The US is about to move towards a far more likely first use of nuclear weapons, with word that the Air Force has “completed flight testing” of the cost-and-performance-plagued F35A Lightning fighter, all units of which are being “upgraded” to carry thermonuclear weapons.

What this means, as explained in a new article in Popular Mechanics, is that the world’s most costly weapons program (at $1.7 trillion), a fifth-generation fighter, supposedly “invisible”  to radar (that actually cannot fight and is not invisible to advanced radars), now has a new mission to justify its existence and continued production:  dropping dial-able “tactical” nuclear weapons that can be as small as 0.3 kilotons or up to 50 kilotons in explosive power.

Now 0.3 kilotons is “just” the equivalent of 300 tons of dynamite, which supposedly makes them “useable,” meaning not holocaust-causing (that is assuming that some country backing the targeted country doesn’t decide to respond in kind and we go up the escalation ladder quickly to ever bigger bombs. Meanwhile,  \ dialed up to its maximum 50-kiloton power each F35A bomb would be significantly more than twice as powerful as the nuclear bomb that leveled Nagasaki.

The Popular Mechanics article, also published in Yahoo News, quotes Pentagon sources as saying the new F35A capability gives the US flexibility to deliver nukes to targets in a country threatening the US, and also to recall them up to the last second before dropping the weapon since the plane would be piloted. But this supposed advantage of a manned delivery system being recallable is a fantasy.

As Daniel Ellsberg has exposed in detail in his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine, written based on his decades of work with a top security clearance on behalf of the Secretary of Defense office investigating command-and-control procedures and practices of the nation’s nuclear forces, there is no way to guarantee that a pilot ordered on a nuclear strike mission will receive — or believe — any message or signal ordering a cancellation of the attack order.

As Ellsberg explains, communication systems routinely break down on an almost daily basis at one of the US military’s hundreds of global bases and aircraft carrier battle groups. cutting of the link between Washington and bases far-flung military bases, because of equipment malfunctions, storms, solar flares, etc.. Furthermore, in a period of international crisis, a pilot may distrust even an order to call off an attack which, after all, won’t be a phone call from the president, a Pentagon general, or even a known base commander, but rather a short coded signal. As Ellsberg notes in his terrifying book, the other flaw is that a pilot, once ordered on such a mission, could decide in the heat of the moment, to just carry on with orders and drop his weapon regardless of receiving a cancellation order. Remember, in times of crisis, countries may be employing jamming systems to knock out enemy military communications, or could even be blinding communication satellites.

Meanwhile the scenario presented in the article — a lone pilot being dispatched to deliver one or two dial-able B61-12 thermonuclear weapons onto some command-and-control center or missile launching site, perhaps — is not really what the Pentagon strategists have in mind for its  F-35A planes.

Actually, hundreds of these Air Force versions of the F-35 have been getting so-called “block four’ alterations, with bulging farings replacing their formerly sleek bodies, in order to allow the carrying  of two elongated Hydrogen bombs inside their fuselages, where they won’t present a larger radar image as bombs carried externally under wings would do. These re-configured planes, which also have software upgrades to allow them to prime, unlock and release their twin nukes, are being delivered to forward bases near Russia and China within the relatively short range of the bomb-laden planes.

The idea (hopefully wishful thinking), is that such planes, armed with their two nukes, could streak across a Russian and/or Chinese border at supersonic speed, flying low to the ground, to strike government buildings, military bases, and missile silos in a surprise strike, leaving the target country unable to retaliate.

For US military policy makers, all the way back to the post-war late 1940s, through the 1950s  and on, taking out America’s nuclear-armed rivals in a preventive atomic blitz has long been a strategic dream, always deferred thankfully because of lingering fears among saner heads that such a criminal and genocidal attack would fail to prevent a counterattack.

Bernie Sanders, the independent self-described “socialist” senator from Vermont, now needs to finally end his own dogged and cynical support for the basing of 18 F-35A planes at the Burlington International Airport, where pilots of the Vermont Air National Guard are now training for exactly the kinds of bombing scenario described above.

Sanders has insisted that while he “opposes” the “wasteful” F35 program, it is a “done deal” and so he wants Vermont’s Air National Guard unit to get a piece of the “benefits” of having it and the “jobs” it supposedly brings with it in his state. He has continued to dissemble, claiming that the Vermont F35As will not carry nuclear weapons or be used in nuclear war. In fact, his office was caught altering a document from the Pentagon to hide the fact that the Vermont Guard’a planes would in fact definitely be upgraded with the “block four” alterations so they can carry nukes just like all F-35As in the Air Force fleet.

Vermont’s planes would not, and could not, fly from Burlington over the North Pole to deliver their bombs to Russian or Chinese targets, except with multiple in-flight refueling sessions, and all the while flying at subsonic speeds to conserve fuel, obviating any chance of a “surprise” attack. But they could, if the pilots are trained (as they will be) in using the upgraded planes to carry their nuclear cargo and to release them on targets, be activated during a period of international crisis. The plan would then be for US-based pilots to ferry their F-35A planes to forward bases, where the nuclear bombs would be stockpiled. The planes and their pilots would then be prepositioned, to join a potential attack, or to create a sense of looming threat that would, supposedly, lead the enemy — say Russia or China — to back down, or alternatively to launch their own attack first.

With word the Air Force is ready to start full-scale upgrading of its F35A fleet to nuclear-capable bombers, Sen. Sanders needs to execute a red-faced volte-face and demand the immediate removal of F35A jets from Vermont. He must also stop hypocritically  supporting the further production and Block-Four upgrading of this plane.

Let’s be clear:  a nuclear-armed, radar-evading fighter-bomber fleet cannot by any stretch be conceived of as a “retaliatory” weapon. If Russia or China, the only countries that could even conceivably consider launching a first strike on the US, were to do so, having a plane that could hit command-and-control centers, missile silos and military bases in the attacking country would be useless. First of all those planes would have been already blown to smithereens on the ground in the initial enemy attack. Second, if they somehow survived to take off, the national political and military leaders of any country launching such an attack would long since have moved to protective hidden locations once having ordered their attack, troops would have been moved off their inevitably targeted bases with their equipment, and missile silos would be empty holes, their rockets having already been launched. Moreover, enemy countries would be on high alert looking for any incoming F35s or other bombers and would have their anti-aircraft missile arrays ready to fire, and their fighter defenses already in the air on full alert to knock down the heavily burdened and inevitably poorly armed incoming US planes.

It’s all a big lie in other words, for the Pentagon to claim these planes are making the world safer by including a pilot.

As first-strike weapons the nuclear bomb-capable F35A simply increases the chance that a war will be started by the US,  if Pentagon strategists start believing they have a window of  opportunity to strike without fear of a significant retaliation.

That leaves the other more likely risk too:  That this nuclear-capable fighter could be used to deliver a “small nuke”  against some  non-nuclear nation — one of the many where US military forces are constantly being engaged in undeclared wars like Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, Niger, the Philippines, etc. The consequences of such a use of a nuclear weapon against a non-nuclear nation, by opening the door to widespread use of nuclear weapons in virtually any armed conflict, could be as profound as was the first such use against non-nuclear Japan by a cocky US in the waning days of World War II.

Those two bombings of two non-military targets, obliterating two major Japanese cities, led directly to a multi-generational multi-trillion-dollar arms race between the US and Soviet Union, and ultimately China too, and to a spread of nuclear weapons to seven more nations.

This latest escalation of nuclear weaponry, creating a fleet of over a thousand nuclear-carrying stealth fighter-bombers, will inevitably lead to similar planes being developed in Russia, China and elsewhere (China has already created a very similar stealth fighter to the F-35, and Russia, which has a very advanced aircraft design capability, is sure to follow suit).  The unrelenting efforts, at incalculable cost. by the US to come up with a viable first-strike capability are also compelling the Russians and Chinese to respond with alternative deterrent weapons, notably hypersonic cruise missiles that can autonomously change direction and shift targets while flying at thousands of miles per hour, are not first-strike weapons, given the relatively longer time it would take them to reach their targets.

For all the huffing and puffing of media scaremongers, the hypersonic missiles being tested by Russia and China are a defensive weapons designed to make a nation like the US that is openly looking for an offensive first-strike possibility,  think twice before launching such a holocaust.

Deterrence is decidedly not what the F35A nuclear bomber upgrades are about. The best that can be hoped is that this bomber upgrade is just the latest in a series of schemes by the Pentagon, F35-maker Lockheed-Martin, and all the company’s Congressional backers accepting the company’s bribes, to keep this $1.7-trillion gravy train for this epic boondoggle of a plane flowing.

counterpunch.org

On October 5 the U.S. State Department announced that the U.S. military’s arsenal of nuclear weapons numbered 3,750 as of September 30, 2020. It was stated with satisfaction that “This number represents an approximate 88 percent reduction in the stockpile from its maximum (31,255) at the end of fiscal year 1967”, although it wasn’t mentioned that the reduction since 2018 was only 35.

On the same day, the U.S. Defense Department publication Stars and Stripes reported that “an Air Force fighter jet slated to debut later this year in Europe passed a milestone when it dropped mock nuclear bombs during training flights designed to ensure its ability to fulfil NATO’s nuclear deterrence mission . . . The successful test of the F-35A Lightning II came as the 48th Fighter Wing, based at Britain’s RAF Lakenheath, reactivated the 495th Fighter Squadron last week for a new mission in Europe. [Emphasis added.] Ahead of the fighter model’s arrival at Lakenheath, two F-35As that took off from Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, completed a full weapon system demonstration, regarded as a graduation flight test for achieving nuclear certification.”

In February 2021 U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken informed the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva that “President Biden has made it clear: the U.S. has a national security imperative and a moral responsibility to reduce and eventually eliminate the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction” and President Biden pledged to “take steps to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy,” but it has not been made clear how elimination of the threat from nuclear weapons or reduction of their role in U.S. military strategy can be achieved by training more combat aircraft pilots in the use of nuclear weapons and then deploying them to Europe with their strike aircraft.

The United Kingdom has an equally interesting perspective in what it describes as its “leading approach to nuclear disarmament” and is increasing its arsenal of nuclear weapons. As the Royal United Services Institute noted in March, the UK’s 2021 Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy states that the UK is “raising a self-imposed limit on its overall nuclear warhead stockpile” of the current 225 warheads.

The Review, headed “Global Britain in a Competitive Age”, explains that in 2021 it had been announced as national policy that there would be a reduction in “our overall nuclear warhead stockpile ceiling from not more than 225 to not more than 180 by the mid-2020s. However, in recognition of the evolving security environment . . . this is no longer possible, and the UK will move to an overall nuclear weapon stockpile of no more than 260 warheads.” Then it assured the international community that in spite of increasing the number of its nuclear weapons delivery systems the United Kingdom is “strongly committed to full implementation of the NPT in all its aspects, including nuclear disarmament.”

It is intriguing that the present British government would have us believe that more nuclear weapons and deployment of 27 U.S. nuclear-capable F-35 aircraft to the UK’s Royal Air Force base at Lakenheath are in some fashion compatible with nuclear disarmament, but what is consistent is their linkage with the stockpiles of U.S. nuclear bombs already in Europe.

It is not known if there are or will be any U.S. nuclear weapons kept at Lakenheath, and no doubt the UK government would be comfortable with such storage which would add comparatively few bombs to the hundred or so already stored in vaults in air bases at Kleine Brogel in Belgium, Büchel in Germany, Aviano and Ghedi in Italy, Volkel in the Netherlands, and Incirlik in Turkey. It is regrettable that while the U.S. and Britain insist that they are trying to reduce the threat of nuclear war they are actually increasing and expanding numbers, locations and strike capabilities of nuclear weapons’ systems.

The U.S.-Nato military alliance policy is that “nuclear weapons are a core component of NATO’s overall capabilities for deterrence and defence,” resting almost entirely on U.S. nuclear delivery capabilities which are to be expanded at vast expense, with the new generation of Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Systems, now referred to as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, likely to cost 95 billion dollars — if there are no cost overruns.

As stated by the Congressional Budget Office, it is “required by law to project the 10-year costs of nuclear forces every two years” and its latest paper, “Projected Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2021 to 2030” makes sobering reading because it is projected that U.S. taxpayers, in this era of fiscal crises, will be required to pay sixty billion dollars a year for nuclear forces over the next ten years. The Office estimates that “about $188 billion of the $551 billion total over the 2021–2030 period would go toward modernizing nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Of that amount, $175 billion would go toward modernizing the strategic nuclear triad, and $13 billion would be for modernizing tactical nuclear weapons and delivery systems.” And this does not include funding of such massive projects as the F-35 strike aircraft which will cost some $1.6 trillion.

The political justification for massive military spending on conventional and nuclear weapons by the governments in London and Washington is their contention that Russia and China pose a threat and that, in the words of the 2021 U.S. Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, Russia, for example, is “determined to enhance its global influence and play a disruptive role on the world stage.” (Presumably Washington means the sort of disruption that Associated Press reported on October 7 when “Europe’s soaring gas prices dropped . . . after Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested his country could sell more gas to European spot buyers via its domestic market in addition to through existing long-term contracts.”)

The surge in deployment of nuclear systems and the overall tenor of nuclear weapons developments in Europe do not meet with approval in the European community. For example, a survey published in January revealed that 74% of Italians, 58% of Dutch and 57% of Belgians and 83% of Germans want U.S. nuclear weapons removed from their countries, and another poll (albeit by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) found that 77% of Britons favour a total ban on nuclear weapons.

Europe is in a state of flux, and not only because of the economic and social effects of the pandemic. For example, the Warsaw government’s recent refusal to abide by European Union laws could result in Poland leaving the EU (which would be greeted with approval by most EU citizens) but this would have no effect on the U.S.-Nato military buildup — the “Enhanced Forward Presence” along Russia’s borders, backed to the hilt by nuclear weapons.

U.S. deployment of a further squadron of nuclear strike aircraft to the UK, for a “new mission in Europe”, combined with its existing stocks of nuclear weapons in Europe and Britain’s undebated decision to increase its nuclear weapons’ arsenal are signals to continental European nations that planning for nuclear war against Russia is accelerating. While these countries prefer to engage with Washington and London in a balanced fashion and wish to maintain cordial relations, it would be advisable to question the motives behind the growing emphasis on nuclear war and insist on reduction in confrontational deployments.

By William HARTUNG

When it comes to trade in the tools of death and destruction, no one tops the United States of America.

In April of this year, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) published its annual analysis of trends in global arms sales and the winner — as always — was the U.S. of A. Between 2016 and 2020, this country accounted for 37 percent of total international weapons deliveries, nearly twice the level of its closest rival, Russia, and more than six times that of Washington’s threat du jour, China.

Sadly, this was no surprise to arms-trade analysts.  The U.S. has held that top spot for 28 of the past 30 years, posting massive sales numbers regardless of which party held power in the White House or Congress.

This is, of course, the definition of good news for weapons contractors like Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, even if it’s bad news for so many of the rest of us, especially those who suffer from the use of those arms by militaries in places like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, the Philippines and the United Arab Emirates.  The recent bombing and leveling of Gaza by the U.S.-financed and supplied Israeli military is just the latest example of the devastating toll exacted by American weapons transfers in these years.

Israeli artillery firing into Gaza, May 18. (IDF, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

While it is well known that the United States provides substantial aid to Israel, the degree to which the Israeli military relies on U.S. planes, bombs, and missiles is not fully appreciated. According to statistics compiled by the Center for International Policy’s Security Assistance Monitor, the United States has provided Israel with $63 billion in security assistance over the past two decades, more than 90 percent of it through the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing, which provides funds to buy U.S. weaponry.  But Washington’s support for the Israeli state goes back much further. Total U.S. military and economic aid to Israel exceeds $236 billion (in inflation-adjusted 2018 dollars) since its founding — nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars.

King of the Arms Dealers

Donald Trump, sometimes referred to by President Joe Biden as “the other guy,” warmly embraced the role of arms-dealer-in-chief and not just by sustaining massive U.S. arms aid for Israel, but throughout the Middle East and beyond.  In a May 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia — his first foreign trip — Trump would tout a mammoth (if, as it turned out, highly exaggerated) $110-billion arms deal with that kingdom.

May 20, 2017, Riyadh: President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump being escorted by Saudi King Salman to a banquet in their honor. (White House, Shealah Craighead)

When Trump arrived in Saudi Arabia to immense local fanfare, he milked the deal for all it was worth. Calling the future Saudi sales “tremendous,” he assured the world that they would create “jobs, jobs, jobs” in the United States.

That arms package, however, did far more than burnish Trump’s reputation as a deal maker and jobs creator.  It represented an endorsement of the Saudi-led coalition’s brutal war in Yemen, which has now resulted in the deaths of nearly a quarter of a million people and put millions of others on the brink of famine.

And don’t for a second think that Trump was alone in enabling that intervention. The kingdom had received a record $115 billion in arms offers — notifications to Congress that don’t always result in final sales — over the eight years of the Obama administration, including for combat aircraft, bombs, missiles, tanks, and attack helicopters, many of which have since been used in Yemen.

Yemeni man in June 2019, during a deadly cholera outbreak linked to the wartime destruction of clean-water infrastructure. (Peter Biro, EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

After repeated Saudi air strikes on civilian targets, the Obama foreign-policy team finally decided to slow Washington’s support for that war effort, moving in December 2016 to stop a multibillion-dollar bomb sale. Upon taking office, however, Trump reversed course and pushed that deal forward, despite Saudi actions that Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA) said “look like war crimes to me.”

Trump made it abundantly clear, in fact, that his reasons for arming Saudi Arabia were anything but strategic.  In an infamous March 2018 White House meeting with Mohammed bin Salman, he even brandished a map of the United States to show which places were likely to benefit most from those Saudi arms deals, including election swing states Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

He doubled down on that economic argument after the October 2018 murder and dismemberment of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at that country’s consulate in Istanbul, even as calls to cut off sales to the regime mounted in Congress.  The president made it clear then that jobs and profits, not human rights, were paramount to him, stating:

“$110 billion will be spent on the purchase of military equipment from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and many other great U.S. defense contractors. If we foolishly cancel these contracts, Russia and China would be the enormous beneficiaries — and very happy to acquire all of this newfound business. It would be a wonderful gift to them directly from the United States!”

And so it went.  In the summer of 2019 Trump vetoed an effort by Congress to block an $8.1-billion arms package that included bombs and support for the Royal Saudi Air Force and he continued to back the kingdom even in his final weeks in office. In December 2020, he offered more than $500 million worth of bombs to that regime on the heels of a $23-billion package to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), its partner-in-crime in the Yemen war.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE weren’t the only beneficiaries of Trump’s penchant for selling weapons.  According to a report by the Security Assistance Monitor at the Center for International Policy, his administration made arms sales offers of more than $110 billion to customers all over the world in 2020, a 75 percent increase over the yearly averages reached during the Obama administration, as well as in the first three years of his tenure.

Will Biden Be Different?

U.S. President Joe Biden condemning rocket attacks into Israel and adding that “Israel has a right to defend itself,” May 15. (The White House, Wikimedia Commons)

Advocates of reining in U.S. weapons trafficking took note of Joe Biden’s campaign-trail pledge that, if elected, he would not “check our values at the door” in deciding whether to continue arming the Saudi regime.  Hopes were further raised when, in his first foreign policy speech as president, he announced that his administration would end “support for offensive operations in Yemen” along with “relevant arms sales.”

That statement, of course, left a potentially giant loophole on the question of which weapons would be considered in support of “offensive operations,” but it did at least appear to mark a sharp departure from the Trump era.  In the wake of Biden’s statement, arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE were indeed put on hold, pending a review of their potential consequences.

Three months into Biden’s term, however, the president’s early pledge to rein in damaging arms deals are already eroding. The first blow was the news that the administration would indeed move forward with a $23-billion arms package to the UAE, including F-35 combat aircraft, armed drones and a staggering $10 billion worth of bombs and missiles.

The decision was ill-advised on several fronts, most notably because of that country’s role in Yemen’s brutal civil war. There, despite scaling back its troops on the ground, it continues to arm, train and finance 90,000 militia members, including extremist groups with links to the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The UAE has also backed armed opposition forces in Libya in violation of a United Nations embargo, launched drone strikes there that killed scores of civilians and cracked down on dissidents at home and abroad. It regularly makes arbitrary arrests and uses torture.  If arming the UAE isn’t a case of “checking our values at the door,” it’s not clear what is.

To its credit, the Biden administration committed to suspending two Trump bomb deals with Saudi Arabia.  Otherwise, it’s not clear what (if any) other pending Saudi sales will be deemed “offensive” and blocked. Certainly, the new administration has allowed U.S. government personnel and contractors to help maintain the effectiveness of the Saudi Air Force and so has continued to enable ongoing air strikes in Yemen that are notorious for killing civilians.

The Biden team has also failed to forcefully pressure the Saudis to end their blockade of that country, which United Nations agencies have determined could put 400,000 Yemeni children at risk of death by starvation in the next year.

Yemeni children playing in the rubble of buildings destroyed in an air raid, June 2019. (Peter Biro, EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

In addition, the Biden administration has cleared a sale of anti-ship missiles to the Egyptian regime of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the most repressive government in that nation’s history, helmed by the man Donald Trump referred to as “my favorite dictator.”  The missiles themselves are in no way useful for either internal repression or that country’s scorched-earth anti-terror campaign against rebels in its part of the Sinai peninsula — where civilians have been tortured and killed, and tens of thousands displaced from their homes — but the sale does represent a tacit endorsement of the regime’s repressive activities.

Guns, Anyone?

While Biden’s early actions have undermined promises to take a different approach to arms sales, the story isn’t over.  Key members of Congress are planning to closely monitor the UAE sale and perhaps intervene to prevent the delivery of the weapons.  Questions have been raised about what arms should go to Saudi Arabia and reforms that would strengthen Congress’s role in blocking objectionable arms transfers are being pressed by at least some members of the House and the Senate.

One area where Biden could readily begin to fulfill his campaign pledge to reduce the harm to civilians from U.S. arms sales would be firearms exports.  The Trump administration significantly loosened restrictions and regulations on the export of a wide range of guns, including semi-automatic firearms and sniper rifles. As a result, such exports surged in 2020, with record sales of more than 175,000 military rifles and shotguns.

In a distinctly deregulatory mood, Trump’s team moved sales of deadly firearms from the jurisdiction of the State Department, which had a mandate to vet any such deals for possible human-rights abuses, to the Commerce Department, whose main mission was simply to promote the export of just about anything.  Trump’s “reforms” also eliminated the need to pre-notify Congress on any major firearms sales, making it far harder to stop deals with repressive regimes.

As he pledged to do during his presidential campaign, Biden could reverse Trump’s approach without even seeking congressional approval. The time to do so is now, given the damage such gun exports cause in places like the Philippines and Mexico, where U.S.-supplied firearms have been used to kill thousands of civilians, while repressing democratic movements and human-rights defenders.

Who Benefits?

Raytheon’s campus in Richardson, Texas, 2016. (Jpalens, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Raytheon stands out in this crowd because of its determined efforts to push through bomb sales to Saudi Arabia and the deep involvement of its former (or future) employees with the U.S. government.  A former Raytheon lobbyist, Charles Faulkner, worked in the Trump State Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and was involved in deciding that Saudi Arabia was not — it was! — intentionally bombing civilians in Yemen. He then supported declaring a bogus “emergency” to ram through the sale of bombs and of aircraft support to Saudi Arabia.

Raytheon has indeed insinuated itself in the halls of government in a fashion that should be deeply troubling even by the minimalist standards of the twenty-first-century military-industrial complex. Former Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper was Raytheon’s chief in-house lobbyist before joining the administration, while current Biden Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin served on Raytheon’s board of directors.  While Austin has pledged to recuse himself from decisions involving the company, it’s a pledge that will prove difficult to verify.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin departing Berlin on April 13. (DoD, Jack Sanders)

Arms sales are Big Business — the caps are a must! — for the top weapons makers.  Lockheed Martin gets roughly one-quarter of its sales from foreign governments and Raytheon five percent of its revenue from Saudi sales.  American jobs allegedly tied to weapons exports are always the selling point for such dealings, but in reality, they’ve been greatly exaggerated.

At most, arms sales account for just more than one-tenth of one percent of U.S. employment. Many such sales, in fact, involve outsourcing production, in whole or in part, to recipient nations, reducing the jobs impact here significantly. Though it’s seldom noted, virtually any other form of spending creates more jobs than weapons production. In addition, exporting green-technology products would create far larger global markets for U.S. goods, should the government ever decide to support them in anything like the way it supports the arms industry.

Given what’s at stake for them economically, Raytheon and its cohorts spend vast sums attempting to influence both parties in Congress and any administration.  In the past two decades, defense companies, led by the major arms exporting firms, spent $285 million in campaign contributions alone and $2.5 billion on lobbying, according to statistics gathered by the Center for Responsive Politics.  Any changes in arms export policy will mean forcefully taking on the arms lobby and generating enough citizen pressure to overcome its considerable influence in Washington.

Given the political will to do so, there are many steps the Biden administration and Congress could take to rein in runaway arms exports, especially since such deals are uniquely unpopular with the public.  A September 2019 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, for example, found that 70 percent of Americans think arms sales make the country less safe.

The question is: Can such public sentiment be mobilized in favor of actions to stop at least the most egregious cases of U.S. weapons trafficking, even as the global arms trade rolls on?  Selling death should be no joy for any country, so halting it is a goal well worth fighting for. Still, it remains to be seen whether the Biden administration will ever limit weapons sales or if it will simply continue to promote this country as the world’s top arms exporter of all time.

TomDispatch.com via consortiumnews.com

On March 1st, Gallup headlined “China, Russia Images in U.S. Hit Historic Lows” and closed their article on an optimistic (for neoconservatives — which includes all U.S.-and allied billionaires) note for the new Biden Administration in Washington and for NATO, by saying: “China and Russia are among the more challenging nations for U.S. foreign policy under the Biden administration, as they were for the prior Obama and Trump administrations. But Biden’s task may be made a bit easier if the current low favorable ratings mean Americans are unified in their perceptions of the challenges each country presents.” The rank-order there, of the approval-ratings by Americans regarding all 18 countries in that report, was virtually exactly the same as had been the ‘news’-slant in U.S. mainstream media — both of the right and of the left — regarding each one of those countries, during recent years. Media made that rank-order the way it is. That rank-order was: Canada, Great Britain, France, Japan, Germany, India, Israel, Taiwan, Mexico, Egypt, Cuba, The Palestinian Authority, Russia, Afghanistan, Iraq, China, Iran, and North Korea. America’s vassal-nations or ‘allies’ had gotten favorable ‘news’-slants (propaganda) in U.S. ‘news’-media, while America’s target-nations (which the U.S. regime and its CIA are trying to conquer) had gotten unfavorable ‘news’-slants (propaganda) from them — and that shaped this rank-order.

In fact, at Gallup’s “Country Ratings”, is shown these country ratings month-by-month, and all of them have changed, over time, in the same way that America’s ‘news’-media-coverage of the given country had been changing before that. The ‘news’-media had prepped the American public to invade and destroy Iraq in 2003, and to invade and destroy Libya in 2011, and to invade and destroy Syria since 2012, etc., and, therefore anyone who (like many billionaires) owns stock in a corporation such as Lockheed Martin and who wants to increase his or her wealth, is going to be concerned about keeping up the fear and hatred that Americans feel toward the leaders of the target-countries, so that sanctions and ultimately invasions will be supported by the American people, and the U.S.-and-allied nations will become enabled to increase their ‘defense’-budgets (going to firms such as Raytheon), against such countries..

Whereas Canada, Great Britain, France, Japan, Germany, India, Israel, and Taiwan, are ‘allies’ and markets for the products of firms such as Lockheed Martin; Cuba, The Palestinian Authority, Russia, Afghanistan, Iraq, China, Iran, and North Korea, are instead targets for their products; and this is how U.S. foreign policy is formed, and how the ‘news’-slant is formed, in the United States — which shapes that rank-order. Those corporations need not only ‘allies’, markets for their products, but also ‘enemies’, targets for their products.

Minds are easy things to manipulate if the people who are doing the manipulating want to manipulate them. How to do it has been understood for at least a hundred years. In a word, it’s done by lying. (Think about ‘Saddam’s WMD’, for example.) At least ever since the end of World War Two in the U.S., the U.S. regime has had an extremely effective system for doing that. In the CIA, it used to be called “Operation Mockingbird” (originally called “Project Mockingbird”), and it included (and still includes) all of the nation’s major and most of its minor media. (Carl Bernstein wrote about that CIA operation in Rolling Stone on 20 October 1977, “THE CIA AND THE MEDIA”, and that was a softer version of the reality, which didn’t even mention the word “Mockingbird.”) The CIA’s own records on it lied, saying that it had only briefly existed, during the early 1960s: “During its short tenure, MOCKINGBIRD established the identities of a significant number of sources and ‘cooperative’ individuals. Much of this information was of a partisan political nature or was in the nature of seeking a ‘plug.’11” Not in law but in reality, the CIA exists to fool Americans; it isn’t merely to fool foreigners. It manipulates mass-minds in all U.S.-and-allied countries, and doesn’t do it only in countries where it’s fomenting or trying to foment coups. Though liberal media such as CNN and conservative media such as Fox News criticize each other, and so do America’s political Parties criticize each other, they all are on the side of the ‘us’, “the U.S.A” (controlled by America’s billionaires) and its ‘allies’ (vassal-nations) such as NATO, against the ‘them’ (which our rulers create), ‘our’ ‘enemies’, against whom the regime (all of the billionaires who control the entire system and hire its ‘news’ media and politicians, and own its ‘defense’ contractors) is propagandizing.

This has become the permanent war, since 1945 — the U.S. constant-warfare state, the world’s first global empire — and that’s something which is prohibited for any U.S. mainstream ‘news’-medium to report exists.

For example, before America conquered and destroyed Iraq on March 20th of 2003, Gallup found that only 5% of Americans were “Favorable” to Iraq during 14-15 March 2003, and that this had been approximately the figure ever since at least 1991, but in Gallup’s next polling on that question, during 9-12 February 2004, 21% of Americans were “Favorable” to Iraq, and this 21% figure has steadily remained approximately the same figure ever since. After America conquered and controlled Iraq, the U.S. coverage of Iraq’s Government improved considerably, and therefore American’s approval of Iraq suddenly shot up, and has stayed up, because the media’s lying against Iraq plunged after the conquest.

What the ‘news’-media won’t report about is that they are all in this public-deception operation together and they are all controlled by America’s fewer-than-a-thousand billionaires, the people who control U.S.-based international corporations and who fund politicians into Congress and the White House. They are America’s authentic masters, and their ‘news’-media misrepresent America (such as that it’s a ‘democracy’) and don’t only misrepresent foreign countries. The big problem with competition is always who controls it, and if the only people who control it, ultimately, are the billionaires who control the ‘news’-media, and who control the ‘defense’-contractors such as General Dynamics which sell only to the U.S. Government and to its allied governments, then, of course, there will result a direct correlation between those Gallup rankings, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the intentions that America’s billionaires collectively have, regarding which nations to sanction, or to coup, or to invade, next. All of this operation — every part of it — exists but is censored-out of all of that ‘news’-reporting, because the ultimate scandal is those billionaires themselves, and is their collective control over the system that they call ‘democracy’, which is very different from any actual democracy. Where the billionaires rule, it can be called an “oligarchy” if it’s a banana republic, but it is more commonly called an “aristocracy” if it’s instead an imperialistic country, such as Britain, or France, or Nazi Germany, or Hirohito’s Japan, or today’s United States. Anyway, it’s certainly no democracy. How can America be a democracy and yet have a higher percentage of its citizenry in prison than any of the other 220 nations on Earth does? It’s not possible. And yet all of the U.S.-and-allied media say it’s not only possible, but real.

Here are a few current examples of how this mass-deceit functions, and these examples dig a bit deeper than the findings in that March 1st Gallup factual report, so as to explain those findings, by pointing out what causes those findings (that rank-order) to be the way that they are:

Also on March 1st, the German “Moon of Alabama” blogger headlined “Biden Breaks Campaign Promise On MbS Punishment — Psaki Lies To Hide That — Guardian Fakes Quote To Hide Psaki’s Lie”, and he documented that Biden, and America’s foreign allies, are actually NOT concerned about either democracy, or basic decency, from rulers that the U.S. is allied with. (The main issue there was the luring, trapping, and murdering, of Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018.) The very next day, on the 2nd of March, Reuters reported that the exact opposite treatment is being given by these same leaders (U.S. and its ‘allies’) to countries that the U.S. and its allies are trying to conquer, specifically Russia, but also including nations that are on good terms with Russia, such as China, Syria, and Iran (countries that scored near the bottom of Gallup’s favorability-list). All of this that “MoA” was reporting relates to lying and hypocrisy that is done by U.S.-and-allied leaders and their ‘news’-media while they still proclaim that they are ‘democracies’ who are opposing countries that aren’t. How often does one see or hear U.S. media saying that other U.S. media have lied about a factual matter? They may report that a politician of the opposite Party had lied, but never that one of their own competitors had lied. They cover for one-another. They absolutely refuse to publish anything about the corruptness of America’s mainstream — and most of its non-mainstream (but also billionaire-controlled) — ‘news’-media. What U.S.-&-allied ‘news’-media refuse to publish, at all, is their own systematic complicity in the lying that goes on, day after day, for decades on end. It’s not only the Government that lies constantly.

The front page of the Weekend Edition of the Financial Times headlined, on February 20th, “Biden tells world ‘America is back’ but warns democracy under assault”, and quoted Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, as saying that “The prospects for multilateralism are much better this year than they were two years ago, and that has a lot to do with Joe Biden becoming US president.” However, nothing concrete was reported achieved from Biden’s participation in the February 19th virtual G7 Conference, which was sponsored from Munich. Merkel (as a U.S. vassal) naturally wants favorable relations with the new U.S. President, but spoke only in platitudes, because the U.S. regime’s demand that Germany not buy Russia’s inexpensive pipelined natural gas but instead buy America’s vastly more expensive canned liquefied natural gas, is too much even for a vassal, such as she, to accept. She doesn’t want to make blatantly obvious, to her voters, that she’s their enemy. Even a vassal-leader needs to look not only upward to the imperial master, but downward to the population whose votes she will also need.

Then, on March 2nd, the next step in the ratcheting-up of U.S.-and-allied sanctions against Russia was announced. Reuters headlined “U.S. imposes sanctions on Russia over poisoning of Navalny”, and reported “The United States on Tuesday imposed sanctions on Russian individuals and entities over Russia’s attempt to kill opposition figure Alexei Navalny with a nerve agent, senior Biden administration officials said. … The moves were being taken in coordination with the European Union. They reiterated President Joe Biden’s call for Russia to release Navalny from prison.” Biden was using the Navalny case as a ‘moral’ reason why Germany must not buy Russia’s natural gas.

A month before that, on February 1st, Russia’s Foreign Ministry had issued, both in Russian and in English, a detailed timeline regarding the Navalny case, headlining “Press release on Russian-German contacts on the ‘Alexey Navalny case’”. It pointed out key events that had not been reported in U.S.-and-allied media but only in non-U.S.-allied media. Because it did point out those things, there was no coverage, in the U.S.-and-allied countries, of that Russian news-report.

The U.S. and UK Governments function together internationally almost as one, and therefore, also on February 1st, Russia’s RT channel headlined with yet another important event in this matter that had never been reported-on in The West: “Top Navalny aide asked alleged British spy for millions in funding, intelligence video released by Russia’s FSB claims to reveal”. Included there, was a video that Russian counter-intelligence had recorded in 2012, a video of the Russian ‘anti-corruption activist’ Alexey Navalny’s #2 man Vladimir Ashurkov discussing with an alleged MI6 agent (James William Thomas Ford, Second Secretary for political affairs at the UK embassy in Russia) inside a Moscow restaurant, as to whether MI6 would donate to Navalny’s operation “a little money,” such as “10, 20 million dollars a year.” “And this is not a big amount of money for people who have billions at stake.” (Navalny’s operation was implicitly acknowledging there, that they aim to assist billionaires.) It would help Navalny create “mass protests, civil initiatives, establishing contacts,” etc. But the UK official suggested instead “turning to Transparency International for grants. Ashurkov said he doubted that working with Transparency ‘would be effective’.” However, what happened afterward is not publicly known. Ashurkov, at this same meeting, additionally asked for MI6 to supply Navalny’s group with dirt on Russia’s Government that they could then “release in conjunction with the Henry Jackson Society,” which is the British Conservative Party’s think tank that’s named after the far-right U.S. Democratic Party Senator (a closeted version of the Republican Party’s infamous Joseph R. McCarthy) who had started the neoconservative movement, and who especially hated Russia.

In the United States, anyone who would be caught trying to sell-out America’s Government to any other government would be prosecuted for treason, and publicly executed. Russia did not do that to Navalny. On February 2nd, a Moscow court replaced Navalny’s three and a half year suspended sentence for violating parole on a prior conviction, with an actual prison sentence, minus the amount of time he had spent under house arrest, meaning he would spend over two and half years in “a corrective labor colony.” That imprisonment of Navalny increased the numbers of Russians who demonstrated against Putin in various cities throughout Russia in support of Navalny.

The idea that the Russian Government poisoned Alexei Navalny presumes such astounding stupidity on the part of Russia’s Government as to be exceedingly dubious, at best. On 5 September 2020, right before the latest Russian Presidential election, the internationally respected Levada polling organization in Russia reported that the top choice of Russians to lead the country was Putin at 56%, the second-from-top choice was Zhirinovsky at 5%, and Alexey Navalny (shown there as Алексей Навальный), was the third-from-top choice, at 2%. In the 2018 Presidential election, Zhirinovsky polled at 13.7%, Grudinin polled at 12.0%, and Putin polled at 72.6%. The actual election-outcome was Putin 76.69%, Grudinin 11.7%, and Zhirinovsky 5.65%. The idea that Putin would need to kill anyone in order to be leading Russia is so stupid and uninformed (and mis-informed) that it is beyond belief, though it is widely publicized in The West as being instead the reality. The contempt that U.S.-and-allied leaders and ‘news’-media have for their respective publics is so clear that provable lies are presented to the public as being instead proven truths. But what is true is that Navalny has been an immense propaganda-asset to the U.S. Government, and he now is especially so. Stirring up anti-Russian hatred is the best way for the U.S. and UK Governments to get the EU to oppose Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline. Whether U.S. or UK intelligence agencies were behind the 2020 poisoning of Navalny in order to blame it on Russia so as to get the EU to oppose Nord Stream 2 is speculative, but certainly it is likelier than that Putin was behind that poisoning.

Furthermore, Wikipedia notes that Ashurkov “is in contact with Mikhail Khodorkovsky.” In other words, Navalny’s ‘anti-corruption campaign’ is being backed by the man who had gained the most from Russia’s most corrupt period, which was when Boris Yeltsin was in power during the 1990s. (And look at what that corruption did to Russia’s economy.) That’s what the U.S. regime wants to be re-installed in Russia. It’s no wonder, then, why Ashurkov, and his boss, Navalny, are trying to sell-out Russia.

Here is a video that Alexei Navalny posted to youtube on 19 September 2007, under the title of “НАРОД за легализацию оружия” meaning “PEOPLE for the legalization of weapons”:

He was saying there that all Russians should get guns in order to kill Muslims who are infesting Russia, which would be like swatting big flies or stamping on big cockroaches.

An excellent article by Kevin Rothrock, on 25 April 2017, “How Alexey Navalny Abandoned Russian Nationalism”, explains Navalny’s switch from being an exterminationist far-right-wing nationalist libertarian Russian to gravitating, after 2011, toward the U.S. liberal position and the key event that caused him to become intensely backed by the U.S. regime being the February 2014 U.S. coup in Ukraine and subsequent breakaway of both Donbass and Crimea. Rothrock quoted a Russian commentator: “The story with Crimea, where Putin acted like a Russian nationalist for the first and only time in his 15-year rule, plunged Navalny into deep confusion. He didn’t know how to act. Support the reabsorption of Crimea? But then they’d consider you a Putin supporter. Oppose it? Well then say goodbye to your patriot image.” This was when Navalny decided that he’d better stick with the ‘anti-corruption’ campaign, in order to replace Putin. The nationalism focus would no longer work for him.

The media in U.S. and allied nations simply refuse to publish the reality of their respective government’s policy-objectives regarding Russia and China. Here, from the great independent geostrategic analyst Alexander Mercouris, is a fine example of the type of analysis that they censor-out — block their public from having access to. It’s much more insightful than the U.S.-and-allied major-media coverage, and the February 19th virtual G7 Conference might as well have preceded as followed after (as it did) his comments. I have turned this video presentation by him on February 12th into a transcript, for anyone who would prefer that to listening to the 14-minute video. His presentation separates the surface from the substance, none of which was changed by that Conference — it’s still the situation, presented, with honest  insight:

——

Good day. It is becoming increasingly clear that Germany greatly overplayed its hand with Russia over the Navalny affair. As we all know, Alexey Navalny the Russian dissident leader was brought to Germany following an agreement between the Russian and German governments after he fell ill on a flight from the Russian city of Tomsk and was treated in a hospital in Omsk. Whilst in Germany the German government on the basis of laboratory findings from a Bundeswehr laboratory and a laboratory in Sweden claimed that Navalny had been poisoned with novichok, the famous Russian nerve agent which we hear so much about, and pointed its finger at senior officials within the Russian leadership as being responsible and called for Russia to institute a criminal investigation. The Germans also dropped all sorts of hints that if the Russians did not launch that investigation they the Germans or at least the European Union would retaliate with possible and potential sanctions and there were even some suggestions that the North Stream Two gas pipeline between Russia and Germany would either be cancelled or would be put on hold.

If this ploy or strategy relating to Navalny was intended to put the Russians in a difficult place, then it’s clear that it wasn’t thought through properly. In fact the Russians pushed back very hard, refused to open an investigation, and demanded to see the evidence that the Germans said pointed to Navalny having been poisoned by novichok. This evidence, for unknown reasons, the Germans and the various laboratories involved and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons have refused to supply, lending doubts to the credibility of the whole German and western narrative around Navalny’s poisoning, but then of course further things happened. Navalny himself decided to return to Moscow or perhaps was persuaded to return there — there’s been some dispute about this — and on arrival was arrested and brought before a court and is now facing a three-year prison term because of his breach of parole conditions for an for an earlier sentence. Protests then followed in Moscow and other Russian cities which contrary to some claims in the western media seem to have been poorly attended, and the result was more demands from more people around the west for more action to be taken against Russia. It has become increasingly clear, over the rush the last few days, that the Germans in particular, the country which has arguably the greatest interest in a strong relationship with Russia, is not prepared to take any step which would in fact break important diplomatic and economic connections to Russia. The German government seems to have categorically rejected any step for example to cancel or suspend or put on hold the Nordstream 2 pipeline. In fact we’ve now had statements about Nordstream 2 from a growing number of German officials. The German economics minister Peter Altmeier has come out in support of it, so has the German President Frank Walter Steinmeier, who has referred to Nordstream 2 as a bridge to Russia and has pointedly reminded Germans that this year is the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s fateful attack on Russia — on the Soviet Union — on 22nd June 1941, the episode, the operation, known as Operation Barbarossa, and this comment about Nordstream 2 being a bridge to Russia has also now been made in rather passionate terms by German foreign minister Heiko Maas who is widely assumed or thought by many people to be one of the most anti-Russian personalities within the German government. In fact not only did Heiko Maas talk about Nordstream 2 being a bridge to Russia but he also spoke in terms of the cancellation of Nordstream 2 accelerating the trend for Russia to detach itself from Europe and possibly seek friends elsewhere — of course he means China but he doesn’t (as is always the case he didn’t) want to say that. Angela Merkel herself, as is always the case, maintains a sphinx-like silence on these issues, but she too has signaled her continued support for Nordstream 2 and her continued wish for continued dialogue with Russia. Her likely successor Armin Laschet has also made clear that he too supports Nordstream 2 and wants to see the pipeline completed and wants to maintain close links with Russia. Moreover the Germans are now apparently in negotiation with the Biden administration to have U.S sanctions on Nordstream 2 [that were] imposed by the Trump administration eased or lifted. The talk apparently is of a mechanism being created whereby if Russia were to cease to supply natural gas through Ukraine — through the pipelines that run through Ukraine — Germany would somehow switch off Nordstream 2. That is, I have to say, a complete non-starter. If that is indeed what the Biden administration and the Germans are negotiating, then the Biden administration is going to give up the sanctions or ease the sanctions, in return effectively for nothing. [Here is why:]

There is no possibility at all that if Russia and Ukraine have another gas war so that Russian gas deliveries through Ukraine are switched off, Germany would damage its own economy in solidarity with Ukraine by switching off Nordstream 2 and denying itself Russian gas [which is vastly cheaper than America’s liquefied natural gas that the Trump Administration were insisting the EU use instead]. This bears all the hallmarks of a face-saving compromise whereby the Germans get what what they want and the Biden administration is able to walk away and say that it has again achieved something when in fact it has achieved nothing.

As I’ve discussed in other videos already we see the Biden administration copying in many respects things that Obama used to do, and this sort of negotiation is a case in point. Anyway let’s put all that to one side.

It’s clear that the Germans are not prepared to sever their relations with Russia. All the talk now is of sanctions in the run-up to the European Council meeting at the end of February, but it’s also clear that those sanctions when they come will be sanctions against individual Russian officials; they will not extend to sanctions against Russia as a whole, or even against major sectors of the Russian economy, like the sectoral sanctions which the EU imposed on Russia in 2014. The Russians are used to these sanctions on individual Russian business figures and political leaders and security officials and even on Russian companies. They will simply shrug their shoulders and carry on exactly as before.

So we see token actions from Germany which really are intended to give the appearance of action when in reality there is none, giving the Russians every confidence that the Germans actually are now fully committed and invested in maintaining their relationship with the Russians and are not going to do anything to jeopardize it.

Well, perhaps that is a good thing, perhaps on balance it is as well that the Germans are now clarifying fully what their intentions are. I suspect that the Germans have been spooked by commentaries that have been coming out of Moscow and indeed from the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov that Russia has given up any idea of forging a relationship with the EU, that it no longer sees the EU and by extension Germany as a reliable partner, that Russia is now going to pursue a EurAsian policy and that it will focus instead on developing its relationship with China. I think this has been very unsettling to the Germans, and I think that they are unnerved and alarmed by it and I think that they are therefore changing course. I’m also starting to think that the disastrous visit by Joseph Borrell the EU external affairs commissioner to Moscow, which took place last week and which I’ve discussed at great detail in previous programs, was partly intended as a way by the Germans to open some kind of line of communication to the Russians to reassure the Russians that some kind of active dialogue between the EU and Russia would continue. If so, what the Germans will have found is that the Russians are in no mood to make any sort of concession at all and that they expect any future relationship between the EU and Russia and between Germany and Russia specifically to be conducted from now on increasingly on Russian terms. Well, as I said, it’s probably better that the Germans have clarified where they stand on this. I say that though of course the EU council meeting has not yet taken place and it’s possible that we may still see surprises there, but given the noises that are coming out of Berlin I would be surprised if that was the case.

How did the Germans get into this position?

I think the Germans need to understand that in dealing with Russia you have to be as Otto von Bismarck the German chancellor who spoke Russian, was once Prussia’s ambassador to the Russian court in Saint Petersburg and knew the Russians well. What the Germans need to understand is that when dealing with Russia you have ultimately to play a straight game. Bismarck put it very well. He said that with the Russians you should play straight or not at all. If you want confrontation with them they will accept that. If you want to deal with them they will accept that too. But they will not accept a game where you are both seeking to deal with them and confronting them at the same time. That is unsustainable. It’s a shame and a pity that it took so long [to recognize this] and obviously adventures and episodes like the Navalny affair will not be tolerated further. In future we will see how well and how fully this lesson has been learned in Berlin. If the Germans want a long-term confrontation with Russia they can have it. If the Germans want a strong relationship with Russia they can have it too. They mustn’t expect the Russians to bend to their will. The Russians have never done that, and they never will.

——

That commentary accurately predicted the new economic sanctions that the U.S. and the EU are now (as-of March 2nd) imposing as a supposed response to Putin’s supposed guilt in the supposed novichok poisoning of a proven Russian traitor. I’d wager that it’s too good a commentary for U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media to allow their respective publics to hear, read, or otherwise get to know about. But we’ll see.

This report is being submitted to all of the major, and many of the smaller, newsmedia in the U.S., UK, Canada, and a few other countries, so that each of them will have an opportunity to publish it to their respective audience, if they wish to inform, instead of merely to propagandize, their audience.

theduran.com

U.S. imperialism is a fact, which the U.S. Government always denies. However, U.S. President Barack Obama implicitly ‘justified’ it when he told graduating students at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, on 28 May, 2014, “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.” That means: every other nation is “dispensable”; only the U.S. is not. He then went into a tirade against Russia and China, and even added: “From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums… It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.” He was telling these West Point cadets (ever so tactfully) that they would be waging war for the benefit of America’s international corporations, and against “rising middle classes [which] compete with us, and governments [which] seek a greater say in global forums” — and that these graduating cadets would be serving in the U.S. military forces in order to crush such “competitors,” if and when America’s diplomatic corps and CIA are turning out to be insufficient to do the job. U.S. military muscle, he was telling them, is against “rising middle classes [which] compete with us, and governments [which] seek a greater say in global forums” — to block such “rise,” and to prevent those other nations from having “a greater say in global forums.” How much more clearly — though only by way of logical inference from what he was explicitly asserting — could he have admitted that America’s military is for global conquest, against all other nations (the world’s “dispensable” nations), and is NOT for national defense? And how much more hostile could he possibly have been to “rising middle classes” abroad, than to say they “compete with us,” and to tell — to America’s future generals, no less — that it will be their “task to respond,” to them, and to that?

America does most of the entire world’s invasions and coups and sanctions. This has been the case ever since 1945. These invasions, coups, and sanctions, aren’t being done in order to conquer a country that attacked America, but are instead being done purely for conquest — 100% aggressive — though “national defense” is always the main excuse that the U.S. Government gives. Only a single quasi-exception to the falsehood of the “national defense” excuse (i.e., the only instance of that excuse having been partly true) has existed, and it was America’s 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, which country likewise had not invaded America, but Al Qaeda had located its headquarters there and so America conquered Afghanistan’s Government, using the 9/11 attacks as its ‘justification’, and this invasion made things even worse for almost everybody (as usually happens from America’s invasions, coups, and sanctions). U.S. imperialism — like that of other countries — doesn’t benefit anyone except the aristocracy (the super-rich) of the invading, coup-promoting, and/or sanctioning, power. The U.S. Government chose to invade Afghanistan instead of to do a Special-Operations take-out of Al Qaeda’s leadership — the alternative option (targeted specifically and only against Al Qaeda’s leadership). The Special-Operations alternative was extremely difficult to achieve, when it was finally done (by Obama), because it wasn’t even started until years after America had already invaded Afghanistan. (Furthermore, the U.S. Government blamed no Government for the 9/11 attacks — not even Afghanistan’s — except Iran, which certainly didn’t participate in either carrying it out or funding it, or planning it; so, that was yet an additional lie by the U.S. Government. The U.S. had grabbed Iran via a coup in 1953 and then lost Iran in 1979 and aims to get it back, so blames Iran mercilessly. America’s entire response to 9/11 was simply loaded with lies.)

The truth about the invasion of Afghanistan was that the U.S. Government wanted to conquer it, and did so, using the 9/11 attacks as the invasion’s ‘explanation’ (excuse, ‘justification’). In fact, the Taliban there repeatedly tried to surrender, but was rebuffed by the U.S. each time. (As another reviewer of that book put it: “Then we had 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan and the installation of Karzai in Kabul. The Taliban, that was a loose confederation of local actors, was immediately impressed (terrified) of American air power, had no objection to Karzai (a fellow Pashtun), decided to back the Kabul government and give up their weapons. They had had enough of war, one that was continuing with the Northern Alliance when the U.S. invaded, and wanted to retire to civilian life now that there was a credible central government. Instead, the U.S. targeted all-and-any Taliban.”) But, other than that invasion, America’s many invasions have been 100%, and purely, aggressive — not for national defense, at all, but only for conquest. Global polls show that outside the United States, no country is as much regarded as the biggest threat to peace in the world as the U.S. is. Not only is the U.S. the world’s most aggressive nation, but there is no close second to it — or so is the view that’s held by peoples throughout the world, outside the United States.

Unquestionably, since 1945, “national defense,” in the United States, is simply an excuse for America’s having — and by far — the world’s largest military, in terms of dollars expended, which spending-amount is approximately half of the global total military expenditures for all of the world’s countries. It’s expenditures purely for coercive power, not for anyone’s benefit except for the benefit of the individuals who control firms such as Lockheed Martin (sellers to U.S.-and-allied governments) and ExxonMobil and other U.S. extractive and other firms that can obtain competitive advantages by having the world’s pre-eminent military force backing them up (paid for by U.S. taxpayers’ dollars, not paid for by the aristocrats who benefit from it). A government can buy weapons not only for defense, but for aggression and the threat of aggression, and that’s what keeps the controlling owners of such U.S. firms satisfied — especially since actually no country is even merely threatening to invade the United States. Rationally, the controlling owners of America’s war-weapons firms would be funding the campaigns of politicians who serve them, and they are. That’s the way for them to control their own market, which is mainly the U.S. Government. Before Harry S. Truman became America’s President in 1945, the ‘Defense’ Department was called (far more honestly) the “War Department,” but the change-of-name (to “Defense Department”) was part of (so as to hide) the U.S. Government’s (under Truman) turn away from the intentions of America’s Founders, never to have a standing army, but only military forces that would be called up if and when a foreign invasion is imminent or in progress — which has been virtually never. Ever since World War II ended (and that’s throughout the history of the U.S. Department of ‘Defense’), the U.S. military has been all for empire — exactly the thing that America’s Founders despised and wanted this country never to have. Even U.S. President James Monroe, when he announced the Monroe Doctrine, in 1823, did it not for any American imperialism, but against European nations’ imperialisms, which were threatening to move forces into the Western Hemisphere where their armies and ships might pose a threat, by land and sea, to invade the United States. It was against imperialism — NOT for it (such as America’s aristocrats and their lackeys allege).

Obama’s West Point speech that was just referred-to included the most detailed ‘justification’ of U.S. imperialism yet, and it even stated that America’s Founders’ view against imperialism was wrong, and that their view is supported today only by “self-described realists”:

At least since George Washington served as Commander-in-Chief, there have been those who warned against foreign entanglements that do not touch directly on our security or economic wellbeing. Today, according to self-described realists, conflicts in Syria or Ukraine or the Central African Republic are not ours to solve. And not surprisingly, after costly wars and continuing challenges here at home, that view is shared by many Americans.

A different view from interventionists from the left and right says that we ignore these conflicts at our own peril; that America’s willingness to apply force around the world is the ultimate safeguard against chaos, and America’s failure to act in the face of Syrian brutality or Russian provocations not only violates our conscience, but invites escalating aggression in the future. …

As the Syrian civil war spills across borders, the capacity of battle-hardened extremist groups to come after us only increases.  Regional aggression that goes unchecked — whether in southern Ukraine or the South China Sea, or anywhere else in the world — will ultimately impact our allies and could draw in our military.  We can’t ignore what happens beyond our boundaries.

And beyond these narrow rationales, I believe we have a real stake, an abiding self-interest, in making sure our children and our grandchildren grow up in a world where schoolgirls are not kidnapped and where individuals are not slaughtered because of tribe or faith or political belief.

Whereas Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, sometimes spoke against Obama’s foreign policies, Trump continued almost all of them and intensified many of them. Obama’s Vice President, Joe Biden, actively supported and continues to espouse all of them, and, now, as the U.S. President, has installed into the key foreign-policy posts ardent Obama-Administration proponents of all of those aggressive policies.

So: who controls America’s — the only global — imperialism? (This actually anti-American phenomenon.)

First of all: what does it mean to “control?” To control is, effectively, to own. A stockholder of a company doesn’t need to own all of a firm’s stock in order to control it. If the stockholder owns a controlling interest — which may be a majority of it or else far less, sometimes only a few percent in a widely held corporation — then that corporation must do what that individual wants it to do. A typical example of this is that Jeff Bezos owns only 11.1% of Amazon Corporation but he controls it, and the only way in which he doesn’t is that 88.9% of its corporate dividends are going to other investors in it than himself. Amazon pays no dividends; so, obviously, his 11.1% has been as beneficial to him as if he were owning 100% of the company. Anyway, the question here is who controls U.S. imperialism, and the question of who owns it is vastly less important than is who controls it, regardless even if “owns U.S. imperialism” has any meaning, which it probably doesn’t — and, if it does, its meaning is actually not much. But the meaning of “control” is enormous.

So, this is about identifying the individuals who control America’s imperialism (imperialism that America’s aristocracy and their lackeys deny even exists).

On 10 January 2019, CNBC bannered “American firms rule the $398 billion global arms industry: Here’s a roundup of the world’s top 10 defense contractors, by sales,” and 5 of the top 6 were U.S. firms (Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics), and the other firm in the top 6 was a UK’s BAE, which was #4. The 5 American firms together sold $139 billion, or 70%, of the total for the world’s top ten makers of weapons-of-war, by dollar-volume of sales. The UK firm (BAE) in the top 6 sold $23 billion, or 11.5% of the top ten. The trans-European Airbus sold 5.5% of the top ten. France’s Thales sold 4.5% of the top ten. Italy’s Leonardo sold 4.5% of the top ten. Russia’s Almaz-Antey sold 4.5% of the top ten. Collectively, those 10 firms together sold $198 billion of war-weapons. That amount was almost exactly half (50%) of the total dollar-volume of all of the top 100 arms-sellers. So, America’s top 5 sold 35% of the entire world’s weaponry. All of the other firms in the top ten were in U.S. allies, members of NATO, except for Russia; so, 95.5% of that $198 billion was in NATO, America’s anti-Russian military alliance. America has 4.3% of the global population. And, as was previously noted, the U.S. Government pays approximately half of the entire world’s military spending, in order (supposedly) to ‘protect the American people’. Of course, lots of lying needs to be believed by the public in order to make this situation seem acceptable; and, actually, there is so much lying, that the American public respect “the Military” more than any other institution in America except “Small business” (which used to be #2 after “The military,” until 2020, when “Small business” became #1 and “The military became the new #2): more than “The church or organized religion,” or than “The Supreme Court,” or than “Congress,” or than “Organized labor,” or than “Big Business,” or than “The public schools,” or than “Newspapers,” or than “The Presidency,” or than “The medical system,” or than “Banks, or than “Television news,” or than “The police,” or than “The criminal justice system,” or than “Large technology companies,” or than “News on the internet,” or than “Health Maintenance Organizations.” That’s a lot of lying, which caused “The military” to be respected more than any of those others.  It is especially a lot because the military is actually the most corrupt of all of America’s institutions.

These are the companies that profit from invading and defending countries. However, the profits from internal weapons-sales by Russian companies (weapons-sales to the Russian Government itself) go mainly to the Russian Government, since that Government requires by law that it must hold a controlling interest in all of the nation’s arms-producers. (For example, Wikipedia’s article on Almaz-Antey — the only Russia firm in that top ten — says “Owner: Federal Agency for Property Management”.) This is done in order to remove the profit-motive from Russia’s weapons-producing firms, and to give that Government total control over Russia’s foreign arms-sales. In other words: it is done to protect Russia’s national security, and also to prevent its arms-producers from controlling the Government, such as can happen in countries (such as the U.S.) where the motive for private profit can (by means of the “revolving-door” and other types of corruption) control the Government’s foreign policies. Unlike other types of corporations, government contractors derive all or virtually all of their profits from sales to governments — not to “the private sector” — and therefore boost their profits by controlling the Government (by means of “revolving-door” and other types of corruption). Consequently, in many countries (especially the United States), the owners of the biggest government contractors do control the Government. In order to achieve this, they, of course, usually need also to control the news-media (and also universities and other ‘non-profits’ such as think tanks), so that they all can claim (and be believed by their public that) their Government is a “democracy.”

So: here are the top owners of America’s producers of war-weapons:

The #1 firm, Lockheed Martin, will be considered first, then the #2, Boeing, then the #3, Raytheon.

Here are the “Top Lockheed Martin Shareholders”, as reported by Investopedia on 6 January 2021:

Top 3 Institutional Shareholders

Institutional investors hold the majority of Lockheed Martin shares at about 69.4% of total shares outstanding.¹⁰

State Street Corp.

State Street owns 42.2 million shares of Lockheed Martin, representing 15.1% of total shares outstanding, according to the company’s 13F filing as of September 30, 2020.¹¹ State Street manages a broad range of assets for clients, including mutual funds, ETFs and other investments with $3.1 trillion in AUM.¹² The SPDR S&P Kensho Final Frontiers ETF (ROKT), which tracks an index of companies involved in space and deep sea exploration, holds Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin represents 4.4% of the fund’s holdings.¹³

Vanguard Group Inc.

Vanguard Group owns 22.0 million shares of Lockheed Martin, representing 7.9% of total shares outstanding, according to the company’s 13F filing for the period ending September 30, 2020.¹¹ The company is primarily a mutual fund and ETF management company with about $6.2 trillion in global AUM.¹⁴ The Vanguard Industrials ETF (VIS), which tracks a market-cap-weighted index of industrial companies, owns Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin comprises about 2.7% of the fund’s portfolio.¹⁵

BlackRock Inc.

BlackRock owns 17.2 million shares of Lockheed Martin, representing 6.2% of total shares outstanding, according to the company’s 13F filing as of September 30, 2020.¹¹ The company is primarily a mutual fund and ETF management company with approximately $7.8 trillion in AUM.¹⁶ The iShares U.S. Aerospace & Defense ETF (ITA), which tracks a market-cap-weighted index of U.S. airplane and defense equipment manufacturers, assemblers, and distributors, owns Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin is the third-largest holding at about 5.7% of the fund’s portfolio.

Here are the “Top Boeing Shareholders”, as reported by Investopedia on 16 July 2020:

Top 3 Institutional Shareholders

Institutional investors hold the majority of Boeing’s shares at about 62% of total shares outstanding. ⁹

Vanguard Group Inc.

Vanguard Group owns 41.8 million shares of Boeing, representing 7.4% of total shares outstanding, according to the company’s 13F filing for the period ending March 31, 2020.¹⁰ The company is primarily a mutual fund and ETF management company with about $6.2 trillion in global assets under management (AUM).¹¹ The Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO) is one of the company’s largest exchange-traded funds (ETFs) with about $151 billion in AUM. Boeing comprises 0.31% of VOO’s holdings.¹²

BlackRock Inc.

BlackRock owns 33.3 million shares of Boeing, representing 5.9% of total shares outstanding, according to the company’s 13F filing for the period ending March 31, 2020.¹⁰ The company is primarily a mutual fund and ETF management company with approximately $6.47 trillion in AUM.¹³ The iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV) is among one of BlackRock’s largest ETFs with approximately $198 billion in AUM. Boeing comprises 0.36% of IVV’s holdings.¹⁴

Newport Trust Co.

Newport Trust owns 32.7 million shares of Boeing, representing 5.8% of total shares outstanding, according to the company’s 13F filing for the period ending March 31, 2020.¹⁰ Newport Trust, owned by Newport Group Inc., is a private company that provides trustee and independent fiduciary services to leading U.S. companies and institutions, including 25% of the corporations in the Fortune 500.^{15 16} The total value of the company’s portfolio is $24.3 billion. Boeing is among Newport Trust’s top 10 holdings, comprising about 20% of the portfolio’s total value [$4.8 billion], as of March 31, 2020.¹⁷

Here are the “Top 10 Owners of Raytheon Technologies Corp”, as reported by CNN Money, on 20 January 2021:

Stockholder    Stake Shares

owned Total value ($)           Shares

SSgA Funds Management, Inc. [State Street]         8.13%  123,514,657  

The Vanguard Group, Inc.     8.09% 122,794,043   

BlackRock Fund Advisors    4.64% 70,492,612     

Wellington Management Co.  LLP     2.87% 43,629,052     

Capital Research & Management Co.          2.66% 40,390,876     

Dodge & Cox  2.00%            30,322,795     

Capital Research & Management Co.          1.93% 29,296,294     

Geode Capital Management LLC      1.48% 22,419,532     

ClearBridge Investments LLC           1.41% 21,351,034     

Franklin Advisers, Inc.           1.28% 19,441,659     

Investopedia also lists the top individual (direct) investors, but those each are top executives of the given firm, and are “less than 0.01% of all outstanding company shares” for Lockheed, and also for Boeing. So, institutional investors control America’s producers of war-weapons.

So: the individuals who are making the investment decisions that determine which U.S. war-weapons makers will be selling stock at what prices are investment-fund managers, mainly at Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street, but also including Wellington Management, Newport Trust, and other such firms. Each of those funds manages hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars, and the identity of their beneficiary top individual investors is not public information; so, these persons, who control American imperialism, are actually anonymous — hidden from the public (as if this were simply a matter of their personal privacy, instead of their participation in ruling over the global empire). Whether those individuals also own controlling interests in mainstream news-media and/or in think tanks or in funding university professorships, or members of Congress, or any U.S. President, or any cabinet member, is likewise unknown — hidden from the public, in this ‘democracy’.

The original purpose for which corporations were created (which was around the year 1600), was in order to enable such anonymity of beneficiaries and also to prevent those owners from being prosecuted for any mass-murders, mass-negligent-homicides, or other mega-crimes, that their corporations perpetrated either domestically or else abroad (such as Union Carbide’s Bhopal India catastrophe). It serves those purposes superbly well. The investors get the profits but can’t be prosecuted for any mega-crimes that have often produced those profits. It’s called “capitalism,” and it’s simply a way to provide investors with legal immunity for vast harms that corporations do, while prisons fill up with almost only poor individuals, who couldn’t even afford a decent lawyer.

America is the king of capitalism. It has actually emerged as the emperor of capitalism, regardless of what socialism is. (Is socialism what’s in the Nordic countries? Or is it only the dictatorial variety, communism? And is socialism even incompatible with communism? Or, are these terms used only propagandistically, to fool the public?)

During the 1930s, the emperor of capitalism was the German “Reich.” That was the world’s leading imperialist nation. But, today, the United States has taken that throne, as the unchallenged leader of imperialism. The individuals who control it are unknown, but what is known is that they are in America’s wealthiest 0.1%. As-of 2014, the top 0.1% of Americans owned almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% did. Furthermore, scientific studies have proven that only the wealthiest control the U.S. Government — the American people don’t. And, of course, the American people don’t benefit from the imperialism of the Government that rules them. Though the invaded and couped and sanctioned countries suffer vastly more than Americans do from the U.S. regime’s imperialism, Americans do suffer from it, too. But the people who control the country don’t allow them to know this. Like in every dictatorship, there is lots of censorship. All of the billionaires’ operations do it — all of them censor-out what no billionaire wants them to know.

Is being extremely evil a prerequisite to serving in a high position at a mega-investment firm within the empire? The chief marketing organization for the empire’s sellers to the empire is NATO; and it, in turn, has several PR or propaganda operations promoting NATO, chief of which is the Atlantic Council, which is funded not only by member governments but by member firms and their founding families. A reasonable presumption would be that those investors have huge investments that are in the very same mega-investment firms that control America’s ‘defense’ contractors.

NATO — America’s military alliance against the Soviet Union — was allegedly against communism, but when the Soviet Union in 1991 ended its communism, and the Soviet Union broke up, NATO did not end but continued on, secretly, continuing its ‘Cold War’ but now against Russia, and expanded right up to Russia’s borders. Every nation that stays in NATO is complicit with the U.S. It’s an international gangland operation and the biggest threat to world peace. A spade should be called a spade, not an organization to ‘defend’ its member-states, but a gang to expand the U.S. empire even farther than it yet has become. It is inimical to all of the world’s peoples, and should be publicly said to be such.

On 9 May 2014, The Real News Network headlined “Who Makes US Foreign Policy? – Lawrence Wilkerson on Reality Asserts Itself (1/3)”, and presented that 20-minute interview, with one of the U.S. regime’s highest-placed whistleblowers, honestly presents the ugly reality, regarding who controls U.S. imperialism. It’s not a democracy; it’s a one-dollar-one-vote dictatorship over a country where the top 0.1% own more than do all of the bottom 80%. Imperialism is inconsistent with democracy. So: naturally, the global empire is a dictatorship.

(NOTE: That interview with Wilkerson closed with his erroneously saying, about Ukraine, that “President Obama has to this point been very subdued about how he’s dealing with sanctions and responses to Putin in general.” Wilkerson was totally ignorant that the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 had been a brutal coup, which Obama’s Administration had been laying the plans for ever since 2011, and which even included — but Obama failed to achieve — America’s taking Russia’s largest naval base, which is on Crimea, and turning it into yet another U.S. naval base. Wilkerson had specialized on the Middle East, and retired from the U.S Government in 2005. He didn’t even know about this massacre by Obama’s newly imposed Ukrainian coup-regime, which had occurred just a week prior to that interview with Wilkerson. But at least Wilkerson was totally honest. Honest errors can happen to anyone. His errors were simply based upon his having been too trusting of the U.S. Government. After all: he had been surrounded and deceived by its lies, from the Government and in its ‘news’-media, during his entire period in Government service. Even he had been fooled about Ukraine.)

The Washington Post put it gleefully by headlining that as a result of the January 26 Biden-Putin telephone call “The Biden-Putin relationship is already on the rocks.” It was no surprise that the profoundly anti-Russia Post would take an entirely negative approach to the U.S.-Russia relationship, whatever the signals might have been, but its reporting of that phone call must have lit up smiles in offices in and all round Washington, from the Pentagon to the Boeing office in Arlington, via Raytheon in Pennsylvania Avenue, Lockheed Martin in Bethesda, Northrop in Falls Church and all the other members of the military-industrial complex who see even more profits looming.

Biden seems to have more heart than his predecessor (but then, most people do), and has concentrated on urgent domestic affairs in his first days in the White House. His desire to combat and overcome the pandemic is not simply political (as in the UK, for example), but seems to stem from a genuine feeling that people matter and that their well-being should be the most important consideration in his deliberations. His White House speech of January 26 was more compassionate than anything Trump ever uttered, and even though Biden did fall into the temptation of rubbishing the disgraceful fumbling of the mercifully-departed Mar-a-Lago man, he was positive and even mildly optimistic. But his approach to international affairs, notably in regard to China and Russia, is negative and pessimistic.

The signal he sent by appointing retired General Lloyd Austin III to be defence secretary was a decidedly mixed one. He obviously intended to attract approval by choosing a black person for the job, which was part of his understandable desire to bind the nation together, but picking a former general was unwise. Apart from anything else, none of these generals have even come close to winning a war, but the main thing is that the war machine should be headed by a civilian, therefore making it clear that the military are not top-guns in any administration.

But Austin is assuredly a top gun, and a rich one too, because he has been deeply involved with military contractor Raytheon, having served on its board and having substantial stock holdings in a company whose 195,000 employees, as reported by the New York Times, “make fighter jet engines, weapons, high-tech sensors and dozens of other military products” that it hawks for billions of dollars a year. And when Mr Austin sells his shares, as he is legally bound to do, he’ll get as much as 1.7 million dollars, which gives rise to the reasonable question that when Raytheon representatives come panting round the Pentagon to apply for another billion-dollar contract, just how can Mr Austin ignore them?

The NYT also noted that Austin “has served as a partner at an investment firm named Pine Island Capital, whose board he joined in July [2020]. The firm has been on a recent buying spree of small military contractors, including Precinmac Precision Machining, which sells specialized parts for rocket launching systems and machine guns”.

The military-industrial complex has just got itself a might ally in the top echelons of the new Administration in Washington, and given that Biden endorses confrontation with Russia and China, currently involving carrier strike groups roving off China’s coast, three U.S. Navy warships operating in the Black Sea, and U.S.-led Nato manoeuvres in the Arctic which U.S. Admiral Andrew Lewis declares to be “the new frontier of our homeland defence,” it is apparent that the new Biden Cold War will be lucrative for countless weapons’ manufacturers and a shot in the arm for the Pentagon, which is being given 740 billion dollars to spend in 2021.

The former Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell, trotted out the usual platitudes about patriotism and declared that the money “looks after our brave men and women who volunteer to wear the uniform” while — of course — ensuring that “we keep pace with competitors like Russia and China.’’

Keep pace?  As recorded by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “the USA’s military spending in 2019 was over 11 times greater than Russia’s” and about three times that of China, which has four time the population of the U.S. and the longest land border in the world, at 22,117 kilometres / 13,743 miles. Russia has a land border of 20,241 km / 12,577 miles, the second largest in the world, and is faced to its west by hostile states which provide bases for air, naval and ground forces from countries of the U.S.-Nato military alliance. One might wonder why both China and Russia have been forced to focus on their armed forces at the expense of social improvements for their citizens — but when they are faced with a massive military empire that has declared its open hostility, there is little choice but to prepare for conflict.

Washington’s National Defence Strategy is designed specifically “to meet the challenges posed by a re-emergence of long-term strategic competition with China and Russia” but fails to mention that the U.S. has over 800 military bases around the world, strategically placed to menace Russia and China, and costing an estimated 150 billion dollars a year. This is in addition to the eleven carrier strike groups and countless B-52 nuclear bomber sorties that menace nations considered by Washington to merit confrontation.

The Watson Institute at Brown University has calculated that the U.S. has spent 6.4 trillion dollars in waging wars since the 9/11 atrocities gave rise to the “Global War on Terror” and all its spinoffs from Afghanistan to Libya, via Iraq, Syria and dozens of other unfortunate countries that have suffered catastrophic destruction and myriad deaths from the military actions of what President Biden calls the “beacon for the globe.”

Listening to the inauguration speech by President Biden was indeed uplifting, and his expressed sentiments were admirable. But since then the tenor has changed concerning external affairs, and although there is certainly a beacon on what President Reagan referred to as the “Shining City on the Hill”, it is beckoning to the wrong people.

President Biden’s beacon should be directed along avenues that lead to international dialogue, moderation and harmony. But it has been deflected to the rugged trails of aggression. It is a signal to the Pentagon and its stalwart supporters that power and profit lie ahead in the beacon-lit shopping malls of weapon manufacturing. President Eisenhower warned against “acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex,” but that is what is happening, and unless Uncle Joe has a rethink about his approach to Russia and China, there will be major rocks ahead.

“There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet plagues and wars take people equally by surprise”

– Albert Camus, “The Plague”

Camus’ novel of a lethal contagion in the North African city of Oran is filled with characters all too recognizable today: indifferent or incompetent officials, short sighted and selfish citizens, and lots of great courage. What not even Camus could imagine, however, is a society in the midst of a deadly epidemic pouring vast amounts of wealth into instruments of death.

Welcome to the world of the hypersonic weapons, devices that are not only superfluous, but which will almost certainly not work. They will, however, cost enormous amounts of money. At a time when countries across the globe are facing economic chaos, financial deficits and unemployment at Great Depression levels, arms manufacturers are set to cash in big.

Hypersonic weapons are missiles that go five times faster than sound—3,800 mph—although some reportedly can reach speeds of Mach 20—15,000 mph. They come in two basic varieties, one powered by a high-speed scramjet, the other – launched from a plane or missile—glides to its target. The idea behind the weapons is that their speed and maneuverability will make them virtually invulnerable to anti-missile systems.

Currently there is a hypersonic arms race going on among China, Russia and the US, and, according to the Pentagon, the Americans are desperately trying to catch up with its two adversaries.

Truth is the first casualty in an arms race.

In the 1950s, it was the “bomber gap” between the Americans and the Soviets. In the 1960s, it was the “missile gap” between the two powers. Neither gap existed, but vast amounts of national treasure were, nonetheless, poured into long-range aircraft and thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The enormous expenditures on those weapons, in turn, heightened tensions between the major powers and on at least three occasions came very close to touching off a nuclear war.

In the current hypersonic arms race, “hype” is the operational word. “The development of hypersonic weapons in the United States,” says physicist James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, ”has been largely motivated by technology, not by strategy. In other words, technologists have decided to try and develop hypersonic weapons because it seems like they should be useful for something, not because there is a clearly defined mission need for them to fulfill.”

They have certainly been “useful” to Lockheed Martin, the largest arms manufacturer in the world. The company has already received $3.5 billion to develop the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (Arrow) glide missile, and the scramjet- driven Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (Hacksaw) missile.

The Russians also have several hypersonic missiles, including the Avangard glide vehicle, a missile said to be capable of Mach 20. China is developing several hypersonic missiles, including the DF-ZF, supposedly capable of taking out aircraft carriers.

In theory hypersonic missiles are unstoppable. In real life, not so much.

The first problem is basic physics: speed in the atmosphere produces heat. High speed generates lots of it. ICBMs avoid this problem with a blunt nose cone that deflects the enormous heat of re-entering the atmosphere as the missile approaches its target. But it only has to endure heat for a short time because much of its flight is in frictionless low earth orbit.

Hypersonic missiles, however, stay in the atmosphere their entire flight. That is the whole idea. An ICBM follows a predictable ballistic curve, much like an inverted U and, in theory, can be intercepted. A missile traveling as fast as an ICBM but at low altitude, however, is much more difficult to spot or engage.

But that’s when physics shows up and does a Las Vegas: what happens on the drawing board stays on the drawing board.

Without a heat deflecting nose cone, high-speed missiles are built like big needles, since they need to decrease the area exposed to the atmosphere Even so, they are going to run very hot. And if they try to maneuver, that heat will increase. Since they can’t carry a large payload they will have to very accurate, but as a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists points out, that is “problematic.”

According to the Union, an object traveling Mach 5 for a period of time “slowly tears itself apart during the flight.” The heat is so great it creates a “plasma” around the craft that makes it difficult “to reference GPS or receive outside course correction commands.”

If the target is moving, as with an aircraft carrier or a mobile missile, it will be almost impossible to alter the weapon’s flight path to intercept it. And any external radar array would never survive the heat or else be so small that it would have very limited range. In short, you can’t get from here to there.

Lockheed Martin says the tests are going just fine, but then Lockheed Martin is the company that builds the F-35, a fifth generation stealth fighter that simply doesn’t work. It does, however, cost $1.5 trillion, the most expensive weapons system in US history. The company has apparently dropped the scramjet engine because it tears itself apart, hardly a surprise.

The Russians and Chinese claim success with their hypersonic weapons and have even begun deploying them. But Pierre Sprey, a Pentagon designer associated with the two very successful aircraft—the F-16 and the A-10—told defense analyst Andrew Cockburn that he is suspicious of the tests.

“I very much doubt those test birds would have reached the advertised range had they maneuvered unpredictably,” he told Cockburn. “More likely they were forced to fly a straight, predictable path. In which case hypersonics offer no advantage whatsoever over traditional ballistic missiles.”

While Russia, China and the US lead the field in the development of hypersonics, Britain, France, India and Japan have joined the race.

Why is everyone building them?

At least the Russians and the Chinese have a rationale. The Russians fear the US anti-missile system might cancel out their ICBMs, so they want a missile that can maneuver. The Chinese would like to keep US aircraft carriers away from their shores. But anti-missile systems can be easily fooled by the use of cheap decoys, and the carriers are vulnerable to much more cost effective conventional weapons. In any case hypersonic missiles can’t do what they are advertised to do.

For the Americans, hypersonics are little more than a very expensive subsidy for the arms corporations. Making and deploying weapons that don’t work is nothing new. The F-35 is a case in point, but nevertheless, there have been many systems produced over the years that were deeply flawed.

The US has spent over $200 billion on anti-missile systems and once they come off the drawing boards, none of them work very well, if at all.

Probably the one that takes the prize is the Mark-28 tactical nuke, nick named the “Davy Crockett,” and its M-388 warhead. Because the M-388 was too delicate to be used in conventional artillery, it was fired from a recoilless rife with a range of 2.5 miles. Problem: if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction the Crockett cooked its three-man crew. It was only tested once and found to be “totally inaccurate.” So, end of story? Not exactly. A total of 2,100 were produced and deployed, mostly in Europe.

While the official military budget is $738 billion, if one pulls all US defense related spending together, the actual cost for taxpayers is $1.25 trillion a year, according to William Hartung of the Center for International Policy. Half that amount would go a long way toward providing not only adequate medical support during the Covid-19 crisis, it would pay jobless Americans a salary

Given that there are more than 31 million Americans now unemployed and the possibility that numerous small businesses—restaurants in particular—will never re-open, building and deploying a new generation of weapons is a luxury the US—and other countries—cannot afford. In the very near future, countries are going to have to choose whether they make guns or vaccines.

The Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighter has suffered a long list of problems that we’ve frequently noted. Now a new report from Bloomberg, citing a Pentagon annual assessment, specifies how the stealth fighters can’t shoot straight.

The Pentagon has already spent upwards of $428 billion on the F-35 program, which will cost taxpayers $1.5 trillion over its 55-year lifespan.

Already, there have been a host of problems with the stealth fighters, including more than 800 software errors.

And the newest problem: A General Dynamics GAU-12/U Equalizer, a five-barrel 25 mm Gatling-type rotary cannon, mounted on some F-35s, has “unacceptable” accuracy of hitting ground targets.

The Pentagon’s new report said the Air Force’s cannon mounted inside the plane, has “unacceptable” accuracy due to “misalignments” in the gun’s mount that didn’t meet specifications.

The report also said mounts for the cannons are cracking, forcing the Air Force to limit the weapon’s use. The F-35 program office has “made progress with changes to the gun installation” to improve accuracy.

The report notes 873 software errors in the plane, as of 4Q19. The good news, it’s down from 917 in 3Q18.

“Although the program office is working to fix deficiencies, new discoveries are still being made, resulting in only a minor decrease in the overall number” and leaving “many significant,” the assessment said.

There was also mention that the planes could be susceptible to cybersecurity “vulnerabilities.”

Here are other unresolved glitches of the F-35 program that we mentioned last year (the partial list via Defense News):

• When the F-35B vertically lands on very hot days, older engines may be unable to produce the required thrust to keep the jet airborne, resulting in a hard landing.
• After doing certain maneuvers, F-35B and F-35C pilots are not always able to completely control the aircraft’s pitch, roll and yaw.
• Supersonic flight in excess of Mach 1.2 can cause structural damage and blistering to the stealth coating of the F-35B and F-35C.
• Cabin pressure spikes in the cockpit of the F-35 have been known to cause barotrauma, the word given to extreme ear and sinus pain.
• The spare parts inventory shown by the F-35’s logistics system does not always reflect reality, causing occasional mission cancellations.
• If the F-35A and F-35B blows a tire upon landing, the impact could also take out both hydraulic lines and pose a loss-of-aircraft risk.
• Possible maneuvering issues when the aircraft is operating above a 20-degree angle of attack.
• The F-35’s logistics system currently has no way for foreign F-35 operators to keep their secret data from being sent to the United States.

Despite the ongoing problems that many F-35s are not combat-ready and have many issues that are putting American pilots in severe disadvantages for a dogfight, Congress continues to order more planes.

As of 3Q19, the F-35 program has 490 planes, many of which could be suffering from computer errors and guns that don’t hit targets.

zerohedge.com

Mandy SMITHBERGER

Call it a colossal victory for a Pentagon that hasn’t won a war in this century, but not for the rest of us. Congress only recently passed and the president approved one of the largest Pentagon budgets ever. It will surpass spending at the peaks of both the Korean and Vietnam wars. As last year ended, as if to highlight the strangeness of all this, the Washington Post broke a story about a “confidential trove of government documents” — interviews with key figures involved in the Afghan War by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction — revealing the degree to which senior Pentagon leaders and military commanders understood that the war was failing. Yet, year after year, they provided “rosy pronouncements they knew to be false,” while “hiding unmistakable evidence that the war had become unwinnable.”

However, as the latest Pentagon budget shows, no matter the revelations, there will be no reckoning when it comes to this country’s endless wars or its military establishment — not at a moment when President Donald Trump is sending yet more U.S. military personnel into the Middle East and has picked a new fight with Iran. No less troubling: how few in either party in Congress are willing to hold the president and the Pentagon accountable for runaway defense spending or the poor performance that has gone with it.

Given the way the Pentagon has sunk taxpayer dollars into those endless wars, in a more reasonable world that institution would be overdue for a comprehensive audit of all its programs and a reevaluation of its expenditures. (It has, by the way, never actually passed an audit.) According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, Washington has already spent at least $2 trillion on its war in Afghanistan alone and, as the Post made clear, the corruption, waste, and failure associated with those expenditures was (or at least should have been) mindboggling.

Of course, little of this was news to people who had read the damning reports released by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction in previous years. They included evidence, for instance, that somewhere between $10 million and $43 million had been spent constructing a single gas station in the middle of nowhere, that $150 million had gone into luxury private villas for Americans who were supposed to be helping strengthen Afghanistan’s economy, and that tens of millions more were wasted on failed programs to improve Afghan industries focused on extracting more of the country’s minerals, oil, and natural gas reserves.

In the face of all this, rather than curtailing Pentagon spending, Congress continued to increase its budget, while also supporting a Department of Defense slush fund for war spending to keep the efforts going. Still, the special inspector general’s reports did manage to rankle American military commanders (unable to find successful combat strategies in Afghanistan) enough to launch what, in effect, would be a public-relations war to try to undermine that watchdog’s findings.

All of this, in turn, reflected the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex that President (and former five-star General) Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans about in his memorable 1961 farewell address. That complex only continues to thrive and grow almost six decades later, as contractor profits are endlessly prioritized over what might be considered the national security interests of the citizenry.

The infamous “revolving door” that regularly ushers senior Pentagon officials into defense-industry posts and senior defense-industry figures into key positions at the Pentagon (and in the rest of the national security state) just adds to the endless public-relations offensives that accompany this country’s forever wars. After all, the retired generals and other officials the media regularly looks to for expertise are often essentially paid shills for the defense industry. The lack of public disclosure and media discussion about such obvious conflicts of interest only further corrupts public debate on both the wars and the funding of the military, while giving the arms industry the biggest seat at the table when decisions are made on how much to spend on war and preparations for the same.

Media Analysis Brought to You by the Arms Industry

That lack of disclosure regarding potential conflicts of interest recently came into fresh relief as industry boosters beat the media drums for war with Iran. Unfortunately, it’s a story we’ve seen many times before. Back in 2008, for instance, in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series, the New York Times revealed that the Pentagon had launched a program to cultivate a coterie of retired-military-officers-turned-pundits in support of its already disastrous war in Iraq. Seeing such figures on TV or reading their comments in the press, the public may have assumed that they were just speaking their minds. However, the Timesinvestigation showed that, while widely cited in the media and regularly featured on the TV news, they never disclosed that they received special Pentagon access and that, collectively, they had financial ties to more than 150 Pentagon contractors.

Given such financial interests, it was nearly impossible for them to be “objective” when it came to this country’s failing war in Iraq. After all, they needed to secure more contracts for their defense-industry employers. A subsequent analysis by the Government Accountability Office found that the Pentagon’s program raised “legitimate questions” about how its public propaganda efforts were tied to the weaponry it bought, highlighting “the possibility of compromised procurements resulting from potential competitive advantages” for those who helped them.

While the program was discontinued that same year, a similar effort was revealed in 2013 during a debate over whether the U.S. should attack Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime. You probably won’t be surprised to discover that most of the former military figures and officials used as analysts at the time supported action against Syria. A review of their commentary by the Public Accountability Initiative found a number of them also had undisclosed ties to the arms industry. In fact, of 111 appearances in major media outlets by 22 commentators, only 13 of them disclosed any aspect of their potential conflicts of interest that might lead them to promote war.

The same pattern is now being repeated in the debate over the Trump administration’s decision to assassinate by drone Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani and other Iran-related issues. While Suleimani clearly opposed the United States and many of its national security interests, his killing risked pushing Washington into another endless war in the Middle East. And in a distinctly recognizable pattern, the Intercept has already found that the air waves were subsequently flooded by defense-industry pundits praising the strike. Unsurprisingly, news of a potential war also promptly boosted defense industry stocks. Northrop Grumman’s, Raytheon’s, and Lockheed Martin’s all started 2020 with an uptick.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative Jackie Speier (D-CA) have offered legislation that could shut down that revolving door between the major weapons makers and Washington for good, but it has met concerted resistance from Pentagon officials and others still in Congress who stand to benefit from preserving the system as is. Even if that revolving door wasn’t shut down, transparency about just who was going through it would help the public better understand what former officials and military commanders are really advocating for when they speak positively of the necessity for yet another war in the Middle East.

Costly Weapons (and Well-Paid Lobbyists)

Here’s what we already know about how it all now works: weapon systems produced by the big defense firms with all those retired generals, former administration officials, and one-time congressional representatives on their boards (or lobbying for or consulting for them behind the scenes) regularly come in overpriced, are often delivered behind schedule, and repeatedly fail to have the capabilities advertised. Take, for instance, the new Ford class aircraft carriers, produced by Huntington Ingalls Industries, the sort of ships that have traditionally been used to show strength globally. In this case, however, the program’s development has been stifled by problems with its weapons elevators and the systems used to launch and recover its aircraft. Those problems have been costly enough to send the price for the first of those carriers soaring to $13.1 billion. Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet fighter, the most expensive weapons system in Pentagon history, has an abysmal rate of combat readiness and currently comes in at more than $100 million per aircraft.

And yet, somehow, no one ever seems to be responsible for such programmatic failures and prices — certainly not the companies that make them (or all those retired military commanders sitting on their boards or working for them). One crucial reason for this lack of accountability is that key members of Congress serving on committees that should be overseeing such spending are often the top recipients of campaign contributions from the big weapons makers and their allies. And just as at the Pentagon, members of those committees or their staff often later become lobbyists for those very federal contractors.

With this in mind, the big defense firms carefully spread their contracts for weapons production across as many congressional districts as possible. This practice of “political engineering,” a term promoted by former Department of Defense analyst and military reformer Chuck Spinney, helps those contractors and the Pentagon buy off members of Congress from both parties. Take, for example, the Littoral Combat Ship, a vessel meant to operate close to shore. Costs for the program tripled over initial estimates and, according to Defense News, the Navy is already considering decommissioning four of the new ships next year as a cost-saving measure. It’s not the first time that program has been threatened with the budget axe. In the past, however, pork-barrel politics spearheaded by Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Richard Shelby (R-AL), in whose states those boats were being built, kept the program afloat.

The Air Force’s new bomber, the B-21, being built by Northrup Grumman, has been on a similar trajectory. Despite significant pressure from then-Senator John McCain (R-AZ), the Air Force refused in 2017 to make public or agree upon a contract price for the program. (It was a “cost-plus,” not a “fixed price” contract, after all.) It did, however, release the names of the companies providing components to the program, ensuring that relevant congressional representatives would support it, no matter the predictably spiraling costs to come.

Recent polling indicates that such pork-barrel politics isn’t backed by the public, even when they might benefit from it. Asked whether congressional representatives should use the Pentagon’s budget to generate jobs in their districts, 77% of respondents rejected the notion. Two-thirds favored shifting such funds to sectors like healthcare, infrastructure, and clean energy that would, in fact, create significantly more jobs.

And keep in mind that, in this big-time system of profiteering, hardware costs, however staggering, are just a modest part of the equation. The Pentagon spends about as much on what it calls “services” as it does on the weaponry itself and those service contracts are another major source of profits. For example, it’s estimated that the F-35 program will cost $1.5 trillion over the lifetime of the plane, but a trillion dollars of those costs will be for support and maintenance of the aircraft.

Increasingly, this means contractors are able to hold the Pentagon hostage over a weapon’s lifetime, which means overcharges of just about every imaginable sort, including for labor. The Project On Government Oversight (where I work) has, for instance, been uncovering overcharges in spare parts since our founding, including an infamous $435 hammer back in 1983. I’m sad to report that what, in the 1980s, was a seemingly outrageous $640 plastic toilet-seat cover for military airplanes now costs an eye-popping $10,000. A number of factors help explain such otherwise unimaginable prices, including the way contractors often retain intellectual property rights to many of the systems taxpayers funded to develop, legal loopholes that make it difficult for the government to challenge wild charges, and a system largely beholden to the interests of defense companies.

The most recent and notorious case may be TransDigm, a company that has purchased other companies with a monopoly on providing spare parts for a number of weapon systems. That, in turn, gave it power to increase the prices of parts with little fear of losing business — once, receiving 9,400% in excess profits for a single half-inch metal pin. An investigation by the House Oversight and Reform Committee found that TransDigm’s employees had been coached to resist providing cost or pricing information to the government, lest such overcharges be challenged.

In one case, for instance, a subsidiary of TransDigm resisted providing such information until the government, desperate for parts for weapons to be used in Iraq and Afghanistan, was forced to capitulate or risk putting troops’ lives on the line. TransDigm did later repay the government $16 million for certain overcharges, but only after the House Oversight and Reform Committee held a hearing on the subject that shamed the company. As it happens, TransDigm’s behavior isn’t an outlier. It’s typical of many defense-related companies doing business with the government — about 20 major industry players, according to a former Pentagon pricing czar.

A Recipe for Disaster

For too long Congress has largely abdicated its responsibilities when it comes to holding the Pentagon accountable. You won’t be surprised to learn that most of the “acquisition reforms” it’s passed in recent years, which affect how the Department of Defense buys goods and services, have placed just about all real negotiating power in the hands of the big defense contractors. To add insult to injury, both parties of Congress continue to vote in near unanimity for increases in the Pentagon budget, despite 18-plus years of losing wars, the never-ending gross mismanagement of weapons programs, and a continued failure to pass a basic audit. If any other federal agency (or the contractors it dealt with) had a similar track record, you can only begin to imagine the hubbub that would ensue. But not the Pentagon. Never the Pentagon.

A significantly reduced budget would undoubtedly increase that institution’s effectiveness by curbing its urge to throw ever more money at problems. Instead, an often bought-and-paid-for Congress continues to enable bad decision-making about what to buy and how to buy it. And let’s face it, a Congress that allows endless wars, terrible spending practices, and multiplying conflicts of interest is, as the history of the twenty-first century has shown us, a recipe for disaster.

tomdispatch.com