If President Reagan’s “law” is correct—that “as government expands, liberty contracts”—then further expanding Big Military can’t help but lead to additional reductions in our freedoms.
Roger Zakheim, director of the Ronald Reagan Institute in Washington, DC, which promotes the former president’s legacy, argued in a recent Wall Street Journal column that the United States needs to increase its annual military spending by at least 30 percent—from approximately 3.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to between 5 and 6 percent.
Zakheim, who also serves on the board of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), said the increase is needed to achieve a “margin of safety” for Americans against the growing threats from China and Russia.
In Zakheim’s telling, U.S. political leaders have made “common cause with the detente-pushing realists” while neglecting the investments necessary to modernize America’s armed forces. Unfortunately, this misses an important nuance. It is true that President Ronald Reagan was a proponent of strong defense, what he termed “peace through strength.” At the same time, he was a skeptic of big government and an opponent of top-down government planning.
The U.S. military sector—the same defense industrial complex the NDIA represents—is the poster child of both. It is a massive government enterprise grounded in top-down state planning by a small group of political elites. The Pentagon is the world’s largest employer. The military-industrial sector is characterized by entanglements between government and private firms, with the latter earning large profits from war preparation and war-making.
These entanglements are a hallmark of political capitalism—a system where political decision-making influences private decision-making and where private parties influence politics to further their interests, usually at the expense of taxpayers. The same you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours exists in other areas where the government is heavily involved as well, such as education and infrastructure, where private firms and other special interests spend millions of dollars attempting to influence policy for their own benefit in the name of some “common good.”
Which will be worse-unproven experimental drugs, burn pits, agent orange, cancer laden water at Camp Lejune, depleted uranium ammunition…with friends like the pentagram…
A new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) document obtained by The Dossier proves without a doubt that the U.S. Department of Defense did not have FDA approved COVID-19 vaccines in its possession — despite top DOD officials claiming otherwise — while unlawfully forcing service members to take the shots, under the very real threat of separation, court martial, and other severe ramifications.
The Dossier has verified the authenticity of the FOIA document, which is published below. We’ve redacted personal information.
Replying to a question about the Defense Department’s possession of Pfizer’s Comirnaty, which in the context of the question can be understood as the FDA approved version of the COVID-19 vaccines, the Defense Logistics Agency responds:
“We began shipping Comirnaty labeled vaccine in June 2022. From the week of June 13, 2022, through the week of August 29, 2022, we will have shipped 9600 doses (160 boxes) of vaccine.”
They did not have anything with a Comirnaty label until June 2022. That’s almost a full year after the DOD vaccine mandate went into effect.
This is an admission that service members were injected exclusively with emergency use authorization products. Today, active duty troops continue to be harassed, threatened, and punished for non compliance with the unlawful order.
It remains unclear what exactly the response of “Comirnaty labeled” means. It likely is a product of legal sleight of hand, as no FDA approved shot has become available to service members. The question about Moderna’s FDA approved Spikevax was not answered directly, so unfortunately, there is no value in that portion of the FOIA response.
Nonetheless, the Department of Defense is now on record admitting that ZERO FDA approved shots were made available to service members.
But that wasn’t what top Pentagon officials were saying at the time of the unlawful mandate.
“It is not at the level we would like to go into combat,” a US defense official told The Wall Street Journalof the Pentagon’s fast depleting stockpiles due to unprecedented defense aid to Ukraine, and stressed in particular that artillery ammunition is now “uncomfortably low”.
What’s more is that the shortfall will likely last into the future, given the norm is for new purchases and then manufacturers supplying the weapons to take a process of years.
“The U.S. has during the past six months supplied Ukraine with 16 U.S. rocket launchers, known as Himars, thousands of guns, drones, missiles and other equipment. Much of that, including ammunition, has come directly from U.S. inventory, depleting stockpiles intended for unexpected threats, defense officials say,” the report spells out.
In total so far, the US has pledged to send about $13 billion in arms to Ukraine after only six months of conflict. Given the alarm over Washington’s own dwindling stockpiles, the DoD is now opting to send 105mm rounds to Ukraine instead of the 155mm guided ‘smart’ artillery shells.
In early July, a senior US defense official told reporters in a briefing that the Ukrainian army was at that point firing about 3,000 155mm shells per day:
The revelation came amid questioning on the latest tranche of weapons and ammunition being sent to Ukraine, including, for the first time 1,000 guided 155mm ‘smart’ shells.
The official said despite the high usage rate, Ukrainian forces still have “substantial stores” of 155mm rounds and are far from running out with more rounds on the way. The U.S. and NATO allies have donated hundreds of thousands of 155mm rounds to Ukraine.
But already at this point it seems the Pentagon is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the rate of these ‘donations’.
The Wall Street Journal report indicated further that the US Army has requested of Congress another $500 million per year to enhance its own ammo factories. It remains that the biggest winner in all of this is the big defense contractors and manufacturers.
Meanwhile, other NATO allies are facing this same problem and worry, especially ‘neutral’ Germany which has dramatically shifted its historic stance on not sending weapons into foreign conflict zones. A number of German politicians have warned that Berlin should not be sharing weapons from its own arsenal, given that “Unfortunately, the situation here is such that we have an absolute deficit in our own stocks,”according to the recent words of Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock.
Speaking to German media agency ZDF, she said: “However, Germany must also think in the medium term. Due to the German arms problem, the armaments industry had to dedicatedly produce material for the Ukraine.”
Make no mistake about it: If China invades Taiwan, U.S. officials will play the innocent, just as they have done with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And they will then have three big crises — Russia, China, and the “war on terrorism” — to justify their permanent existence and their ever-growing taxpayer-funded largess.
Ever since the federal government was converted from a limited-government republic to a national-security state after World War II, America has lived under a system of ongoing, never-ending, perpetual foreign-policy crises. That’s not a coincidence. The national-security establishment — i.e. the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — need such crises to justify their continued existence and their ever-growing taxpayer-funded largess.
An interesting aspect of this phenomenon is that oftentimes the crises are ginned up by the national-security establishment itself. Once the crisis materializes, the Pentagon and the CIA play the innocent. “We had nothing to do with ginning up this crisis,” they cry. “We are totally innocent.”
After the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon and the CIA were desperately in need of a crisis that could replace the Cold War crisis, which they were convinced would last forever. That’s when they began going into the Middle East and killing people. When that massive killing spree, which included killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, ended up producing terrorist blowback, the national-security establishment had its new crisis — terrorism, which replaced communism as America’s big official enemy.
The “war on terrorism” replaced the Cold War’s “war on communism.” Americans began fearing the terrorists (and the Muslims) almost as much as they feared the Reds. With the new crisis, the national-security establishment, including its army of “defense” contractors, was assured of continued existence and ever-expanding taxpayer-funded largess.
Notwithstanding the ostensible end of the Cold War, however, the Pentagon and the CIA never lost hope of reestablishing Russia as an official enemy. But the challenge was: How to make Russia an official enemy again and how to get another ongoing crisis environment with Russia to keep the U.S. national-security establishment in high cotton?
President Biden on Wednesday announced new military aid for Ukraine worth nearly $3 billion, marking the single largest weapons package for Kyiv since Russia launched its invasion on February 24.
The Pentagon detailed the contents of the $2.98 billion package and said it demonstrates the US commitment to “supporting Ukraine over the long term.” The Pentagon said the new aid represents “multi-year investments to build the enduring strength of Ukraine’s Armed Forces.”
The new weapons package includes:
Six additional National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) with additional munitions for NASAMS
Up to 245,000 rounds of 155mm artillery ammunition
Up to 65,000 rounds of 120mm mortar ammunition
Up to 24 counter-artillery radars
Puma Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and support equipment for Scan Eagle UAS systems
VAMPIRE Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems
Laser-guided rocket systems
Funding for training, maintenance, and sustainment
The funds are being pulled from the $40 billion Ukraine aid bill President Biden signed in May. The weapons will be sent to Ukraine through a program known as the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), which allows the US government to purchase equipment for Kyiv from the arms industry.
The Pentagon said that the announcement marks the beginning of the contract process to purchase the weapons for Ukraine. Most weapons the US has sent to Ukraine were done under the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which allows President Biden to send arms directly from US military stockpiles. The new package brings the total of direct military aid for Kyiv since the war started to about $13.6 billion.
The majority of the equipment was tactical ground vehicles, such as MRAPs and Humvees
On Wednesday, the Taliban reportedly tested two US-made aircraft in flights over Kabul, a sign that they have the means to repair the equipment. The Taliban have said that they would integrate pilots, mechanics, and other specialists from the former US-backed Afghan army.
So…was this gross incompetence, the pentagram couldn’t be bothered as taxpayers would replace the equipment or is there a hidden agenda in arming the Taliban? Will the Taliban be the next Mujaheddin? We know what they morphed into.
The Pentagon’s Inspector General said Tuesday that the now-defunct US-backed Afghan government had over $7 billion in US military equipment at the time of its collapse last year and that most of it was seized by the Taliban.
“The DoD estimated that US-funded equipment valued at $7.12 billion was in the inventory of the former Afghan government when it collapsed, much of which has since been seized by the Taliban,” the Inspector General’s report said.
The report said the things left behind included “military aircraft, ground vehicles, weapons, and other military equipment.” The majority of the equipment was tactical ground vehicles, such as MRAPs and Humvees, worth an estimated $4.12 billion.
The Inspector General said that the US military “destroyed nearly all major equipment used by US troops in Afghanistan throughout the drawdown period in 2021.” Monday marked one year since the Taliban entered Kabul and the US-backed Afghan government officially collapsed.
On Wednesday, the Taliban reportedly tested two US-made aircraft in flights over Kabul, a sign that they have the means to repair the equipment. The Taliban have said that they would integrate pilots, mechanics, and other specialists from the former US-backed Afghan army.
The US had plans to increase funding for Afghanistan’s forces after the withdrawal as Washington expected to be funding a proxy war against the Taliban for years to come. But the plan failed as the US-backed forces agreed to surrender to the Taliban. Some of the military aid meant for Afghanistan has been sent to Ukraine, including Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters.
The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — i.e., the national-security branch of the federal government — own and control Congress — lock, stock, and barrel, just as they own and control the president and the Supreme Court.
Joe Biden wanted to make it clear that the Pentagon was opposed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan, a trip that was obviously intended to gin up a crisis with Red China.
The notion that the Pentagon opposed Pelosi’s trip is sheer nonsense. In my opinion, there is no possibility whatsoever that any member of Congress, and especially the Speaker of the House, would ever buck the Pentagon on anything. The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — i.e., the national-security branch of the federal government — own and control Congress — lock, stock, and barrel, just as they own and control the president and the Supreme Court.
This is not a new phenomenon. Once the federal government was converted to a national-security state, everyone in Washington knew that there was a new sheriff in town, one that wielded omnipotent, totalitarian-like powers, including the power of assassination. Given the overwhelming power of the new national-security branch of the government, the other three branches went into passive-and-support mode, especially after the Kennedy assassination in 1963.
But this phenomenon clearly existed prior to that assassination. That was reflected by the term that President Eisenhower initially planned to use — “the military-industrial-congressional complex” — in the warning he issued to the American people in his Farewell Address in 1961.
Longtime readers of my blog know that for the past few years, I have been recommending a book entitled National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon, who is professor of international law at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and who served as counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Everyone in America should read Glennon’s book. It is a true eye-opener as to how the federal government is run, especially in foreign affairs.
Glennon’s thesis is a simple one: The national-security establishment is in charge of the federal government. But it permits the other three branches to have the appearance that they are actually in control. The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA don’t care about appearances. It’s fine by them that Americans maintain the belief that the president, Congress, and the Supreme Court are in charge. What matters to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA is that actual power of being in charge.
If Glennon is right — and I have no doubt that he is — then there is a good possibility that it was the Pentagon that put Pelosi up to making her trip or at least quietly supported it, even while creating the false appearance that Pelosi was acting against the wishes of the U.S. military establishment.
Why would the Pentagon do such a thing? For the same reason the national-security establishment has been ginning up crises around the world practically since its inception. The more crises, the better, because then Americans get afraid and get convinced that a national-security state is necessary to keep them safe. More crises mean more power, influence, and tax-funded largess for the national-security establishment.
That’s what their old Cold War racket was all about — a perpetual crisis ostensibly based on a supposed international conspiracy supposedly based in Moscow in which the Reds were coming to get us. The more they made Americans afraid of the supposed communist threat to take over America, the more Americans supported them with power and warfare largess.
As I point out in my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, President Kennedy, having achieved a gigantic breakthrough after the Cuban Missile Crisis, decided to put an end to their Cold War racket and to move our nation in a totally different direction. He is the only president to have done so. No president since Kennedy has dared to take on the national-security establishment. Kennedy’s different vision for America’s future was why they needed to eliminate him and elevate Vice President Johnson, who had the same Cold War mindset as the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.
When they lost their perpetual Cold War racket, they turned to deadly and destructive interventionism in the Middle East, knowing that that would produce a new crisis, one that would be based on terrorist blowback. The initial blowback — e.g., the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and the attack on the USS Cole — was not sufficient to produce a gigantic crisis. But the 9/11 attacks did prove to be sufficient. At that point, the national-security establishment had a new, big, perpetual crisis, one based on “terrorism.” They were now off to the races again. That’s when they invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of people and wreaking massive destruction in those two countries — and producing what seemed to be a perpetual crisis based on a never-ending supply of new terrorists.
But they knew that their war on terrorism might ultimately begin to fizzle. The rather ho-hum reaction among many Americans to their assassination of 71-year-old al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri this week reflects the fizzling out of their war on terrorism. They need another big terrorist attack on American soil to get it ramped up again.
But it is now clear that they never gave up hope of restoring Russia and China as renewed official enemies. That’s what the Pentagon’s use of NATO to absorb former members of the Warsaw Pact was all about. The Pentagon knew that if NATO ultimately threatened to absorb Ukraine, it could get Russia to react, which Russia ultimately did with its invasion of Ukraine.
But clearly that’s not enough for these people. They need to ramp up another Cold War crisis with Red China, which would enable them to reinvigorate their old Cold War anti-communist crusade. That would enable them to trot out all of their old anti-communist mantras. That’s what President Trump’s trade war against China was all about. That’s also what Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan is all about. U.S. officials are dead-set on ginning up another crisis in that part of the world against another of their old Cold War official enemies. Don’t be surprised about additional crises involving North Korea, Cuba, and maybe even Vietnam.
The biggest mistake the American people have ever made — even bigger than having adopted the socialism of a welfare state and the federal income tax to fund it — was to permit the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state. So long as that conversion is permitted to stand, Americans will continue to live lives that are besieged by crises. To get our nation back on the right road — the road toward liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world — it is necessary to restore our founding government system of a limited-government republic, which necessarily means the dismantling and termination of the national-security establishment.
In just one year, more than $300 million earmarked for small businesses ended up going to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, L3Harris, and other top defense contractors, according to a recent report from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO).
Experts say this misuse of funds threatens to force more small companies out of business, eliminating competition and empowering defense giants to drive up prices.
And since the program uses middlemen, taxpayers end up paying extra for gear from companies that have no problem selling directly to the Pentagon.
The sheer size of the program also allows officials to make big claims about supporting small businesses while pumping money toward traditional defense giants, according to Robert Burton, a lawyer who previously served as a high-level federal procurement official.
“We don’t generally have $33 billion contracts over 10 years,” said Burton. “This one is special because the DoD is getting credit for all $33 billion going to small business.”
David Goodreau, the president of the Small Business Aerospace Industry Coalition, said small businesses that contract with the Pentagon are tired of big promises with little payoff.
“There’s all kinds of reasons to exercise supply chain contraction, but not at the expense of telling everybody in your marketing materials and at your conferences […] about how you’re doing more for small business,” Goodreau said. “It’s a lie.”
Not your mother’s small business
The Tailored Logistics Support (TLS) program is administered by the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which conducts acquisitions for military services. The program manages the $33 billion small business contract, which it subcontracts to four intermediaries. The resellers are in turn supposed to fulfill their orders by purchasing from small business manufacturers. But not all of that money is getting where it’s meant to go.
To understand how this is happening, let’s look at one of these four intermediaries: Atlantic Diving Supply (ADS), which gets the vast majority of its revenue through the TLS program. At first glance, it might be hard to consider ADS — a corporation with more than $1 billion in annual revenue — a “small business.” But it plays a key role in the program, according to Nick Schwellenbach, the POGO report’s author.
“The idea of the program is that all sorts of federal agencies […] can go to DLA and say, ‘We have some special ops guys, we have some troops who need knives or rifle scopes or new boots, and we don’t want to go through the traditional contracting process. We want to do this quickly,’” Schwellenbach said.
Intermediaries like ADS, which have the know-how to work smoothly with the Pentagon, can in turn seek out small businesses to produce the gear and then sell it to the government. As Schwellenbach argues (and the Pentagon implies in its marketing), contracting to small businesses speeds up procurement, generates new ideas, and keeps prices low by encouraging competition.
But there’s a loophole in the system: ADS can contract out to businesses of any size if it gets a waiver approved by the Small Business Administration.
Hundreds of thousands of service members who participated in the creation and expansion of the American nuclear arsenal might receive a new medal from the Pentagon. It’s the first real acknowledgement of how severe the impact of those tests were on the military.
A June 29 memo officially designated the director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency as overseer of the new honor. The “Atomic Veterans Medal” as being colloquially known as would be given, at the Department of Defense’s discretion to some of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who worked in non-combat nuclear tests.
It’s unclear exactly who will receive the new Atomic Veterans Commemorative Service Medal. These “Atomic Veterans” could number more than 600,000 according to advocates, although the conservative number of potential honorees is at least 225,000. As Military.com noted, veteran groups are pushing for eligibility to go to troops who, for instance, were involved in radioactive clean up in the 1970s. Per the new memo, the veterans must have served between 1945-1992, and meet certain criteria. These “radiation-exposed veterans” might be directly involved in the detonation of a nuclear weapon, involved in the clean up of a weapon or nuclear accident, or been exposed to radiation from the two bombs used in World War II.
The move comes after years of advocacy and pressure from veterans for recognition of both their work and the negative health impacts it caused them. Despite how important the nuclear arsenal is to the United States’ military power, and the massive testing and expansion of its nuclear program in the 1950s and 1960s, the military was wary to acknowledge the health damage posed by radiation and nuclear tests. The Pentagon has also been averse to acknowledging the harm Agent Orange and burn pits have done to soldiers.
As for the new medals themselves, the DoD memo describes a 4.45 cm in diameter gold disc, showing an eagle on a laurel, with an atom above and “atomic” and “veteran” written to each side. The back will read “awarded for unique service in support of nuclear deterrence,” which does not quite fit with what some of the eligibility categories entail. As many of these veterans have already died, the medal will be given to family members.
Service members exposed to radiation are eligible to some compensation through the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which was originally passed in 1990 and also covers civilians exposed to radioactive winds or who worked in mining radioactive ore. That was extended for another two years in June by President Joe Biden.
It’s unclear when the first medal will be given to atomic veterans, or how many will be among the first recipients.
For skeptics, I refer to an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal whose title pretty much tells it all: “High-Ranking Afghan Officials Escaped to Luxury Homes Abroad.” The opening paragraph states, “Some senior Afghan officials and their families spent millions purchasing expensive homes in the U.S. and abroad in the final years of the war, which became luxurious landings when they escaped the escalating violence in Afghanistan.”
In my blog post of May 18, 2022, I raised the possibility that the $40 billion aid package that Congress quickly approved for Ukraine was going to be used, at least in part, to pay multimillion dollar bribes to Ukrainian officials. After all, why else would the members of Congress, as well as the Pentagon’s assets within the mainstream press, react so vociferously against the idea of having the Inspector General monitor how the money is being used? And what better way to ensure that Ukrainian officials remain on board for perpetual war than the payment of bribes to officials serving in what is perhaps the most corrupt regime on the planet?
For skeptics, I refer to an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal whose title pretty much tells it all: “High-Ranking Afghan Officials Escaped to Luxury Homes Abroad.” The opening paragraph states, “Some senior Afghan officials and their families spent millions purchasing expensive homes in the U.S. and abroad in the final years of the war, which became luxurious landings when they escaped the escalating violence in Afghanistan.” The article then goes on to detail some of those “luxurious landings.”
Okay, yes, it is conceivable that those Afghan officials are all honest politicians and bureaucrats in an impoverished nation who became millionaires by dutifully saving portions of their government salaries.
But there is another possibility, a much more likely one in my opinion. Do you remember those planeloads of U.S.-taxpayer-provided hundred-dollar bills that Pentagon officials were shipping into Afghanistan? Do you recall how there wasn’t any Inspector General monitoring how all that moolah was being disbursed? I think there is a very good chance that it was being handed out to Afghan officials as bribes to bring them on board in support of the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country.
I’m reminded of the CIA’s plan to prevent Salvador Allende from becoming president of Chile after he received a plurality of votes in the 1970 presidential election. Since the election was thrown into the Chilean congress, the CIA decided to secretly bribe the members of the Chilean Congress with U.S.-taxpayer money as a way to induce them to vote against Allende.
The CIA also initiated a scheme designed to induce the Chilean national-security establishment to implement a violent coup that would keep Allende from taking office and, most likely, leave him dead in the process. As I detail in my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, when the overall commander of Chile’s armed forces, Gen. Rene Schneider, refused to go along with the CIA’s evil and illegal scheme, the CIA orchestrated his kidnapping/assassination, which left Schneider shot dead on the streets of Santiago.
Ironically, the strong public reaction in Chile against Schneider’s assassination doomed the CIA’s bribery plot, and the Chilean congress ended up confirming Allende as president. Three years later, the CIA’s regime-change operation succeeded when the Chilean national-security establishment, with the full support of the U.S. national-security establishment, took control over the government, leaving the democratically elected Allende dead in the process.
As I have repeatedly written, the war in Ukraine is not about freedom. It’s about membership in the old, rotten Cold War dinosaur known as NATO. Ukrainian officials were willing to sacrifice thousands of their citizens and the destruction of their country ostensibly for the sake of joining NATO. The question that obviously arises is: Was there something else — like the payment of multimillion bribes from U.S.-taxpayer-provided moolah — that induced crooked and corrupt Ukrainian officials to sacrifice their citizens and their country?
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