Category: Military

Save $1.2 trillion that the Pentagon doesn’t need

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“Need” being the operative word.

❝ The Pentagon could save more than $1.2 trillion with a number of tweaks to its spending plan for the next decade, including canceling the creation of a Space Force and nuclear weapons projects, according to a report by the Center for International Policy.

❝ The report, “Sustainable Defense: More Security, Less Spending,” offers new strategies that challenge the National Defense Strategy by encouraging more diplomacy (specifically in regard to the Iran nuclear deal) and less military confrontation to cut costs. It also says the NDS “exaggerate[s] the challenges posed by major powers” like China and Russia.

❝ The report offers Congress several solutions to reduce Defense Department spending in the short term, including restricting overseas contingency operations funds, cutting the Pentagon’s private contractor workforce by 15 percent, blocking plans for the Space Force, avoiding placing weapons in space and rolling back the nuclear modernization plan. Capitol Hill is in the middle of a funding debate over fiscal 2020 military spending.

The rationale of last resort from tame economists for inflated military budgets is the production of non-consumable goods. They produce jobs, profits and little or no inflation. Meaningless in an economy that has Wall Street wankers whining over a lack of inflation and our tax base for items we actually could use has been reduced by the butt-kisser in the White House. Making less available for items like healthcare and education.

New Mexico wants Air Force to halt public access to contaminated lake

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A campsite at Lake Holloman — Joshua Hernandez/AP

❝ New Mexico’s top prosecutor is demanding that the U.S. Air Force close a publicly accessible lake at Holloman Air Force Base, saying…the concentration of hazardous chemicals at the site poses a risk to public health and the environment.

…Attorney General Hector Balderas told Air Force officials that sampling shows the contamination — linked to chemicals known as per-and-polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS — are dozens of times higher than federal health advisory levels.

❝ In the case of perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, the samples showed 84 times more than the advisory levels set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency…

❝ New Mexico is preparing to sue the Air Force over groundwater contamination at two bases, arguing that the federal government has a responsibility to clean up plumes of toxic chemicals left behind by past military firefighting activities.

You might think the responsible answer from the military – after all, part of our federal government – would be to work to remedy toxic conditions resulting from their own activities. But, then, this is the United States. The culturally moronic response – “What me worry?” – isn’t limited to cartoon characters. Our politicians, generals, profiteers from the whole military-industrial complex persist in feeling they’re exempt from responsibility to the public-at-large. All we’re allowed is to foot the bills for all of it.

Watch independent testing of the sidearm just adopted by the US Army

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This is from a couple years ago and Sigg and the Army didn’t perform this test back then – and I don’t believe they do, nowadays. I’d be pleased to be corrected.

Though I embrace pretty much every progressive legal requirement for gun ownership, I’ve been a gun owner my whole adult life. I come from an extended family that had beaucoup years working for gun manufacturers all the way up to prototype gunsmiths. I still own guns. I still shoot pretty damn good for an old geezer.

I think if a firearm is passed for military use it should be able to pass more rigorous testing than what is apparently considered sufficient. If the folks who produced this video still have it right.

‘Nuff said.

New rules for UFO sightings start [of course] by calling them something else

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The U.S. Navy is drafting new guidelines for pilots and other personnel to report encounters with “unidentified aircraft,” a significant new step in creating a formal process to collect and analyze the unexplained sightings — and destigmatize them.

The previously unreported move is in response to a series of sightings of unknown, highly advanced aircraft intruding on Navy strike groups and other sensitive military formations and facilities…

To be clear, the Navy isn’t endorsing the idea that its sailors have encountered alien spacecraft. But it is acknowledging there have been enough strange aerial sightings by credible and highly trained military personnel that they need to be recorded in the official record and studied — rather than dismissed as some kooky phenomena from the realm of science-fiction…

Luis Elizondo, the former Pentagon official who ran the so-called AATIP [Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program] office, complained after he retired from government service that the Pentagon’s approach to these unidentified aircraft has been far too blasé.

“If you are in a busy airport and see something you are supposed to say something,” Elizondo said. “With our own military members it is kind of the opposite: ‘If you do see something, don’t say something.'”

Tales of American Military bureaucracy still seem to echo the worst of history’s examples. You’d think that with a budget guaranteed larger than any other significant combination of nations a bit of confidence might temper the character of our own Colonel Blimps. Or Admiral Blimps.

The Fake President Called Former President Jimmy Carter To Talk About China

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Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

❝ President Trump called former President Jimmy Carter for the first time…[weekend of April 13/14]

❝ Earlier this year, Carter sent Trump a letter with some advice about managing the U.S.-China relationship. Carter oversaw the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries 40 years ago.

On Saturday evening, Trump called Carter to talk about it. It was the first time they’d spoken, Carter said. He said Trump told him that he is particularly concerned about how China is “getting ahead of us…”

❝ Carter said he agreed with Trump on this issue.

“And do you know why?” Carter said. “I normalized diplomatic relations with China in 1979. Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None. And we have stayed at war,” he said…

❝ Carter said the United States is “the most warlike nation in the history of the world” due to a desire to impose American values on other countries, and he suggested that China is investing its resources into projects such as high-speed railroads instead of defense spending.

If you read up on uses for a national military, China follows an old model where the military is truly constituted for national service. That primarily means damage control and service to communities hit by natural disasters. Enough of those to go around to keep any standing forces occupied. Plus actual defense.

The wasted money in some quarters is viewed as production of non-consumable goods to aid our economy. A subsidy without calling it such. The Cold War took care of motivation for politicians who got subsidized industries and employment in their districts. Little or no inflation resulted from the subsidies because consumer goods don’t really include tanks or aircraft carriers.

Pentagon + White House = Ignore Law, Add $97.9 Billion to Budget

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❝ US defence officials previously feared that rising interest rates and growing federal debt would push the government’s net interest costs so high that they would squeeze out funding available for personnel, training, equipment, modernisation, maintenance, and more. Interest rates are now higher and the debt is now larger, but Pentagon budget officials are no longer worrying about either…

❝ The national defence budget – as well as the ‘domestic’ budget – is legally capped by the 2011 Budget Control Act. However, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget instructed the Pentagon to use the uncapped Overseas Contingency Operations account to bypass the legislated limits, which were meant to lower discretionary spending and begin lowering the US public debt. Pentagon officials said about USD97.9 billion was shifted into the unlimited OCO account.

So far.

With the Fake President in office, who cares about budgets, the rule of law or how big a bill you drop on American taxpayers?

See how little Trump cares about American Families!

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The dirty details are over here. Education, social services, healthcare, practically everything built over generations to help the American family find a better life for themselves, their children, their neighbors is dismissed out of hand by the fake president.

Apparently, he counts on military voters and, of course, all the corporations getting a bump in profits from his wartime budget. Except, most of his war is on ordinary Americans.

Pentagon To Retire USS Truman – could save $30 Billion

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USS Harry Truman

❝ Amidst rising anxiety over whether the US Navy’s thousand-foot-long flagships could evade Chinese missiles in a future war, the Pentagon has decided to cut the aircraft carrier fleet from 11 today to 10.

By retiring the Nimitz-class supercarrier USS Truman at least two decades early, rather than refueling its nuclear reactor core in 2024 as planned, the military would save tens of billions on overhaul and operations costs that it could invest in other priorities. But the proposal, part of the 2020-2024 budget plan due out mid-March, is sure to inspire outrage on Capitol Hill.

How many peace-loving Center-Left politicians from the two old parties have you ever seen embracing cuts to the dollar$ Congress pours down the so-called defense rathole?

❝ …The mid-life overhaul has been used as a bargaining chip for a larger budget in the past,” said Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain turned analyst…he said, “I doubt the Congress would allow it to go through.”

RTFA for all the detailed alternatives. Think about what you might propose as alternate uses for that funding? Say, schools, teachers, retraining programs for workers in disappearing industries, Medicare-for-all? The list goes on.

Congress and pinhead economists in Washington DC still live-and-die by a now-ancient concept that has enthralled American capitalism since WW2. Production of non-consumable goods limits inflation while providing jobs, funding the most inefficient corporate welfare. Everything from the Federal Interstate Highway Construction to the Cold War always found boatloads of support for the concept.

Pentagon admits their Humvee replacement sucks!

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❝ According to the Pentagon’s in-house watchdog, the replacement for the U.S. military’s Humvee is in serious trouble.

The new Joint Tactical Light Vehicle (JLTV) is “not operationally suitable” because of deficiencies in “reliability, maintainability, training, manuals, crew situational awareness, and safety,” a new report says. The vehicle is so bug-ridden that it requires contractors in the field to fix problems, and is so large and loud that it’s easily detectable on the battlefield…

❝ …All four vehicle types are encountering mechanical problems during field trials including, “engine wiring problems, flat and damaged tires…A “health monitoring system” designed to bring problems to the attention of maintainers is not accurate and “reduces crew and maintainer confidence in the system.” One last mechanical problem: The doors on some vehicles didn’t work.

❝ The vehicles are faulted for having a “large visual and loud aural signature, increasing detectability…troops riding inside have poor visibility and that the TOW anti-tank missile launcher, capable of destroying tanks to ranges of up to 2.48 miles, is slow and difficult to reload…the vehicles are so large fewer of them can fit on the military’s Maritime Prepositioned Force ships, cargo ships that carry floating arsenals of Army and Marine Corps equipment, ready to link up with ground troops and quickly enter battle.

RTFA for ever more silliness. How many years has our military spent designing their own vehicles – which suck? Do they ever learn how to make doors work the first time?