- America: "Indispensable Nation" No More?
Authored by Andrew Bacevich via The American Conservative,
Rather than seeing ‘far into the future,’ American elites have struggled to discern what might happen next week…
“Only those of us who were born under Queen Victoria,” wrote Ronald Knox, “know what it feels like to assume, without questioning, that England is permanently top nation, that foreigners do not matter, and that if worst comes to the worst, Lord Salisbury will send a gunboat.”
Knox offered this trenchant observation, redolent with irony and perhaps tinged with regret, not as a policymaker or strategic thinker, but from the vantage point of a clergyman. From the 1920s through the 1950s, Monsignor Knox was the most famous and influential Catholic priest in all of Great Britain. As such, he entertained a distinct perspective on what actually qualifies as permanent and what merely offers the appearance.
While perhaps using different terms—our preference is for dispatching nuclear aircraft carriers rather than gunboats—Americans born after World War II came into adulthood imbued with precisely the same sentiment about their own country. From the mid-1940s onward, the primacy of the United States was assumed as a given. History had rendered a verdict: we—not the Brits and certainly not the Germans, French, or Russians—were number one, and, more importantly, were meant to be. That history’s verdict might be subject to revision was literally unimaginable, especially to anyone making a living in or near Washington, D.C.
If doubts remained on that score, the end of the Cold War removed them. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, politicians, journalists, and policy intellectuals threw themselves headlong into a competition over who could explain best just how unprecedented, how complete, and how wondrous was the global preeminence of the United States.
Choose your own favorite post-Cold War paean to American power and privilege. Mine remains Madeleine Albright’s justification for some now-forgotten episode of armed intervention, uttered 20 years ago when American wars were merely occasional (and therefore required some nominal justification) rather then perpetual (and therefore requiring no justification whatsoever).
“If we have to use force,” Secretary of State Albright announced on morning television in February 1998, “it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”
Back then, it was Albright’s claim to American indispensability that stuck in my craw. Yet as a testimony to ruling class hubris, the assertion of indispensability pales in comparison to Albright’s insistence that “we see further into the future.”
In fact, from February 1998 down to the present, events have time and again caught Albright’s “we” napping. The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the several unsuccessful wars of choice that followed offer prime examples. But so too did Washington’s belated and inadequate recognition of the developments that actually endanger the wellbeing of 21st-century Americans, namely climate change, cyber threats, and the ongoing reallocation of global power prompted by the rise of China. Rather than seeing far into the future, American elites have struggled to discern what might happen next week. More often than not, they get even that wrong.
Like some idiot savant, Donald Trump understood this. He grasped that the establishment’s formula for militarized global leadership applied to actually existing post-Cold War circumstances was spurring American decline. Certainly other observers, including contributors to this publication, had for years been making the same argument, but in the halls of power their dissent counted for nothing.
Yet in 2016, Trump’s critique of U.S. policy resonated with many ordinary Americans and formed the basis of his successful run for the presidency. Unfortunately, once Trump assumed office, that critique did not translate into anything even remotely approximating a coherent strategy. President Trump’s half-baked formula for Making America Great Again—building “the wall,” provoking trade wars, and elevating Iran to the status of existential threat—is, to put it mildly, flawed, if not altogether irrelevant. His own manifest incompetence and limited attention span don’t help.
So the nation today finds itself in an interesting predicament. The media elites that drive the national conversation have reached the conclusion that nothing surpasses in importance Trump’s removal from office. The midterm elections that returned the Democrats to power in the House have heightened expectations of the Trump era coming to an end. This has injected into the early maneuvering for the 2020 presidential election a palpable sense of urgency. Sensing opportunity, candidates rush to join the competition. The field promises to be a crowded one.
Among progressives, the presence of women, people of color, and at least one gay person in the race suggests that something of epic importance is about to unfold. Maybe so. But here’s one thing that’s likely to be missing: any serious assessment of the costs and consequences of recent policies formulated pursuant to the insistence that the United States is, as Monsignor Knox put it, “permanently top nation.”
The gatekeepers of the orthodoxy, united in denouncing Trump, will not permit any such assessment. So the coming campaign will no doubt be entertaining. In some respects, it may also be enlightening. But in all likelihood, it will leave untouched the basic premises of U.S. policy—the bloated military budget, the vast empire of bases, the penchant for interventionism, all backed by the absurd claims of American exceptionalism voiced by the likes of Madeleine Albright and her kindred spirits.
When Ronald Knox was born, Queen Victoria presided over an empire on which the sun never set. By the time he died during the reign of Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter, that empire had vanished. Funny how quickly these things can happen.
- Navy's New "Robot Wolfpack" Of Orca Submarines Will Be Ready For War
In a modernization effort, the US Navy is adding a fleet of autonomous submarines with the purchase of four of Boeing’s Orca Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (XLUUVs) that will become multi-mission for the service, according to the US Naval Institute.
Last Wednesday, the Navy awarded Boeing a $43 million deal to manufacture four of the 51-foot Orca XLUUVs capable of traveling 6,500 nautical miles unaided.
The service is eyeing the submarine for “robot wolfpacks” of remotely-operated vessels to conduct anti-submarine warfare, electronic warfare, mine countermeasures, and strike missions.
“We are pleased with the Navy’s decision to award Boeing a contract to build and deliver four Orca Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicles, and are committed to providing this important autonomous undersea capability to meet the Navy’s unique mission needs,” the company said in a Thursday statement to USNI News.
The Orca is a fully autonomous diesel-electric submarine launched and recovered from a naval port. With a range of 6,500 nautical miles, the vessel can run for weeks at a time. The sub is enormous, in terms of a robot submarine, measures 51 by 8.5 by 8.5 feet and weighs 50 tons.
The sub features a high-tech inertial navigation system, depth sensors, and can surface to transmit data back to base. The vessel can dive to a maximum depth of 11,000 feet and has a top speed of eight knots.
One crucial piece of the sub is the payload system that allows it to haul up to eight tons in an internal cargo bay that measures 34 feet.
Popular Mechanics points out, the sub’s modular design and cheap price tag make the vessel a potential game-changer for the Navy.
Orca could even pack a Mk. 46 lightweight torpedo to take a shot at an enemy sub itself. It could also carry heavier Mk. 48 heavyweight torpedoes to attack surface ships, or even conceivably anti-ship missiles. Orca could drop off cargos on the seabed, detect, or even lay mines. The modular hardware payload system and open architecture software ensures Orca could be rapidly configured based on need.
This sort of versatility in a single, low-cost package is fairly unheard of in military spending. The nearest rough equivalent is the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship, which costs $584 million each and has a crew of 40. While LCS is faster, has the benefit of an onboard crew, and carries a larger payload, Orca is autonomous—and cheaper by orders of magnitude.
The purchase of these robot subs comes amid a push into autonomous vessels for the service. Last month, the Navy’s autonomous Sea Hunter ship, conducted its first surveillance mission from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and back without a crew onboard.
- Homeless Encampments And Luxury Apartments: Our Long Strange Boom
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
The cold truth is homelessness and soaring rents are the only possible outputs of central bank policies that inflate asset bubbles.
It’s been a long, strange economic boom since the nadir of the Global Financial Meltdown in 2009. A 10-year long boom that saw the S&P 500 rise from 666 in early 2009 to 2,780 and GDP rise by 43% has been slightly more uneven for most participants.
First and most importantly, household income hasn’t risen by the same percentages as assets, GDP or costs of big-ticket expenses such as rent, healthcare and college tuition. The broadest measure of income, median household income, has registered a 23% increase in the past decade, roughly half of GDP gains and a mere fraction of stock market and housing gains.
It’s well known income gains have skewed to the top, as revealed by Census Bureau data: Historical Income Tables: Household (US Census Bureau).
The bottom quintile (20%) registered income gains of 20% from 2009 to 2017, while the middle quintile (roughly speaking, the middle class) gained 25.5% and the top 5% enjoyed a 31.6% gain.
The raw numbers tell the story in a slightly more visceral fashion:
Upper limit of bottom quintile: $24,638 up 20% since 2009
Upper limit of middle quintile: $77,552 up 25.5% since 2009
Lower limit of top 5%: $237,034 up 31.6% since 2009
(the median household income is much higher–around $350,000 according to Household Income Quintiles the Tax Policy Center.)So the top 5% earn at a minimum 10 times the lowest quintile income and around 4 or 5 times the middle quintile income.
Here in Northern California, this has manifested in rapidly expanding homeless encampments a stone’s throw away from new luxury rental apartments charging $3,000 and up for one-bedroom flats and $4,000 and up for two-bedroom flats.
Meanwhile, the streets are filled with potholes and cracks. Maintaining streets–presumably one of the core missions of local government–is simply not being done in a timely manner. Major streets are in such disrepair that local businesses have taken to raising banners demanding “pave our street now.”
Let’s look at three charts of the long, strange boom from 2009: median household income (up 23%), national rents (up 31%) and rent in the San Francisco Bay Area (up 52.4%). Rents are double the gains in median household income in many cities.
The tens of thousands of pricey rentals being built in the region assume an endless expansion of well-paid techie jobs filled by young techies who are happy to sacrifice all hope of ever owning a home in the region ($900,000 for a 100-year old bungalow on a 5,000 square foot lot) or having a family unless they cash in on an IPO or marry a techie who already cashed in.
Sadly, the affordable housing fees collected by cities (up to $10 million per project) are not enough to address the unprecedented need for affordable housing and low-cost housing solutions for the homeless and near-homeless.
What’s behind the soaring cost of housing? It’s really pretty simple: the extended near-zero interest rates and unlimited liquidity pushed by the Federal Reserve as the “solution” for recession have impoverished the bottom 80% and put ownership of capital out of reach for all but the top 5%.
Though the mainstream media punditry and the political class will deny this, the cold truth is homelessness and soaring rents are the only possible outputs of central bank policies that inflate asset bubbles that inevitably outpace the wages needed to pay the soaring cost of rent and housing.
* * *
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- Video: Iran Hacks Into CENTCOM, Crashes MQ-9 Reaper Drone
Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps Aerospace Force Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh revealed on Thursday that several American unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) flying above Syria and Iraq were remotely commandeered by the Iranian Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC).
“Seven to eight drones that had constant flights over Syria and Iraq were brought under our control and their intel was monitored by us and we could gain their first-hand intel,” General Hajizadeh said in the Western Iranian city of Hamedan on Thursday.
Fars News Agency published a three-minute video taken on several different occasions by UAVs. Half of the content shows a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper hacked by IRGC electronic warfare forces, then flown into the ground. The last segment of the video shows an American air strike targeting the crashed UAV.
The footage below shows IRGC’s penetration into United States Central Command, could be seen as evidence that supports General Hajizadeh’s claims.
Iran has a long history of pioneering UAV technology. The country has manufactured UAVs since the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s.
Fars News Agency explains that drone technology in the country soared when it downed a US army RQ-170 Sentinel in Eastern Iran in 2011. One quarter later, Iran started production of its RQ-170 stealth aircraft after it reverse engineered the downed UAV. The Iranian RQ-170 conducted its official flight in late 2014.
The original RQ-170 was a stealth UAV manufactured for surveillance operations, while the Iranian version of the RQ-170 is armed with missiles.
In 2013, General Hajizadeh said Iran jumped three decades ahead in UAV technology after it reverse engineered American UAVs.
Fars News Agency said Iran has acquired a vast collection of downed American UAVs, including Scan Eagle, Raptor, M-Q9 surveillance. All drones have since been reverse engineered into new advance drones that are currently being deployed in Iran and in Syria.
The statement from General Hajizadeh and the video published by Fars News Agency came amid reports that the US had accelerated a top-secret program to destroy Iran’s missile program.
- Mapping the American War On Terror
Authored by Stephanie Savell via TomDispatch.com,
In September 2001, the Bush administration launched the “Global War on Terror.” Though “global” has long since been dropped from the name, as it turns out, they weren’t kidding…
When I first set out to map all the places in the world where the United States is still fighting terrorism so many years later, I didn’t think it would be that hard to do. This was before the 2017 incident in Niger in which four American soldiers were killed on a counterterror mission and Americans were given an inkling of how far-reaching the war on terrorism might really be. I imagined a map that would highlight Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria – the places many Americans automatically think of in association with the war on terror – as well as perhaps a dozen less-noticed countries like the Philippines and Somalia. I had no idea that I was embarking on a research odyssey that would, in its second annual update, map U.S. counterterror missions in 80 countries in 2017 and 2018, or 40% of the nations on this planet (a map first featured in Smithsonian magazine).
As co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, I’m all too aware of the costs that accompany such a sprawling overseas presence. Our project’s research shows that, since 2001, the U.S. war on terror has resulted in the loss — conservatively estimated — of almost half a million lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan alone. By the end of 2019, we also estimate that Washington’s global war will cost American taxpayers no less than $5.9 trillion already spent and in commitments to caring for veterans of the war throughout their lifetimes.
In general, the American public has largely ignored these post-9/11 wars and their costs. But the vastness of Washington’s counterterror activities suggests, now more than ever, that it’s time to pay attention. Recently, the Trump administration has been talking of withdrawing from Syria and negotiating peace with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Yet, unbeknownst to many Americans, the war on terror reaches far beyond such lands and under Trump is actually ramping up in a number of places. That our counterterror missions are so extensive and their costs so staggeringly high should prompt Americans to demand answers to a few obvious and urgent questions: Is this global war truly making Americans safer? Is it reducing violence against civilians in the U.S. and other places? If, as I believe, the answer to both those questions is no, then isn’t there a more effective way to accomplish such goals?
Combat or “Training” and “Assisting”?
The major obstacle to creating our database, my research team would discover, was that the U.S. government is often so secretive about its war on terror. The Constitution gives Congress the right and responsibility to declare war, offering the citizens of this country, at least in theory, some means of input. And yet, in the name of operational security, the military classifies most information about its counterterror activities abroad.
This is particularly true of missions in which there are American boots on the ground engaging in direct action against militants, a reality, my team and I found, in 14 different countries in the last two years. The list includes Afghanistan and Syria, of course, but also some lesser known and unexpected places like Libya, Tunisia, Somalia, Mali, and Kenya. Officially, many of these are labeled “train, advise, and assist” missions, in which the U.S. military ostensibly works to support local militaries fighting groups that Washington labels terrorist organizations. Unofficially, the line between “assistance” and combat turns out to be, at best, blurry.
Some outstanding investigative journalists have documented the way this shadow war has been playing out, predominantly in Africa. In Niger in October 2017, as journalists subsequently revealed, what was officially a training mission proved to be a “kill or capture” operation directed at a suspected terrorist.
Such missions occur regularly. In Kenya, for instance, American service members are actively hunting the militants of al-Shabaab, a US-designated terrorist group. In Tunisia, there was at least one outright battle between joint U.S.-Tunisian forces and al-Qaeda militants. Indeed, two U.S. service members were later awarded medals of valor for their actions there, a clue that led journalists to discover that there had been a battle in the first place.
In yet other African countries, U.S. Special Operations forces have planned and controlled missions, operating in “cooperation with” — but actually in charge of — their African counterparts. In creating our database, we erred on the side of caution, only documenting combat in countries where we had at least two credible sources of proof, and checking in with experts and journalists who could provide us with additional information. In other words, American troops have undoubtedly been engaged in combat in even more places than we’ve been able to document.
Another striking finding in our research was just how many countries there were — 65 in all — in which the U.S. “trains” and/or “assists” local security forces in counterterrorism. While the military does much of this training, the State Department is also surprisingly heavily involved, funding and training police, military, and border patrol agents in many countries. It also donates equipment, including vehicle X-ray detection machines and contraband inspection kits. In addition, it develops programs it labels “Countering Violent Extremism,” which represent a soft-power approach, focusing on public education and other tools to “counter terrorist safe havens and recruitment.”
Such training and assistance occurs across the Middle East and Africa, as well as in some places in Asia and Latin America. American “law enforcement entities” trained security forces in Brazil to monitor terrorist threats in advance of the 2016 Summer Olympics, for example (and continued the partnership in 2017). Similarly, U.S. border patrol agents worked with their counterparts in Argentina to crack down on suspected money laundering by terrorist groups in the illicit marketplaces of the tri-border region that lies between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.
To many Americans, all of this may sound relatively innocuous — like little more than generous, neighborly help with policing or a sensibly self-interested fighting-them-over-there-before-they-get-here set of policies. But shouldn’t we know better after all these years of hearing such claims in places like Iraq and Afghanistan where the results were anything but harmless or effective?
Such training has often fed into, or been used for, the grimmest of purposes in the many countries involved. In Nigeria, for instance, the U.S. military continues to work closely with local security forces which have used torture and committed extrajudicial killings, as well as engaging in sexual exploitation and abuse. In the Philippines, it has conducted large-scale joint military exercises in cooperation with President Rodrigo Duterte’s military, even as the police at his command continue to inflict horrific violence on that country’s citizenry.
The government of Djibouti, which for years has hosted the largest U.S. military base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier, also uses its anti-terrorism laws to prosecute internal dissidents. The State Department has not attempted to hide the way its own training programs have fed into a larger kind of repression in that country (and others). According to its 2017 Country Reports on Terrorism, a document that annually provides Congress with an overview of terrorism and anti-terror cooperation with the United States in a designated set of countries, in Djibouti, “the government continued to use counterterrorism legislation to suppress criticism by detaining and prosecuting opposition figures and other activists.”
In that country and many other allied nations, Washington’s terror-training programs feed into or reinforce human-rights abuses by local forces as authoritarian governments adopt “anti-terrorism” as the latest excuse for repressive practices of all sorts.
A Vast Military Footprint
As we were trying to document those 65 training-and-assistance locations of the U.S. military, the State Department reports proved an important source of information, even if they were often ambiguous about what was really going on. They regularly relied on loose terms like “security forces,” while failing to directly address the role played by our military in each of those countries.
Sometimes, as I read them and tried to figure out what was happening in distant lands, I had a nagging feeling that what the American military was doing, rather than coming into focus, was eternally receding from view. In the end, we felt certain in identifying those 14 countries in which American military personnel have seen combat in the war on terror in 2017-2018. We also found it relatively easy to document the seven countries in which, in the last two years, the U.S. has launched drone or other air strikes against what the government labels terrorist targets (but which regularly kill civilians as well): Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. These were the highest-intensity elements of that U.S. global war. However, this still represented a relatively small portion of the 80 countries we ended up including on our map.
In part, that was because I realized that the U.S. military tends to advertise — or at least not hide — many of the military exercises it directs or takes part in abroad. After all, these are intended to display the country’s global military might, deter enemies (in this case, terrorists), and bolster alliances with strategically chosen allies. Such exercises, which we documented as being explicitly focused on counterterrorism in 26 countries, along with lands which host American bases or smaller military outposts also involved in anti-terrorist activities, provide a sense of the armed forces’ behemoth footprint in the war on terror.
Although there are more than 800 American military bases around the world, we included in our map only those 40 countries in which such bases are directly involved in the counterterror war, including Germany and other European nations that are important staging areas for American operations in the Middle East and Africa.
To sum up: our completed map indicates that, in 2017 and 2018, seven countries were targeted by U.S. air strikes; double that number were sites where American military personnel engaged directly in ground combat; 26 countries were locations for joint military exercises; 40 hosted bases involved in the war on terror; and in 65, local military and security forces received counterterrorism-oriented “training and assistance.”
A Better Grand Plan
How often in the last 17 years has Congress or the American public debated the expansion of the war on terror to such a staggering range of places? The answer is: seldom indeed.
After so many years of silence and inactivity here at home, recent media and congressional attention to American wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen represents a new trend. Members of Congress have finally begun calling for discussion of parts of the war on terror. Last Wednesday, for instance, the House of Representatives voted to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, and the Senate has passed legislation requiring Congress to vote on the same issue sometime in the coming months.
On February 6th, the House Armed Services Committee finally held a hearing on the Pentagon’s “counterterrorism approach” — a subject Congress as a whole has not debated since, several days after the 9/11 attacks, it passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump have all used to wage the ongoing global war. Congress has not debated or voted on the sprawling expansion of that effort in all the years since. And judging from the befuddledreactions of several members of Congress to the deaths of those four soldiers in Niger in 2017, most of them were (and many probably still are) largely ignorant of how far the global war they’ve seldom bothered to discuss now reaches.
With potential shifts afoot in Trump administration policy on Syria and Afghanistan, isn’t it finally time to assess in the broadest possible way the necessity and efficacy of extending the war on terror to so many different places? Research has shown that using war to address terror tactics is a fruitless approach. Quite the opposite of achieving this country’s goals, from Libya to Syria, Niger to Afghanistan, the U.S. military presence abroad has often only fueled intense resentment of America. It has helped to both spread terror movements and provide yet more recruits to extremist Islamist groups, which have multiplied substantially since 9/11.
In the name of the war on terror in countries like Somalia, diplomatic activities, aid, and support for human rights have dwindled in favor of an ever more militarized American stance. Yet research shows that, in the long term, it is far more effective and sustainable to address the underlying grievances that fuel terrorist violence than to answer them on the battlefield.
All told, it should be clear that another kind of grand plan is needed to deal with the threat of terrorism both globally and to Americans — one that relies on a far smaller U.S. military footprint and costs far less blood and treasure. It’s also high time to put this threat in context and acknowledge that other developments, like climate change, may pose a far greater danger to our country.
- Trump And Kim Jong Un Impersonators Arrested Ahead Of Vietnam Nuclear Summit
Two men known for impersonating Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un were arrested by Vietnamese authorities ahead of next week’s nuclear summit between the two world leaders in the capital city of Hanoi, reports the Independent.
Kim lookalike Howard X claimed 15 officers had questioned him and Trump lookalike Russell White for almost three hours, warning them to drop their imitation act.
The pair have been making public appearances in Hanoi over the past few days, talking to media and taking pictures with amused onlookers. –Independent
The Hong-Kong born Australian Kim impersonator, whose real name is Lee Howard Ho Wun, explained what happened in a lengthy Facebook post, detailing their arrest shortly after shooting a segment for a local TV station. Authorities arrived at the station and detained the two men for a “mandatory” interrogation – essentially telling them to stop doing their act.
“We were taken to different parts of the room where we were interviewed separately and were asked to present our passports in regards to our visas, how we managed to obtain them, who we obtained them from and what our plans were for the duration of our stay. They then said that this was a very sensitive time in the city due to the Trump/Kim summit and that our impersonation was causing a “disturbance” and he suggested that we do not do the impersonation in public for the duration of our stay as these presidents have many enemies and that it was for our own safety” –Facebook
The two men were driven back to their hotel and told to remain there until authorities decide what to do about them.
“Although I am not surprised that I got detained for doing my impersonation in Vietnam, it’s still pretty annoying. What it shows is that Vietnam has a long way to go before they will be a developed country and I wonder if they ever will under these conditions,” wrote Lee.
“Trump,” whose real name is Russell White, confirmed that the two had been threatened with deportation, and were told to “stop doing the impersonation or we will kick you out of the country,” according to AFP.
Howard X was also questioned by Singaporean immigration authorities when he and his colleague appeared in the city-state for the first Kim-Trump summit last June.
He also showed up at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, where he danced in front of an appalled North Korean cheer squad before security officials hauled him away. –Independent
The real Trump and Kim will meet in Hanoi on February 27 and 28 where they will discuss North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
- US Military's Anti-Drug Campaign In Afghanistan Ends In Failure
Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,
Hundreds of airstrikes failed to curb opium trade…
The Trump Administration’s attempt to curb the Afghanistan opium trade with hundreds of military strikes against “drug labs” has come to an end a little over a year after it began. Officials have concluded it is a failure.
“The fight against illicit narcotics does not appear to be a consistent priority either for the international community or the Afghan government.”
“To put it bluntly,” SIGAR has said, “these numbers spell failure.”
The Pentagon had previously claimed that the airstrikes had cost the Taliban an estimated $42 million over the year. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction expressed doubt about this, noting that “no ground verification takes place” and that no efforts are made to determine what was actually destroyed.
This has been the go-to strategy for US airstrikes worldwide, with officials not following up on strikes in some cases to avoid creating a paper trail on civilians killed. In the case of Afghanistan, however, it may be that what they hoped they were destroying was more important than what they expected to find if they actually looked.
Yet even the $42 million estimate, for several hundred airstrikes, is not only a bad return on the massive cost of such a campaign, but also a paltry amount of the estimated overall drug trade flowing through Afghanistan.
- Microsoft Workers Revolt Over $480 Million Defense Contract
18 years after Microsoft’s Halo began training kids to shoot bad guys using a heads-up display (HUD), dozens of Microsoft employees have signed a petition against the development of Halo-esque augmented reality HUDs for the US Army, reports CNBC.
HoloLens is one of the leading consumer-grade headsets, however with only 50,000 units sold as of last November, it has yet to find a large-scale consumer application.
The contract, awarded last November, could eventually lead to the military purchasing more than 100,000 headsets that project holographic images into the wearer’s field of vision in order to “increase lethality by enhancing the ability to detect, decide and engage before the enemy,” according to a government description of the program.
“Augmented reality technology will provide troops with more and better information to make decisions. This new work extends our longstanding, trusted relationship with the Department of Defense to this new area,” a Microsoft spokesman said in a November statement to Bloomberg.
The U.S. Army and the Israeli military have already used Microsoft’s HoloLens devices in training, but plans for live combat would be a significant step forward. –Bloomberg
The contract was awarded to Microsoft through a 25-company bidding process designed to encourage the Army to ink deals with companies that aren’t longstanding defense contractors. Other companies interested in the deal were Booz Allen Hamilton (of Edward Snowden fame), Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
An attendee wears a HoloLens headset at SXSW. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg Microsoft employees doth protest
“We are a global coalition of Microsoft workers, and we refuse to create technology for warfare and oppression,” reads a letter signed by more than 50 Microsoft employees after it began to circulate on Friday.
“We are alarmed that Microsoft is working to provide weapons technology to the US Military, helping one country’s government ‘increase lethality’ using tools we built. We did not sign up to develop weapons, and we demand a say in how our work is used,” the letter goes on to say.
The letter, addressed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and president and chief legal officer Brad Smith, notes that the company has previously licensed technology to the military – including HoloLens for use in training – but has never before “crossed the line into weapons development”.
It adds that the program, officially called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, turns “warfare into a simulated ‘video game,’ further distancing soldiers from the grim stakes of war and the reality of bloodshed.” –CNBC
The employees have demanded that Microsoft cancel the IVAS contract, cease all work on defense technology and create a public policy clarifying these commitments. The letter also demands an independent ethics review board to ensure compliance.
“A lot of people feel uncomfortable about being involved in war-related business or producing weapons that hurt other people,” said one Microsoft employee who was not authorized to speak on the record. “To me, it’s a basic violation of Microsoft’s mission statement to empower every person and organization on the planet to do more.”
“Although I believe in security and military action for a morally justifiable cause, I take issue with the language of ‘lethality’,” said software developer Monte Michaelis – who worked on HoloLens for two years before leaving Microsoft in 2018.
“There are appropriate applications for mixed reality in a military setting, but I would not want to be designing an experience where my goal was to more efficiently kill people.”
As CNBC notes, the letter comes just days before Microsoft is expected to roll out HoloLens 2 – which is expected to be lighter, more comfortable, and contain an upgraded display.
Last June, over 100 Microsoft employees protested the company’s project for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – demanding that the company immediately stop working with the agency.
- Americans Call Their Government America's Top Problem
Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
On February 18th, Gallup bannered “Record High Name Government as Most Important Problem” and reported that, out of a list of 47 national “problems,” the top ten that were selected (and the percentage of respondents who selected each) were:
More than a third of Americans think that “The government/Poor leadership” is the “Top Problem” in America.
That’s almost twice the percentage who listed the second-from-top option, “Immigration,” as being this.
In turn, the third-most-frequently chosen option was “Healthcare,” mentioned by a third as many respondents as listed “Immigration.” (And healthcare in the United States is the worst and by far the costliest in all of the developed nations; so it’s a system that’sextraordinarily rotten and corrupt, and thus obviously an enormous U.S. problem.) (And immigration wasn’t high on these lists until Trump’s Presidency, which raised it from virtually nowhere — such as 5% in 2005 — to 19% today; so its being high on the list now is due only to the propaganda and not to any reality.)
Consequently, that this Government does not represent the American people, is a fact which is beyond any reasonable doubt.
How validly can one call such a country a “democracy,” if “democracy” is being defined as“government that represents the people”?
Here are other indications that the U.S. is, in truth, a dictatorship:
America has the world’s highest percentage of its people in prison — the highest percentage in prison of any nation on the planet. If this means that it’s a police-state, then the U.S. already is leading the world as being that. Every other nation can reasonably look down upon America as having the highest percentage of its residents being in prison, and this American condition is entirely inconsistent with the country’s being a democracy. Of course, the U.S. also allows the death penalty, but that punishment is rarely imposed now, because of the international embarrassment.
On 18 July 2018, Dave Lawler at Axios headlined “Comparing the popularities of leading world leaders”, and he reported that in the latest available polling within top nations, the job-approval of heads-of-state were: 55% Justin Trudeau (CA), 52% Shinzo Abe (JA), 48% Angela Merkel (GE), 43% Donald Trump (US), 40% Emmanuel Macron (FR), and 25% Theresa May (UK). Clearly, UK doesn’t now have an effective democracy, when its leader has only one-quarter of the public approving of her performance. That’s way below 50%. Macron’s 40% job-approval in France could also indicate that France is a dictatorship. Trump likewise. The others probably aren’t, or aren’t as much, dictatorships.
Earlier-polled national job-approval ratings showed that the national job-approvals of 7 leaders were, in order starting from the highest: Putin (83%), Trudeau (63%), Obama (56%), Merkel (54%), Italy’s Renzi (40%), France’s Hollande (12%), and Brazil’s Temer (11%).
Also earlier-polled were 10 leaders, and they rated, top to bottom, within their respective nations: China’s Xi, Russia’s Putin, India’s Modi, South Africa’s Zuma, Germany’s Merkel, Brazil’s Roussef, America’s Obama, Japan’s Abe, UK’s Cameron, and France’s Hollande.
All of those ratings were, of course, within nations. All of those polls sampled people only about their own nation’s leader. By contrast, approval-ratings worldwide for 10 leaders showed them, in order from highest to lowest, to be: Merkel, Macron, Modi, May, Xi, Putin, Salman, Netanyahu, Rouhani, and Trump. But those ratings aren’t relevant to the nations’ degree of democracy or dictatorship.
The United States is the only country in the world that has been scientifically analyzed regarding its degree of dictatorship or else democracy, and the results were clear that it’sa one-dollar-one-vote controlled country; it’s not actually controlled on a one-person-one-vote basis; it’s a dictatorship. In other words, it is an aristocracy — the richest rule here — it’s not a democracy, of any type.
I have elsewhere discussed a multitude of measures for the degree to which a given nation is either a democracy or a dictatorship. America doesn’t score high for democracy on any of them. The common references in the press using the term “democracy” to refer to America are lies. They may express accurately some of the formalities of democracy, but certainly not the realities (such as they claim to be doing).
In conclusion, one may say that internationally the aristocracy has imposed, in many if not most nations, the ways and means to corrupt the government so profoundly that the aristocracy actually reign, but this hasn’t happened uniformly throughout the world. And only in the United States has it been scientifically proven that the Government is a dictatorship. Elsewhere, there is at least the possibility to question whether a nation is dictatorial, and, if so, to what extent. But unquestionably the U.S. is. And, according to the latest Gallup poll on what the nation’s top problem is, a stunningly high percentage even of Americans are now sensing that this is true.
Short of performing a scientific analysis, however, the most reliable indicator of whether or not a given nation is a democracy might reasonably be that the higher the percentage of its people who are in prison, the lower is the given nation’s democracy-quotient, and that the lower this percentage is, the more democratic the government is.
After all, either a military dictatorship, or a police state, is clearly not a democracy, no matter how much the given nation’s constitution and other formalities say it is.
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