How the American War Machine Is Sucking Up Vast Amounts of Cash to Screw Up the World | Alternet

President Obama and Senator John McCain, who have clashed on almost every conceivable issue, do agree on one thing: the Pentagon needs more money. Obama wants to raise the Pentagon’s budget for fiscal year 2016 by $35 billion more than the caps that exist under current law allow. McCain wants to see Obama his $35 billion and raise him $17 billion more. Last week, the House and Senate Budget Committees attempted to meet Obama’s demands by pressing to pour tens of billions of additional dollars into the uncapped supplemental war budget.

What will this new avalanche of cash be used for? A major ground war in Iraq? Bombing the Assad regime in Syria? A permanent troop presence in Afghanistan? More likely, the bulk of the funds will be wielded simply to take pressure off the Pentagon’s base budget so it can continue to pay for staggeringly expensive projects like the F-35 combat aircraft and a new generation of ballistic missile submarines. Whether the enthusiastic budgeteers in the end succeed in this particular maneuver to create a massive Pentagon slush fund, the effort represents a troubling development for anyone who thinks that Pentagon spending is already out of hand.

Mind you, such funds would be added not just to a Pentagon budget already running at half-a-trillion dollars annually, but to the actual national security budget, which is undoubtedly close to twice that. It includes items like work on nuclear weapons tucked away at the Department of Energy, that Pentagon supplementary war budget, the black budget of the Intelligence Community, and war-related expenditures in the budgets of the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Homeland Security.

Despite the jaw-dropping resources available to the national security state, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair General Martin Dempsey recently claimed that, without significant additional infusions of cash, the U.S. military won’t be able to “execute the strategy” with which it has been tasked. As it happens, Dempsey’s remark unintentionally points the way to a dramatically different approach to what’s still called “defense spending.” Instead of seeking yet more of it, perhaps it’s time for the Pentagon to abandon its costly and counterproductive military strategy of “covering the globe.”

A Cold War Strategy for the Twenty-First Century

Even to begin discussing this subject means asking the obvious question: Does the U.S. military have a strategy worthy of the name? As President Dwight D. Eisenhower put it in his farewell address in 1961, defense requires a “balance between cost and hoped for advantage” and “between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable.” Eisenhower conveniently omitted a third category: things that shouldn’t have been done in the first place -- on his watch, for instance, the CIA’s coups in Iran and Guatemala that overthrew democratic governments or, in our century, the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. But Eisenhower’s underlying point holds. Strategy involves making choices. Bottom line: current U.S. strategy fails this test abysmally.

Despite the obvious changes that have occurred globally since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military is still expected to be ready to go anywhere on Earth and fight any battle. The authors of the Pentagon’s key 2014Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), for instance, claimed that its supposedly “updated strategy” was focused on “twenty-first-century defense priorities.” Self-congratulatory rhetoric aside, however, the document outlined an all-encompassing global military blueprint whose goals would have been familiar to any Cold War strategist of the latter half of the previous century. With an utter inability to focus, the QDR claimed that the U.S. military needed to be prepared to act in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, the Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. In addition, plans are now well underway to beef up the Pentagon’s ability to project power into the melting Arctic as part of a global race for resources brewing there.

Complete story at - How the American War Machine Is Sucking Up Vast Amounts of Cash to Screw Up the World | Alternet

NATO’s 20-Year Campaign To Find An Enemy And Weapons Market For The Military-Industrial Complex | David Stockman's Contra Corner

By Raúl Ilargi Meijer at The Automatic Earth

As the first subglacial eruption has been registered in the Barbardunga volcano, and there are earthquakes in the region about every minute, a German magazine reports that Berlin (or, actually, even Bonn) has been spying on NATO partners like Turkey for decades. Which is funny, because I was just wondering – with a degree of suspicion – where and how Merkel gets her information.

She’s in Kiev calling for a ceasefire – which at least is a step up from what Washington is doing -, but says that first the border between Ukraine and Russia needs to be sealed off so no more support for the rebels can be smuggled in. See, I’m getting the idea that perhaps Angela relies for these kinds of claims on information she gets from NATO, who in turn get it from Kiev. Which has proven to be the most unreliable source of information in a long time.

On Tuesday, presidents Putin and Poroshenko, and some EU leaders, will meet in Minsk, Belarus, for discussions on the ceasefire. It’s starting to look like “our” side is going into the talks with so many demands, and of such obviously impossible nature for Putin, that they will kill any serious discussion before it’s even started.

Over the past few days, NATO has claimed that the Russian aid convoy, which returned home on Saturday without any incidents, was a Trojan horse, “a disguised attempt to reinforce separatist forces”. And that the Russians are shelling the Ukraine army both cross-border and from within Ukraine. And that there are huge troop concentrations and movements happening at the Russian side of the border. And that Russia is delivering weapons and mercenaries into Ukraine. These are all things that Ukraine claimed first, and NATO simply repeated. And, you know what’s coming next, for none of it has one single piece of evidence been presented. Something we’ve long since ceased to expect from Kiev.

But NATO itself has the technology, the ability to find and present evidence. And the obligation to us, the people who pay for its entire apparatus, do so prior to making any claims. So why does it simply parrot Kiev claims, and in very aggressive language to boot, instead of finding its own truths, and present us with proof? I’m guessing it’s a combination of the proof simply not being there, and the same hubris that’s prevalent in Washington.

The Ukraine army claimed yesterday that the returning aid convoy trucks had taken ‘equipment from a factory in Luhansk that makes firearm magazines and a Topaz plant that produces radars’. And taken it back with them to Russia. They gave no reason why this would have been done, nor, once again, any proof that it happened at all. Inspections of the trucks as they crossed back over the border showed nothing.

Complete story at - NATO’s 20-Year Campaign To Find An Enemy And Weapons Market For The Military-Industrial Complex | David Stockman's Contra Corner

Anti- Imperialist U: America's global military empire

Global domination how the American military sees the world.

As you can see the military has carved up the world into a number of Commands.

Southcom despite the fact that most of Latin America is no longer under total US control Southcom remains. US military influence is largely based in failed narcostates like Columbia, Guatemala and Honduras this should come as no surprise to those familiar with America's longterm alliances with drug traffickers all over the world from the KMT in the 40's to Al Qaeda today. Today America is using Columbia in an attempt to destroy Venezuela. Guatemala and Columbia also have some of the worst human rights track records in the world. Guatemala laboratory of imperialism was the victim of a CIA coup in 1954 the reason the government under Arbenz was attempting to buy unused land from United fruit (which owned a large portion of Guatemalan land) and give it to peasants. Unfortunately for him the Dulles brothers a CIA Director and Secretary of state were closely connected to United Fruit. He was overthrown and replaced by a series of military dictators who waged a war of extermination on the Guatemalan people especially the Maya. This sort of thing happened a lot. America provided training and indoctrination to all of Latin America's military forces then it let them loose to overthrow their own governments, torture, kill and terrorize their populace. In Chile for example it could be fatal for a man to have long hair (it was the 70's) or for women to wear pants.

Africom was founded in 2007 to train the military forces of African nations and turn the entire military of the continent on it's own people. Of course this process went by other names prior to 2007. For example the US provided training to the RPF before their invasion of Rwanda, and also before their invasion of Congo. Death toll so far 10 million. One way to spot a future hotspot is any country like Libya or Eritrea that is not part of Africom.

It says alot about America's relationship with it's allies that the head of Eucom is almost always promoted from Southcom. Who knows those Europeans might get funny ideas like flirting with communism better safe then sorry. In Greece for example the US backed a murderous Junta known as the cololonels. Thus a tour of duty supervising torture and murder in South America is rewarded with the Command of Eu forces. Also notice the 3 separate commands covering Eurasia the major goal of US policy is to prevent Eurasian integration. Also note how Russia is covered even though they are not our allies. I guess even Imperialists have gotta dream sometimes.

Centcom is the one that get's all the press, well not the command itself but all it's wars. It is responsible for intervening in the US created arc of crisis. This arc stretches across southwest Asia (the middle east) and through central Asia. In other words from Egypt in north Africa (for some reason imperialists hate the idea that Egypt is in Africa.) all the way to Pakistan in the east. Centcom is responsible for waging war on Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen. In the great game this is the big Prize. According to strategic thinkers whoever controls central Asia can control Eurasia. Whoever can control Eurasia controls the world island (Europe, Asia, Africa.) Whoever controls the world island controls the world.

Complete story at - Anti- Imperialist U: America's global military empire

U.S. Officials Back Abe’s Military Push - Japan Real Time - WSJ

The U.S. on Monday endorsed Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s effort to expand the role of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, saying it would help the U.S.-Japan alliance keep the peace in the Asia-Pacific region.

The statements came ahead of President Barack Obama’s visit to Japan from Wednesday to Friday.

Mr. Abe has expressed a desire to reinterpret Japan’s constitution and permit the country to exercise its right of “collective self-defense,” meaning Japan could assist allies in a conflict even if it wasn’t directly attacked.

In Washington, Pentagon officials have encouraged such efforts, arguing that Tokyo needs to do more to balance China’s investment in its armed forces.

Complete story at - U.S. Officials Back Abe’s Military Push - Japan Real Time - WSJ