pentagon dod 2

primary rename 7 26

819 disambig bak

see main DoD

merri ok

SEE HEGSETH PRESS SUPPRESS

woke mil?

no notes 5/14

see MIC

should add all the brass

see NSC security

see infiltration/active duty

see retire mil officers

===

MPU 526

https://substack.perfectunion.us/p/how-trump-is-helping-military-contractors

*By Lucy Dean Stockton, More Perfect Union

In recent years, the Pentagon has welcomed new contracting processes that pad military contractors’ profits — a trend that is now being turbocharged under President Donald Trump, and the military-industrial complex is thrilled.

Typically, when the government buys a product or service, it uses competitive contracts to ensure that taxpayers get a fair price. But in the last few decades, the Department of Defense — with the blessing of bipartisan lawmakers — has embraced alternative processes that let contractors circumvent many of the mandated regulations governing Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) contracts, like accounting standards, cost negotiations, and intellectual property rights limitations. This means that some agencies have been empowered to negotiate terms that look closer to normal business contracts, but often offer a worse deal for U.S. taxpayers.

“The Pentagon is increasingly relying on rapid acquisition pathways that subvert competition to acquire weapons,” Julia Gledhill, a research analyst at the Stimson Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on global peace, told More Perfect Union. “Legislators have totally kneecapped the Pentagon’s ability to negotiate contracts with military contractors, meaning that both the military and taxpayers are being fleeced by these companies.”

These alternative contracting mechanisms, including “non-traditional contracting” and “Other Transaction Authority” (OTA) procurement, have vastly expanded over the last decade within agencies like the DOD and the Department of Homeland Security. This has corrupted a process that was originally designed to produce narrow contracts for innovative products into a major acquisition vehicle for basic procurement from well-established military contractors as well.

In 2025, these kinds of OTA contracts amounted to more than $18 billion in government spending. Across the board, it means that prototyping agreements have become much more common and expensive than basic procurement agreements.

“ The OTA is an existing vehicle that, if they expand it, it helps speed the money out the door.” Bill Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told More Perfect Union. “It’s less record keeping, less scrutiny, and it’s the perfect vehicle for lining the pockets of both the old and the new contractors.”

In April 2025, Trump signaled that he would accelerate the shift towards rapid acquisition processes through an executive order to overhaul the DOD’s procurement process. The order specifically requested that the new processes “expedite acquisitions…including a first preference for commercial solutions and a general preference for Other Transactions Authority.”

IFrame Content

And the military-industrial complex is loving it. On an April 23 earnings call, Lockheed Martin President Jim Taiclet called the Iran War and the Trump administration’s focus on “agility” in military contracting, “a golden opportunity right now based on who’s in government, their experience, their willingness to change the demand that they have for what we do and our partners in our industry do.”

“We can move the contracting system from this FAR cost — Federal Acquisition Regulation -based, cost-based Truth [in] Negotiation Act burden that we’ve all had — and move it more towards a commercial contracting system,” Taiclet told investors. Venture-backed investors, he said, “are helping us and the government get out of our traditions and into a more agile contracting scenario.”

Lockheed Martin has won nearly $50 billion in government contracts since 2008, more than 97 percent of which were with the Department of Defense. The last quarter of 2025 represented their biggest season of contracts ever. In 2024, they were the fourth-highest awarded OTA contract recipient with the Defense Department, just behind peer weapons manufacturer Northrop Grumman.

Last year, Lockheed Martin spent more than $15 million lobbying lawmakers, including on “acquisition policy,” among other issues.

Lockheed Martin did not respond to More Perfect Union’s request for comment.

Northrop Grumman executives echoed the excitement about the expansion of OTAs. On an April 22 earnings call, Northrop Grumman President Kathy Warden told investors that the company is “seeing more use of OTAs and other nontraditional contracting mechanisms.”

These contracts have been lucrative for the defense company and its subsidiaries, which won nearly $7 billion in total Defense Department contracts in 2025.

“I don’t see a desire by the department to push industry profitability down,” Warden told shareholders. “I see a real alignment here and an opportunity for us to work with the department to create better economics for industry and the government.”

Northrop Grumman spent more than $8 million lobbying on acquisition policy, including specific lobbying on Streamlining Procurement for Effective Execution and Delivery Act of 2025, which expands the use of OTAs in military procurement.

Northrop Grumman did not respond to a request for comment.

Other military contractors, like L3Harris Technologies, an American defense technology company, echoed this sentiment.

“I have to give the Department of War credit for their innovative approach to acquisition here,” L3Harris Technologies Chairman Christopher Kubasik told investors on an April 30 earnings call. “What is going on now has never been done in the history of our country, and they are going fast. We and the rest of the defense industrial base are keeping up with them to the best of our ability. I think it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

L3Harris Technologies won $318 million in OTA contracts last year, the 6th highest of any military contractor. They were awarded $7.6 billion in total government contracts last year.

Defense contractors’ profit margins already far outpace most other industries by as much as four times. While typical commercial industry profits sit around 6 percent, many military contractors see profits of at least 15 percent, paid almost entirely by U.S. taxpayers. Military contractors have received more than half of all Pentagon spending since 2020. And as the industry has grown more consolidated, the remaining companies are exercising even more power over the Pentagon.

The defense industry spends tens of millions of dollars lobbying the government each year. In 2025, the industry collectively spent a record-breaking $198 million to influence lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Last year, the Pentagon failed its financial audit for the eighth consecutive year, after auditors found significant accounting errors, missing information, and billions of dollars unaccounted for. It remains the only major U.S. federal agency that has never passed an audit.

“We’re experiencing one of the biggest military spending buildups in American history,” Gledhill said. “So you can imagine that a combination of a $1.5 trillion military budget and a less competitive, less accountable weapons acquisition process is really the perfect recipe for fleecing the American people in the name of weapons production and procurement.”

The use of OTAs may also become particularly useful for the DOD as it launches Trump’s Golden Dome Project, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated this week could cost up to $1.2 trillion over 20 years. The project, which is heavily reliant on satellites, would likely benefit from Trump’s Dec. 18, 2025 outer space-focused executive order in which he urged agencies to act with “a first preference for commercial solutions and a general preference for Other Transactions Authority or Space Act Agreements” to promote streamlined acquisitions.

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AN 4 26

President Donald Trump's Navy secretary revealed "we screwed up."

The USS Boise, a nuclear sub is being taken offline after spending about $800 million trying to overhaul it. The goal was to use what they have and rebuild, but the costs are mounting, and it isn't even halfway completed. The full maintenance cost could reach $1.9 billion. So, they've decided to scrap it and build a new one instead,Semafor reported on Friday.

Secretary John Phelan said that Trump is aiming for a new "Golden Fleet" of ships. His 2027 budget allocated less than $42 billion for 19 new battle force ships.

“We screwed up,” said Phelan, who said he was embracing “radical transparency” now that he's in charge. “We did. This doesn’t look good. It is what it is. Time to move on, and try to get going in the future and move forward.”

A Congressional Budget Office report cited that building a modern equivalent of the Boise, a Los Angeles-class submarine (SSN-764), would cost about $8.7 billion. The Navy calculates it closer to $7.1 billion. A 2024 report from The National Interest said, "Modern aircraft carriers, like the U.S. Navy’s Gerald R. Ford-class, cost around $13 billion each due to their immense complexity and advanced technology."

Trump's "golden fleet" demand would be "battleships described as highly advanced and heavily armed. The proposal requests $65.8 billion for shipbuilding, aiming to produce 18 battle force ships, 16 non-battle vessels, as well as an increase in public shipyard capacity," Business Insider reported.

“I think, by killing these programs, it’s sending a message that we’re not going to continue to send good money after bad investments, and that we’re going to try to make prudent economic decisions that are in the best interest of the fleet and the force,” Phelan explained.

He implied, however, that Trump's $65.8 billion budget request for shipbuilding won't be enough to meet the goal Trump has set for ship production.

“The ’27 budget [will have] a very big impact on this, and in trying to get after it, and really an exponential increase in our readiness,” Phelan said.

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AN 2 26

President Donald Trump is costing US taxpayers “billions” with his various military ventures, an expert wrote on Tuesday, even though both he and his critics have been strangely silent on the subject.

From his quite real military action in Venezuela to his threatened activities in Colombia, Mexico, Nigeria, Gaza, Iran and Greenland, Trump is repeatedly actually or potentially engaging in multibillion dollar military campaigns all over the globe, according to a report by Bloomberg. For example Operation Southern Sphere in January, during which Trump captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, cost $31 million per day, according to an analysis by the Washington think tank the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

“That comes to more than $11 billion a year if the US maintains its current level there,” reported Bloomberg’s Wes Kosova. If Trump successfully pushes US oil companies to spend $100 billion to rebuild Venezuela’s energy industry, “that means you’re bringing in some kind of occupation,” explained Heidi Peltier, director of programs at Brown University’s Costs of War project. “US taxpayers would be rebuilding the oil industry and paying for a military presence there to stabilize the country and make it a safe enough investment.”

Similarly Trump’s threatened attacks against Iran, which he said would be “far worse” than the B-2 bomber attacks from last year, would cost $8 million daily or $2.9 billion annually.

“That’s on top of the at least $2 billion the US spent on military action against Iran and its proxies in 2025, according to calculations by the Costs of War project,” Bloomberg wrote. “Needless to say, those numbers will climb dramatically if Trump orders further strikes.” And that doesn’t include the cost of Trump’s threatened occupation of Greenland (roughly $700 billion).

“No matter how compelling a president’s argument may be for missile strikes or troop deployments, the current practice of heaping war costs atop the nation’s already staggering pile of debt can last only so long,” Bloomberg reported. “At the start of the Iraq War, US debt held by the public was $3.7 trillion, or 33 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Today it’s more than $30 trillion, equal to 97 percent of GDP.”

Bloomberg is not alone within the business world in looking askance at Trump’s invasion of Venezuela. TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné told reporters that he quit the country in 2022 and Trump’s invasion has not changed that.

"It was too expensive and too polluting," Pouyanné said, "and that is still the case.”

Similarly Exxon CEO Darren Woods has described the Venezuelan market as “uninvestable.” Trump replied by threatening to sideline the Exxon leader by “playing too cute.” Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton also observed in January that oil companies might not feel comfortable investing in Venezuela because of the instability injected by Trump’s policies.

“If I were an oil company executive being pressured by Trump to invest billions of dollars of capital expenditures to revive Venezuela's oil infrastructure, I would want a regime in place committed to the rule of law,” Bolton said.

Overall the economic risk involved in Venezuela stems from the uncertainty baked into the military operation’s future, said one expert.

"Tactically, it was executed with precision," retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling said for the conservative publication The Bulwark. "But the immediate aftermath revealed a strategic uncertainty. Even in the (Trump) Administration's first press briefings, it was unclear who was in charge in Caracas, what authority Washington claimed to exercise, and what political end state the United States was pursuing. That ambiguity has not improved with time."

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an 2 26

Punchbowl News reported on Tuesday that President Donald Trump wanted a hefty budget for the start of his "Golden Dome" project, but even Republicans have no idea what's going on with it.

Speaking with Republicans on Capitol Hill, Briana Reilly and Anthony Adragna found that even they don't know what has been done or what will happen in the next year.

The so-called "Golden Dome" is supposed to be similar to the Israeli anti-missile system in place that detects and shoots down any aerial weapons coming into the country. The United States, however, is over 400 times the size of Israel. Part of Trump's reasoning for demanding Greenland become part of the U.S. was the claim that he wanted the dome to stretch all the way there.

That would mean expanding the area under the "Golden Dome" to over 1,000 times the size of Israel.

A report titled Build Your Own Golden Dome: A Framework for Understanding Costs, Choices, and Tradeoffs from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute estimated the cost at anywhere between $252 billion and $3.6 trillion over 20 years.

Thus far, Congress has allocated $23 billion to the Department of Defense. Lawmakers have since been asking what they got for that.

Punchbowl cited Pentagon officials telling the Hill they would speak to Congress about its detailed plans. But that was three months ago. Lawmakers are still waiting.

“I would hope we could have hearings on it — both classified and unclassified — to lay out the plan and also talk about budgets and where the money’s coming from, and how we’re going to integrate technology,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) told Punchbowl.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Brian Mast (R-Fla.) anticipates there are going to be huge arguments over the project from now on.

“It’s stirring, big debate here,” Mast revealed.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is a top lawmaker on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee. Speaking to Punchbowl, she explained that the GOP members were happy to turn over the billions, but they don't know where they have disappeared to.

“I can tell you how much we included within the reconciliation bill for Golden Dome, but in terms of what it exactly means, I think the Congress is still waiting to hear on that as well,” she said. “That’s what I’d like to know.”

One of the biggest fiscal complaints about the Pentagon is that the Defense Department budget has ballooned to $1 trillion only to deliver years late at twice the price.

"Many weapons systems also don’t work too well. The F-35 works less than one-third of the time. The Navy is retiring Littoral Combat Ships decades ahead of schedule because they can’t perform the missions the Navy needs. Army leaders cancelled the Future Combat System without producing a single operational vehicle," wrote Dan Grazier, senior fellow and director of the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center.

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hegs lose $60m navy jet?

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an 4 25

GOP unveils plan to give $150B more to Pentagon amid threats of cuts to Social Security

Jake Johnson Common Dreams

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MMA

Trump is trying to throttle the free press — and U.S. moguls are going along with it

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 02/04/25

President Donald Trump is wasting no time in carrying out his goal of throttling the free press. Over the first two weeks of Trump’s presidency, his appointees have wielded federal regulatory authority to punish outlets the president dislikes — and American media moguls are responding with submission.

Trump has turned standard conservative attacks on journalists into one of the hallmarks of his political agenda.

He takes as his model Hungary’s autocrat Viktor Orban, who has “effectively dismantled the news media in his country” as “a central pillar of Orban’s broader project to remake his country as an ‘illiberal democracy,’” as New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger noted in an extraordinary warning last year.

During his first term in office, Trump repeatedly tried to leverage state power against his despised “fake news,” and together with his Project 2025 allies has developed a playbook to attack, defund, and delegitimize news outlets in his second.

Major media companies began signaling before Trump took office that they were willing to play ball with his administration in order to preserve their business interests. But since Inauguration Day, as Trump’s appointees have begun showing their intentions, executives at several news outlets have gone into full retreat.

CBS News preps for a Trump settlement

In the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump denounced CBS News’ editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris as “the biggest scandal in broadcast history” and declared that CBS should be stripped of its broadcast license. But in addition to invective and threats, Trump also filed a lawsuit against the outlet for producing journalism which displeased him.

The suit, which alleged that CBS airing different portions of Harris’ answer to a question in different venues constituted “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference,” drew derision from First Amendment attorneys, who described its legal theory to CNN as “ridiculous junk” and “a frivolous and dangerous attempt by a politician to control the news media.”

But over the past few weeks, reports have indicated that CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, may be preparing to settle the suit with Trump. Such a settlement would be “an extraordinary concession by a major U.S. media company to a sitting president, especially in a case in which there is no evidence that the network got facts wrong or damaged the plaintiff’s reputation,” as The New York Times put it.

But Paramount needs federal approval for its proposed merger with Skydance Media, the production company founded by filmmaker David Ellison, and apparently sees giving the president a payoff as a valid way to smooth the path. Pressure for the settlement is coming from top Paramount shareholder Shari Redstone, the Times reported, who “stands to clear billions of dollars on the sale of Paramount.”

LA Times’ biotech industry owner goes all-in for RFK Jr.}:

Billionaire doctor Patrick Soon-Shiong once drew plaudits for using a small fraction of the vast fortune he made in the biotech industry to purchase and sustain his hometown newspaper, the Los Angeles Times.

But Soon-Shiong’s involvement in the paper’s operations has become more heavy-handed since the final months of the presidential campaign, with the owner repeatedly weighing in on Trump’s behalf. Over the past few weeks, Soon-Shiong, whose medical patents are subject to federal oversight, has begun cheerleading for the confirmation of the anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services.

“‘I truly believe [Kennedy] has the American public's best interests at heart,’ Soon-Shiong tweeted Tuesday in a post he pinned to the top of his account on X, formerly Twitter, for much of last week,” NPR reported. “It was one of 18 messages promoting Kennedy that Soon-Shiong — a billionaire surgeon and medical inventor — posted over the course of four days, which included Kennedy's confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill.”

Soon-Shiong’s support for Kennedy appears to have bled into his paper’s operations as well. On Friday, an op-ed contributor accused the paper of deceptively editing the piece he submitted in order to remove his criticisms of Kennedy’s nomination.

### CNN tries to move on

Journalists at CNN regularly drew vicious attacks from Trump and his supporters during the president’s first term. During a tone-setting press conference shortly before he took office, Trump lashed out at then-White House correspondent Jim Acosta as “fake news” and “terrible.” And Trump’s salvos at the network went beyond just words — his Justice Department tried to block a merger involving CNN’s then-parent company..

This time, CNN’s corporate leadership appears less willing to leave the network vulnerable to Trumpian retribution. Network chief Mark Thompson led an editorial meeting the day before Inauguration Day in which he instructed CNN talent “to be forward-thinking and to avoid pre-judging Trump” and to avoid “expressing any outrage of their own” or “relitigat[ing] the past,” former CNN reporter Oliver Darcy reported in his Status newsletter.

As for Acosta, he left CNN last week rather than accept Thompson’s offer to anchor the network’s coverage from midnight to 2 a.m. ET.

### Trump’s FCC targets ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, and PBS

The tip of the president’s anti-press spear is Brendan Carr, a Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission whom Trump elevated to chair. Carr authored Project 2025’s chapter on the FCC and has notably refused to reject Trump’s repeated calls for the commission to yank the licenses of broadcast networks whose reporting he dislikes.

Following his promotion, Carr sent a letter to Bob Iger, the CEO of ABC parent company Disney, in which he denounced the network for having “contributed” to the “erosion in public trust” and pointedly referenced the FCC’s regulatory power.

Carr also restored a right-wing group’s bias complaints targeting NBC, CBS, and ABC for purportedly biased coverage of the presidential campaign, which his predecessor had dismissed. In response to the CBS complaint, the FCC demanded that CBS News provide the unedited transcript and tapes of Harris’ 60 Minutes interview, adding government pressure to the benefit of Trump’s private lawsuit. The network ultimately submitted to what one legal expert described as a “highly partisan intervention” with “no historical antecedent.”

And on Wednesday, Carr announced a new FCC probe of underwriting announcements produced by NPR and PBS, “with an eye toward unraveling federal funding for all public broadcasting.”

### Defense Department retaliates against news outlets

The Pentagon announced Friday night that the defense correspondents at NBC News, The New York Times, Politico, and National Public Radio are all required to vacate their dedicated workspaces. Their spots will instead go to the right-wing One America News Network, New York Post, and Breitbart — and theoretically to the progressive HuffPost, which does not have a Pentagon reporter and did not request space.

The move came a week after the Senate confirmed former Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defense secretary.

Take Trumpist threats to jail journalists seriously

:{09/23/24

Donald Trump’s authoritarian playbook to crush the free press in a second term}:

:{10/29/24

“Fake News Networks”: Trump and Project 2025’s goal to attack, defund, and delegitimize the press}:

10/16/24

===

AN 1 25

President-elect Donald Trump is taking over the "staggering challenge" of a military that is unprepared to fight America's enemies, conservative analyst Max Boot wrote for The Washington Post — and worse still, he has nominated a man to lead it who doesn't understand why.

This comes as Trump's pick to lead the Department of Defense, Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, has come under fire for his history of alleged sexual misconduct, heavy drinking, and advocacy to pardon war criminals — and it also comes as Trump refuses to rule out using military force to seize territories like Greenland and the Panama Canal Zone as part of a neo-imperialist project.

But the military is not even prepared to perform its basic defense duties right now, wrote Boot, let alone engage in wars of aggression and conquest.

"The essential question that senators must ask is whether Hegseth, a Fox News host and former National Guardsman, has the capacity and experience to prepare the armed forces to fight a major war — and, if so, how he would go about it," wrote Boot. "Because right now, the U.S. military simply is not ready to defeat an adversary such as China or Russia in a protracted conflict."

ALSO READ: Trump intel advisor Devin Nunes still dismisses Russian election meddling as a 'hoax'

Hegseth has repeatedly claimed the military is failing to meet its recruitment goals due to "wokeness" and commitments to diversity alienating the type of masculine soldier stock America once relied on — but that completely misunderstands the issue, wrote Boot: the real problem "is that America became complacent after the Cold War when it downsized its armed forces and its defense-industrial base. Since then, the United States has prepared a military suitable for fighting insurgents in Afghanistan or Iraq — but utterly inadequate for an extended fight against a major power."

Today, Boot wrote, we're facing a military that has a degraded ability to construct and service its own ships, a massive shortage of drones, and a lack of infrastructure or institutional knowledge to fix these problems — and despite common complaints about how much money is spent on the military, "While high in absolute terms, U.S. defense spending is just 3 percent of gross domestic product, far below Cold War levels."

"Now it will be up to senators to decide if Hegseth — who was dogged by accusations of mismanagement and misconduct at the two nonprofits he ran — is the right person to rebuild America’s atrophied defense capabilities," Boot concluded. "The committee members should grill him not only about his past, but also about his plans to address this massive challenge. His record doesn’t inspire confidence that he can rise to a task that would severely test far more experienced executives."

omg kaki-

AN 11 24

President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to nominate as the U.S. Secretary of the Navy a financier, art collector, and MAGA megadonor with no military experience is coming under fire.

“It is my great honor to announce John Phelan as our next United States Secretary of the Navy!” declared Trump in a statement, deviating from his usual habit of acknowledging their status as a nominee. “John will be a tremendous force for our Naval Servicemembers, and a steadfast leader in advancing my America First vision. He will put the business of the U.S. Navy above all else.”

Trump claimed, “John has excelled in every endeavor, from founding and leading Rugger Management LLC, to co-founding MSD Capital, LP, the Private Investment Firm for Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies. His Record of Success speaks for itself – A true Champion of American Enterprise and Ingenuity!”

The Independent noted, “According to the U.S. Code,the secretary of the Navy shall be appointed ‘from among persons most highly qualified for the position by reason of background and experience.'”

Phelan “donated $834,600 to Trump’s joint fundraising committee, Trump 47,” back in April, according to The Hill. In August, at his $38 million Aspen estate, Phelan hosted a “$25,000 to $500,000 a couple” fundraiser that reportedly generated $12 million for Trump.

“The dinner, which Trump reportedly flew in for on a private jet once owned by disgraced financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, was held at the $38 million home of art collectors and investors John and Amy Phelan, with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), gambling mogul Steve Wynn, and billionaire Thomas Peterffy also in attendance,” The Daily Beast reported. “There were about 100 attendees at the event, which required couples to pony up $500,000 to serve on the host committee or at least $25,000 to attend at all.”

“If confirmed,” The Military Times reports, “Phelan would be the first permanent Navy secretary without military experience since 2009, when Donald Winter finished up his three-year term in the role. Unlike Winter, who previously had worked within the Pentagon and on Navy contracts at major defense firms, Phelan has little public connection to the sea service.”

Winter was nominated by Republican President George W. Bush.

“Of the 26 men to be confirmed as Navy secretary over the last 70 years, all but six have been veterans,” The Military Times also noted.

Critics are pointing to Phelan’s lack of relevant experience.

Paul Rieckhoff, the veterans’ activist and founder of Independent Veterans of America, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), and Righteous Media, blasted Trump’s pick.

He warned, “of course, Phelan has not served in the Navy. Or any other branch of military service. But he is a big Trump donor. The least qualified and most overtly political cabinet in American history continues to expand. And #OurEnemiesAreCelebrating.”

Veteran foreign policy journalist Laura Rozen, pointing to Phelan’s bio at the nonprofit Spirit of America and the London School of Economics and Political Science, writes, “Harvard MBA, art collector, manages fund of Michael Dell’s money. dont see anything in his bio that has any national security.”

Kevin Baron, the award-winning military journalist and former executive editor of Defense One, responding to a report on Phelan’s nomination, wrote, “Who?”

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rww random but //

11/18/2024

Kyle Mantyla

Ryan Bort @ Rolling Stone: Oklahoma Superintendent Demands Students Watch Him Pray for Trump

Ryan Walters has already been under fire for using state money to purchase Trump Bibles for classrooms.

Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee, Vaughn Hillyard and Mosheh Gains @ NBC News: Trump transition team compiling list of current and former U.S. military officers for possible courts-martial

All of the officers were involved in the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which independent reviews have blamed on both the Trump and Biden administrations.

Jennifer Bowers Bahney @ Mediaite: ‘TRUE!!’ Trump Confirms Plans to Declare a National Emergency to Use the US Military For Mass Deportations

Donald Trump has confirmed that he will declare a national emergency and use the US military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented migrants.

Edith Olmstead @ The New Republic: Trump’s War With the Press Takes a Terrifying Turn

Donald Trump has nominated a Project 2025 author to lead the Federal Communications Commission.

Michael Kranish, Josh Dawsey and Jonathan O'Connell @ The Washington Post: Defense pick Hegseth paid accuser but denies sexual assault, attorney says

Documents obtained by The Post provide extensive detail about allegation and the response by Trump’s defense secretary pick.

Will Steakin and Peter Charalambous @ ABC News: Lawyer tells ABC News his 2 clients told House Ethics Committee that Gaetz paid them for sex

An attorney representing two women who testified before the House Ethics Committee told ABC News in an interview that former Rep. Matt Gaetz paid both his adult clients for sex.

Phil Williams @ NewsChannel 5: Aiming to 'radicalize Main Street,' Christian nationalists set sights on tiny Jackson County, Tennessee

An exclusive NewsChannel 5 investigation has discovered that those Christian nationalists have set their sights on a remote Middle Tennessee county, hoping to attract hundreds, even thousands, of like-minded people from across the country as part of efforts, in the words of one activist, to “radicalize Main Street.”

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YMAIL 11 24

Trump has appointed Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Department of Government Efficency. Despite the name, it is not a government department. In fact, it is not part of the government at all. It is a non-governmental commission that will provide advice to the Trump administration.

Musk says he will identify "at least $2 trillion" in savings from the $6.5 trillion federal budget. How will Musk do it? Details are scarce. Musk is recruiting "high-IQ revolutionaries" to work 80-hour weeks for no pay to help him with the task.

Cutting $2 trillion is impossible politically. But if Musk is serious about cutting government spending and waste there is only one place to start: the defense budget. About half of the discretionary budget — the spending that Congress approves each year — is spent on defense. For the 2024 budget, the amount allocated for the Department of Defense exceeded $840 billion.

About half of the massive defense budget goes to military contractors, with tens of billions directed to "Big 5" firms — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. These contractors, according to a 60 Minutes investigation last year, "overcharge the Pentagon on almost everything the Department of Defense buys." The misuse of taxpayer dollars became more acute "in the early 2000s when the Pentagon, in another cost-saving move, cut 130,000 employees whose jobs were to negotiate and oversee defense contracts." Another factor is the consolidation of the defense industry, resulting in less competition for contracts.

Still, Musk may have a difficult time cutting Department of Defense spending. First, Musk is the CEO of the company, SpaceX, that actively seeks billions in defense contracts. Second, if Musk is able to overcome his conflict-of-interest, defense industry lobbyists will lobby Congress to reverse any planned cuts. Finally, Trump has pledged to increase military spending during his second term.

"I will provide record funding for our military," Trump said in a video posted on his campaign website.

Popular Information is an independent newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism since 2018. It is made possible by readers who upgrade to a paid subscription.

Trump is calling for more defense spending even though defense spending has doubled over the last 20 years. The Department of Defense struggles to accurately account how it spends this gusher of money. For the seventh year in a row, it has failed an independent audit.

Redefining failure as success

This year’s audit failure means that the Department of Defense has not passed since Congress began mandating the audits in 2018. The 2024 audit, which surveyed 28 separate agencies that operate under the Pentagon’s umbrella, found that 15 agencies failed to provide enough information for the auditors to assess how they handle their money.

Michael McCord, the Pentagon’s comptroller and chief financial officer, was unfazed by this failure, calling it “expected.” He also argued that because some agencies passed, the audit was actually a success. “So if someone had a report card that is half good and half not good, I don’t know that you call the student or the report card a failure,” McCord told reporters at a press conference on Friday. “We have a lot of work to do, but I think we’re making progress.”

Nine agencies passed their audit and three agency audits are still pending. In 2023, auditors failed 18 agencies.

Eight agencies also did a better job this year of balancing their spending and the amount of cash they have in government accounts. But of those eight, only two agencies actually passed their audit. The other six, while properly accounting for their cash, did not have enough information about their other assets to pass the audit.

Even with the improvements McCord touted, the scope of the Pentagon’s failure to keep track of its assets is still vast. According to the audit, the 15 agencies that could not properly account for their finances make up 44 percent of the Pentagon’s total assets and 68 percent of its budget. This year, the Pentagon held over $4.1 trillion in assets and had a budget of over $840 billion, meaning that auditors were unable to pin down $1.8 trillion in assets and $571 billion of the budget.

Despite these failures, Congress continues to appropriate more money every year to the Department of Defense. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act requires the Department of Defense to pass its audit by 2028, but has no mechanism for penalizing failure.

McCord insisted that the Pentagon was on track for a clean audit by 2028, but that it would take the cooperation of the incoming Trump administration to reach that goal. If Trump is serious about improving government efficiency, he could push his Department of Defense to do a better job tracking its assets. But if he decides not to, the Pentagon will not face any consequences.

Popular Information is an independent newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism since 2018.

===

omfg

nbc no lnx

Trump transition team compiling list of current and former U.S. military officers for possible courts-martial

All of the officers were involved in the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which independent reviews have blamed on both the Trump and Biden administrations.

Nov. 16, 2024, 5:52 PM PST / Updated Nov. 17, 2024, 3:55 AM PST

By Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee, Vaughn Hillyard and Mosheh Gains

The Trump transition team is compiling a list of senior current and former U.S. military officers who were directly involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and exploring whether they could be court-martialed for their involvement, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the plan.

Officials working on the transition are considering creating a commission to investigate the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, including gathering information about who was directly involved in the decision-making for the military, how it was carried out, and whether the military leaders could be eligible for charges as serious as treason, the U.S. official and person with knowledge of the plan said.

“They’re taking it very seriously,” the person with knowledge of the plan said.

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Matt Flynn, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for counternarcotics and global threats, is helping lead the effort, the sources said. It is being framed as a review of how the U.S. first got into the war in Afghanistan and how the U.S. ultimately withdrew.

General view of people in a field.

“Matt Flynn has nothing to do with the Trump transition team, much less leading any review concerning military justice matters,” said Mark S. Zaid, Flynn’s attorney. In a statement Zaid said that “no one has sought out Mr. Flynn’s views on this hypothetical legal scenario.”

NBC News did reach out to multiple officials on the Trump transition team about this story.

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“The sources apparently pushing this story appear to be your typical selfish Washington, D.C. insiders seeking to gain better positioning for their own administration jobs,” said an individual with knowledge of the campaign.

President-elect Donald Trump has condemned the withdrawal as a “humiliation” and “the most embarrassing day in the history of our country.”

It is not clear, though, what would legally justify “treason” charges since the military officers were following the orders of President Joe Biden to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

A 2022 independent review by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction blamed both the Trump and Biden administrations for the chaotic U.S. withdrawal in 2021.

Trump first reached an agreement with the Taliban in 2020 to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan, roughly 13,000 troops, and release 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison. The Biden administration then completed the withdrawal and badly overestimated the ability of Afghan government forces to fight the Taliban on their own.

Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, has criticized the withdrawal, saying the U.S. lost the war and wasted billions of dollars.

In his book “The War on Warriors,” Hegseth wrote, “The next president of the United States needs to radically overhaul Pentagon senior leadership to make us ready to defend our nation and defeat our enemies. Lots of people need to be fired. The debacle in Afghanistan, of course, is the most glaring example.”

Afghan Afghan Special Immigrant Visa applicants seek help.

Afghan applicants crowd into a cafe seeking help applying for the Special Immigrant Visas program in 2021 in Kabul, Afghanistan.Paula Bronstein / Getty Images file

Hegseth calls the withdrawal a “humiliating retreat” and says leaders at the Pentagon were not held accountable for the deadly attack at Abbey Gate, which killed 13 U.S. service members and roughly 170 Afghan civilians. Nor were they held accountable for a subsequent U.S. airstrike in Kabul that officials thought would kill the Islamic State group leader behind the suicide attack but instead killed 10 innocent Afghans, including seven children, he wrote.

“These generals lied. They mismanaged. They violated their oath. They failed. They disgraced our troops, and our nation. They got people killed, unnecessarily,” he wrote. “And, to this moment, they keep their jobs. Worse, they continue to actively erode our military and its values — by capitulating to civilians with radical agendas. They are an embarrassment, with stars still on their shoulders.”

The transition team is looking at the possibility of recalling several commanders to active duty for possible charges, the U.S. official said.

It’s not clear the Trump administration would pursue treason charges, and instead could focus on lesser charges that highlight the officer’s involvement. “They want to set an example,” said the person with knowledge of the plan.

Taliban fighters with guns.

Taliban fighters storm into the Kabul International Airport, wielding American supplied weapons, equipment and uniforms after the United States Military have completed their withdrawal, in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 31, 2021.Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images file

Speaking to NBC News days before the election, Howard Lutnick, one of the two advisers leading the transition, said Trump learned after his first administration that he had hired Democratic generals, and he would not make that mistake again.

Former officials who worked in Trump’s first administration have said they advised Trump against policies they thought would weaken U.S. national security, such as withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria. And they advised against actions that they thought might violate the Constitution or inflame tensions domestically, such as deploying active-duty U.S. troops to quell protests after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd.

===

no lnx

alternet

an 11 24

The editors of the conservative Wall Street Journal are warning former President Donald Trump against carrying out a recently leaked scheme to purge the American military of senior officers.

In an editorial about Trump's nomination of Fox News personality Pete Hegseth to lead the United States Department of Defense, the editors urged Trump to act with caution when it comes to plans to shake up the military brass.

"The military isn’t Mr. Trump’s enemy, and a purge mentality will court political trouble and demoralize the ranks," the editorial board argued. "The draft executive order, leaked to the press, about forming a group of former officers to rule on the fitness of current generals would be a mistake that smacks of politicizing the officer corps."

The editorial also argued against taking out his anger against former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley on other military leaders.

"Firing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs CQ Brown would also be counterproductive," they wrote. "Mr. Trump is still furious about former Chairman Mark Milley’s criticisms, and not without cause, but Mr. Trump promoted Gen. Milley. The better path is to look for officers who understand the current global dangers and have good ideas for what to do about it. Adm. Sam Paparo of the U.S. Indo-Pacific command is one."

The editors also expressed concern that Hegseth seems to be obsessed with purging any "woke" elements from the American military rather than focusing on more immediate and concrete problems.

"In the context of America’s security challenges, wokeness is a small concern," they argued.

WARRIOR BD DOD purity /loyalty test --> fascist klepto caci-

milley mad dog mattis usmc gen mike kelly

omfg desantis would pick

an 11 24

If Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is confirmed as President-elect Donald Trump's next secretary of state, it could open the door for Trump's family to get an even deeper foothold in the federal government.

Any Senate vacancy in Florida has to be filled by Governor Ron DeSantis (R) until the next election, which wouldn't happen until 2028. And MAGA is now pushing for Trump's daughter-in-law, Lara, to be appointed senator in Rubio's place should his seat become vacant. The Daily Beast reported that Lara Trump herself is now actively offering herself as a replacement for Rubio.

"This is my home state now and has been for three years," the Republican National Committee co-chair told Fox News' Sean Hannity, adding that she would "love to serve the people of Florida." Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) also endorsed the idea of Lara Trump's appointment. And CBS News' Scott MacFarlane posted to the social media platform Bluesky that Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) is also reportedly on board.

Ric Grenell, who was Trump's acting Director of National Intelligence in his first administration, was thought to be a front-runner to helm the State Department before the news of Rubio's appointment was made public. Tara Palmieri of Puck News tweeted that DeSantis was not in the loop, and learned about Florida's senior U.S. senator being nominated as the nation's potential next top diplomat while he was on vacation in Italy.

Trump tapping Rubio to head the State Department is particularly noteworthy given that they were bitter rivals in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. In a debate, Rubio took a jab at the size of Trump's hands, implying that the billionaire reality TV star was small elsewhere. This led Trump to say there was "no problem" with the size of any of his body parts.

Political strategist and columnist Cheri Jacobus, who is a former communications staffer for the RNC, offered one potential explanation for Rubio's appointment to one of the most high-ranking Cabinet positions — "to open the seat for his daughter-in-law."

"I think that may be the main reason Trump picked Rubio," Jacobus wrote on Bluesky.

However, not all Republicans are as enthusiastic about the prospect of Lara Trump joining the Senate. Conservative columnist Scott Morefield called it a "bridge too far" in a post on X.

"Yes, Donald Trump should get his Cabinet picks, but the Senate pick is DeSantis’, not Trump’s," Morefield wrote. "And it would be a bad idea because it would make the seat vulnerable when election time rolls around."

Like Rubio, DeSantis is also a former Trump rival, having run a short-lived campaign for the Republican nomination in 2024. The two-term Florida governor went all-in on the Iowa Caucuses, only to come up short to Trump. He suspended his campaign shortly afterward and endorsed Trump.

Click here to read the Daily Beast's report in full (subscription required).

READ MORE:[All in the family? How Marco Rubio's Senate seat could go to a DeSantis or a Trump

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an 1 24

in a Sunday article from NBC News, Peter Nicholas, Katherine Doyle, Megan Lebowitz and Courtney Kube report, "a loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers is quietly devising plans to try to foil any efforts to expand presidential power, which could include pressuring the military to cater" to Donald Trump's politics.

Per NBC, "Trump has raised fresh questions about his intentions if he regains power by putting forward a legal theory that a president would be free to do nearly anything with impunity — including assassinate political rivals — so long as Congress can’t muster the votes to impeach him" and remove him from office.

"We're already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to," Mary McCord, former US attorney and executive director of the Institution for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, told the news outlet.

Other experts "taking part in the effort told NBC News they are studying Trump’s past actions and 2024 policy positions so that they will be ready if he wins in November," which "involves preparing to take legal action and send letters to Trump appointees spelling out consequences they’d face if they undermine constitutional norms."

NBC notes:

*Among the least-understood tools available to a president is the Insurrection Act. Vaguely worded, it gives a president considerable discretion in deciding what constitutes an uprising and when it is OK to deploy active-duty military in response, experts say.

*Some lawmakers on Capitol Hill worry that Trump might invoke the act to involve the armed forces in the face of domestic protests or if the midterm elections don’t go his way.

"There are an array of horrors that could result from Donald Trump's unrestricted use of the Insurrection Act," US Senator Richard Blumenthal (R-CT) said in an interview, according to NBC. "A malignantly motivated president could use it in a vast variety of dictatorial ways unless at some point the military itself resisted what they deemed to be an unlawful order. But that places a very heavy burden on the military."

Blumenthal, NBC reports, is currently working on legislation "that would clarify the act and give Congress and the courts some say in its use."

Democracy Forward President Skye Perryman told NBC, "We are preparing for litigation and preparing to use every tool in the toolbox that our democracy provides to provide the American people an ability to fight back. We believe this is an existential moment for American democracy and it’s incumbent on everybody to do their part."

*NBC News' full report is here.

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https://www.alternet.org/pentagon-slush-fun/

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retaliation for mil abortion, woke dod?! no officers confirm

https://www.alternet.org/abortion-2659709091/

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an 2 23

During the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush years, members of Republican presidential administrations often used the phrase "peace through strength" when arguing in favor of a large military budget and an interventionist foreign policy. But Christopher C. Miller, who served as acting secretary of defense during the final months of the Trump Administration, is calling for the United States to "dramatically" reduce its military budget.

During an interview for CBS News’ podcast "The Takeout," Miller — a retired U.S. Army Special Forces colonel — told host Major Garrett that the United States’ military budget could be cut by as much as half.

The 57-year-old Miller argued, "We have created an entire enterprise that focuses economically on creating crisis to justify outrageously high defense spending. You have to starve the beast to make people come out of their cubby holes and start thinking creatively."

During the interview, Miller also urged politicians to quit obsessing over China.

Miller told Garrett, "I think by constantly harping on the fact that China is the new threat and we’re going to go to war with them someday actually plays right into Chairman Xi’s hands and the Chinese Communist Party. They need to have an enemy that they can, you know, focus their people’s anger and attention on, and I think we provide them that opportunity by constantly harking on the fact that the Chinese are the greatest threat to America and what not."

Miller, author of the new book "Soldier Secretary: Warnings from the Battlefield & the Pentagon about America’s Most Dangerous Enemies," joined Trump's administration on November 9, 2020 after then-President Donald Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper.

Read CBS News’ full article at this link.

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good big pix update 1 23

https://www.alternet.org/climate-change-pentagon/

klare tom d

...Historically speaking, the United States and the European Union (EU) countries have been the largest GHG emitters, responsible for 25% and 22% of cumulative CO2 emissions, respectively. But those countries, and other advanced industrial nations like Canada and Japan, have been taking significant steps to reduce their emissions, including phasing out the use of coal in electricity generation and providing incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles. As a result, their net CO2 emissions have diminished in recent years and are expected to decline further in the decades to come (though they will need to do yet more to keep us below that 1.5-degree warming limit).

China, a relative latecomer to the industrial era, is historically responsible for “only” 13% of cumulative global CO2 emissions. However, in its drive to accelerate its economic growth in recent decades, it has vastly increased its reliance on coal to generate electricity, resulting in ever-greater CO2 emissions. China now accounts for an astonishing 56% of total world coal consumption, which, in turn, largely explains its current dominance among the major carbon emitters. According to the 2022 edition of the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook, the PRC was responsible for 33% of global CO2 emissions in 2021, compared with 15% for the U.S. and 11% for the EU.

Like most other countries, China has pledged to abide by the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 and undertake the decarbonization of its economy as part of a worldwide drive to keep global warming within some bounds. As part of that agreement, however, China identified itself as a “developing” country with the option of increasing its fossil-fuel use for 15 years or so before achieving a peak in CO2 emissions in 2030. Barring some surprising set of developments then, the PRC will undoubtedly remain the world’s leading source of CO2 emissions for years to come, suffusing the atmosphere with colossal amounts of carbon dioxide and undergirding a continuing rise in global temperatures.

Yes, the United States, Japan, and the EU countries should indeed do more to reduce their emissions, but they’re already on a downward trajectory and an even more rapid decline will not be enough to offset China’s colossal CO2 output. Put differently, those Chinese emissions — estimated by the IEA at 12 billion metric tons annually — represent at least as great a threat to U.S. security as the multitude of tanks, planes, ships, and missiles enumerated in the Pentagon’s 2022 report on security developments in the PRC. That means they will require the close attention of American policymakers if we are to escape the most severe impacts of climate change.

China’s Vulnerability to Climate Change

Along with detailed information on China’s outsized contribution to the greenhouse effect, any thorough report on security developments involving the PRC should have included an assessment of that country’s vulnerability to climate change. It should have laid out just how global warming might, in the future, affect its ability to marshal resources for a demanding, high-cost military competition with the United States.

In the coming decades, like the U.S. and other continental-scale countries, China will suffer severely from the multiple impacts of rising world temperatures, including extreme storm damage, prolonged droughts and heatwaves, catastrophic flooding, and rising seas. Worse yet, the PRC has several distinctive features that will leave it especially vulnerable to global warming, including a heavily-populated eastern seaboard exposed to rising sea levels and increasingly powerful typhoons; a vast interior, parts of which, already significantly dry, will be prone to full-scale desertification; and a vital river system that relies on unpredictable rainfall and increasingly imperiled glacial runoff. As warming advances and China experiences an ever-increasing climate assault, its social, economic, and political institutions, including the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), will be severely tested.

According to a recent study from the Center for Climate and Security, “China’s Climate Security Vulnerabilities,” the threats to its vital institutions will take two major forms: hits to its critical infrastructure like port facilities, military bases, transportation hubs, and low-lying urban centers along China’s heavily populated coastline; and the danger of growing internal instability arising from ever-increasing economic dislocation, food scarcity, and governmental incapacitation.

China’s coastline already suffers heavy flooding during severe storms and significant parts of it could be entirely underwater by the second half of this century, requiring the possible relocation of hundreds of millions of people and the reconstruction of billions of dollars’ worth of vital facilities.Such tasks will surely require the full attention of Chinese authorities as well as the extensive homebound commitment of military resources, leaving little capacity for foreign adventures. Why, you might wonder, is there not a single sentence about this in the Pentagon’s assessment of future Chinese capabilities?

Even more worrisome, from Beijing’s perspective, is the possible effect of climate change on the country’s internal stability. “Climate change impacts are likely to threaten China’s economic growth, its food and water security, and its efforts at poverty eradication,” the climate center’s study suggests (but the Pentagon report doesn’t mention). Such developments will, in turn, “likely increase the country’s vulnerability to political instability, as climate change undermines the government’s ability to meet its citizens’ demands.”

Of particular concern, the report suggests, is global warming’s dire threat to food security. China, it notes, must feed approximately 20% of the world’s population while occupying only 12% of its arable land, much of which is vulnerable to drought, flooding, extreme heat, and other disastrous climate impacts. As food and water supplies dwindle, Beijing could face popular unrest, even revolt, in food-scarce areas of the country, especially if the government fails to respond adequately. This, no doubt, will compel the CCP to deploy its armed forces nationwide to maintain order, leaving ever fewer of them available for other military purposes — another possibility absent from the Pentagon’s assessment.

Of course, in the years to come, the U.S., too, will feel the ever more severe impacts of climate change and may itself no longer be in a position to fight wars in distant lands — a consideration also completely absent from the Pentagon report.

The Prospects for Climate Cooperation

Along with gauging China’s military capabilities, that annual report is required by law to consider “United States-China engagement and cooperation on security matters… including through United States-China military-to-military contacts.” And indeed, the 2022 version does note that Washington interprets such “engagement” as involving joint efforts to avert accidental or inadvertent conflict by participating in high-level Pentagon-PLA crisis-management arrangements, including what’s known as the Crisis Communications Working Group. “Recurring exchanges [like these],” the report affirms, “serve as regularized mechanisms for dialogue to advance priorities related to crisis prevention and management.”

Any effort aimed at preventing conflict between the two countries is certainly a worthy endeavor. But the report also assumes that such military friction is now inevitable and the most that can be hoped for is to prevent World War III from being ignited. However, given all we’ve already learned about the climate threat to both China and the United States, isn’t it time to move beyond mere conflict avoidance to more collaborative efforts, military and otherwise, aimed at reducing our mutual climate vulnerabilities?

At the moment, sadly enough, such relations sound far-fetched indeed. But it shouldn’t be so. After all, the Department of Defense has already designated climate change a vital threat to national security and has indeed called for cooperative efforts between American forces and those of other countries in overcoming climate-related dangers. “We will elevate climate as a national security priority,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared in March 2021, “integrating climate considerations into the Department’s policies, strategies, and partner engagements.”

The Pentagon provided further information on such “partner engagements” in a 2021 report on the military’s vulnerabilities to climate change. “There are many ways for the Department to integrate climate considerations into international partner engagements,” that report affirmed, “including supporting interagency diplomacy and development initiatives in partner nations [and] sharing best practices.” One such effort, it noted, is the Pacific Environmental Security Partnership, a network of climate specialists from that region who meet annually at the Pentagon-sponsored Pacific Environmental Security Forum.

At present, China is not among the nations involved in that or other Pentagon-sponsored climate initiatives. Yet, as both countries experience increasingly severe impacts from rising global temperatures and their militaries are forced to devote ever more time and resources to disaster relief, information-sharing on climate-response “best practices” will make so much more sense than girding for war over Taiwan or small uninhabited islands in the East and South China Seas (some of which will be completely underwater by century’s end). Indeed, the Pentagon and the PLA are more alike in facing the climate challenge than most of the world’s military forces and so it should be in both countries’ mutual interests to promote cooperation in the ultimate critical area for any country in this era of ours.

[quite long]

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an 1 23

The Jan. 6 insurrection testimony of General Mark Milley revealed that there were conversations among members of the Trump administration to court-martial retired military officers who criticized Trump’s handling of 2020 civil unrest in published op-eds, Insider reports.

A 20th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and top military aide to Trump since 2019, Milley’s testimony was part of a trove of documents the committee released earlier this week.

The testimony includes Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA) asking if Milley considered approaching former Trump advisor, Michael Flynn, about the administration's desire to enforce military action against the retired officers. Milley said he was “concerned about the politicization of the military” after op-eds “very critical of then President Trump” by retired military officers were published.

Milley said, "There was actually discussions with me: Bring him back on Active Duty, court-martial him, you know, make him walk the plank sort of thing, right? I advised them not to do that, because that would further politicize, in my personal view."

Retired military officers the administration targeted for court-martialing were not named during testimony, but according to Insider, a few did publish op-eds criticizing the way Trump responded to nationwide protests following George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

For Foreign Policy, retired Marine Corps General John Allen wrote, “Donald Trump expressed only the barest of condolences at the murder of George Floyd, but he also said nothing about the fundamental and underlying reasons for the unrest: systemic racism and inequality, a historic absence of respect, and a denial of justice.”

Allen also highlighted that Trump "threatened to deploy the U.S. military against American citizens."

Navy Admiral Mike Mullen said in his Atlantic op-ed titled “I Cannot Remain Silent” that he was “deeply worried that as [the military] execute their orders, the members of our military will be co-opted for political purposes.”

Mullen wrote, “Even in the midst of the carnage we are witnessing, we must endeavor to see American cities and towns as our homes and our neighborhoods. They are not 'battle spaces' to be dominated, and must never become so.”

Milley mentioned during testimony that he “was worried about the ‘broader implications’ of politicization of the military, taking action against retired officers who speak out shouldn't be done lightly," Insider reports.

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an 12 22

no lnx tet

'No justification': Peace advocates explode after House approves gigantic $858 billion Pentagon budget

Brett Wilkins and Common Dreams December 09, 2022

Peace advocates on Thursday slammed the House of Representatives' passage of a mammoth $858 billion military spending billas an early holiday gift for the Pentagon and the weapons corporations who benefit from the United States' ongoing—but largely forgotten—War on Terror.

House lawmakers voted 350-80 in favor of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), with 45 Democrats and 35 Republicans voting "no."

The new NDAA authorizes an $80 billion military spending increase over the 2022 bill, and $118 billion more than when President Joe Biden took office in 2021. The 2023 allocation is more than the combined military budgets of China, India, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and South Korea, according to the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). It's also more than the annual gross domestic product of countries including Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey, based on United Nations figures.

The $858 billion figure does not include additional spending on the U.S. nuclear arsenal, contributions to Ukraine's defense, or veterans' benefits.

Progressives including Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Jesús "Chuy" García (D-Ill.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Marc Pocan (D-Wis.), Katie Porter (D-Calif.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) were among those who rejected the bill.

:{:{}:

"While working families are being crushed by inflation, we shouldn't be spending $45 billion MORE than the president requested in the NDAA," tweeted Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), who opposed the bill. "Certainly not on top of an already bloated $800+ billion Pentagon budget full of lobbyist giveaways. I voted NO."

:{:{}:

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), another "no" vote, said he could not support a bill whose "topline remains billions of dollars above the president's request, adding to an already bloated Pentagon budget."

Calling the bill an "absolute disgrace," the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen tweeted that "increasing the budget for inflation is a lousy excuse. The minimum wage has been $7.25 for over a decade. Why is there always money for the military-industrial complex, but a livable wage is somehow 'too expensive'?"

"There is no justification to throw... $858 billion at the Pentagon when we're told we can't afford child tax credit expansion, universal paid leave, or other basic human necessities," the group added. "End of story."

Cole Harrison, executive director of Massachusetts Peace Action (MPA), said in a statement that "Waltham-based Raytheon and its fellow merchant of death, Lockheed, are celebrating Christmas early."

"Bring our war dollars home," Harrison added, noting that the fight for the bill is not over. "We don't need more weapons and more war. We need international respect and cooperation. We urge senators to vote 'no' on this disgraceful misappropriation of taxpayers' money."

MPA further noted that "the Pentagon recently failed its fifth consecutive annual audit, yet House members were quick to shower the unaccountable agency with taxpayers' money," and that "2.9 million children in the United States were lifted out of poverty in 2021 by the child tax credit, but that program expired after a year, and now our elected officials have decided to spend an equivalent amount on increasing the war budget."

Anti-war activists call on people to contact their senators and urge them to vote "no" on the NDAA—even while acknowledging that the mammoth package is all but sure to pass in the upper chamber.

Writing for the Qunicy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, National Taxpayers Union director of federal policy Andrew Lautz said that "Congress is rushing to pass the NDAA over the next week or two, before they go home for the holidays."

"Lawmakers will all but certainly pass a massive increase to the defense budget approved by members of both parties in both chambers of the legislature—at least $80 billion in total above 2022 levels, and that doesn't include tens of billions of dollars the Pentagon has received to combat Russia's invasion of Ukraine," he said.

"If so," Lautz added, "then Christmas will come early for the nation's military brass, who often get to spend without consequences from lawmakers who control their purse strings, and defense contractors, who benefit mightily from the taxpayer-funded largesse."

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/patriot-front-2657558190/

an 6 22 no lnx

PB t shirt gangs of NY DDL

Report details the chilling ways far-right extremists are recruiting military veterans

Members of the Proud Boys in Raleigh, North Carolina in November 2018, Wikimedia Commons

Alex Henderson June 24, 2022

From a mass shooting in a Buffalo, New York supermarket on May 14 to the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre in October 2018 to a plot to kidnap and possibly murder Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — not to mention the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol Building — the United States clearly has a problem with White supremacist and White nationalist terrorism. And one of the places where racist extremists, according to law enforcement officials and national security experts, are trying to recruit new members is the U.S. military.

Reporter Sonner Kehrt, in article published by The War Horse on June 23 and republished by Navy Times that day, takes an in-depth look at White power groups that are trying to convert veterans to their cause. And her piece points to Chris Buckley, an Afghan War veteran, as an example of a veteran who racists targeted for recruitment.

After serving in Afghanistan, Kehrt reports, Buckley was incredibly angry — angry because of the death of a close friend and fellow veteran in Afghanistan, angry because of the severe back pain he was living with because of a training accident. And Buckley was attracted to the anger expressed by a Facebook group, not realizing, at first, that the people he was chatting with online wereKu Klux Klan members. Buckley joined the KKK in 2014, but he has since distanced from that terrorist group.

“With the help of a former extremist, Buckley left the KKK,” Kehrt explains. “Today, he works with Parents for Peace, an organization dedicated to supporting families and friends trying to help loved ones leave extremist groups. He points to his experience in the months and years after he left the Army National Guard as an example of why a disproportionate number of veterans are vulnerable to extremist recruitment efforts.”

Buckley, interviewed by The War Horse, warned, “I would rival KKK recruiters to that of any military recruiter I ever talked to…. I was looking for something to be a part of something. I needed a mission.”

Buckley, according to Kehrt, is hardly the only military veteran who has been vulnerable to recruitment by White supremacists and White nationalists.

:{:{}:

“The data that does exist suggests the problem is growing,” Kehrt reports. “Statistics from the Center for Strategic & International Studies show that 6.4% of all domestic terror plots and attacks in the United States in 2020 were committed by active-duty or reserve service members — a tiny percentage, but up from 1.5% in 2019. A 2019 poll by Military Times found that more than 1 in 3 troops surveyed reported seeing direct evidence of White nationalism within the military.”

Kehrt continues, “That’s also up, from 1 in 4 in 2017…. While the total number of veterans who join extremist groups is still very small, they play an outsize role in these groups, particularly in militia-style organizations. (Researcher) Amy Cooter and other experts have found that, very roughly, 30 to 40% of militia members have military experience.”

Because there are so many different far-right extremist groups in the U.S. in 2022 — from Patriot Front to the Proud Boys to the Oath Keepers to the Boogaloo Bois to Patriot Prayer — the KKK, which has a long history of terrorism, doesn’t receive as much attention as it did in the past. But Buckley warns that the KKK is still a threat, although they have changed some of their tactics.

Buckley told The War Horse, “They’re doing away with the ‘let’s protest in public with pointy hats and robes.’ The KKK is shifting towards a more militia-style environment.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/2024-election/

3 mil leaders warn 2024; pentagon new guidelines on RW

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Personal goon squad': Why a newly reported memo by a Trump loyalist is 'cause of considerable alarm' for US democracy

Alex Henderson

November 15, 2021

ABC News' Jonathan Karl has reported that on October 19, 2020, Trump loyalist John McEntee — then serving as White House director of presidential personnel — issued a memo listing reasons to fire then-Defense ESPER...

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2 generals who said they cd not respond 1/6 shown to be lying, it WAS optics? [is that entirely bad?]

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trms trump could not get mil to do coup, so used mob 1/6

pentagon "decapitated" sec of def tried to hold on a few more days ~ nunes wackos

experts warn of 'national emergency' after bombshell report reveals top general feared Trump would stage military coup

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

July 15, 2021

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Donald Trump, General Mark Milley, was so concerned the outgoing president would try to stage a military coup he warned the heads of the U.S. Military branches,...

---

trump ordered mil force:

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/trump-george-floyd/

"just shoot them"

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"woke" military aha last fed/gubmint institution to fall, once sacrosanct b/c manly, trad conservative and defend us from evil commies; god bless our troops almost secular so common?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/fox-news-2653517083/

gen milley vs gaetz "take their budget" [grn beret?]

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Joint Chiefs chairman incinerates Matt Gaetz with epic lecture on Critical Race Theory

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

June 23, 2021

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley blasted U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz for mocking and opposing critical race theory during what was supposed to be a budget hearing. He left the Florida Republican...

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letter all 10 incl cheney rummy ~ coup?

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wiki sez (acting) sec of def ok'd maryland nat'l guard but it was sec of army?

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tepid

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/military-leadership/

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/military-veterans

It's time for Americans to end their ritualistic fawning over veterans. When former members of the U.S. armed forces visit the White House to promote military coups, they prove that veterans do not automatically, uncritically warrant our praise.

In an era of perpetual war, this may appear blasphemous. America's all-volunteer force has borne the burden of a militarized foreign policy in the wake of 9/11 that has sent more than two million servicemen and women overseas to keep our nation safe. These veterans have sacrificed immensely, some in heroic fashion. Incredibly brave men and women still populate our military ranks.

Yet in society's haste to thank them for their service, veterans have become, in far too many ways, an inviolable sect beyond reproach. Any criticism risks bringing forth a slew of anti-patriotic opprobrium. Such blanket adulation must end. And this most chaotic of years demonstrates why.

In one of the more contentious political seasons in American history, few malefactors have exceeded the duplicity of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who has called on President Trump to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law so military leaders can oversee a redo of the 2020 election. Never mind that Flynn, who pled guilty to misleading the FBI, once swore an oath to uphold that very Constitution.

Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney has echoed Flynn's sedition entreaties. The Vietnam War veteran also petitioned for martial law in the aftermath of a free and fair election, but then went further still, imploring Trump to cancel the Electoral College, suspend habeas corpus and arrest Democrats for treason.

Below these conspiracy theorists might be found veterans like Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, embracing his party's hyper-partisan talking points to ridicule the working-class background of his colleague Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. To Crenshaw, his political opponents were "nuts" and didn't "know hardship" like he did. (Democratic senatorial candidate MJ Hegar relied on similar tactics in Texas.) Apparently, in these narratives, only veterans understand adversity and suffering.

Nor have senior military leaders and veterans accorded themselves well in foreign policy. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a 1986 West Point graduate, slow-rolled acknowledging Joe Biden as president-elect and publicly quipped he would help usher a "smooth transition to a second Trump administration." The policies Pompeo have supported — one source recently described him as a "global arsonist" — hardly have advanced our national interests overseas.

Even well-respected officers have been largely derivative in their approach to U.S. foreign policy. Retired Lt. Gen. and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, in his latest book, has recommended a national security strategy based on little beyond what one reviewer has deemed "a more muscular and constant use of force." When President Trump authorized the assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, chief of Iran's Quds Force, other retired generals described the act only in terms of "American deterrence," without questioning its moral or legal justifications.

And none of us should discount that some American veterans have acted immorally in our recent wars, a point of vital concern for our society, if not for our president. Texas Republican chair Allen West — who recently called for secession — received a military reprimand for threatening to shoot an Iraqi detainee,while Eddie Gallagher, Clint Lorance and Robert Bales, among others, either have been accused or convicted of killing civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do these men deserve our admiration simply because they wore a uniform?,.....

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/qanon-2649643344/

alexh

reporter Ben Collins, in an article published by NBC News' website on December 22, takes a disturbing look at QAnon supporters who are yearning for President Donald Trump to impose a fascist military dictatorship and end liberal democracy in the United States.

President-elect Joe Biden enjoyed a decisive victory in the 2020 presidential election, winning 306 electoral votes and defeating Trump by over 7 million in the popular vote. But QAnon supporters view Democrats as their enemy and have been promoting the hashtag @CrossTheRubicon — which, in QAnon terminology, means imposing a military dictatorship. And QAnon supporters, Collins reports, are urging Trump to "cross the Rubicon" and become a full-fledged dictator.

"With Trump's days in office dwindling," Collins explains, "QAnon influencers have become increasingly restless and militant — urging him to #CrossTheRubicon, a reference to Julius Caesar's crossing the Rubicon River after the Roman Senate explicitly told him not to, effectively kickstarting the Roman Civil War and Caesar's dictatorship."

To understand why QAnon believes that Trump deserves to be a full-fledged dictator, one needs to know about their bizarre and outlandish conspiracy theories. QAnon believes that the United States' federal government, especially the Democratic Party, has been infiltrated by an international cabal of Satanists, child sex traffickers, pedophiles and cannibals and that Trump has been put in the White House to fight the cabal. "Q," according to QAnon, is an anonymous figure who is providing updates about Trump's battle.

Claiming, without evidence, that the election was stolen from Trump because of widespread voter fraud, some far-right Trump supporters have been urging the president to declare martial law in order to prevent Biden from being inaugurated on January 20, 2021 —including former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Atlanta-based attorney Lin Wood and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

"Flynn, a hero in the mythology of the QAnon conspiracy theory who once took a QAnon 'oath' on video, has said in appearances on the conservative media channel Newsmax that Trump should use the military to'rerun' the election," Collins observes.

QAnon terminology, Collins points out, is being used by some prominent Republicans. For example, Kelli Ward, who chairs the Arizona Republican Party, has used the #CrossTheRubicon hashtag. And attorney Sidney Powell, who has been working with Wood on election-related lawsuits, has used the QAnon hashtag #TheStormIsComing, which, Collins notes, is "a QAnon phrase that refers to the extrajudicial roundup of Democrats at the heart of the theory."

Mr. President @realDonaldTrump - we are with you in #Arizona. We are working every avenue to stop this coup & to st… https://t.co/CP7RNETBdk

— Dr. Kelli Ward (@Dr. Kelli Ward )1608429214.0

Michael Flynn's new attorney, Sidney Powell, has repeatedly retweeted major QAnon accounts, including one of the 3… https://t.co/0DGjSw3Wf0

— Alex Kaplan (@Alex Kaplan)1560371762.0

Sidney Powell was probably the most powerful person to have ever believed in deep, mystic, devout QAnonism. Her Twi… https://t.co/9KWYwHGxt1

— Ben Collins (@Ben Collins)1606090386.0

According to Collins, "Some QAnon followers believe Trump is left with no choice but to declare martial law — a belief based in part on a series of wildly false news articles that have claimed that Trump is in a secret, ongoing land war with China in parts of the U.S. A series of fake news articles, YouTube videos and tweets that went viral among QAnon acolytes last week led followers to believe Trump was conducting clandestine military operations on U.S. soil."

Ron Watkins, who formerly ran the QAnon hub 8kun, recently tweeted:

Will @realDonaldTrump #CrossTheRubicon? Spread the hashtag and show POTUS how you feel about it.

— Ron (@Ron)1608307687.0

Rep. Denver Riggleman, a Republican with libertarian leanings, has been warning about how dangerous QAnon is. The outgoing Virginia congressman, who will be replaced by far-right wingnut Rep.-elect Bob Goodin January, told NBC News, "I'm losing friends and family over a straight-up cult based on anti-Semitism, fantasy and just bizarre made-up tripe. It's an idiocracy based on a digital prophet."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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fox silent

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/martial-law-2649638050/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/martial-law-2649638899

A series of pardons, post-election protests claiming voter fraud that has never been proven, and one man's probable mental illness at the head of the nation are adding up to a "red alert" in what has normally been a quiet time of the year for many: the holidays. But not this year.

"Pentagon and Washington-area military leaders are on red alert, wary of what President Donald Trump might do in his remaining days in office," Newsweek reported on Thursday.

One officer who spoke with Newsweek on the condition of anonymity said the inaugural and transitional planning is being kept out of sight of the White House and Trump loyalists in the Pentagon for fear that it would be shut down.

"I've been associated with the military for over 40 years and I've never seen the discussions that are being had right now, the need for such discussions," said the retired flag officer, who is currently a defense contractor. He was granted anonymity in order to speak without fear of reprisal.

"Right now, because of coronavirus," one retired judge advocate general said, "the president actually has unprecedented emergency powers, ones that might convince him—particularly if he listens to certain of his supporters—that he has unlimited powers and is above the law."

He continued, "But martial law is the wrong paradigm to think about the dangers ahead."

"There is no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of an American election," Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and Army Chief of Staff General James McConville said in a joint statement last Friday.

"At this point there's no telling what the president might do in the next month," a former Northern Command (NORTHCOM) commander told Newsweek. "Though I'm confident that the uniformed military leadership has their heads screwed on right, the craziness is unprecedented and the possibilities are endless."

The retired flag officer also requested anonymity because he is actively advising senior officers and is not authorized to speak on the record.

Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, President Trump's first national security advisor and a recently pardoned felon, publicly broached the subject of martial law on the conservative channel Newsmax last week, saying that the president should use the military to seize voting boxes and "rerun" the election in certain states.

"He could take military capabilities and he could … basically rerun an election," Flynn said. "The president has to plan for every eventuality because we cannot allow this election and the integrity of our election to go the way it is."

Flynn's statement has been condemned by numerous retired officers who referred to Flynn as a "disgrace to his uniform."

Trump has so far denied the martial law suggestion publicly.

Martial law = Fake News. Just more knowingly bad reporting!

— Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump)1608440788.0

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/pentagon

four star Army General Barry McCaffrey (Ret.) is sounding the alarm on reports acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller has banned Pentagon brass from holding meetings with Biden transition team officials, leaving career military staff "stunned."

"Pentagon abruptly halts Biden transition—- MAKES NO SENSE. CLAIM THEY ARE OVERWHELMED. DOD GOES OPAQUE. TRUMP-MILLER UP TO NO GOOD. DANGER.—-" tweeted McCaffrey, who is a well-known and highly-respected NBC News and MSNBC military analyst.

Reports from Axios and Business Insider both say Pentagon officials are feeling "overwhelmed" by the number of meetings they've attended with Biden staff, and Miller has decided to order a two-week break for the holidays.

An official who spoke with Business Insider attempted to soften the ban, "explaining that the Pentagon and the Biden transition team agreed to a break and that the transition meetings are being rescheduled for after the holidays."

That report adds "other transition activities, such as answering requests for information and providing written materials, continue uninterrupted, the official explained."

Last month (video below) McCaffrey expressed great concern about Trump getting rid of senior Pentagon officials – including his Secretary of Defense – and substituting them with top Trump loyalists. McCaffrey said he was "alarmed" with the shakeup.

"If I was a CIA officer trying to understand what was going on in a third-world country and I saw this pattern of behavior, I would say the strongman's trying to take over the government and defy an election."...

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trump's purge at the Pentagon is increasing fears of a coup-in-progress

Kenny Stancil Common Dreams

November 12, 2020

Fears that a possible slow-motion coup is in progress in the United States continued to grow on Wednesday, as observers sounded the alarm over President Donald Trump's decision to install "extreme Republican partisans" at the Pentagon after his firingof Defense...

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an 1220

Friday, the White House fired nine members of the Pentagon's Defense Business Board and installed people loyal to President Donald Trump, Politico reports. At the same time, Trump's Pentagon officials have refused members of President-elect Joe Biden's transition team to meet with officials at U.S. intelligence agencies.

The aforementioned board members were all fired via form letter email that told them that their terms had expired — even though that wasn't true for three of the members — and they were neither given any warning nor thanks for their service.

"The Defense Business Board is made up of more than a dozen industry and academic leaders who volunteer to provide independent business advice to Pentagon leadership and are appointed by top Pentagon leaders," the publication writes, adding that the board has generally been understood as non-partisan.

Among its duties, the board reviews defense agencies and field activities, studies data on how private companies interact with the Department of Defense.

In their place, Trump installed his former campaign officials Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie. Trump could've installed his new members as the board can accommodate up to 35 people and only had 16 before the firings began.

The firings come one week after the White House fired a dozen members of the Defense Policy Board, a similar advisory council of experts outside the government, and his Defense Secretary Mark Esper. As of November 20, more than 40 percent of the Department of Defense's top positions have been left unstaffed thanks to Trump's firings.

Meanwhile, because Biden's team hasn't been able to meet with defense officials for almost a month after he won the election, it has "impaired the Biden team's ability to get up to speed on espionage operations against Russia, China, Iran and other U.S. adversaries," The New York Times reports.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-pentagon/

no lnx twt

Trump’s Pentagon nominee promoted calls for the president to declare martial law: report

Alex Henderson December 04, 2020

Scott O'Grady is a former fighter pilot who President Donald Trump has nominated for a senior position in the Pentagon. And according to CNN, he is also a Trump loyalist and far-right conspiracy theorist who has been echoing Trump's baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and shared tweets calling for martial law.

Trump supporters who have posted or forwarded tweets urging the president to declare martial law include attorney Lin Wood (who has been fighting President-elect Joe Biden's victory in Georgia) and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

According to CNN reporters Nathan McDermott, Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck, O'Grady "retweeted an account that shared an article that said former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had shared a petition that called for martial law. He then retweeted the same account which suggested that Trump should declare martial law."

That account said, "I don't know who needs to hear this, but calling for martial law is not a bad idea when there is an attempted coup against the president and this country happening right now."

O'Grady has a history of sharing unhinged tweets.

McDermott, Kaczynski and Steck report, "CNN's KFile reviewed O'Grady's tweets and media appearances and found that O'Grady shared other debunked election conspiracies and that he also degraded top military and intelligence officials. In a radio interview, he called former President Barack Obama and military generals 'sworn socialists' and advocated that the military justice system should bring back treason charges. He retweeted a tweet that called former Defense Secretary James Mattis a 'traitor.'"

On top of that, the CNN reporters note, O'Grady "tweeted that Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a star witness during the Trump impeachment hearings, should be charged 'for insurrection because he is a biased liberal political operative' and said, on a radio show, that it was 'disgusting' for Vindman to testify against Trump. He also spread a baseless claim that the whistleblower in the impeachment saga dated the daughter of House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff."

O'Grady has been nominated for assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. If he is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, he would only remain in the Pentagon until the end of Trump's presidency. Inauguration for Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is set for January 20.

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General Flynn

@GenFlynn

#WeThePeople

@SidneyPowell1

@LLinWood

@DanScavino

@LouDobbs

@MariaBartiromo

@marklevinshow

@lofly727

Freedom never kneels except for God ??????

---

lin Wood

@LLinWood

Good morning.

Our country is headed to civil war. A war created by 3rd party bad actors for their benefit - not for We The People.

Communist China is leading the nefarious efforts to take away our freedom.

@realDonaldTrump should declare martial law.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/mark-esper/

corp guy vs loyalist

...fense Mark Esper's firingU.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper's firing did not come as a surprise but that does not mean it was not a disturbing development in the last days of the Trump administration. Now, his interview following his departure signals a very big problem and warning alarm about what is to come as President Donald Trump begrudgingly goes through his lame-duck days.

Within an hour of his firing, Esper conducted a preemptive interview with Military Times in an effort to ring the alarm about the days ahead. Esper admitted that he was fired simply because he refused to be a Trump loyalist and adhere to the president's demands. Esper also expressed concern as he warned about the type of replacement to secede him.

"I could have a fight over anything, and I could make it a big fight, and I could live with that," Esper said Wednesday, at a time when reports of his imminent firing were swirling. He added: "Why? Who's going to come in behind me? It's going to be a real 'yes man.' And then God help us."

He later added, "My frustration is I sit here and say, 'Hm, 18 Cabinet members. Who's pushed back more than anybody?' Name another Cabinet secretary that's pushed back," he said. "Have you seen me on a stage saying, 'Under the exceptional leadership of blah-blah-blah, we have blah-blah-blah-blah?'"

Contrary to what the Trump administration typically says about most former employees, Esper is not just some "disgruntled" former employee. The threat Esper is suggesting is very real and raises even more questions about the harm Trump's administration could cause. However, there were multiple occasions where he actually did praise the president's leadership.

In fact, Esper appeared on multiple conservative news outlets commending Trump's "bold leadership."

"I'd like to thank President Trump for his bold leadership and support to the men and women of the United States Armed Forces," Esper said while standing next to Trump at a Norfolk, Va., news conference back in March. "This is an unprecedented time for our nation, and your leadership is uniting the American people to defeat this virus."

Commending Trump may have sent the wrong message to the president which may also explain Trump's disapproval of Esper pushing back against his attempt to invoke the Insurrection Act. From that point, many suspected Esper would be on Trump's firing list somewhere down the line. Now, he is.

From Your Site Articles

pentagon officials fear Trump may order troops to put down election unrest: NYT

Brad Reed / Raw StorySeptember 25, 2020

Senior Defense Department officials have been privately discussing resigning if President Donald Trump orders the American military to put down unrest in the wake of the 2020 election. The New York…

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an 720

Appalling and dangerous’: Pentagon chief under fire after leaked military docs refer to journalists as ‘adversaries’

Pentagon is now training the military to view protestors and journalists as a ‘threat’: report

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement

Former Pentagon press secretary and CIA spokesperson George Little calls it “appalling and dangerous.”

---

an 720

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/here-are-7-disturbing-revelations-from-a-national-guard-officer-about-trumps-lafayette-square-disaster/

720 intercept

...Even before the Black Lives Matters protests, a string of deadly attacks against minorities by white supremacists — including the rampage last August at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, which killed 22 people, most of them Latinos — had prompted the FBI and DHS to elevate the threat posed by domestic extremists. The agencies put them on a par with foreign-based terrorist groups like the Islamic State and other Islamist extremists, which have been the dominant focus of counterterrorism officials since the September 11 attacks.

One of the most alarming far-right plots emerged just last week, and like several earlier episodes, it involved an American soldier.

Federal prosecutors said that a22-year-old Army private from Kentucky named Ethan Melzer aligned himself with a violent neo-Nazi group and sent along sensitive military information about deployment schedules to facilitate an attack on his own unit in Turkey. In private chat messages, Meltzer told members of the neo-Nazi group, known as the “RapeWaffen Division” or “Order of the Nine Angles,” that he wanted to inflict mass casualties and start “a new war,” even if it meant he himself might be killed, according to his indictment. The authorities said that Melzer confessed after his arrest last month and “declared himself to be a traitor against the United States whose conduct was tantamount to treason.”

Investigators with the FBI and the military appear to have had a confidential source within the neo-Nazi group whom they used to find out about the plot as it was being hatched, according to an unsealed affidavit in the case.

But the broad findings from the National Counterterrorism Center report suggest that authorities could be left in the dark about other extremist plots — and unable to head them off — without wide changes to the system.

Trump himself has shown little inclination to go after domestic extremists, even before the recent racial unrest. In one of his most notorious proclamations, he said there were “very fine people on both sides” at the violent neo-Nazi demonstration in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, and after last year’s massacre of 49 Muslims at two New Zealand mosques, he rejected the suggestion that white nationalists were a growing global threat, characterizing them instead as “a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.” At the same time, his administration gutted funding for an Obama-era program called Countering Violent Extremism, meant to head off the radicalization of Americans.

The latest accusations against Trump of fanning racial tensions came this weekend, when he retweeted a video from Florida that included a supporter yelling “White Power!” at protesters. The president later took down the post.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trump-nominee-for-key-pentagon-position-accused-is-an-islamophobic-conspiracy-theorist-who-called-obama-a-terrorist-leader/

trump nominee for key Pentagon position accused is ‘an Islamophobic conspiracy theorist who called Obama a terrorist leader’

Written by Alex Henderson June 16, 2020

President Donald Trump has nominated retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Tata for a key position in the Pentagon, but Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee, according to CNN, have vowed to oppose the nomination in light of Tata’s history of hateful anti-Islam rants.That includes Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, the leading Democrat on the SASC.

In 2018, CNN reported, Tata described Islam as the “most oppressive violent religion I know of” and called former President Barack Obama as a “terrorist leader” for — as he saw it — being overly pro-Islam. Tata was vehemently critical of the Obama Administration’s deal with Iran and claimed that it came about because ofObama’s “Islamic roots.” Obama, Tata claimed, did more to “help Islamic countries than any president in history.”

Anthony J. Tata

@ajtata

If true, and it appears to be, #Obama and #Clinton are guilty of sedition and/or treason 18 U.S. Code 2384 #MAGA #trump2020 #ComeyMemos #Kanye2024 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2384 … https://twitter.com/_vachellindsay_/status/988616258022076416 …

8:31 PM - Apr 23, 2018

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See Anthony J. Tata's other Tweets

In addition to Reed, Senate Democrats who have told CNN they will oppose Tata’s nomination include Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Gary Peters of Michigan. Warren told CNN, “An Islamophobic conspiracy theorist who called President Obama a ‘terrorist leader’ should not be #3 at the Pentagon. Anthony Tata is by far Trump’s most unqualified and ill-suited senior defense nominee.”

In May 2018, Tata attacked former CIA Director John Brennan and tweeted, “Might be a good time to pick your poison: firing squad, public hanging, life sentence as prison b*tch, or just suck on your pistol. Your call. #Treason #Sedition #crossfirehurricane #Obamagate.”

andrew kaczynski??

@KFILE

Replying to @KFILE

The "Manchurian candidate" Obama conspiracy article shared and endorsed by Tata claimed that Obama let ISIS grow on purpose in Iraq and Libya, saying the "deviousness of the Obama sedition runs deep."https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/politics/tata-pentagon-nominee-kfile/index.html …

Democrats on key Senate committee oppose Pentagon pick as more inflammatory tweets emerge

Several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee said Monday that they would oppose the nomination of retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata to oversee the Pentagon's policy shop.

cnn.com

andrew kaczynski??

@KFILE

Tata accused Obama administration remembers of treason several times, saying former CIA chief John Brennan should "pick your poison: firing squad, public hanging, life sentence as prison b*tch, or just suck on your pistol. Your call."https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/politics/tata-pentagon-nominee-kfile/index.html …

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

754

4:26 PM - Jun 15, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

527 people are talking about this

Brendan Nyhan

@BrendanNyhan

A nominee for a Senate-confirmed position as third highest official in the Pentagon https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/1272671759435792385 …

andrew kaczynski??

@KFILE

Replying to @KFILE

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

440

4:34 PM - Jun 15, 2020

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326 people are talking about this

andrew kaczynski??

@KFILE

Replying to @KFILE

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

andrew kaczynski??

@KFILE

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Tata did not respond to a request for comment.

No Republican members of Armed Services commented on Tata's tweets to CNN.

The Pentagon referred inquiries to the White House on his nomination.

4:27 PM - Jun 15, 2020

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346 people are talking about this

no lnx pix twt

jt chief milley?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/it-was-a-mistake-joint-chiefs-of-staff-chairman-says-he-was-wrong-for-walking-with-trump-to-his-church-photo-op/

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https://theintercept.com/2020/06/05/pentagon-war-game-gen-z/

no lnx pix

pENTAGON WAR GAME INCLUDES SCENARIO FOR MILITARY RESPONSE TO DOMESTIC GEN Z REBELLION

Nick Turse

June 5 2020, 12:01 p.m.

IN THE FACE of protests composed largely of young people, the presence of America’s military on the streets of major cities has been a controversial development. But this isn’t the first time that Generation Z — those born after 1996 — has popped up on the Pentagon’s radar.

Documents obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act reveal that a Pentagon war game, called the 2018 Joint Land, Air and Sea Strategic Special Program, or JLASS, offered a scenario in which members of Generation Z, driven by malaise and discontent, launch a “Zbellion” in America in the mid-2020s.

JLASS Document

2 pages]

The Zbellion plot was a small part of JLASS 2018, which also featured scenarios involving Islamist militants in Africa, anti-capitalist extremists, and ISIS successors. The war game was conducted by students and faculty from the U.S. military’s war colleges, the training grounds for prospective generals and admirals. While it is explicitly not a national intelligence estimate, the war game, which covers the future through early 2028, is “intended to reflect a plausible depiction of major trends and influences in the world regions,” according to the more than 200 pages of documents.

According to the scenario, many members of Gen Z — psychologically scarred in their youth by 9/11 and the Great Recession, crushed by college debt, and disenchanted with their employment options — have given up on their hopes for a good life and believe the system is rigged against them. Here’s how the origins of the uprising are described:

Both the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Great Recession greatly influenced the attitudes of this generation in the United states, and resulted in a feeling of unsettlement and insecurity among Gen Z. Although Millennials experienced these events during their coming of age, Gen Z lived through them as part of their childhood, affecting their realism and world view … many found themselves stuck with excessive college debt when they discovered employment options did not meet their expectations. Gen Z are often described as seeking independence and opportunity but are also among the least likely to believe there is such a thing as the “American Dream,” and that the “system is rigged” against them. Frequently seeing themselves as agents for social change, they crave fulfillment and excitement in their job to help “move the world forward.” Despite the technological proficiency they possess, Gen Z actually prefer person-to-person contact as opposed to online interaction. They describe themselves as being involved in their virtual and physical communities, and as having rejected excessive consumerism.

In early 2025, a cadre of these disaffected Zoomers launch a protest movement. Beginning in “parks, rallies, protests, and coffee shops” — first in Seattle; then New York City; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Las Vegas; and Austin — a group known as Zbellion begins a “global cyber campaign to expose injustice and corruption and to support causes it deem[s] beneficial.”

During face-to-face recruitment, would-be members of Zbellion are given instructions for going to sites on the dark web that allow them to access sophisticated malware to siphon funds from corporations, financial institutions, and nonprofits that support “the establishment.” The gains are then converted to Bitcoin and distributed to “worthy recipients” including fellow Zbellion members who claim financial need. Zbellion leadership, says the scenario, assures its members that their Robin Hood-esque wealth redistribution is not only untraceable by law enforcement but “ultimately justifiable,” as targets are selected based on “secure polling” of “network delegates.” Although its origins are American, by the latter 2020s, Zbellion activities are also occurring across Europe and cities throughout Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, including Nairobi, Kenya; Hanoi, Vietnam; and Amman, Jordan.

In the world of JLASS 2018, Gen Z’s most militant members have essentially taken to privately taxing large corporations and other institutions to combat income inequality or, as the war gamers put it, using the “cyber world to spread a call for anarchy.”

The JLASS war game emerges in the context of the Pentagon playing a controversial and visible role in the unfolding domestic protests against racism and police brutality in the U.S. National Guard units have been deployed in various locations already, and some active-duty military forces were sent by the Trump administration to the Washington D.C. area.

“I think the sooner that you mass and dominate the battlespace, the quicker this dissipates and we can get back to the right normal,” said Secretary of Defense Mark Esper earlier this week during a teleconference call that also saw President Donald Trump deride U.S. governors for their “weak” response to protests over the killing of George Floyd. Trump even declared that he had put Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “in charge.” Later that day, after security forces drove protesters and clergy from Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Square with tear gas, Milley, dressed in combat fatigues, followed Trump, Attorney General William Barr, Esper, and others to a roundly condemned photo op in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church.

This came amid the backdrop of threats being issued to employ active-duty military to forcefully suppress protests, and the deployment of rapid-reaction units from the 82nd Airborne Division to bases just outside Washington, D.C. With retired admirals and generals, among others, excoriating Trump — and to a lesser extent Esper and Milley — for breeches of long-standing norms in civilian-military relations, it’s worth considering how the Pentagon’s war gamers chose to focus the military’s attention on a generation now demonstrating peacefully in America’s streets.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/we-are-witnessing-the-birth-of-a-movement-and-the-downfall-of-a-president/

They almost always begin to right wrongs: illegitimate wars; decades of discrimination on the grounds of gender or racial or sexual identity; killings of innocents by police or gun-toting lunatics; oppression by governments wielding unequal laws; the deeply embedded legacy of centuries of racism.

This article first appeared in Salon.

They are imperfect. Arising out of rage, they can be unfocused, inchoate, contradictory. Protesting violence, they often involve violence. Protesting oppression, they sometimes oppress by destroying public spaces, small businesses, even entire neighborhoods.

But sometimes they are large enough and powerful enough and righteous enough to bend the arc of history. We are in such a moment. There has been a turning. A protest against the murder of a black man by police in Minneapolis has become a movement. Demonstrations, which began almost two weeks ago, are ongoing. They are huge. They are nationwide. They are peaceful. They show no signs of stopping.

Among the extraordinary things about this moment is the fact that every single person who has taken to the streets to demonstrate is risking his or her life. People who only days ago were huddled inside their homes, afraid of a virus that has taken in excess of 110,000 lives in this country, are putting on their face masks and gathering by the tens or even hundreds of thousands, unafraid of the virus or the forces arrayed on the streets against them. They are protesting the death of a man who should not have had to die, and they are protesting the man who seemingly gave permission for him to be murdered by the intolerance and racism he has openly promoted for more than four years.

If we had any doubts that our fellow citizens would turn out to vote in November because they would be afraid of the virus or intimidated by attempts to block their votes, we have our answer. More people will turn out to vote, not less, and this has Trump very, very worried.

The show of courage on the streets has frightened Trump and his allies in the Republican Party. If you have any doubts, all you have to do is watch the scene of Republican senators scurrying away from MSNBC reporter Kasie Hunt on Capitol Hill when she asked them to comment on Trump’s disgusting and disreputable photo-op at St. John’s Church on Monday.

Trump has turned Washington into an armed camp. He has built a three-mile-long wall around the White House and cowered in a basement bunker as protests grew on the streets outside. But Trump’s threat to use active-duty soldiers to suppress dissent has encountered some profound pushback from an unexpected source: the United States military.

It began with a statement by former Secretary of Defense James Mattis in reaction to the use of force, including National Guard soldiers, to clear peaceful demonstrators from a street near the White House so Trump could make his now-infamous “walk” to St. John’s Church for his Bible-waving photo-op. “I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled,” Mattis wrote in The Atlantic:

When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens — much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values — our values as people and our values as a nation. We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.

And then something extraordinary happened. Mattis’ clarion call was joined by more senior military figures, beginning with Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, who had been the object of strong criticism for standing next to Trump during his Bible photo-op. Esper held a press conference at the Pentagon on Wednesday and announced that he was against invoking the Insurrection Act, which would (hypothetically) authorize the deployment of active-duty military on the streets of America. Trump is said to be very, very unhappy with Esper and reversed his order for elements of the 82nd Airborne Division to return to their base in North Carolina. By week’s end, however, Esper had prevailed, and the 82nd was on the way home.

Retired Adm. Mike Mullen, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Barack Obama, was next. He wrote a piece for The Atlantic entitled, “I cannot remain silent.”

“t sickened me yesterday to see security personnel — including members of the National Guard — forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president’s visit outside St. John’s Church. I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump’s leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent.

Whatever Trump’s goal in conducting his visit, he laid bare his disdain for the rights of peaceful protest in this country, gave succor to the leaders of other countries who take comfort in our domestic strife, and risked further politicizing the men and women of our armed forces.”

Retired General John R. Allen weighed in next, writing ominously in Foreign Policy magazine, “The slide of the United States into illiberalism may well have begun on June 1, 2020. Remember the date. It may well signal the beginning of the end of the American experiment.”

More retired generals weighed in later in the week, including two former chairs of the Joint Chiefs, Martin Dempsey and Richard Meyers. Both were critical of Trump’s handling of protests and opposed the use of the military to suppress dissent.

But even more extraordinary than the retired officers who spoke out was the letter from the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark A. Milley, which was leaked to conservative pundit Bill Kristol on Thursday.Milleyis said to have had a contentious meeting with Trump in the Oval Office on Monday before joining him in his infamous “walk” down the street cleared by police and National Guard soldiers. According to David Ignatius of the Washington Post, Milley, “whose temper can match Trump’s…was vocal in reiterating his advice to the president against mobilizing troops, according to three knowledgeable sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity.” That is Washington-speak for “they were yelling at each other.”

Sent to all of the other chiefs of staff for the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, National Guard and commanders of combatant commands, Milley’s letter is unlike anything I have seen, and I’ve been around the military since I was born in an Army field hospital in occupied Japan in 1947.

He reminded everyone in uniform of their oath to support and defend the Constitution. I’ve never seen that done before. All service members take the same oath, but they don’t go around reminding each other about it. Milley wrote of the Constitution, “This document is founded on the essential principles that all men and women are born free and equal, and should be treated with respect and dignity. It also gives Americans the right to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly. We in uniform — all branches, all components, all ranks — remain committed to our national values and principles embedded in the Constitution.” He went on to note specifically that the National Guard “is operating under the authority of state governors.”

For a military man, this comes close to a call for insurrection. Milley’s message is written in a code that everyone in uniform will understand implicitly. By reminding every member of the military that the soldiers currently deployed on the street around the country are not there under the authority of the president, and by reminding them of their oath to the Constitution, he is telling them that the military will not be carrying out any un-American orders issued by Donald Trump. Late Friday, Secretary of Defense Esper disarmed the National Guard doing riot duty in Washington, ordering them to turn in their weapons and ammunition. He also ordered all active duty troops amassed outside the capital earlier in the week by the White House to be sent home. He issued both orders without consulting the White House.

These generals are not politicians, but all their statements are as political as any I’ve ever seen by senior officers, retired or active duty. It’s the equivalent of lining up howitzers on Pennsylvania Avenue and aiming at the White House.

I’ll bet Trump rues the day he appointed “Mad Dog” Mattis as secretary of defense. They don’t go out and make statements like this without talking to one another. Mullen and Mattis were said to have been aware of Milley’s confrontation with the president at the time they wrote their articles on Tuesday and Wednesday. Milley and his fellow generals and admirals are giving a clear sign that the military leaders are turning against Trump. Colin Powell will reportedly be next, in an appearance on one of the Sunday morning shows.

The military is the most reliably conservative institution this country has. But inside the military establishment, the signals are being sent. They have announced that they are more reliable as defenders of the rights of their fellow citizens than the police. Without stepping over the line into insubordination, they have made it as clear as they can that their loyalty isn’t to the president. It’s to the Constitution.

I don’t think we have to worry about the military following illegal orders from Trump. At least for now, they’re on our side.

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see also DN 3/9/20 fighting threatens peace deal w/ taliban

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/afghanistan-papers-reveal-how-presidents-and-generals-misled-the-american-public-on-wars-progress/

NEW

How Amazon and Silicon Valley Seduced the Pentagon

Tech moguls like Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt have gotten unprecedented access to the Pentagon. And one whistleblower who raised flags has paid the price.

by James Bandler, Anjali Tsui and Doris Burke

View Story

no lnx

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-amazon-and-silicon-valley-seduced-the-pentagon

How Amazon and Silicon Valley Seduced the Pentagon

Tech moguls like Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt have gotten unprecedented access to the Pentagon. And one whistleblower who raised flags has paid the price.

by James Bandler, Anjali Tsui and Doris Burke Aug. 22, 5 a.m. EDT

[pix From left: Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google’s parent company, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, and Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. (Nate Kitch, special to ProPublica)

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

This article was co-published with Fortune.

On Aug. 8, 2017, Roma Laster, a Pentagon employee responsible for policing conflicts of interest, emailed an urgent warning to the chief of staff of then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Several department employees had arranged for Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, to be sworn into an influential Pentagon advisory board despite the fact that, in the year since he’d been nominated, Bezos had never completed a required background check to obtain a security clearance.

Mattis was about to fly to the West Coast, where he would personally swear Bezos in at Amazon’s headquarters before moving on to meetings with executives from Google and Apple. Soon phone calls and emails began bouncing around the Pentagon. Security clearances are no trivial matter to defense officials; they exist to ensure that people with access to sensitive information aren’t, say, vulnerable to blackmail and don’t have conflicts of interest. Laster also contended that it was a “noteworthy exception” for Mattis to perform the ceremony. Secretaries of defense, she wrote, don’t hold swearing-in events.

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Laster’s alarms triggered fear among Pentagon brass that Mattis would be seen as doing a special favor for Bezos, which could put him in hot water with President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly proclaimed his antipathy to Bezos, mainly because of his ownership of The Washington Post. The swearing-in was canceled only hours before it was scheduled to occur. (This episode, never previously reported, is based on interviews with six people familiar with the matter. An Amazon spokesperson said the company was told that Bezos did not need a security clearance and that the company provided all requested information.)

Despite the cancellation, Bezos met with Mattis that day. They talked about leadership and military history, then moved on to Amazon’s sales pitch on why the Defense Department should make a radical shift in its computing. Amazon wanted the department to abandon its hodgepodge of 2,215 data centers, located in various Pentagon facilities and run using different systems by an array of different companies, and let Amazon replace that with cloud service: computing power provided over the internet, all of it running on Amazon’s servers.

That vision is now well on its way to becoming a reality. The Pentagon is preparing to award a $10 billion, 10-year contract to move its information technology systems to the cloud. Amazon’s cloud unit, Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is the biggest provider of cloud services in the country and also the company’s profit engine: It accounted for 58.7% of Amazon’s operating income last year. AWS has been the favorite to emerge with the Pentagon contract.

Known as JEDI, for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, the project has been the subject of accusations of favoritism. Two spurned bidders have launched unsuccessful bid protests and one of them, Oracle, filed and lost a lawsuit. Meanwhile, there’s an ongoing investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general.

The DOD defends JEDI. The agency’s decision-makers have “always placed the interests of the warfighter first and have acted without bias, prejudice, or self-interest,” DOD spokesperson Elissa Smith said in a statement. “The same cannot be said of all parties to the debate over JEDI.”

What’s happened at the Pentagon extends past the JEDI contract. It’s a story of how some of America’s biggest tech companies used a little-known advisory board, some aggressive advocacy by a few billionaires and some unofficial lobbying to open a backdoor into the Pentagon. And so, no matter who wins the JEDI contract, one winner is already clear: Silicon Valley. The question is no longer whether a technology giant will emerge with the $10 billion prize, but rather which technology giant (or giants) will.

There are certainly benefits. The Pentagon’s technological infrastructure does indeed need to be modernized. But there may also be costs. Silicon Valley has pushed for the Pentagon to adopt its technology and its move-fast-and-break-things ethos. The result, according to interviews with more than three dozen current and former DOD officials and tech executives, has been internal clashes and a tortured process that has combined the hype of tech with the ethical morass of the Washington industry-government revolving door.

Laster did her best to enforce the rules. She would challenge the Pentagon’s cozy relationship not only with Bezos, but with Google’s Eric Schmidt, the chairman of the defense board that Bezos sought to join. The ultimate resolution? Laster was shunted aside. She was removed from the innovation board in November 2017 (but remains at the Defense Department). “Roma was removed because she insisted on them following the rules,” said a former DOD official knowledgeable about her situation.

Laster filed a grievance, which was denied. “I’ve been betrayed by an organization I joined when I was 17 years old,” said Laster, who is 54. “This is an organization built on loyalty, dedication and patriotism. Unfortunately, it is kind of one-way.”

Other criticism, from Amazon’s rivals and the press, has centered on the actions of several DOD workers who had previously worked directly or indirectly for Amazon and have since returned to the private sector. The most important of those employees, Sally Donnelly — a former outside strategist for Amazon who had become one of Mattis’ top aides — helped give Amazon officials access to Mattis in intimate settings, an opportunity that most defense contractors don’t enjoy. Donnelly organized a private dinner, never reported before, for Mattis, Bezos, herself and Amazon’s top government-sales executive at a Washington restaurant, DBGB, on Jan. 17, 2018. The dinner occurred just as the DOD was finalizing draft bid specifications for JEDI. (Asked about the dinner and several others like it, the DOD’s Smith said: “One of the department’s priorities is to reform the way DOD does business. As part of this reform, leaders are expected to engage with industry — in a full and open manner within legal boundaries — to find ways to reform our business practices and build a more lethal force.” A spokesperson for AWS said the dinner “had nothing to do with the JEDI procurement, and those implying otherwise either are misinformed or disappointed competitors trying to distract with innuendo vs competing fairly with their technical capabilities.”)

Such meetings aren’t illegal, but they undermine public trust in defense contracting, said Charles Tiefer, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and one of the nation’s leading experts on government-contracting law. “This is a particularly serious example of the revolving door among Pentagon officials and defense contractors, which has been problematic in recent years and is getting worse under the Trump administration,” he said.

In July, Trump expressed concerns about the process and whether it was skewed in Amazon’s favor. Early this month, his new defense secretary, Mark Esper, announced a fresh review, which will delay the selection of a winner. The judge in the JEDI-related case ruled in favor of the government but nonetheless summed up the process as containing conflict-of-interest allegations that were “certainly sufficient to raise eyebrows” and a “constant gravitational pull on agency employees by technology behemoths.”

The board that Bezos almost joined — called the Defense Innovation Board — was launched in 2016 by Ashton Carter, the last defense secretary in the Obama administration. Carter worried that the Pentagon’s information technology was falling behind. He recruited a collection of tech luminaries, including Schmidt, then the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, by appealing to their patriotism and enticing them with the proposition that the DOD needed the insight and culture of Silicon Valley. Of course, the Pentagon also has an annual infotech budget of $38 billion, and what tech CEO could resist offering products and services to solve the department’s problems?

Schmidt, the chairman of the innovation board, embraced the mission. In the spring and summer of 2016, he embarked, with fellow board members, on a series of visits to Pentagon operations around the world. Schmidt visited a submarine base in San Diego, an aircraft carrier off the coast of the United Arab Emirates and Creech Air Force Base, located deep in the Nevada desert near Area 51.

Inside the drone operations center at Creech, according to three people familiar with the trip, Schmidt observed video as a truck in a contested zone somewhere was surveilled by a Predator drone and annihilated. It was a mesmerizing display of the U.S. military’s lethal reach.

Yet as Schmidt and his colleagues studied the control panels and displays, they felt like they were witnessing technology frozen in the 1970s. He began asking questions about the challenges of controlling drones thousands of miles away. One operator complained that he had to use his joystick to toggle quickly between systems and screens, turning off one feed to use another. He had to do all of this while simultaneously flying the drone and trying to keep his attention on a target that was frequently in motion.

A little later, on the operations floor, Schmidt watched as dozens of people monitored video feeds from drones around the globe. One of the visitors noted that computers using recognition software and machine learning could much more efficiently and accurately perform the majority of these tasks.

A little more than a year after Schmidt’s visit, Google won a $17 million subcontract in a project called Maven to help the military use image recognition software to identify drone targets — exactly the kind of function that Schmidt witnessed at Creech. (Schmidt declined to be interviewed. A person close to the innovation board said he was unaware of his company’s involvement in Maven. Google, which has funded ProPublica projects on voting and video journalism in recent years, declined to comment on the record.)

Schmidt’s influence, already strong under Carter, only grew when Mattis arrived as defense secretary. Schmidt’s travel privileges at the DOD, which required painstaking approval from the agency’s chief of staff for each stop of every trip, were suddenly unfettered after Schmidt requested carte blanche, according to three sources knowledgeable about the matter. Mattis granted him and the board permission to travel anywhere they wanted and to talk to anyone at the DOD on all but the most secret programs.

Such access is unheard-of for executives or directors of companies that sell to the government, say three current and former DOD officials, both to prevent opportunities for bribery or improper influence and to ensure that one company does not get advantages over others. “Mattis changed the rules of engagement and the muscularity of the innovation board went from zero to 60,” said a person who has served on Pentagon advisory boards. “There’s a lot of opportunity for mischief.”

In a written statement, the DOD denied that Mattis extended Schmidt’s privileges, characterizing them as “no more and no less” than when Carter was defense secretary. As for Mattis, his former press secretary, Dana White, speaking on his behalf, said: “In order to do their job, all members of the Defense Innovation Board had full access to the department and its entities. Secretary Mattis insisted on it. He fully leveraged their unique experience to ensure DOD adapted and gained maximum advantage over the rising threats of near-peer competitors.”

Over the next months, Schmidt and two other board members with Google ties would continue flying all over the country, visiting Pentagon installations and meeting with DOD officials, sessions that no other company could attend. It’s hard to reconstruct what occurred in many of those meetings, since they were private. On one occasion, Schmidt quizzed a briefer about which cloud service provider was being used for a data project, according to a memo that Laster prepared after the briefing. When the briefer told him that Amazon handled the business, Schmidt asked if they’d considered other cloud providers. Laster’s memo flagged Schmidt’s inquiry as a “point of concern,” given that he was the chairman of a major cloud provider.

The DOD became unusually deferential to Schmidt. He preferred to travel on his personal jet, and he would ferry fellow board members with him. But that created a problem for his handlers: DOD employees are not permitted to ride on private planes. Still, the staff at the board didn’t want to inconvenience Schmidt by making him wait for his department support team to arrive on commercial flights. So, according to a source knowledgeable about the board’s spending, on at least one occasion the department requisitioned military aircraft at a cost of $25,000 an hour to transport its employees to meet Schmidt on his tour. (The DOD’s spokesperson said employees did this because “there were no commercial flights available.”)

The fact that such unusual access was granted to a board member who was a DOD vendor raised alarm, according to current and former Pentagon employees. As she had in the Bezos episode, Laster took action. She was a former Marine who’d been a military police officer in the U.S. force in Somalia in the 1990s. Her official title was designated federal officer for the Defense Innovation Board. Laster’s job was to make sure that members’ conduct was ethical and in accordance with laws, regulations and rules. Blunt and direct, she was hardly a pushover. But Laster had never encountered tech billionaires before, much less ones empowered by the head of her agency.

The trouble started after Laster sought a clarification of how to carry out Mattis’ sweeping travel directive. She was concerned that it could expose the department to accusations of giving vendors an unfair edge. Three members of the board worked directly or indirectly for Google and two for United Technologies, a major defense contractor.

Schmidt responded by threatening to go over her head to Mattis, according to her grievance. She was told to stand down and never again speak to Schmidt. According to the grievance, her boss told her, “Mr. Schmidt was a billionaire and would never accept pushback, warnings or limits.”

The Schmidt episode captured the tension that had emerged inside the department. To one Silicon Valley supporter, it was a “textbook example of the bureaucracy trying to slow down progress and change using rules, rules, rules.” To Michael Bayer, the former chairman of another Pentagon advisory board, where he had worked with Laster, she was a person of “extraordinary character” who was working hard to make sure the board “did the right thing.”

It would be hard to find a purer embodiment of the proverbial revolving door — or a stealth influencer — than Sally Donnelly. For the past dozen years she has shuttled between the DOD and consulting firms, including at least once with Amazon as a client, that seek to influence the department. During her most recent government stint, Donnelly, 59,came to be viewed as the “fairy godmother” of the Big Tech advocates in the department, as one Pentagon official put it to ProPublica.

Donnelly is known as a superb crafter of narratives, a person who can present ideas in persuasive ways. She honed those skills in her first career, as a reporter at Time magazine, where, among other things, she covered the Pentagon and wrote glowingly of Mattis. Donnelly spent 20 years at the newsweekly before moving to the DOD for the first time in 2007. She worked for the then-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, then later for Mattis, including while he oversaw the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as the head of Central Command.

In 2012, Donnelly departed and opened her own consulting firm, SBD Advisors. “Our team offers guidance and stealth strategies,” its website boasted, according to a 2014 article in Politico, “ensuring that clients benefit from the results of our campaigns while outwardly they are under-the-radar.” SBD’s clients included Amazon, Uber, Bloomberg, Palantir and others.

Donnelly was a master at quietly cultivating a network, one that straddled the permeable line between government and industry. Carter rented an office at the firm before he became Obama’s defense secretary, and a Politico story listed him as a SBD adviser. (During Carter’s tenure as secretary, Donnelly worked as a DOD consultant.) SBD’s other high-profile generals and defense-connected figures included Mullen, former director of national intelligence Dennis Blair and Michael Flynn, the former Defense Intelligence Agency chief and national security adviser who has since pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

By 2015, Donnelly’s business had announced a new focus. SBD now specialized in “bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and Washington, DC,” its website declared, by “facilitating engagements between the technology and defense sectors.” The next year her firm started advising Amazon Web Services on how to land DOD contracts.

In January 2017, Donnelly rejoined the department after successfully shepherding Mattis through the Senate confirmation process. Her title, senior adviser, understated her influence. She emerged as one of the most powerful people in the leadership of the Pentagon, according to numerous DOD staffers. She guided Mattis on politics (which was relatively new terrain for him), relations with the White House and dealing with the press.

Donnelly also helped the defense secretary connect with outside companies. She helped arrange not only the January 2018 dinner between Bezos and Mattis, but also a previously reported private dinner with Mattis and Teresa Carlson, the head of the AWS division that sells services to governments, in March 2017 in London. (A host of that gathering told The Wall Street Journal that cloud computing was not discussed and that the purpose of the dinner was to talk about a charity involving wounded veterans.) The same year, at Donnelly’s behest, AWS’ Carlson met with several of Mattis’ top aides. People familiar with the matter say they discussed a possible job for Carlson at the Pentagon. No offer was made. (A source close to Carlson said such a job “would not have been of interest.”)

A lawyer for Donnelly, Michael Levy, said she “always adhered to all ethical and legal obligations and acted in the best interest of the national security of the United States.” He added that she played no role in the JEDI contract. “To suggest otherwise … reflects an absence of even the most rudimentary understanding of the government contracting process.”

A veteran Marine general, Mattis was initially perceived as skeptical of what Silicon Valley was selling. He knew the flesh-and-blood realities of war and believed in giving autonomy to commanders on the ground. In his mind, anything that reinforced Pentagon leaders’ desire to micromanage events halfway across the globe was problematic. Technology, he believed, could make matters worse.

But Schmidt was an effective advocate for the power of big data, which he argued had become as important a strategic resource as oil. And he emphasized that the need for technological improvement was urgent: China was rapidly improving. In June 2017, at a private lunch in a Pentagon conference room, Schmidt told him Google’s lead over China in artificial intelligence technology had shrunk from five years to six months. “Mr. Secretary, they’re at your heels,” Schmidt said, according to three people familiar with the lunch. “You need to take decisive action now.”

Schmidt wanted the department to adopt a Silicon Valley philosophy that emphasized innovation, taking risks and moving fast. Among his recommendations: embrace cloud computing. In the summer of 2017, Mattis decided to investigate firsthand. He departed on a tour that would include visits to Amazon and Google headquarters and a one-on-one with Apple CEO Tim Cook.

At Amazon, despite the tempest about Bezos joining the innovation board, Mattis and the CEO hit it off. The two talked together for about an hour. Mattis gave a pithy sweep of lessons from military history and expressed his view on the perils of overreliance on technology. He noted how the British Navy, once famous for its derring-do, nearly lost the World War I battle of Jutland when ship captains hesitated, waiting for flag signals from their fleet commander.

Amazon bills itself as “Earth’s most customer-centric company.” Yet its algorithm is hiding the best deal from many customers.

After the meeting, Bezos and Mattis walked to another conference room, where AWS executives made their case that the company’s cloud products offer better security than traditional data centers, according to three people who attended. As evidence, they noted that the Central Intelligence Agency had embarked on a $600 million, 10-year cloud contract with Amazon in 2013 and, they said, it was working.

To ensure that Mattis could visualize the impact Amazon’s technology could have on an actual battlefield, staffers placed on the conference room table a “Snowball Edge,” a suitcase-sized device with lots of storage that allowed soldiers in remote environments to quickly process information.

One of Mattis’ last meetings on the trip seemed to tip him into the camp of the cloud advocates. He met with venture capitalists, including Marc Andreessen, an influential Silicon Valley figure who first made his name as the creator of the Netscape browser a quarter-century ago. Andreessen was a booster of Amazon. “You need to get to the cloud,” he told Mattis. “You’d be stupid not to.”

Something seemed to click inside Mattis. He told his staff to begin preparing a memo laying out how the DOD would shift its computing to the cloud.

The Pentagon’s cloud initiative ultimately ended up being led by Chris Lynch, the head of Defense Digital Service. DDS was no ordinary unit; it was a corps of software engineers hired from Google, Amazon and other tech companies to “challenge the status quo, burdensome policies and established bureaucracies in an effort to streamline DOD’s ability to introduce modern software development, tools and practices,” according to a department spokesperson. And Lynch himself was no ordinary government employee. As a teenager, he had been arrested and expelled from his Ohio high school after he and some friends called in a bomb threat as a joke. But he grew up, earned his high school degree, worked at Microsoft and then ran a series of startups. At 43, he wore hoodies to an office dominated by starched white shirts and still considered himself an insurgent, a point he conveyed by posting a sign reading “The Rebel Alliance” outside the entrance to his group’s office; the name also reflected his obsession with Star Wars. (His team came up with the acronym JEDI for the cloud project.)

Lynch had a vision of how the Pentagon’s cloud initiative should work: a single DOD-wide cloud run by one provider that would allow the agency to shutter all but the most secret of its data centers. Having one cloud would be ultra-efficient, he said. It would allow programmers to deliver instant software fixes to the entire department, rather than multiple divisions needing to wait weeks for an outside contractor to come by in person.

Lynch also believed the department lacked the expertise to manage multiple vendors, each with its own idiosyncrasies. Better to give the entire agency one provider. And as he saw it, only three cloud companies in the U.S. were capable of that mission: Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Some in the Pentagon believed that Lynch’s plan presented its own risk. They thought that putting all of the agency’s data in one company’s system made it more vulnerable, not less, than having it stored with multiple vendors. They also worried such an approach would stifle competition and create a huge monopoly.

But Lynch had an advantage in the fight: Donnelly.She obtained full access to the Pentagon front office for Lynch and secured a “letter of marque” for him, a written statement of support from Mattis that put the weight of the agency’s chief behind him.

Amazon often seemed to have allies close at hand. For example, the deputy defense secretary sometimes used his chief of staff, Tony DeMartino, as a point man to the key committee on JEDI. DeMartino had been managing director of Donnelly’s consulting firm, where he’d had Amazon as a client. He was warned to be “vigilant and consult” with ethics lawyers before involving himself in matters related to Amazon. But even after the warning, DeMartino repeatedly participated in the cloud-related matters, according to emails submitted by Oracle in its lawsuit against the government, as well as emails obtained by ProPublica and interviews with current and former Pentagon officials. For example, one November 2017 email reviewed by ProPublica, which was copied to Donnelly, shows DeMartino suggested a “huddle” with the new head of the Pentagon’s cloud executive steering group to discuss the man’s responsibilities. Later, after DeMartino was no longer serving the deputy secretary, he asked to remain “linked into” the cloud initiative. A contracting officer who examined DeMartino’s role concluded that his actions hadn’t affected the JEDI process since DeMartino’s role was “ministerial and perfunctory.” (A person in DeMartino’s camp insists that his only activity on JEDI was blocking a “stupid acronym” — C3PO — from being inserted in a larger memo.)

A second former Amazon employee would spark more controversy. Deap Ubhi, a former AWS employee who worked for Lynch, was tasked with gathering marketing information to make the case for a single cloud inside the DOD. Around the same time that he started working on JEDI, Ubhi began talking with AWS about rejoining the company. As his work on JEDI deepened, so did his job negotiations. Six days after he received a formal offer from Amazon, Ubhi recused himself from JEDI, fabricating a story that Amazon had expressed an interest in buying a startup company he owned. A contracting officer who investigated found enough evidence that Ubhi’s conduct violated conflict of interest rules to refer the matter to the inspector general, but concluded that his conduct did not corrupt the process. (Ubhi, who now works in AWS’ commercial division, declined comment through a company spokesperson.)

Ubhi worsened the impression by making ill-advised public statements while still employed by the DOD. In a tweet, he described himself as “once an Amazonian, always an Amazonian.”

By the time the draft JEDI bid was formally unveiled in March 2018, rumors had begun surfacing in trade publications that the specifications had been written with Amazon in mind. For example, the bid required that the JEDI contract could not account for more than half of the provider’s cloud data load. And it required that the provider have at least three physical data centers, each separated by more than 150 miles. Only a tiny handful of companies could fulfill those mandates.

Many tech companies were furious. Indeed, the only major cloud computing company that defended JEDI was Amazon. The harshest reaction came from IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, which would form the nucleus of a coalition that would work to stop JEDI. “This one-size-fits-all idea is, I think, limited to JEDI and promoted by Amazon, because it fits Amazon’s needs,” said Ken Glueck, Oracle’s top Washington executive.

The DOD’s spokesperson said, “The requirements were not designed around any one provider.” An Amazon spokesperson said that “from day one, we’ve competed for JEDI on the breadth and depth of our services, and their corresponding security and operational performance.”

Oracle responded by using its own access. As first reported by Bloomberg, Oracle arranged for its co-CEO, Safra Catz, to attend a private dinner in April 2018 with Trump and Peter Thiel, a founder of defense firm Palantir and a Trump ally. Catz told Trump she thought the JEDI specifications had been written so that only Amazon could win, according to a person familiar with the conversation and Bloomberg.

Only four companies submitted bids for JEDI. Google had already withdrawn from the bidding, citing its belief that the project should be split among multiple providers. The decision came after its own employees protested the company’s participation in Maven, expressing opposition to the idea that their technology would be used to help kill people. Two bidders — IBM and Oracle — were eliminated after they failed to meet the bid requirements. That has left only Amazon and Microsoft still standing in the JEDI competition.

Both IBM and Oracle filed protests. IBM’s protest was dismissed and Oracle’s was denied by the Government Accountability Office. Oracle sued the government in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, asserting JEDI had been tainted by conflicts of interest. The judge in the case ruled against Oracle. He agreed with the contracting officer that Oracle lost the bid on the merits and that any “errors and omissions” were “not significant and did not give AWS a competitive advantage.”

Oracle did not give up. The company hired former members of the Trump administration and made its case to allies on key congressional committees. Largely as a result, the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee blocked the DOD from spending money on JEDI until it demonstrated it was using multiple cloud vendors.

Then, in July, Trump himself got involved, saying he was considering intervening in JEDI. Soon after, the new secretary of defense, Mark Esper (a former chief lobbyist for Raytheon), requested another review.

Much of the information that has surfaced in the press about JEDI is the product of investigations performed by Oracle and its lawyers. Meanwhile, PowerPoint presentations and investigative reports containing allegations of all sorts of byzantine chicanery by Amazon began circulating last year. By the spring of 2019, multiple corporate interests had deployed private teams to investigate their rivals and DOD officials.

The Pentagon’s inspector general continues to investigate, according to a spokesperson, including “whether current or former DOD officials committed misconduct relating to the JEDI acquisition, such as whether any had any conflicts of interest related to their involvement in the acquisition process.”

The claims and investigations have left JEDI shrouded in uncertainty. The project might not survive in its current form, according to people knowledgeable about the DOD, but there’s little doubt that the agency will move its computing to the cloud in one form or another.

As for Donnelly, she left government again last year. A going-away party was thrown for her at the Pentagon. Jared Kushner and former White House economic adviser Gary Cohn attended. Today, Cohn is the chairman of the advisory board of a new firm that Donnelly has opened, Pallas Advisors, which she founded along with Tony DeMartino, the former DOD political appointee and ex-strategy consultant for SBD.

Pallas describes itself as a “strategic advisory firm” that provides “insight into how governments think and operate.” According to a person familiar with the matter, one of Pallas’ staffers, Robert Daigle — who had previously worked on the JEDI project at the DOD — turned up in early August in the offices of at least one U.S. senator. Daigle was accompanied by Chris Lynch, who has left the DOD and founded a company, Rebellion Defense, that is seeking defense contracts relating to artificial intelligence. (Rebellion’s board members include Eric Schmidt.)

Lynch and Daigle were pushing a familiar agenda from a new vantage point: They wanted to explain why a single-cloud makes sense for the Defense Department. And if their own companies got some new opportunities as a result, it went without saying, that would be just fine with them.

Claire Perlman contributed to this story.

Filed under: Military Technology

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/pentagon-budget-mystery-807276/

Pentagon’s Bottomless Money Pit

When the Defense Department flunked its first-ever fiscal review, one of our government’s greatest mysteries was exposed: Where does the DoD’s $700 billion annual budget go?

MATT TAIBBi

...The Air Force, which had an $85 billion budget that year, nearly created in one stroke an accounting error more than a third the size of the U.S. GDP, which was just over $10 trillion in 2001. Nobody lost money. It was just a paper error, one that was caught.

“Even the Air Force notices a trillion-dollar error,” Andy says with a laugh. “Now, if it had been a billion, it might have gone through.”

Years later, Andy watched as another massive accounting issue made its way into the military bureaucracy. The Air Force changed one of its financial reporting systems, and after the change, the service showed a negative number for inventory — everything from engine cores to landing gear — in transit.

Freaked out, because you can’t have a negative number of things in transit, Air Force accountants went back and tried to reverse the mistake. In doing so, they somehow ended up adding more than $4 billion in value to the Air Force’s overall spare-parts inventory in a single month.

This suspicious number is still there. You can see a sudden spike in the Air Force’s working-capital fund’s stagnant spare-parts numbers. It was $23.2 billion in 2015, $23.3 billion in 2016, $24.4 billion in 2017, and then suddenly $28.8 billion in September 2018.

That doesn’t mean money was lost, or stolen. It does, however, mean the Air Force probably has less inventory on hand than it thinks it does.

Now retired, Andy sometimes visits his neighborhood library, which uses RFID smart labels, or radio frequency identification, allowing it to know where all its books are at all times.

Meanwhile, the Air Force, which has a $156 billion annual budget, still doesn’t always use serial numbers. It has no idea how much of almost anything it has at any given time. Nuclear weapons are the exception, and it started electronically tagging those only after two extraordinary mistakes, in 2006 and 2007. In the first, the Air Force accidentally loaded six nuclear weapons in a B-52 and flew them across the country, unbeknownst to the crew. In the other, the services sent nuclear nose cones by mistake to Taiwan, which had asked for helicopter batteries.

“What kind of an organization,” Andy asks, “doesn’t keep track of $20 billion in inventory?”

Despite being the taxpayers’ greatest investment — more than $700 billion a year — the Department of Defense has remained an organizational black box throughout its history. It’s repelled generations of official inquiries, the latest being an audit three decades in the making, mainly by scrambling its accounting into such a mess that it may never be untangled.

Ahead of misappropriation, fraud, theft, overruns, contracting corruption and other abuses that are almost certainly still going on, the Pentagon’s first problem is its books. It’s the world’s largest producer of wrong numbers, an ingenious bureaucratic defense system that hides all the other rats’ nests underneath. Meet the Gordian knot of legend, brought to life in modern America.

AT THE TAIL end of last year, the Department of Defense finally completed an audit. At a cost of $400 million, some 1,200 auditors charged into the jungle of military finance, but returned in defeat. They were unable to pass the Pentagon or flunk it. They could only offer no opinion, explaining the military’s empire of hundreds of acronymic accounting silos was too illogical to penetrate.

The audit is the last piece in one of the great ass-covering projects ever undertaken, also known as the effort to give the United States government a clean bill of financial health. Twenty-nine years ago, in 1990, Congress ordered all government agencies to begin producing audited financial statements. Others complied. Defense refused from the jump.

It took a Herculean legislative effort lasting 20 years to move the Pentagon off its intransigent starting position. In 2011, it finally agreed to be ready by 2017, which turned into 2018, when the Department of Defense finally complied with part of the law ordering “timely performance reports.”

Last November 15th, when the whiffed audit was announced, Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan said it was nothing to worry about, because “we never expected to pass it.” Asked by a reporter why taxpayers should keep giving the Pentagon roughly $700 billion a year if it can’t even “get their house in order and count ships right or buildings right,” Shanahan quipped, “We count ships right.”

This was an inside joke. The joke was, the Pentagon isn’t so hot at counting buildings. Just a few years ago, in fact, it admitted to losing track of “478 structures,” in addition to 39 Black Hawk helicopters (whose fully loaded versions list for about $21 million a pop).

That didn’t mean 478 buildings disappeared. But they did vanish from the government’s ledgers at some point. The Pentagon bureaucracy is designed to spend money quickly and deploy troops and material to the field quickly, but it has no reliable method of recording transactions. It designs stealth drones and silent-running submarines, but still hasn’t progressed to bar codes when it comes to tracking inventory. Some of its accounting programs are using the ancient computing language COBOL, which was cutting-edge in 1959....

“These systems,” as one Senate staffer puts it, “were not designed to be audited.”

If and when the defense review is ever completed, we’re likely to find a pile of Enrons, with the military’s losses and liabilities hidden in Enron-like special-purpose vehicles, assets systematically overvalued, monies Congress approved for X feloniously diverted to Program Y, contractors paid twice, parts bought twice, repairs done unnecessarily and at great expense, and so on.

Enron at its core was an accounting maze that systematically hid losses and overstated gains in order to keep investor money flowing in. The Pentagon is an exponentially larger financial bureaucracy whose mark is the taxpayer. Of course, less overtly a criminal scheme, the military still churns out Enron-size losses regularly, and this is only possible because its accounting is a long-tolerated fraud.

We’ve seen glimpses already. The infamous F-35 Joint Strike fighter program is now projected to cost the taxpayers $1.5 trillion, roughly what we spent on the entire Iraq War. Overruns and fraud from that program alone are currently expected to cost taxpayers about 100 times what was spent on Obama’s much-ballyhooed Solyndra solar-energy deal.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department a few years ago found about $125 billion in administrative waste, a wart that by itself was just under twice the size of that $74 billion Enron bankruptcy. Inspectors found “at least” $6 billion to $8 billion in waste in the Iraq campaign, and said $15 billion of waste found in the Afghan theater was probably “only a portion” of the total lost.

Even the military’s top-line budget number is an Enron-esque accounting trick. Congress in 2011 passed the Budget Control Act, which caps the defense budget at roughly 54 percent of discretionary spending. Almost immediately, it began using so-called Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), a giant second checking account that can be raised without limit.

Therefore, for this year, the Pentagon has secured $617 billion in “base” budget money, which puts it in technical compliance with the Budget Control law. But it also receives $69 billion in OCO money, sometimes described as “war funding,” a euphemistic term for an open slush fund. (Non-defense spending also exceeds caps, but typically for real emergencies like hurricane relief.) Add in the VA ($83 billion), Homeland Security ($46 billion), the National Nuclear Security Administration ($21.9 billion) and roughly $19 billion more in OCO funds for anti-ISIS operations that go to State and DHS, and the actual defense outlay is north of $855 billion, and that’s just what we know about (other programs, like the CIA’s drones, are part of the secret “black budget”).

In a supreme irony, the auditors’ search for boondoggles has itself become a boondoggle. In the early Nineties and 2000s, the Defense Department spent billions hiring private firms in preparation for last year. In many cases, those new outside accountants simply repeated recommendations that had already been raised and ignored by past government auditors like the Defense inspector general.

After last year’s debacle, the services are now spending even more on outside advice to prepare for the next expected flop. The Air Force alone just awarded Deloitte up to $800 million to help the service with future “audit preparation.” The Navy countered with a $980 million audit-readiness contract spread across four companies (Deloitte, Booz Allen Hamilton, Accenture and KPMG).

Taxpayers, in other words, are paying gargantuan sums to private accounting firms to write reports about how previous recommendations were ignored....

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Pentagon: Climate Change Is Real and a 'National Security Issue' 1/19.

Pentagon released a Congressionally mandated report (pdf) that warns flooding, drought and wildfires and other effects of climate change puts U.S. military bases at risk.

The 22-page analysis states plainly: "The effects of a changing climate are a national security issue with potential impacts to Department of Defense (DoD or the Department) missions, operational plans, and installations."

The DoD said it is working with other nations "to understand and plan for future potential mission impacts," adding that this is a "global issue."

The report, titled Report on Effects of a Changing Climate to the Department of Defense, reveals that two-thirds of the 79 mission-essential military installations that were reviewed are vulnerable to current or future recurrent flooding, more than half are vulnerable to current or future drought, and about half are exposed to wildfires. Six sites are also facing desertification and one is vulnerable to thawing permafrost.

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https://www.alternet.org/2018/12/meet-the-defense-contractor-trump-picked-to-take-over-the-pentagon/

Patrick Shanahan, the man who will become acting Secretary of Defense on Jan. 1, is best known in Washington circles for the decades he spent employed with one of America’s most powerful defense contractors — Boeing.

Shanahan began working for Boeing in 1986 and continued to be employed with them for more than three decades prior to his tenure at the Department of Defense. His most recent position there was as Boeing’s senior vice president of supply chain and operations, and he had also served on previous occasions as vice president and general manager of two of the company’s defense divisions, Boeing Missile Defense Systems and Rotorcraft Systems. During his time at Boeing, Shanahan earned the nickname “Mr. Fix-It” due to his history of turning around faltering programs like the 787 Dreamliner.

When Shanahan was being confirmed for his current position as Deputy Secretary of Defense, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., expressed concern about Shanahan’s background.

“I have to have confidence that the fox is not going to be put back into the henhouse,” McCain told Shanahan.

In response to this and other criticisms, Shanahan recused himself from all issues involving Boeing and signed an ethics agreement saying he would divest himself from all financial interests related to Boeing.

One edge that Shanahan will bring to his job, at least in terms of possibly getting it permanently, is that he has been supportive of Trump’s proposed Space Force, according to The New York Times. The newspaper went into detail about how Shanahan wound up supporting a policy that many critics ridiculed as patently ridiculous.

When it was first announced last spring, President Trump’s proposal for a new Space Force was resisted by the Pentagon and ridiculed by late-night comics who envisioned Luke Skywalker in the military. But it found a champion in Patrick M. Shanahan, the deputy secretary of defense who will soon become the Pentagon’s acting chief.

“We are not the Department of No,” Mr. Shanahan told Pentagon officials after Space Force was announced, arguing that it was a presidential priority and could help develop new military capabilities more quickly. “There is a vision, and it makes sense.”

The departure of Secretary of Defense James Mattis has raised questions about whether there will be anyone to rein in Trump’s worst instincts. Last year, when speaking to Salon about concerns that the president’s erratic nature could cause global conflict, former presidential adviser David Gergen — who worked for Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton — illustrated Mattis’ value through a story about Nixon’s presidency during the nadir of Watergate.

“Nixon was the commander in chief, and [former Secretary of Defense Jim] Schlesinger in effect was saying, ‘We’re going to override the commander in chief if in fact we think it’s coming from some sort of aggressive personality or he’s just pissed off. Whatever it may be,'” Gergen told Salon. “And I’ve asked people in the Defense Department, ‘Do you think there’s a similar arrangement today between [Secretary of Defense Jim] Mattis and the four-star generals?’ And the answer they’ve given me back — I don’t think there’s any reason to believe he’s giving such an order … [is] that if they’re given an order that they think comes from an erratic personality, they will double-check it with the secretary before they carry it out.”

https://www.americansecurityproject.org/congress-climate-security/

11/17

...Climate change is a threat to national security. The military and national security community has been preparing for the effects of climate change for over a decade. However, for several years, there has been notable push-back from Congress; as recently as 2016, the House of Representatives had voted along purely partisan lines to support an amendment prohibiting any action by the Department of Defense on climate change.

In a remarkable turnaround, the Republican-led Congress has now begun to ask for the military to plan for the effects of climate change, and President Trump has signed legislation requiring that they do so. Below, is a of list legislation considered in 2017, by their committee of jurisdiction.

House Armed Services Committee

In the House version of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) (H.R. 2810), the committee accepted an amendment sponsored by Congressman Langevin (RI) that stated that it was the sense of Congress that climate change “is a direct threat to the national security of the United States” and that military installations “must be able to effectively prepare to mitigate climate damage.”

The Amendment requires a report to Congress on vulnerabilities to climate damage in military infrastructure and how climate change is affecting missions like humanitarian assistance and disaster response. The report would detail how much addressing climate change is expected to cost the Department.

The amendment was accepted by voice vote in committee.

Full House of Representatives

When the full House considered the NDAA on July 13, Representative Perry offered an amendment that would strip the bill of any language on climate change, including the report. After floor debate that included discussions from Rep. Langevin, Rep. Peters, and GOP Representatives Stefanik and Ros-Lehtinen. The amendment to strip the climate security section failed by a vote of 185-234, with 45 Republicans voting against. This vote on the House floor was an important signal that Congress is ready to support the military’s actions in preparing for the effects of climate change.

House Appropriations Committee

In the report to accompany the 2018 Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Bill (H.R. 2998), the House Appropriations committee called on the Department of Defense to plan for the effects of climate change on its bases and its operations.

The report directs the Department of Defense to take into account the impacts of climate change, both “as a driver of instability” and as a threat to the military’s infrastructure. Noting the 2015 report to Congress about the national security implications of climate change, the report asks the Secretary of Defense to report back to Congress (not later than 120 days after enactment of this Act) on the “adaptation strategies developed for vulnerable installations.”

Furthermore, the report includes strong support for the Department of Defense to continue its work planning for the impacts of climate change. In a section titled “Climate and Security for Military Installations” the report states:

The Department of Defense must pay close attention to potential adverse impacts of climate change as a driver of instability. From sea level rise to increased drought and flooding across the country and the world, proper defense planning must include considerations related to climate change impacts. The Committee urges the Secretary of Defense to plan infrastructure and other projects using the best available data and science on climate change to mitigate risks to our armed forces serving domestically and abroad.

The Omnibus Appropriations bill in which this bill was folded into has not yet been signed into law.

Senate Armed Services Committee

In the reportto accompany the Senate version of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) (S.1519), the committee asks that the Secretary of Defense performs a “comprehensive threat assessment” and “implementation master plan” by March 1, 2018. The report looks both at how to address overseas stability issues as well as infrastructure impacts. The committee is worried about how climate change will threaten readiness for the military as a whole. One particularly interesting area is that it asks for the report to asses how “public-private partnerships” could be used to build resiliency.

House-Senate Conference

...

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waste/fraud:

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Pathologizing poverty has been a long-term, ongoing—and sadly, highly successful—project of the right in this country. From Scott Walker’s recent appeal to PEOTUS Donald Trump to allow the state of Wisconsin to drug-test food-stamp recipients, to House GOP plans to make it harder to qualify for aid, the goal is to punish and stigmatize the poor while eliminating programs that help lift them out of poverty.

Fox News essentially functions as the media arm of the Republican Party, and on Wednesday it did its part to undermine a program that helps 44 million poor Americans. To that transparent end, an episode of “Fox & Friends” featured a segment titled, “Food Stamp Fraud at All-Time High: Is It Time to End the Program?” The piece goes on to claim that USDA figures reveal “$70 million of taxpayer money was wasted in 2016 due to food stamp fraud.”

There are a number of problems with this episode, from the false fact buried in the query to the absurd answer it proposes. Obviously, no, we shouldn’t scrap a program that serves 44 million needy people, because that would be disastrous for families, children and communities around the country. Especially since it’s an argument based on lies and obfuscation, as Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum points out:

First, I have no idea where Fox's $70 million figure comes from—and I looked pretty hard for it. The Fox graphic attributes it to "2016 USDA," but as near as I can tell the USDA has no numbers for SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] fraud more recent than 2011.

Drum goes on to note that even if the imaginary figure were real, it would account for a tiny fraction of cases.

That's not all: $70 million is a startlingly low figure. In the most recent fiscal year, SNAP cost $71 billion, which means that fraud accounted for a minuscule 0.098 percent of the program budget.

So, less than 1 percent of program costs went to fraudulent cases. As Drum notes, that’s not to suggest that having $70 million go to people who weren’t eligible to receive the money isn’t problematic. But as the Washington Post points out, if we really wanted to make sure federal funds aren’t being wasted in unnecessary places, there are a few other sites we might want to look first.

Earlier this month, The Washington Post revealed that the Defense Department had deep-sixed recommendations that might save the agency up to $125 billion over the course of five years. “Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power,” our Craig Whitlock and Bob Woodward wrote. “But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.” That's a potential savings of $25 billion a year — 357 times the amount of waste in the SNAP program.

Another example. On Wednesday, we reported about a long-running scam operated by Leonard Francis, a Navy contractor who, over the course of several years, defrauded the government to the tune of $35 million.

“As of writing, Fox News has not questioned whether we should disband the Navy,” the Post wryly notes.

In fact, we can be 100 percent certain that the network would attack any messenger who suggests American military spending should be cut, though the U.S. spends more on its armed forces than the next eight nations combined. Yet Fox has no problem suggesting, based on flimsy evidence and illogical reasoning, that we should let millions of American adults and children go hungry. If the election of Trump wasn’t enough proof of the right’s complete and utter lack of morals, there’s new evidence emerging all the time.

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/fox-news-caught-using-out-and-out-lie-push-end-food-stamps

https://www.democracynow.org/2016/12/2/veterans_helped_trump_win_but_critics

univ of phoenix

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pivot to asia china

http://www.alternet.org/economy/defense-department-ruining-america-big-budgets-militarization-and-real-story-behind-our-asia