the RDT&E request, or about $2.5 billion, is earmarked for research in even more experimental fields like quantum computing and advanced microelectronics. “The Department’s science and technology investments are underpinned by early-stage basic research,” the Pentagon explains. “Payoff for this research may not be evident for years, but it is critical to ensuring our enduring technological advantage in the decades ahead.” As in the case of AI, autonomous weapons, and hypersonics, these relatively small amounts (by Pentagon standards) will balloon in the years ahead as initial discoveries are applied to functioning weapons systems and procured in ever larger quantities.

Harnessing American Tech Talent for Long-Term War Planning

There’s one consequence of such an investment in RDT&E that’s almost too obvious to mention. If you think the Pentagon budget is sky high now, just wait! Future spending, as today’s laboratory concepts are converted into actual combat systems, is likely to stagger the imagination. And that’s just one of the significant consequences of such a path to permanent military superiority. To ensure that the United States continues to dominate research in the emerging technologies most applicable to future weaponry, the Pentagon will seek to harness an ever-increasing share of this country’s scientific and technological resources for military-oriented work.

This, in turn, will mean capturing an ever-larger part of the government’s net R&D budget at the expense of other national priorities. In 2022, for example, federal funding for non-military R&D (including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) represented only about 33% of R&D spending. If the 2024 military budget goes through at the level requested (or higher), that figure for non-military spending will drop to 31%, a trend only likely to strengthen in the future as more and more resources are devoted to war preparation, leaving an ever-diminishing share of taxpayer funding for research on vital concerns like cancer prevention and treatment, pandemic response, and climate change adaptation.

No less worrisome, ever more scientists and engineers will undoubtedly be encouraged— not to say, prodded — to devote their careers to military research rather than work in more peaceable fields. While many scientists struggle for grants to support their work, the Department of Defense (DoD) offers bundles of money to those who choose to study military-related topics. Typically enough, the 2024 request includes $347 million for what the military is now calling the University Research Initiative, most of which will be used to finance the formation of “teams of researchers across disciplines and across geographic boundaries to focus on DoD-specific hard science problems.” Another $200 million is being allocated to the Joint University Microelectronics Program by the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, the Pentagon’s R&D outfit, while $100 million is being provided to the University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics by the Pentagon’s Joint Hypersonics Transition Office. With so much money flowing into such programs and the share devoted to other fields of study shrinking, it’s hardly surprising that scientists and graduate students at major universities are being drawn into the Pentagon’s research networks.

In fact, it’s also seeking to expand its talent pool by providing additional funding to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). In January, for example, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced that Howard University in Washington, D.C., had been chosen as the first such school to serve as a university-affiliated research center by the Department of Defense, in which capacity it will soon be involved in work on autonomous weapons systems. This will, of course, provide badly needed money to scientists and engineers at that school and other HBCUs that may have been starved of such funding in the past. But it also begs the question: Why shouldn’t Howard receive similar amounts to study problems of greater relevance to the Black community like sickle-cell anemia and endemic poverty?

Endless Arms Races vs. Genuine Security

In devoting all those billions of dollars to research on next-generation weaponry, the Pentagon’s rationale is straightforward: spend now to ensure U.S. military superiority in the 2040s, 2050s, and beyond. But however persuasive this conceit may seem — even with all those mammoth sums of money pouring in — things rarely work out so neatly. Any major investment of this sort by one country is bound to trigger countermoves from its rivals, ensuring that any early technological advantage will soon be overcome in some fashion, even as the planet is turned into ever more of an armed camp.

The Pentagon’s development of precision-guided munitions, for example, provided American forces with an enormous military advantage during the Persian Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003, but also prompted China, Iran, Russia, and other countries to begin developing similar weaponry, quickly diminishing that advantage. Likewise, China and Russia were the first to deploy combat-ready hypersonic weapons, but in response, the U.S. will be fielding a far greater array of them in a few years’ time.

Chinese and Russian advances in deploying hypersonics also led the U.S. to invest in developing — yes, you guessed it! — anti-hypersonic hypersonics, launching yet one more arms race on planet Earth, while boosting the Pentagon budget by additional billions. Given all this, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the 2024 Pentagon budget request includes $209 million for the development of a hypersonic interceptor, only the first installment in costly development and procurement programs in the years to come in Washington, Beijing, and Moscow.

If you want to bet on anything, then here’s a surefire way to go: the Pentagon’s drive to achieve dominance in the development and deployment of advanced weaponry will lead not to supremacy but to another endless cycle of high-tech arms races that, in turn, will consume an ever-increasing share of this country’s wealth and scientific talent, while providing negligible improvements in national security. Rather than spending so much on future weaponry, we should all be thinking about enhanced arms control measures, global climate cooperation, and greater investment in non-military R&D.

If only…

This essay was distributed by TomDispatch.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael T. Klare.

A highly classified Pentagon document sheds light on what the United Nations has deemed the worst humanitarian crisis in the world: war-torn Yemen. Pitting Saudi Arabia, the richest country in the Middle East, against Yemen, the poorest, the conflict has seen some 85,000 Yemeni children under age 5 die of starvation since the conflict began.

The assessment is a window into the strategic calculus of Saudi Arabia and the Houthis, Yemen’s de facto ruling tribe, in the final weeks before the Chinese government brokered a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which backs the Houthi movement.

Since the détente, the Saudis have reportedly agreed to much more significant concessions than were on offer in mid-February, demonstrating that a more direct path to peace was available given the right diplomatic maneuvering. If successful, the ceasefire bid would put an end to a grinding war that has brought Yemen to the brink of famine.

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

NPP found that, on average, American taxpayers contributed $1,087 to Pentagon contractors, compared with $270 for K-12 education. The top military contractor—Lockheed Martin—received $106 from the average taxpayer, while just $6 went to funding renewable energy.

According to the analysis, the average 2022 U.S. taxpayer:

• Paid $74 for nuclear weapons, and just $43 for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention;
• Spent $70 on deportations and border control, versus just $19 for refugee assistance;
• Contributed $20 for federal prisons, and just $11 for anti-homelessness programs; and
• Gave $298 to the top five military contractors, and just $19 for mental health and substance abuse.

"The main message? Our government is continuing to invest too much in the military, and in militarized law enforcement, and not nearly enough on prevention, people, and our communities," NPP said.

The annual analysis shows how individual income taxes—the portion withheld from workers' paychecks—were spent in 2022. It does not include corporate or individual payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare. To determine what constitutes the average tax bill, NPP divided the total amount of federal income tax collected by the number of applicable returns filed.

NPP's analysis comes just over a month after the White House released President Joe Biden's $1.6 trillion budget requestfor fiscal year 2024. More than half of that amount—$886 billion—would go to the military.

Responding to the $886 billion request, NPP program director Lindsay Koshgarian said last month that "this military budget represents a shameful status quo that the country can no longer afford."

"Families are struggling to afford basics like housing, food, and medicine, and our last pandemic-era protections are ending, all while Pentagon contractors pay their CEOs millions straight from the public treasury," Koshgarian noted.

"A responsible budget would restore the Pentagon's spending to previous reduced levels from just a few short years ago, and reinvest that additional money at home where we need it the most," she added.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Why is the Pentagon budget so high?

On March 13th, the Biden administration unveiled its $842 billion military budget request for 2024, the largest ask (in today's dollars) since the peaks of the Afghan and Iraq wars. And mind you, that's before the hawks in Congress get their hands on it. Last year, they added $35 billion to the administration's request and, this year, their add-on is likely to prove at least that big. Given that American forces aren't even officially at war right now (if you don't count those engaged in counter-terror operations in Africa and elsewhere), what explains so much military spending?

The answer offered by senior Pentagon officials and echoed in mainstream Washington media coverage is that this country faces a growing risk of war with Russia or China (or both of them at once) and that the lesson of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is the need to stockpile vast numbers of bombs, missiles, and other munitions. "Pentagon, Juggling Russia, China, Seeks Billions for Long-Range Weapons" was a typical headline in the Washington Post about that 2024 budget request. Military leaders are overwhelmingly focused on a potential future conflict with either or both of those powers and are convinced that a lot more money should be spent now to prepare for such an outcome, which means buying extra tanks, ships, and planes, along with all the bombs, shells, and missiles they carry.

If you want to bet on anything, then here's a surefire way to go: the Pentagon's drive to achieve dominance in the development and deployment of advanced weaponry will lead not to supremacy but to another endless cycle of high-tech arms races

Even a quick look at the briefing materials for that future budget confirms such an assessment. Many of the billions of dollars being tacked onto it are intended to procure exactly the items you would expect to use in a war with those powers in the late 2020s or 2030s. Aside from personnel costs and operating expenses, the largest share of the proposed budget—$170 billion or 20%—is allocated for purchasing just such hardware.

But while preparations for such wars in the near future drive a significant part of that increase, a surprising share of it—$145 billion, or 17%—is aimed at possible conflicts in the 2040s and 2050s. Believing that our "strategic competition" with China is likely to persist for decades to come and that a conflict with that country could erupt at any moment along that future trajectory, the Pentagon is requesting its largest allocation ever for what's called "research, development, test, and evaluation" (RDT&E), or the process of converting the latest scientific discoveries into weapons of war.

To put this in perspective, that $145 billion is more than any other country except what China spends on defense in toto and constitutes approximately half of China's full military budget. So what's that staggering sum of money, itself only a modest part of this country's military budget, intended for?

Some of it, especially the "T&E" part, is designed for futuristic upgrades of existing weapons systems. For example, the B-52 bomber—at 70, the oldest model still flying—is being retrofitted to carry experimental AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapons (ARRWs), or advanced hypersonic missiles. But much of that sum, especially the "R&D" part, is aimed at developing weapons that may not see battlefield use until decades in the future, if ever. Spending on such systems is still only in the millions or low billions, but it will certainly balloon into the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in the years to come, ensuring that future Pentagon budgets soar into the trillions.

Weaponizing Emerging Technologies

Driving the Pentagon's increased focus on future weapons development is the assumption that China and Russia will remain major adversaries for decades to come and that future wars with those, or other major powers, could largely be decided by the mastery of artificial intelligence (AI) along with other emerging technologies. Those would include robotics, hypersonics (projectiles that fly at more than five times the speed of sound), and quantum computing. As the Pentagon's 2024 budget request put it:

"An increasing array of fast-evolving technologies and innovative applications of existing technology complicates the [Defense] Department's ability to maintain an edge in combat credibility and deterrence. Newer capabilities such as counterspace weapons, hypersonic weapons, new and emerging payload and delivery systems… all create a heightened potential… for shifts in perceived deterrence of U.S. military power."

To ensure that this country can overpower Chinese and/or Russian forces in any conceivable encounter, top officials insist, Washington must focus on investing in a major way in the advanced technologies likely to dominate future battlefields. Accordingly, $17.8 billion of that $145 billion RDT&E budget will be directly dedicated to military-related science and technology development. Those funds, the Pentagon explains, will be used to accelerate the weaponization of artificial intelligence and speed the growth of other emerging technologies, especially robotics, autonomous (or "unmanned") weapons systems, and hypersonic missiles.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is of particular interest to the Department of Defense, given its wide range of potential military uses, including target identification and assessment, enhanced weapons navigation and targeting systems, and computer-assisted battlefield decision-making. Although there's no total figure for AI research and development offered in the unclassified version of the 2024 budget, certain individual programs are highlighted. One of these is the Joint All-Domain Command-and-Control system (JADC2), an AI-enabled matrix of sensors, computers, and communications devices intended to collect and process data on enemy movements and convey that information at lightning speed to combat forces in every "domain" (air, sea, ground, and space). At $1.3 billion, JADC2 may not be "the biggest number in the budget," said Under Secretary of Defense Michael J. McCord, but it constitutes "a very central organizing concept of how we're trying to link information together."

AI is also essential for the development of—and yes, nothing seems to lack an acronym in Pentagon documents—autonomous weapons systems, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and unmanned surface vessels (USVs). Such devices—far more bluntly called "killer robots" by their critics—typically combine a mobile platform of some sort (plane, tank, or ship), an onboard "kill mechanism" (gun or missile), and an ability to identify and attack targets with minimal human oversight. Believing that the future battlefield will become ever more lethal, Pentagon officials aim to replace as many of its crewed platforms as possible—think ships, planes, and artillery—with advanced UAVs, UGVs, and USVs.

The 2024 budget request doesn't include a total dollar figure for research on future unmanned weapons systems but count on one thing: it will come to many billions of dollars. The budget does indicate that $2.2 billion is being sought for the early procurement of MQ-4 and MQ-25 unmanned aerial vehicles, and such figures are guaranteed to swell as experimental robotic systems move into large-scale production. Another $200 million was requested to design a large USV, essentially a crewless frigate or destroyer. Once prototype vessels of this type have been built and tested, the Navy plans to order dozens, perhaps hundreds of them, instantly creating a $100 billion-plus market for a naval force lacking the usual human crew.

Another area receiving extensive Pentagon attention is hypersonics, because such projectiles will fly so fast and maneuver with such skill (while skimming atop the atmosphere's outer layer) that they should be essentially impossible to track and intercept. Both China and Russia already possess rudimentary weapons of this type, with Russia reportedly firing some of its hypersonic Kinzhal missiles into Ukraine in recent months.

As the Pentagon put it in its budget request:

"Hypersonic systems expand our ability to hold distant targets at risk, dramatically shorten the timeline to strike a target, and their maneuverability increases survivability and unpredictability. The Department will accelerate fielding of transformational capability enabled by air, land, and sea-based hypersonic strike weapon systems to overcome the challenges to our future battlefield domain dominance."

Another 14% of the RDT&E request, or about $2.5 billion, is earmarked for research in even more experimental fields like quantum computing and advanced microelectronics. "The Department's science and technology investments are underpinned by early-stage basic research," the Pentagon explains. "Payoff for this research may not be evident for years, but it is critical to ensuring our enduring technological advantage in the decades ahead." As in the case of AI, autonomous weapons, and hypersonics, these relatively small amounts (by Pentagon standards) will balloon in the years ahead as initial discoveries are applied to functioning weapons systems and procured in ever larger quantities.

Harnessing American Tech Talent for Long-Term War Planning

There's one consequence of such an investment in RDT&E that's almost too obvious to mention. If you think the Pentagon budget is sky high now, just wait! Future spending, as today's laboratory concepts are converted into actual combat systems, is likely to stagger the imagination. And that's just one of the significant consequences of such a path to permanent military superiority. To ensure that the United States continues to dominate research in the emerging technologies most applicable to future weaponry, the Pentagon will seek to harness an ever-increasing share of this country's scientific and technological resources for military-oriented work.

This, in turn, will mean capturing an ever-larger part of the government's net R&D budget at the expense of other national priorities. In 2022, for example, federal funding for non-military R&D (including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) represented only about 33% of R&D spending. If the 2024 military budget goes through at the level requested (or higher), that figure for non-military spending will drop to 31%, a trend only likely to strengthen in the future as more and more resources are devoted to war preparation, leaving an ever-diminishing share of taxpayer funding for research on vital concerns like cancer prevention and treatment, pandemic response, and climate change adaptation.

No less worrisome, ever more scientists and engineers will undoubtedly be encouraged—not to say, prodded—to devote their careers to military research rather than work in more peaceable fields. While many scientists struggle for grants to support their work, the Department of Defense (DoD) offers bundles of money to those who choose to study military-related topics. Typically enough, the 2024 request includes $347 million for what the military is now calling the University Research Initiative, most of which will be used to finance the formation of "teams of researchers across disciplines and across geographic boundaries to focus on DoD-specific hard science problems." Another $200 million is being allocated to the Joint University Microelectronics Program by the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, the Pentagon's R&D outfit, while $100 million is being provided to the University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics by the Pentagon's Joint Hypersonics Transition Office. With so much money flowing into such programs and the share devoted to other fields of study shrinking, it's hardly surprising that scientists and graduate students at major universities are being drawn into the Pentagon's research networks.

In fact, it's also seeking to expand its talent pool by providing additional funding to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). In January, for example, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced that Howard University in Washington, D.C., had been chosen as the first such school to serve as a university-affiliated research center by the Department of Defense, in which capacity it will soon be involved in work on autonomous weapons systems. This will, of course, provide badly needed money to scientists and engineers at that school and other HBCUs that may have been starved of such funding in the past. But it also begs the question: Why shouldn't Howard receive similar amounts to study problems of greater relevance to the Black community like sickle-cell anemia and endemic poverty?

Endless Arms Races vs. Genuine Security

In devoting all those billions of dollars to research on next-generation weaponry, the Pentagon's rationale is straightforward: spend now to ensure U.S. military superiority in the 2040s, 2050s, and beyond. But however persuasive this conceit may seem—even with all those mammoth sums of money pouring in—things rarely work out so neatly. Any major investment of this sort by one country is bound to trigger countermoves from its rivals, ensuring that any early technological advantage will soon be overcome in some fashion, even as the planet is turned into ever more of an armed camp.

The Pentagon's development of precision-guided munitions, for example, provided American forces with an enormous military advantage during the Persian Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003, but also prompted China, Iran, Russia, and other countries to begin developing similar weaponry, quickly diminishing that advantage. Likewise, China and Russia were the first to deploy combat-ready hypersonic weapons, but in response, the U.S. will be fielding a far greater array of them in a few years' time.

Chinese and Russian advances in deploying hypersonics also led the U.S. to invest in developing—yes, you guessed it!—anti-hypersonic hypersonics, launching yet one more arms race on planet Earth, while boosting the Pentagon budget by additional billions. Given all this, I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that the 2024 Pentagon budget request includes $209 million for the development of a hypersonic interceptor, only the first installment in costly development and procurement programs in the years to come in Washington, Beijing, and Moscow.

If you want to bet on anything, then here's a surefire way to go: the Pentagon's drive to achieve dominance in the development and deployment of advanced weaponry will lead not to supremacy but to another endless cycle of high-tech arms races that, in turn, will consume an ever-increasing share of this country's wealth and scientific talent, while providing negligible improvements in national security. Rather than spending so much on future weaponry, we should all be thinking about enhanced arms control measures, global climate cooperation, and greater investment in non-military R&D.

If only…

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Michael T. Klare.

We cannot end climate change without ending war. The United States military is the planet’s largest single emitter of greenhouse gasses and consumer of oil. The US military and its weapons, consistently deployed to secure economic dominance for the few while ensuring suffering for the many, has no place on a just and livable planet. The corporate interests and fascist, militarist tendencies that lead humanity into conflict are the very same that view our Earth, its atmosphere, and its abundant life as a resource to be exploited for profit. Ending war means ending the war economy – the colonial system of extraction and exploitation that got us into this mess in the first place.

That a more peaceful world could be a result of the broad system change climate activists are calling for is no coincidence. But the theoretical intersection alone isn’t enough! Environmentalists and climate change activists must make a commitment to peace explicitly. Our planet depends on it.

There are already plenty of reasons to oppose war such as the threat of nuclear destruction, massive civilian casualties, and violence against women and the concentration of fascist imperialist powers into corporatized hands. But if that is not enough for folks doing important work in climate justice to also oppose all wars, then let’s also consider — militarism and the war economy.

The Pentagon is already the planet’s largest single institutional emitter of fossil fuels, and US-backed conflicts around the world since WWII can always be tied back to economic gain dominance, especially via the private control of fuel and natural resources. A war with China, which the US has gradually encircled with hundreds of military bases and weaponry, is being provoked for economic reasons as the government and media manufacture the consent of the American public. This will only result in the increase of Pentagon funding (already at $858 billion), siphoning off billions of dollars of taxpayer money to infrastructure and weaponry which is destroying our climate.

Many people don’t realize that every solution to climate change already exists. The problem is the government simply will not fund it while its priority is war. Demilitarization is one of the most important things we can do for the climate, and for living beings inside and outside conflict zones.

Currently, our measure of success as a country is based on how much we can destroy and exploit. While the basic tenets of capitalism are taught in America as economic law, this is hardly the case.The economic system we operate under is a choice. There are other options. Our broken and optional system  –where income inequality is at an all-time high, the poor have little access to healthcare, and the climate is nearing deadly tipping points – is driven by capitalists and federal economists who love to talk about the profit-oriented metric Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. This metric, which is used as an indicator of our country’s well-being, tells us the amount of financial profit produced by economic activity in a given time period. Which is pretty ridiculous when well-being is obviously a function of things that aren’t liquid cash, like quality of education, healthcare, and biodiversity.

Essentially, under a GDP-oriented economy, half of a country’s forest cover could be destroyed and the poverty rate in all major cities could double over the course of a year, but as long as billionaires continue to increase their profits, the illusion of progress persists. But if we manage to change how we measure progress in this country, we may actually be able to achieve some. Genuine Progress Indicator is a metric which places value on things like improving air quality and food security. With GPI in place, lawmakers and activists would have the most undeniable picture yet of the cost of war on people and planet

And what is the cost of war to the environment? Take the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to massive death and displacement, as well as environmental damage with exponential increases in greenhouse gas emissions from rocket attacks and explosions. Attacks on infrastructure–railways, electrical grids, apartment buildings, oil depots–have led to hollowed-out cities blanketed by charred rubble and toxic munitions.

Additionally, the sabotage of the underwater Nord Stream pipelines supplying Russian gas to Germany led to the release of 300,000 tons of methane gas into the atmosphere, similar to the annual emissions of a million cars. According to the UN Environmental Programme, it was the largest release of methane gas emissions ever recorded.

The shelling of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, particularly the Zaporizhzhia plant, has increased fears of an explosion that would spread radiation throughout Ukraine and beyond.

As the fighting has now gone on for a year with no end in sight, Ukraine braces itself for further disruption of local ecosystems, forest fires, blackened trees, air pollution, sewage leaks and chemical contamination of rivers and groundwater in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has mutated the global fuel market, with Russian cuts of fuel exports and Western sanctions leading many European countries to resume filthy coal-fired power generation. US companies have also consolidated money and power as a result, dramatically increasing their exports of natural gas to Europe. These exorbitant profits will fuel the fossil fuel economy for years to come.

Funding endless war is an existential threat to human life and one of the leading causes of climate change. In order to achieve climate justice and secure a sustainable future, climate and environmental groups must adopt an antiwar position for people and the planet. To defend Earth, we must end wars.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Teddy Ogborn.

A recently leaked cache of highly classified U.S. intelligence reports sheds light on the growing risk of a U.S. conflict with Iran, as well as apparent Israeli efforts to directly involve the U.S. in operations targeting Iranian interests in the Middle East. The documents expose the sensitivity of the geopolitical situation, and how tension between Russia and Israel could escalate dramatically in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The set of classified documents is reported to have been shared online in a gaming forum. Police on Thursday arrested a 21-year-old U.S. Air Force National Guardsman named Jack Teixeira on suspicion of involvement in the leak.

A briefing document dated February 28, marked “Top Secret” and prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency, details four scenarios it considers possible under which Israel could provide lethal aid to Ukraine — something Washington has sought but that Israel, which has ties to Russia, has refused to do.

In one plausible scenario, the briefing says, “Russia continues to allow Iranian advanced conventional weapons through Syria, prompting Israel to request expanded U.S. support for Israeli counter-Iran activities in exchange for lethal aid to Ukraine.” (Israel has accused Iran of transferring military equipment into Syrian territory that could be used against Israel in a future conflict.)

The document also provides “background” to this scenario, which appears to refer to current circumstances that could set the stage for such a situation: “Israeli defense leaders are advocating for increased risk-taking to counter Iran, including proposing bilateral Israeli-U.S. operations.” Both countries have been engaging in high-profile military drills as tensions in the region have risen. This January, the U.S. and Israel conducted their largest joint military exercise in history — an exercise that reportedly simulated airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites.

Iranian press photographers stand next to burnt U.S. and Israel flags during an anti-Israel protest in downtown Tehran on August 9, 2022.

Photo: Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

Update (3:00 pm):

Jack Teixeira, the Air National Guard member suspected of leaking hundreds of classified Pentagon documents to members of an online forum, was arrested Thursday in Dighton, Massachusetts after The New York Times reported on his alleged identity.

CNN aired footage of Teixeira, who was known as "OG" in the online chat group, being apprehended by the FBI.

In a press briefing, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland confirmed that Teixeira had been arrested "in connection with an investigation into alleged unauthorized removal, retention, and transmission of classified national defense information."

Earlier:

The person behind a leak of hundreds of classified Pentagon documents related to the war in Ukraine is reportedly a racist young gun enthusiast who spent several months sharing the information with members of an online forum on Discord, a platform that's popular in the gaming community, according to interviews The Washington Post and investigative journalism collective Bellingcat conducted with another member of the forum.

The New York Times reported Thursday that the alleged leaker's name is Jack Teixeira and that he served as a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Teixeira is reportedly 21 years old.

Aric Toler of Bellingcat interviewed a teenage member of the private Discord server that Teixeira frequented, known as "Thug Shaker Central," on Sunday, and the Post published a report based on the source's story on Wednesday, a week after the Times first reported that the documents had been leaked.

The teenage member said Teixeira was in his early-to-mid 20s and was seen as a leader of the forum, where he was known as OG. The Post viewed a video of the man identified as OG at a shooting range, where he yelled "a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera" before firing several rounds of ammunition at a target. The newspaper reported it had verified details shared by the teenage source with other members of Thug Shaker Central.

The members did not confirm to the Times that Teixeira and OG were one and the same, but the newspaper reported that "a trail of digital evidence compiled by the Times leads to Airman Teixeira."

According to the teenage member, OG worked at an unnamed "military base" where he was one of thousands of entry- and low-level government employees who had access to classified documents like the ones he allegedly shared with about 25 members of Thug Shaker Central.

OG told the other members that he worked in a secure facility on the base where cellphones and other electronic devices were prohibited to prevent leaks.

The teenage member told the Post that OG frequently knew about major news events before they happened, saying, "Only someone with this kind of high clearance" would have that information.

Late last year, Teixeira began sharing several documents per week on the server, annotating some to translate abbreviations used in the intelligence community, such as "NOFORN" for information that could not be shared with foreign nationals.

The group contained people from "just about every walk of life," according to the teenage member, including people from Asia and South America as well as Ukrainian and Russian citizens. The source told the Post that members from the "Eastern Bloc and those post-Soviet countries" showed interest in the documents.

The classified documents included charts of battlefields in Ukraine, which has been under attack by Russian forces since Russia's invasion in February 2022, and "highly classified satellite images of the aftermath of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian electrical facilities," according to the Post. OG also shared documents that showed the possible path of North Korean ballistic nuclear missiles that could reach the U.S. and photographs of the object that the Biden administration identified as a Chinese spy balloon in February.

OG reportedly "had a dark view of the government" and spoke frequently with other members of the Discord server about "government overreach" and his opposition to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

The teenage member was adamant, however, that Teixeira did not leak the documents as a political act.

"I would definitely not call him a whistleblower. I would not call OG a whistleblower in the slightest," he told the Post, adding that OG "seemed very confused and lost as to what to do" when he spoke to him following the Times' reporting on the leaks.

Shortly before the Timesreported on the documents on April 6, OG logged into the Discord server and was "frantic, which is unusual for him," the member said.

Josh Marshall, founder of Talking Points Memo, expressed skepticism about OG's identity.

"If he is [who he claims to be] there seem to be so many breadcrumbs it's hard to believe everyone involved won't be arrested in a matter of days," he tweeted.

On Thursday, CNNreported that the Pentagon has begun limiting access to highly classified documents, which roughly 1.25 million federal employees and contractors have previously had clearance to access.

Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, a spokesperson for the Pentagon, told News Nation on Wednesday that the federal government is considering "mitigation measures in terms of what we can do to prevent potential additional unauthorized leaks."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

We look more at what recently leaked Pentagon documents reveal about the war in Ukraine, and U.S. spying on both its adversaries and its allies, including Israel. In Part 2 of our interview with James Bamford, the longtime investigative journalist discusses how the leaks challenge the corporate media’s portrayal of the war in Ukraine, and more. Bamford’s latest book is Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into a recent leak of highly classified Pentagon intelligence documents revealing secrets about the war in Ukraine, as well as details about the U.S. spying on a number of its adversaries, as well as its allies, including Israel and South Korea. We discuss the documents, the agencies they come from, how and where they were released, and more with investigative journalist James Bamford, whose latest book is Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The next time banks need a bailout, they’ll have a new argument for why it’s necessary: national security.

In recent months, the Pentagon has moved to provide loans, guarantees, and other financial instruments to technology companies it considers crucial to national security — a step beyond the grants and contracts it normally employs. So when Silicon Valley Bank threatened to fail in March following a bank run, the defense agency advocated for government intervention to insure the investments. The Pentagon had even scrambled to prepare multiple plans to get cash to affected companies if necessary, reporting by Defense One revealed.

Their interest in Silicon Valley Bank stems from the Pentagon’s brand-new office, the Office of Strategic Capital. According to the Wall Street Journal, the secretary of defense established the OSC in December specifically to counteract the investment power of adversaries like China in U.S. technologies, and to secure separate funding for companies whose products are considered vital to national security. It enjoys special authority to use loans and guarantees not normally available to the Defense Department to attract private investment in technology.

The full extent of OSC’s authorities has not yet been determined, as its charter is still being drafted, an OSC official not authorized to speak publicly told The Intercept. OSC’s website identifies its mission as twofold: first, identifying critical technology areas, and second, funding those investments using investment tools. “These financial tools are new to the Department and will be complementary to ongoing technology innovation efforts,” the agency’s mission states.

OSC is so new that it does not yet have its own budget, but President Joe Biden recently requested $115 million in funding.

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In 2022, Mark Warner was the only senator to receive a campaign donation from Silicon Valley Bank’s super PAC.

The defense budget is already bloated, without having to additionally ensure the financial health of the investment economy.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

Last month, the House and Senate Armed Services committees held hearings to discuss the Department of Defense’s legislative asks and priorities regarding U.S. special operations forces. In those hearings, Department officials made clear that one of their top priorities for the upcoming legislative cycle is expanding an obscure security cooperation authority: section 1202 of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes the U.S. military to work “by, with, and through” foreign partners to counter foreign adversaries like Russia and China.

In advocating for an expansion of section 1202, Department officials have reportedly promised that the authority would be “limited to noncombat operations.” Congress, however, should cast a wary eye on this promise and on the Department’s overarching request for broader authority.

Section 1202 is a provisional authority, in effect through 2025, that permits the Department of Defense to recruit, train, equip, and pay salaries to foreign militaries, paramilitaries, and even private individuals who are supporting U.S. “irregular warfare” operations — defined as “competition . . . short of traditional armed conflict” — against supposed malign state actors. By putting section 1202 partners on payroll, U.S. forces gain the ability to command them, directing them to achieve U.S. military objectives either alongside U.S. forces or in U.S. forces’ stead. As a result, the Department describes its relationship with section 1202 partners as one of “operational control,” and it refers to these partners as “surrogate forces.”

Surrogate forces can be a powerful tool: They are a force multiplier and can afford the Department of Defense access or credibility that American troops may not have in a foreign context. But working by, with, and through foreign partners carries serious risks, both of escalation and of unlawful combat.

In the past, security cooperation programs have pulled U.S. forces into combat with adversaries who are not clearly covered by any congressionally enacted authorization for use of military force (“AUMF”). This is especially true of surrogate force programs run under 10 U.S.C. § 127e, an established counterterrorism authority on which section 1202 is based. According to investigative reporting, the Department has used section 127e surrogate forces to pursue Boko Haram and various Islamic State affiliates in countries ranging from Cameroon to Egypt. Neither Boko Haram nor any Islamic State affiliate has been publicly disclosed as one of al-Qaeda’s “associated forces” or “successor forces” who can be targeted under the 2001 AUMF, per the executive branch’s interpretation of that authority. This raises questions about whether the Department has worked by, with, and through surrogates to target these or other organizations under yet‑undisclosed interpretations of the 2001 AUMF or the president’s constitutional authority — or worse, whether the Department has treated section 127e as a de facto AUMF.

Department of Defense officials have taken pains to distinguish section 1202 from its progenitor, section 127e. In a conversation in mid-2022, a current Department official assured me that section 1202 surrogate forces were not being commanded into combat like their section 127e peers. That same official, however, was unaware of any written Department policy that would prevent section 1202 programs from being used for combat. Other former and current Department officials with whom I spoke were similarly unaware of such a policy, and a public memorandum outlining the Department’s original procedures for implementing section 1202 contained no language prohibiting kinetic programs. (The memorandum was set to expire on August 3, 2022. The Department has not published a replacement policy, and the New York Times is now suing the Department under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain any such policy.) One current official with experience working on section 1202 programs said he would be “surprised” if the Department decided to promulgate a policy foreclosing combat because “you want to be flexible, in case you’re asked by [a lawmaker] or the president” to have surrogate forces undertake kinetic operations.

Nor are the weak limits in section 1202 itself — its definition of “irregular warfare” and its rules of construction — sufficient to prevent combat through surrogate forces. Although “irregular warfare” is defined as conduct “short of traditional armed conflict,” the Department of Defense views nontraditional or gray-zone conflict as encompassing “the full range of military and other capabilities,” including proxy and guerilla operations. As recently as last summer, a group of Department lawyers, writing in their personal capacity, assessed that the Department could run section 1202 programs in Ukraine to assist war efforts against Russia, so long as the United States did not itself “become embroiled in the ongoing conflict.”

The rules of construction similarly fail to guard against the use of section 1202 to engage in combat. Although one rule specifies that section 1202 is not itself an AUMF, it does not prevent the Department of Defense from using surrogate forces in furtherance of the president’s claimed authority to use force under Article II of the Constitution. The rule prohibiting the use of surrogates for operations that U.S. forces “are not . . . legally authorized to conduct themselves” suffers from the same defect, according to multiple Department of Defense officials with whom I have spoken. This is worrying because the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (“OLC”) has interpreted Article II of the Constitution to allow the president to use force, without congressional authorization, whenever it is in the “national interest” and unlikely to produce a conflict of sufficient nature, scope, and duration to constitute “war in the constitutional sense.” Leading experts have criticized that OLC’s interpretation “provides no meaningful constraint” on the president’s authority to launch airstrikes or direct U.S. forces into low‑intensity combat. Indeed, recent presidents have relied on this interpretation of Article II to intervene in Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya and attack Bashar al-Assad’s military installations in Syria — without Congress’s prior approval.

If Department of Defense officials are telling Congress that section 1202 programs will not involve combat, they may be making a promise they cannot keep. Without real guardrails, mission creep or personnel turnover (including in the White House) could easily result in section 1202 surrogate forces being commanded into combat. There’s certainly an appetite to push the present boundaries: Just last week, a former Marine Corps official proposed using kinetic section 1202 programs to “target[] Chinese military assets” in the South China Sea.

To the extent that Congress wants to prevent section 1202 surrogate forces from being used like their section 127e counterparts, Congress needs to limit the authority, not expand it. Congress should add language to section 1202 that would prevent the authority from being used to implement expansive interpretations of the president’s authority to use force without congressional authorization. This could be a simple fix, accomplished by requiring section 1202 programs to support “ongoing and statutorily authorized” U.S. irregular warfare operations. Congress should also improve its capacity to oversee section 1202 programs, which are poorly understood by most members of the defense committees and largely concealed from members of the foreign affairs committees.

Our Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the constitutional power to declare war. It gives Congress the authority to create, fund, and regulate the military. As it stands, section 1202 is an overbroad authority that already risks degrading these constitutional prerogatives and removing decisions of war and peace from democratic debate and accountability. Contrary to the Department of Defense’s assertions and asks, expanding section 1202 would deepen these risks, widening the aperture for U.S. forces to engage in and direct combat in unauthorized, foreign wars.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Katherine Yon Bright.

Here’s something we seldom focus on when it comes to war, American-style, even during the just-passed 20th anniversary of our disastrous invasion of Iraq: many more soldiers survive armed conflict than die from it. This has been especially so during this country’s twenty-first-century War on Terror, which is still playing out in all too many lands globally.

And here’s something to add to that reality: even though many more soldiers survive, they do so with ever more injuries of various sorts — conditions that the Veterans Affairs (VA) and military doctors euphemistically call polytrauma. For some of this, you can thank ever-more-sophisticated improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and other gems of modern warfare like “smart” suicide bombs that can burn, blind, deafen, or mutilate soldier’s bodies, while traumatizing their brains in myriad ways, some of which will not be evident until months or years later.

The U.S. Department of Defense’s wartime casualty count provides just a glimpse of this disparity between injuries and deaths — about eight wounded for every one killed, according to its figures — because it totes up only those troops and contractors whose deaths and wounds can be traced back to their time in war zones like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere. The Pentagon doesn’t include in its tallies those whose injuries either happened or only became apparent off the battlefields of America’s wars, who, for instance, suffer from breathing problems thanks to the toxic burn pits the Pentagon established to dispose of garbage in Iraq or from depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and chronic pain. After all, the suicide rate of veterans is 1.5 times higher than that of the general population.

Such casualty criteria suggest that the U.S. government has many more veterans of its post-9/11 wars to care for than it has ever acknowledged. Those would also include people who have never seen combat but lived through the relentless pace and pressure of deployments or even simply the brutal hazing in many commands in today’s overstretched military.

In short, America’s veterans need all the help they can get and, as yet, there’s no evidence it’s coming their way.

All told today, more than 40% of post-9/11 veterans have some sort of officially recognized disability — compared with less than 25% of those from prior wars. That number is expected to rise to 54% over the course of the next 30 years. Those veterans are also using VA medical services at unprecedented rates, yet they often need to wait weeks to access much-needed care.

The Personal Battles We Don’t See

As a military spouse of 10 years, a clinical social worker serving veterans and active-duty military families, and a co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, I’ve spoken to hundreds of veterans and active-duty service members over the years. They regularly describe gaps in the kind of medical care and social support they so desperately need. Often, private charities fill in where state assistance is lacking.

Among the examples I’ve encountered would be the Air Force Reserve officer who relied on donations and food banks to feed his family; the former Marine infantryman who found a physical therapist for his never-ending back pain and mobility issues thanks only to a chance encounter at a farmer’s market; and the Navy ensign, less than honorably discharged with “bad papers,” who got treatment only through a local Alcoholics Anonymous group. And just beyond the frame of such (relatively) happy endings lie significant holes in government support for the health of our veterans.

In most prior major wars, the draft helped ensure the presence of more support personnel for active-duty troops and veterans, while more Americans then knew someone who had served. Twenty-first-century America has settled for a society characterized by less knowledge of — and support for — its veteran community. Civilians (mostly women, of course) often pick up the slack, even as they are expected (along with their husbands) to smoothly reintegrate into civilian life after serving in the armed forces.

The VA Caregiver Program

The government is not entirely indifferent to the plight of family members who give up their livelihoods to care for our wounded. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law a bill that set in motion the VA Caregiver Program, a series of supports for families already dealing with the most injured or ill post-9/11 veterans. The program includes a stipend, travel reimbursement, special healthcare services, and training for these caregivers. Over time, it was expanded for veterans of other eras and their loved ones, while the criteria for being a paid caregiver came to include anyone living with a veteran full-time. The establishment of that Caregiver Program crucially recognized the family as an integral part of the echelons of private contractors brought in to support the War on Terror, even if wives, mothers, and relatives were not nearly as handsomely paid as their defense contractor peers.

Unfortunately, good things only last so long! In late 2021, the VA announced that it would conduct an audit of the nearly 20,000 families of post-9/11 veterans receiving stipends and services under the program, based on a new more stringent set of requirements. Those rules stipulated that veterans whose loved ones were enrolled be totally unable to perform at least one of the “tasks of daily living” like getting dressed, bathing, eating, or simply moving around.

While the VA initially projected that about a third of the “legacy” families previously covered by the program would lose their benefits in the new care environment, it soon became clear that many more — nearly 90% of those reviewed — might be found ineligible. After a series of court challenges and interventions by veterans’ groups, the Caregiver Program suspended its audit in early 2022 and agreed to reexamine its rulemaking.

This February, however, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal brought by advocates for veterans challenging the absence of caregiver input in the review process and a lack of attention to the particularities of what each veteran actually needs. In the meantime, as with so many other aspects of military life, all too many veterans and their families who have relied on this support see their futures hanging by a thread.

The War on Terror’s Lasting Human Costs

We Americans tend to look the other way when the government places a relatively small number of us in harm’s way — though we were talking about 170,000 American troops in Iraq alone in 2007! Today, most of us undoubtedly think the War on Terror is over. When President George W. Bush’s administration first received congressional authorization to attack Afghanistan and then Iraq, essentially obtaining blank checks for years to come, generations of Americans, many from lower-income and minority communities, were consigned to endless fighting and — no kidding! — hundreds of thousands of them to futures of injury and social isolation.

Lack of support for such future veterans was seeded into the process from the outset, since the Bush administration never set aside money to cover the long-term expenses of caring for them, nor did Congress ever fully account for such future costs that could, in the end, reach – a Costs of War Project estimate — $2.2 trillion. It’s not clear where that money will come from, let alone how we’ll recruit and train enough healthcare providers and support staff for a pandemic-ravaged medical system.

As a military spouse and mental healthcare provider myself, I face the apathy of our government on a regular basis. My spouse is about to end 20 years in the military and, with some trepidation, I anticipate the long wait times and bureaucratic red tape that I know all too well have been faced by so many others in his position.

My experiences as a therapist do little to counter such realities. More than three months ago, I called the provider services department of the VA’s Community Care Network. It contracts with non-military healthcare givers so that veterans can seek services outside of VA facilities if they choose to do so. After the representative I spoke with confirmed that there was a need for more mental health providers in my region, she took down my name and contact information, telling me that someone would call back to do an “intake” interview with me within 10 days.

More than 100 days and three follow-up phone calls later, I’m still waiting. So is a colleague I know with decades of experience navigating America’s labyrinthine mental-health insurance system. Most major insurance companies do have standardized online forms that can digitally accept “intakes” from credential providers. (Indeed, all that is necessary is less than a page-worth of demographic and tax-related information.) No such entry point exists in my regional VA system — and mind you, I live just a stone’s throw from the Pentagon.

For every VA staff member keeping a seat warm who stands between veterans and those qualified to provide for their care, there is at least one untrained, stressed-out family member forced to work at little or no cost. Believe me, it’s difficult to witness the stress of a loved one facing a momentous transition, while knowing that the policymakers once so prepared to place them in harm’s way are now remarkably unprepared to care for them when they are no longer of direct use.

United We Fall?

You’d like to think — wouldn’t you? — that people are what Americans most want to invest in to secure a livable future for our country, let alone humanity as a whole. Again and again, facing needs ranging from healthcare to hunger to unfettered environmental degradation wrought by our own military and government, our congressional representatives seem ready to commit to little more than ever greater weapons production on a multi-year basis.

Lack of support for veterans is but part of this larger social vacuum. In my family, at least, a fear of far worse lurks all too close at hand (including that our country might end up in a future apocalyptic nuclear tit-for-tat with Vladimir Putin’s maniacal Russian government). Even without such futuristic horror, the living conditions of the vulnerable among us who have survived our own nightmarish wars should serve as a warning that, if we continue to be so unprepared to care for those who tried to serve us, not much worth fighting for will remain.

My spouse and I like to torture ourselves weekly by watching the apocalyptic sci-fi television series The Last of Us in which pandemic-stricken zombies and violence by our own troops reduce this country to a series of military-led quarantine zones reserved for a privileged few. In one scene, a general in charge of one of those zones warns an unruly teenage recruit that her best bet for a decent existence is to become an officer in his government. Spoiler alert: she ends up getting kidnapped by resistance fighters who try to use her to find a cure for the pandemic virus circulating in that world. In the end, she buys into the dream of a decent future made possible by science and acts on it herself. You’ll have to watch to find out more, but her caring decision to pursue what’s best for us all left my spouse and me feeling remarkably upbeat in such a downbeat world.

I suspect that if we do want a better world, the rest of us will have to act like that young heroine who risks life and limb for the good of us all. My version of that dream would start with urging our government to do everything possible to ensure that we invest more in human beings instead of the next round of weaponry, including the world-ending variety of them.

A recent New York Timesop-ed marveled that Americans today don’t seem to fear nuclear weapons as they once did, even though we fear so many other things from viruses to disinformation to climate change. Paradoxically, I suspect that such an oversight is caused, at least in part, by this country’s seemingly never-ending commitment to funding an ever-vaster military and its weaponry instead of education, healthcare, infrastructure, and jobs, not to speak of the veterans we dispatched into that nightmarish war on terror without making a commitment to truly support them.

Isn’t it time that we begin pushing our congressional representatives (small hope, sadly enough!) to set in motion policies that would uplift us all, including those veterans, instead of pouring yet more staggering sums into a military that’s only sent so many of us to hell and back in this century?

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Andrea Mazzarino.

On March 13th, the Pentagon rolled out its proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2024. The results were — or at least should have been — stunning, even by the standards of a department that’s used to getting what it wants when it wants it.

The new Pentagon budget would come in at $842 billion. That’s the highest level requested since World War II, except for the peak moment of the Afghan and Iraq wars, when the United States had nearly 200,000 troops deployed in those two countries.

$1 Trillion for the Pentagon?

It’s important to note that the $842 billion proposed price tag for the Pentagon next year will only be the beginning of what taxpayers will be asked to shell out in the name of “defense.” If you add in nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy and small amounts of military spending spread across other agencies, you’re already at a total military budget of $886 billion. And if last year is any guide, Congress will add tens of billions of dollars extra to that sum, while yet more billions will go for emergency aid to Ukraine to help it fend off Russia’s brutal invasion. In short, we’re talking about possible total spending of well over $950 billion on war and preparations for more of it — within striking distance, in other words, of the $1 trillion mark that hawkish officials and pundits could only dream about a few short years ago.

The ultimate driver of that enormous spending spree is a seldom-commented-upon strategy of global military overreach, including 750 U.S. military bases scattered on every continent except Antarctica, 170,000 troops stationed overseas, and counterterror operations in at least 85 — no, that is not a typo — countries (a count offered by Brown University’s Costs of War Project). Worse yet, the Biden administration only seems to be preparing for more of the same. Its National Defense Strategy, released late last year, manages to find the potential for conflict virtually everywhere on the planet and calls for preparations to win a war with Russia and/or China, fight Iran and North Korea, and continue to wage a global war on terror, which, in recent times, has been redubbed “countering violent extremism.” Think of such a strategic view of the world as the exact opposite of the “diplomacy first” approach touted by President Joe Biden and his team during his early months in office. Worse yet, it’s more likely to serve as a recipe for conflict than a blueprint for peace and security.

In an ideal world, Congress would carefully scrutinize that Pentagon budget request and rein in the department’s overly ambitious, counterproductive plans. But the past two years suggest that, at least in the short term, exactly the opposite approach lies ahead. After all, lawmakers added $25 billion and $45 billion, respectively, to the Pentagon’s budget requests for 2022 and 2023, mostly for special-interest projects based in the states or districts of key members of Congress. And count on it, hawks on Capitol Hill will push for similar increases this year, too.

How the Arms Industry Captures Congress

The $45 billion by which Congress increased the Pentagon’s budget request last year was among the highest levels on record. Add-ons included five extra F-35 jet fighters and a $4.7 billion boost to the shipbuilding budget. Other congressional additions included 10 HH-60W helicopters, four EC-37 aircraft, and 16 additional C-130J aircraft (at a cost of $1.7 billion). There were also provisions that prevented the Pentagon from retiring a wide array of older aircraft and ships — including B-1 bombers, F-22 and F-15 combat aircraft, aerial refueling planes, C-130 and C-40 transport aircraft, E-3 electronic warfare planes, HH-60W helicopters, and the relatively new but disastrous Littoral Combat Ships (LCS), referred to by detractors as “little crappy ships.”

The lobbying effort to prevent the Navy from retiring those problem-plagued ships is a case study of all that’s wrong with the Pentagon budget process as it works its way through Congress. As the New York Times noted in a detailed analysis of the checkered history of the LCS, it was originally imagined as a multi-mission vessel capable of detecting submarines, destroying anti-ship mines, and doing battle with the kinds of small craft used by countries like Iran. Once produced, however, it proved inept at every one of those tasks, while experiencing repeated engine problems that made it hard even to deploy. Add to that the Navy’s view that the LCS would be useless in a potential naval clash with China and it was decided to retire nine of them, even though some had only served four to six years of a potential 25-year lifetime.

Contractors and public officials with a stake in the LCS, however, quickly mobilized to block the Navy from shelving the ships and ultimately saved five of the nine slated for retirement. Major players included a trade association representing companies that had received contracts worth $3 billion to repair and maintain those vessels at a shipyard in Jacksonville, Florida, as well as other sites in the U.S. and overseas.

The key congressional players in saving the ship were Representative John Rutherford (R-FL), whose district includes that Jacksonville shipyard, and Representative Rob Wittman (R-VA), whose district includes a major naval facility at Hampton Roads where maintenance and repair work on the LCS is also done. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that, in 2022, Wittman received hundreds of thousands of dollars in arms-industry campaign contributions, including substantial donations from companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics with a role in the LCS program. When asked if the lobbying campaign for the LCS influenced his actions, he said bluntly enough, “I can’t tell you it was the predominant factor… but I can tell you it was a factor.”

Former Representative Jackie Speier (D-CA), who tried to make the decision to retire the ships stick, had a harsh view of the campaign to save them:

“If the LCS was a car sold in America today, they would be deemed lemons, and the automakers would be sued into oblivion… The only winners have been the contractors on which the Navy relies for sustaining these ships.”

Not all members of Congress are wedded to the idea of endlessly increasing Pentagon spending. On the progressive side, Representatives Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) have introduced a bill that would cut $100 billion a year from the department’s budget. That figure aligns with a 2021 Congressional Budget Office report outlining three paths toward Pentagon budget reductions that would leave the U.S. with a significantly more than adequate defense system.

Meanwhile, members of the right-wing Freedom Caucus and their allies have promised to push for a freeze on federal discretionary spending at Fiscal Year 2022 levels. If implemented across the board, that would mean a $75 to $100 billion cut in Pentagon spending. But proponents of the freeze have been unclear about the degree to which such cuts (if any) would affect the Department of Defense.

A number of Republican House members, including Speaker Kevin McCarthy, have indeed said that the Pentagon will be “on the table” in any discussion of future budget cuts, but the only specific items mentioned have involved curbing the Pentagon’s “woke agenda” — that is, defunding things like alternative fuel research — along with initiatives aimed at closing unnecessary military bases or reducing the size of the officer corps. Such moves could indeed save a few billion dollars, while leaving the vast bulk of the Pentagon’s budget intact. No matter where they stand on the political spectrum, proponents of trimming the military budget will have to face a congressional majority of Pentagon boosters and the arms industry’s daunting influence machine.

Greasing the Wheels: Lobbying, Campaign Contributions, and the Job Card

As with the LCS, major arms contractors have routinely greased the wheels of access and influence in Congress with campaign contributions to the tune of $83 million over the past two election cycles. Such donations go mainly to the members with the most power to help the major weapons producers. And the arms industry is fast on the draw. Typically, for instance, those corporations have already expanded their collaboration with the Republicans who, since the 2022 election, now head the House Armed Services Committee and the House Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee.

The latest figures from OpenSecrets, an organization that closely tracks campaign and lobbying expenditures, show that new House Armed Services Committee chief Mike Rogers (R-AL) received more than $511,000 from weapons makers in the most recent election cycle, while Ken Calvert (R-CA), the new head of the defense appropriations subcommittee, followed close behind at $445,000. Rogers has been one of the most aggressive members of Congress when it comes to pushing for higher Pentagon spending. He’s a longstanding booster of the Department of Defense and has more than ample incentives to advocate for its agenda, given not just his own beliefs but the presence of major defense contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin in his state.

Contractors and members of Congress with arms plants or military bases in their jurisdictions routinely use the jobs argument as a tool of last resort in pushing the funding of relevant facilities and weapons systems. It matters little that the actual economic impact of Pentagon spending has been greatly exaggerated and more efficient sources of job creation could, with the right funding, be developed.

At the national level, direct employment in the weapons sector has dropped dramatically in the past four decades, from 3.2 million Americans in the mid-1980s to one million today, according to figures compiled by the National Defense Industrial Association, the arms industry’s largest trade group. And those one million jobs in the defense sector represent just six-tenths of one percent of the U.S. civilian labor force of more than 160 million people. In short, weapons spending is a distinct niche sector in the larger economy rather than an essential driver of overall economic activity.

Arms-related employment will certainly rise as Pentagon budgets do and as ongoing expenditures aimed at arming Ukraine continue to do so as well. Still, total employment in the defense sector will remain at modest levels relative to those during the Cold War, even though the current military budget is far higher than spending in the peak years of that era.

Reductions in defense-related employment are masked by the tendency of major contractors like Lockheed Martin to exaggerate the number of jobs associated with their most significant weapons-making programs. For example, Lockheed Martin claims that the F-35 program creates 298,000 jobs in 48 states, though the real figure is closer to half that number (based on average annual expenditures on the program and estimates by the Costs of War Project that military spending creates about 11,200 jobs per billion dollars spent).

It’s true, however, that the jobs that do exist generate considerable political clout because they tend to be in the states and districts of the members of Congress with the most sway over spending on weapons research, development, and production. Addressing that problem would require a new investment strategy aimed at easing the transition of defense-dependent communities and workers to other jobs (as outlined in Miriam Pemberton’s new bookSix Stops on the National Security Tour: Rethinking Warfare Economies).

Unfortunately, the major contractors are ever better positioned to shape future debates on Pentagon spending and strategy. For example, a newly formed congressional commission charged with evaluating the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy mostly consists of experts and ex-government officials with close ties to those weapons makers. They are either executives, consultants, board members, or staffers at think tanks with substantial industry funding.

And sadly, this should shock no one. The last time Congress created a commission on strategy, its membership was also heavily slanted towards individuals with defense-industry ties and it recommended a 3% to 5% annual increase in Pentagon spending, adjusted for inflation, for years to come. That was well more than what the department was then projected to spend. The figure that the commission recommended immediately became a rallying cry for Pentagon boosters like Mike Rogers and former ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee James Inhofe (R-OK) in their efforts to push spending even higher. Inhofe typically treated that document as gospel, at one point waving a copy of it at a congressional hearing on the Pentagon budget.

“An Alert and Knowledgeable Citizenry”

The power and influence of the arms industry are daunting obstacles to a change in national priorities. But there is historical precedent for a different approach. After all, given enough public pressure, Pentagon spending did drop in the wake of the Vietnam War, again at the end of the Cold War, and even during the deficit reduction debates of the early 2010s. It could happen again.

As President Dwight D. Eisenhower noted in his famous farewell address in 1961, the only counterbalance to the power of the military-industrial complex is an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry.” Fortunately, a number of individuals and groups are working hard to sound the alarm and mobilize opposition to massive overspending on war and preparations for more of it. Coalitions like People Over Pentagon and organizations like the Poor People’s Campaign continue to educate the public and work to increase the number of congressional representatives in favor of reining in the Pentagon’s bloated budget and shifting funds to areas of urgent national need.

As of now, the Pentagon consumes more than half of the federal government’s discretionary budget. That, in turn, means the funds needed to prevent pandemics, address climate change, and reduce poverty and inequality have taken a back seat. Those problems aren’t going away and are likely to pose greater threats to American lives and livelihoods than traditional military challenges. As that reality becomes clearer to ever more Americans, the Pentagon’s days of virtually unlimited funding may indeed come to an end. It’s not the work of a day or a year, but it certainly is essential to the safety and security of this country and the world.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by William Hartung.

The U.S. launched airstrikes in Syria on Thursday after one American contractor was killed and five service members were injured in an attack by a drone that the Pentagon claims was of "Iranian origin."

The drone attack on a maintenance facility in northeast Syria and the U.S. response came two weeks after the House of Representatives voted down a bipartisan resolution that would have required President Joe Biden to withdraw all American troops from Syria within 180 days.

Around 900 U.S. troops and hundreds of contractors are currently stationed in Syria under a legal rationale that experts say is highly dubious at best.

Thursday's airstrikes in Syria were among several Biden has approved without congressional authorization since taking office. In a statement, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that "at the direction of President Biden," the Pentagon "authorized U.S. Central Command forces to conduct precision airstrikes tonight in eastern Syria against facilities used by groups affiliated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)."

"The airstrikes were conducted in response to today's attack as well as a series of recent attacks against coalition forces in Syria by groups affiliated with the IRGC," Austin added.

The strikes, which reportedly killed at least eight people described as "pro-Iran fighters," spurred another flurry of questions about the legal authority that the Biden administration is using to maintain the presence of U.S. troops and carry out military operations in Syria.

While Austin did not specifically invoke any legal authority in his statement, he did say the U.S. airstrikes were "intended to protect and defend U.S. personnel"—an apparent reference to Article II of the Constitution.

"We are at war in Syria, but American lawmakers haven't debated it and the public barely knows," Vox foreign policy writer Jonathan Guyer tweeted late Thursday. "One of the most significant and least discussed legacies of George W. Bush's 20-year-old invasion of Iraq is the way it's led to unauthorized forever wars we scarcely discuss."

Members of Congress have previously voiced alarm over the Biden administration's reliance on Article II to carry out military operations without congressional approval, something that was also done by previous administrations.

In 2021, following two rounds of U.S. airstrikes in Syria, more than 30 House lawmakers led by Reps. Peter Defazio (D-Ore.), Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) sent a letter criticizing the Biden administration's "dangerous claim that Article II of the Constitution permits you to bypass congressional authorization to perform strikes inside Syria."

The lawmakers also rebuked the administration's insistence that "the wide range of activities" it has "undertaken as part of the ongoing U.S. occupation of a large swath of Syrian territory is justified by the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) of 2001," the measure Congress passed in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

That AUMF has been used by several administrations to justify military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, and other countries. Opponents of the war powers resolution aimed at withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria invoked the 2001 AUMF to justify the continued occupation.

Congress has never specifically authorized the U.S. military to combat "Iran-backed forces" in Syria.

Earlier this week, as Congress moved to repeal the separate 2002 Iraq War AUMF, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) attempted to pass an amendment to change the language of the authorization to greenlight operations "against Iranian-backed militias operating in Iraq."

The Graham amendment was soundly defeated, with 60 senators voting no.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The U.S. launched airstrikes in Syria on Thursday after one American contractor was killed and five service members were injured in an attack by a drone that the Pentagon claims was of "Iranian origin."

The drone attack on a maintenance facility in northeast Syria and the U.S. response came two weeks after the House of Representatives voted down a bipartisan resolution that would have required President Joe Biden to withdraw all American troops from Syria within 180 days.

Around 900 U.S. troops and hundreds of contractors are currently stationed in Syria under a legal rationale that experts say is highly dubious at best.

Thursday's airstrikes in Syria were among several Biden has approved without congressional authorization since taking office. In a statement, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that "at the direction of President Biden," the Pentagon "authorized U.S. Central Command forces to conduct precision airstrikes tonight in eastern Syria against facilities used by groups affiliated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)."

"The airstrikes were conducted in response to today's attack as well as a series of recent attacks against coalition forces in Syria by groups affiliated with the IRGC," Austin added.

The strikes, which reportedly killed at least eight people described as "pro-Iran fighters," spurred another flurry of questions about the legal authority that the Biden administration is using to maintain the presence of U.S. troops and carry out military operations in Syria.

While Austin did not specifically invoke any legal authority in his statement, he did say the U.S. airstrikes were "intended to protect and defend U.S. personnel"—an apparent reference to Article II of the Constitution.

"We are at war in Syria, but American lawmakers haven't debated it and the public barely knows," Vox foreign policy writer Jonathan Guyer tweeted late Thursday. "One of the most significant and least discussed legacies of George W. Bush's 20-year-old invasion of Iraq is the way it's led to unauthorized forever wars we scarcely discuss."

Members of Congress have previously voiced alarm over the Biden administration's reliance on Article II to carry out military operations without congressional approval, something that was also done by previous administrations.

In 2021, following two rounds of U.S. airstrikes in Syria, more than 30 House lawmakers led by Reps. Peter Defazio (D-Ore.), Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) sent a letter criticizing the Biden administration's "dangerous claim that Article II of the Constitution permits you to bypass congressional authorization to perform strikes inside Syria."

The lawmakers also rebuked the administration's insistence that "the wide range of activities" it has "undertaken as part of the ongoing U.S. occupation of a large swath of Syrian territory is justified by the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) of 2001," the measure Congress passed in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

That AUMF has been used by several administrations to justify military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, and other countries. Opponents of the war powers resolution aimed at withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria invoked the 2001 AUMF to justify the continued occupation.

Congress has never specifically authorized the U.S. military to combat "Iran-backed forces" in Syria.

Earlier this week, as Congress moved to repeal the separate 2002 Iraq War AUMF, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) attempted to pass an amendment to change the language of the authorization to greenlight operations "against Iranian-backed militias operating in Iraq."

The Graham amendment was soundly defeated, with 60 senators voting no.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

In April 1953, newly elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a retired five-star Army general who had led the landings on D-Day in France in June 1944, gave his most powerful speech. It would become known as his “Cross of Iron” address. In it, Ike warned of the cost humanity would pay if Cold War competition led to a world dominated by wars and weaponry that couldn’t be reined in. In the immediate aftermath of the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Ike extended an olive branch to the new leaders of that empire. He sought, he said, to put America and the world on a “highway to peace.” It was, of course, never to be, as this country’s emergent military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) chose instead to build a militarized (and highly profitable) highway to hell.

Eight years later, in his famous farewell address, a frustrated and alarmed president called out “the military-industrial complex,” prophetically warning of its anti-democratic nature and the disastrous rise of misplaced power that it represented. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry, fully engaged in corralling, containing, and constraining it, he concluded, could save democracy and bolster peaceful methods and goals.

The MICC’s response was, of course, to ignore his warning, while waging a savage war on communism in the name of containing it. In the process, atrocious conflicts would be launched in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as the contagion of war spread. Threatened with the possibility of peace in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the MICC bided its time with operations in Iraq (Desert Storm), Bosnia, and elsewhere, along with the expansion of NATO, until it could launch an unconstrained Global War on Terror in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Those “good times” (filled with lost wars) lasted until 2021 and the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Only Americans, Ike once said, can truly hurt America. Meaning, to put the matter in a more positive context, only we can truly help save America. A vital first step is to put the word “peace” back in our national vocabulary.

Not to be deterred by the fizzling of the nightmarish war on terror, the MICC seized on a “new cold war” with China and Russia, which only surged when, in 2022, Vladimir Putin so disastrously invaded Ukraine (as the U.S. had once invaded Afghanistan and Iraq). Yet again, Americans were told that they faced implacable foes that could only be met with overwhelming military power and, of course, the funding that went with it — again in the name of deterrence and containment.

In a way, in 1953 and later in 1961, Ike, too, had been urging Americans to launch a war of containment, only against an internal foe: what he then labeled for the first time “the military-industrial complex.” For various reasons, we failed to heed his warnings. As a result, over the last 70 years, it has grown to dominate the federal government as well as American culture in a myriad of ways. Leaving aside funding where it’s beyond dominant, try movies, TV shows, video games, education, sports, you name it. Today, the MICC is remarkably uncontained. Ike’s words weren’t enough and, sadly, his actions too often conflicted with his vision (as in the CIA’s involvement in a coup in Iran in 1953). So, his worst nightmare did indeed come to pass. In 2023, along with much of the world, America does indeed hang from a cross of iron, hovering closer to the brink of nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Updating Ike’s Cross of Iron Speech for Today

Perhaps the most quoted passage in that 1953 speech addressed the true cost of militarism, with Ike putting it in homespun, easily grasped, terms. He started by saying, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” (An aside: Can you imagine Donald Trump, Joe Biden, or any other recent president challenging Pentagon spending and militarism so brazenly?)

Ike then added:

“This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”

He concluded with a harrowing image: “This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Ike’s cost breakdown of guns versus butter, weapons versus civilian goods, got me thinking recently: What would it look like if he could give that speech today? Are we getting more bang for the military megabucks we spend, or less? How much are Americans sacrificing to their wasteful and wanton god of war?

Let’s take a closer look. A conservative cost estimate for one of the Air Force’s new “heavy” strategic nuclear bombers, the B-21 Raider, is $750 million. A conservative estimate for a single new fighter plane, in this case the F-35 Lightning II, is $100 million. A single Navy destroyer, a Zumwalt-class ship, will be anywhere from $4 to $8 billion, but let’s just stick with the lower figure. Using those weapons, and some quick Internet sleuthing, here’s how Ike’s passage might read if he stood before us now:

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick-veneer and reinforced concrete school in 75 cities. It is five electric power plants, each serving a town with 60,000 inhabitants. It is five fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 150 miles of pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with more than 12 million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 64,000 people.”

(Quick and dirty figures for the calculations above: $10 million per elementary school; $150 million per power plant [$5,000/kilowatt for 30,000 homes]; $150 million per hospital; $5 million per new mile of road; $8 per bushel of wheat; $250,000 per home for four people.)

Grim stats indeed! Admittedly, those are just ballpark figures, but taken together they show that the tradeoff between guns and butter — bombers and jet fighters on the one hand, schools and hospitals on the other — is considerably worse now than in Ike’s day. Yet Congress doesn’t seem to care, as Pentagon budgets continue to soar irrespective of huge cost overruns and failed audits (five in a row!), not to speak of failed wars.

Speaking of wasteful warships, Ike was hardly the first person to notice how much they cost or what can be sacrificed in building them. In his prescient book The War in the Air, first published in 1907, H.G. Wells, the famed author who had envisioned an alien invasion of Earth in The War of the Worlds, denounced his own epoch’s obsession with ironclad battleships in a passage that eerily anticipated Ike’s powerful critique:

The cost of those battleships, Wells wrote, must be measured by:

“The lives of countless men… spent in their service, the splendid genius and patience of thousands of engineers and inventors, wealth and material beyond estimating; to their account we must put stunted and starved lives on land, millions of children sent to toil unduly, innumerable opportunities of fine living undeveloped and lost. Money had to be found for them at any cost—that was the law of a nation’s existence during that strange time. Surely they were the weirdest, most destructive and wasteful megatheria in the whole history of mechanical invention.”

Little could he imagine our own era’s “wasteful megatheria.” These days, substitute nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, strategic bombers, aircraft carriers, and similar “modern” weapons for the ironclads of his era and the sentiment rings at least as true as it did then. (Interestingly, all those highly touted ironclads did nothing to avert the disaster of World War I and had little impact on its murderous course or ponderous duration.)

Returning to 1953, Eisenhower didn’t mince words about what the world faced if the iron cross mentality won out: at worst, nuclear war; at best, “a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system, or the Soviet system, or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.”

Ike’s worst-case scenario grows ever more likely today. Recently, Russia suspended the START treaty, the final nuclear deal still in operation, that oversaw reductions in strategic nuclear weapons. Instead of reductions, Russia, China, and the United States are now pursuing staggering “modernization” programs for their nuclear arsenals, an effort that may cost the American taxpayer nearly $2 trillion over the coming decades (though even such a huge sum matters little if most of us are dead from nuclear war).

In any case, the United States in 2023 clearly reflects Ike’s “cross of iron” scenario. It’s a country that’s become thoroughly militarized and so is slowly wasting away, marked increasingly by fear, deprivation, and unhappiness.

It’s Never Too Late to Change Course

Only Americans, Ike once said, can truly hurt America. Meaning, to put the matter in a more positive context, only we can truly help save America. A vital first step is to put the word “peace” back in our national vocabulary.

“The peace we seek,” Ike explained 70 years ago, “founded upon a decent trust and cooperative effort among nations, can be fortified, not by weapons of war but by wheat and by cotton, by milk and by wool, by meat and timber and rice. These are words that translate into every language on earth. These are the needs that challenge this world in arms.”

The real needs of humanity haven’t changed since Ike’s time. Whether in 1953 or 2023, more guns won’t serve the cause of peace. They won’t provide succor. They’ll only stunt and starve us, to echo the words of H.G. Wells, while imperiling the lives and futures of our children.

This is no way of life at all, as Ike certainly would have noted, were he alive today.

Which is why the federal budget proposal released by President Biden for 2024 was both so painfully predictable and so immensely disappointing. Calamitously so. Biden’s proposal once again boosts spending on weaponry and war in a Pentagon budget now pegged at $886 billion. It will include yet more spending on nuclear weapons and envisions only further perpetual tensions with “near-peer” rivals China and Russia.

This past year, Congress added $45 billion more to that budget than even the president and the Pentagon requested, putting this country’s 2023 Pentagon budget at $858 billion. Clearly, a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget is in our collective future, perhaps as early as 2027. Perish the thought of how high it could soar, should the U.S. find itself in a shooting war with China or Russia (as the recent Russian downing of a U.S. drone in the Black Sea brought to mind). And if that war were to go nuclear…

The Pentagon’s soaring war budget broadcast a clear and shocking message to the world. In America’s creed, blessed are the warmakers and those martyrs crucified on its cross of iron.

This was hardly the message Ike sought to convey to the world 70 years ago this April. Yet it’s the message the MICC conveys with its grossly inflated military budgets and endless saber-rattling.

Yet one thing remains true today: it’s never too late to change course, to order an “about-face.” Sadly, lacking the wisdom of Dwight D. Eisenhower, such an order won’t come from Joe Biden or Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or any other major candidate for president in 2024. It would have to come from us, collectively. It’s time to wise up, America. Together, it’s time to find an exit ramp from the highway to hell that we’ve been on since 1953 and look for the on-ramp to Ike’s highway to peace.

And once we’re on it, let’s push the pedal to the metal and never look back.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by William Astore.

Denny Tamaki, the recently re-elected Governor of Okinawa, traveled to DC for a weeklong trip to lobby lawmakers and officials to reduce the disproportionate burden of US military bases in Okinawa, which hosts over 70% of US military presence in Japan. The Governor met with leading US officials including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other lawmakers and aides, as well as government officials, diplomats, and academics, to discuss the critical issues pertaining to the US bases and stress the need for diplomacy to ease tensions with China.

Tamaki told reporters he met with AOC for over 30 minutes to brief the Congresswoman on the local opposition against the construction of a new US base at Henoko. He explained the US and Japanese governments are ignoring the will of Okinawans through this construction, as well as noting that toxic PFAS chemical contamination of soil and water from the bases are worsening and require immediate studies by the US government. During the meeting, AOC indicated concern over these issues and expressed willingness to work together on a solution, including through potential legislation. She told the Okinawa Times that her office will review the contents of the meeting and consider what action is necessary.

During last week’s visit, Governor Tamaki also met with Senator Todd Young (R-IN) and Representative Jill Tokuda (D-HI), as well as aides of Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Ed Markey(D-MA), and the Senate Armed Services Committee. Other meetings including with State Department officials, the Japanese Ambassador, and DC think tank experts, sought to emphasize the need for constructive dialogue. A panel discussion co-hosted by the Quincy Institute, Okinawa Prefectural Government, and George Washington University, with Tamaki, professor Mike Mochizuki, and senior research fellow Michael Swaine, stressed the importance of addressing the issues with the bases and for the US to engage diplomatically in the Asia-Pacific, instead of escalating its already high military presence.

As US tensions with China continue to rise, Governor Tamaki asked lawmakers “to tell the US government to conduct diplomacy peacefully and relieve tensions to not bring war to Okinawa''. With increased Japanese military spending, expanded US-Japanese joint military drills, and plans from Tokyo to station surface-to-air missiles in Okinawa, Tamaki instead brought to the US a message of diplomacy, urging dialogue over military buildup on the issue with Taiwan.

The Governor’s visit follows growing opposition to the US bases in Okinawa, including from organizations such as the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA), as well as DSA state and local elected officials in the US who signed a recent letter outlining the issues and opposition to the bases. While hardliners against China dominate US mainstream politics, people in the Asia-Pacific region who feel their voices are ignored by the US government are the ones paying the burden of this rising militarism.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Gerard Dalbon.

More than 60 faith-based organizations on Tuesday urged the U.S. Congress to impose major cuts on the bloated military budget as President Joe Biden pushes for a nearly $30 billion increase and Republicans demand even bigger spending hike.

"The country is sprinting towards a trillion-dollar budget for weapons and war—propping up an expensive and harmful militarized foreign policy while people struggle to meet their basic needs," reads a new letter to members of Congress signed by U.S., international, and state and local groups including the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice, Hindus for Human Rights, and dozens of others.

"We cannot continue down this morally bankrupt path," the letter continues. "We urge members of Congress to dramatically cut militarized spending in the fiscal year 2024 budget—both to facilitate reinvestment in the well-being of our communities, and to curtail the harms of our militarized foreign policy."

The groups' principled stand against devoting further resources to the U.S. military—and specifically to the Pentagon, an agency that recently failed its fifth consecutive audit—comes days after Biden requested an $886 billion military budget for the upcoming fiscal year, with $842 billion of that total earmarked for the Department of Defense.

Tori Bateman, the policy advocacy coordinator at AFSC, said Tuesday that "we know that there is enormous waste, fraud, and abuse at the Pentagon—and that spending exorbitant amounts of money on weapons and war takes away from the funding our communities receive for things like healthcare and housing."

"This year, we need Congress to commit to cutting Pentagon spending, and maintaining a robust level of spending on human needs programs," Bateman added.

"We need Congress to commit to cutting Pentagon spending, and maintaining a robust level of spending on human needs programs."

But that demand is likely to be ignored in a Congress that agrees each year—on a bipartisan basis and with relatively little pushback—to increase the U.S. military budget, often by tens of billions more than the president's original request. In 2022, just 78 members of the House voted for Rep. Barbara Lee's (D-Calif.) amendment to cut the military budget by $100 billion while 350 opposed it.

In response to Biden's budget framework, leading Republicans made clear that they would push for even more military spending, calling the president's proposal "woefully inadequate"—even though it's among the largest in U.S. history.

"If past experience is any guide, more than half of the new Pentagon budget will go to contractors, with the biggest share going to the top five—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—to build everything from howitzers and tanks to intercontinental ballistic missiles," William Hartung of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft noted last week. "Much of the funding for contractors will come from spending on buying, researching, and developing weapons, which accounts for $315 billion of the new budget request."

Of the $1.7 trillion in discretionary spending that Biden has proposed for fiscal year 2024, just $584 billion is reserved for social programs, analyst Stephen Semler observed.

The anti-war group CodePink said in a statement Tuesday that while "President Biden's overall 2024 budget does have some positive proposals like restoring the child tax credit, investing in clean energy projects, and cleaning up nuclear waste sites," the "likelihood of passing the tax reform needed as well as the policies themselves seems very unlikely as congressional Democrats couldn't even pass the Build Back Better legislation when they had more control in 2021."

"What will pass—what always passes no matter who is in the White House and what majority fills the halls of Congress—is the defense budget," the group added. "Any domestic policy being dangled to the public by the Democrats is meaningless while they still support the ever-growing and immoral defense budget."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Progressive lawmakers were among those mourning the death of former U.S. Rep. Patricia Schroeder, who served in the House for 24 years and pushed for legislation to protect the jobs of parents, control military spending, and expand healthcare for low-income people. She died in Celebration, Florida on Monday at age 82.

Schroeder first ran for Congress in 1972, representing the Denver area and centering her grassroots campaign largely on her opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam.

She was one of just 14 women in the House when she took office and was the first woman to serve on the House Armed Services Committee, on which she sat for her entire legislative career.

Upon being named to the committee, Schroeder recalled being ordered by Chairman F. Edward Hébert, a right-wing Democrat from Louisiana, to share a seat with African-American Rep. Ron Dellums (D-Calif.), saying that Hébert told the newly elected lawmakers that they were "only worth half the normal member."

She had previously been told by a dean at Harvard Law School, where she earned a law degree in 1964, that she and the other 14 women in her class had "taken this position from a man."

She was undaunted by the sexism she encountered, and used her position on the Armed Services Committee to regularly call for arms control and reduced military spending. Schroeder aimed to reform the committee that she said acted too frequently as the Pentagon's "lap dog."

The congresswoman was also well known for leading the fight for women's rights in the workplace, pushing for the passage of the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which prohibited employers from firing women because they were pregnant. Fifteen years later, she helped pass the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 to ensure people wouldn't lose their jobs for taking time off work to care for a newborn or other family member.

Other legislation she played a crucial role in passing included the Violence Against Women Act of 1994; the National Child Protection Act of 1993, which established a background check system for childcare providers; and the Breast and Cervical Cancer Mortality Prevention Act of 1990, which provided screenings for lower-income women.

In 1995, Schroeder joined Bernie Sanders, then an Independent member of the House representing Vermont, in rising to oppose the comments of Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-Calif.). Cunningham uttered a slur as he attacked the two lawmakers for supporting gay Americans who served in the military and told Sanders, "Sit down, you socialist!"

Schroeder retorted with a "parliamentary inquiry," asking, "Do we have to call the gentleman a gentleman if he's not one?"

On Tuesday, Sanders tweeted that Schroeder "was not only a friend but an extraordinarily effective congresswoman who, in so many ways, led the way in opening up opportunities for women."

"Former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder was a fearless champion for women's rights," said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez(D-N.Y.). "Her work has inspired countless women in politics and government, and we hope to continue to uphold her legacy."

Newly elected progressive Reps. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Fla.) and Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) also expressed appreciation for Schroeder's legacy.

"A pioneer for women's rights, Rep. Schroeder spoke up for Colorado in D.C. for over two decades, defying odds and making her mark," said Crockett. "Last night we lost a giant—but Pat Schroeder's legacy and work lives on!"

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

China accused Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of threatening peace in the Pacific region after leaders of the so-called AUKUS military partnership unveiled further information about their plan to expand the reach of Washington's nuclear-powered submarine technology.

"The latest joint statement from the U.S., U.K., and Australia demonstrates that the three countries, for the sake of their own geopolitical interests, completely disregard the concerns of the international community and are walking further and further down the path of error and danger," Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a Tuesday press conference.

Eighteen months after AUKUS was established, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and U.S. President Joe Biden met Monday in California, where they announced details about the yearslong collaboration.

Following roughly a decade of training from the U.S. and U.K. navies, Australia is set to purchase three Virginia-class submarines propelled by enriched uranium by the "early 2030s," pending U.S. congressional approval. After the initial deal, Canberra will have the option to obtain two additional vessels, which are valued at $3 billion each and capable of launching cruise missiles.

"The sale announced on Monday is part of a long-term, multi-stage plan destined to make Australia a full partner in fielding top-secret U.S. nuclear technology previously shared only with the U.K.," Al Jazeerareported. "Meanwhile, Australia and Britain will start building a new submarine model with U.S. technology and support, with the U.K. expected to deliver its first home-built nuclear submarine by the late 2030s. Australia is set to deliver those new vessels to its navy by the early 2040s."

As the news outlet noted, the trilateral agreement also "includes a commitment to cooperate on building artificial intelligence capabilities, hypersonic weapons, and other advanced technologies."

Although China received only a passing reference on Monday, AUKUS is widely seen as a U.S.-led effort to contain Beijing's growing economic, military, and diplomatic power. Chinese officials, global peace activists, and the U.K. Labour Party have denounced the military pact as an escalation of a "new Cold War" against China.

Speaking Monday from the Naval Base Point Loma in San Diego, Biden described the moment as "an inflection point in history, where the hard work of enhancing deterrence and promoting stability is going to affect the prospect of peace for decades to come."

Albanese, meanwhile, thanked the U.S. for sharing its nuclear propulsion technology for "the first time in 65 years and only the second time in history."

For his part, Sunak argued that "Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, China's growing assertiveness, and [the] destabilizing behavior of Iran and North Korea" make it "more important than ever that we strengthen the resilience of our own countries," adding: "Ultimately, the defense of our values depends, as it always has, on the quality of our relationships with others."

Wang's statement came after the Chinese mission to the United Nations condemned the deal on Twitter:

The nuclear submarine cooperation plan released today by AUKUS is a blatant act that constitutes serious nuclear proliferation risks, undermines [the] international non-proliferation system, fuels arms races, and hurts peace and stability in the region.

The irony of AUKUS is that two nuclear weapons states who claim to uphold the highest nuclear non-proliferation standard are transferring tons of weapons-grade enriched uranium to a non-nuclear-weapon state, clearly violating the object and purpose of the NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty].

Such a textbook case of double standard will damage the authority and effectiveness of the international non-proliferation system. We urge the trio to honor their obligations as members of the NPT and respond to the [concerns] of the international community.

According toThe Guardian: "Biden rejected the accusation, saying the submarines would be 'nuclear-powered, not nuclear-armed.' Penny Wong, Australia's foreign minister, said the Chinese criticism was 'not grounded in fact.'"

Australia has long maintained that it is not looking to acquire nuclear weapons or build its civil nuclear capacity and intends to abide by the NPT.

But critics of AUKUS worry that it "could still indirectly spur the proliferation of weapons" by setting "a dangerous precedent for countries to exploit a loophole in the NPT," The Guardianexplained when the alliance was created in September 2021. The NPT allows countries without atomic bombs, such as Australia, "to build nuclear-powered submarines, and to remove the fissile material they need for the submarine reactors from the stockpile monitored by the global watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, opening up the possibility it could be diverted to making weapons."

The joint statement issued by Biden, Sunak, and Albanese on Monday says that the U.S., U.K., and Australia "continue to consult with the International Atomic Energy Agency to develop a non-proliferation approach that sets the strongest precedent for the acquisition of a nuclear-powered submarine capability."

Wang called this claim "pure deception" and accused the three countries of "coercing" the IAEA into providing its endorsement.

Mao Ning, another Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, urged the trio "to abandon the Cold War mentality and zero-sum games, honor international obligations in good faith, and do more things that are conducive to regional peace and stability."

Biden said Monday that he expects to speak soon with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

But Wang declared Tuesday that Beijing does not want to "communicate for the sake of communicating." Instead, he said, "the U.S. side should come forward sincerely, with practical actions to promote China-U.S. relations."

Relations between Washington and Beijing have deteriorated in recent months, hitting their lowest point in decades.

Last August, visits by then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other members of Congress to Taiwan (the Republic of China, or ROC) chilled numerous channels of communication. Beijing—along with most of the international community, including Washington since the 1970s—considers the breakaway province to be part of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

In a departure from more than four decades of "One China" policy—in which the U.S. recognizes the PRC as the sole legal government of China and maintains informal relations with the ROC while adopting a position of "strategic ambiguity" to obscure how far it would go to protect Taiwan—Biden has vowed on multiple occasions to use military force in response to a Chinese invasion of the island.