Tag: Pentagon

Congrats! You Now Have A Trillion!

For ages I and others have been bitching about the money that is blindly thrown at the Pentagon all in the name of ‘national defense’…..it has always been high and we have got nothing in return….we have a fighter plane that spends more time grounded than flying, we have a tank that no one wants and we have a fleet of Naval vessels that are already in mothballs waiting to become a fishing reef….wasted money and yet the money just keeps rolling in with little to no oversight.

The money in the budget for the War Department has continually gone higher and higher with every new budget and sometimes it gets billions it did not request because….well just because.

And the new administration is not different only this time around the amount cracks the trillion dollar barrier.

The White House released a budget plan on Friday proposing $1.01 trillion in military spending for 2026, a 13% increase from this year.

The proposal fulfills President Trump’s vow to bring the official US military budget to over $1 trillion for the first time. The increase in US military spending will include funding for President Trump’s plans for a major missile defense system for the US, which he has dubbed the “Iron Dome for America, which will likely kick off a new global arms race.

Despite the massive increase, Trump is facing pushback from some Republican hawks, who are complaining that the White House is relying on a reconciliation bill for some of the funds.

According to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the White House is asking Congress for $892.6 billion in military spending for fiscal year 2026, which is about the same as the 2025 budget. The remaining $119 will be authorized under a budget bill that Congress is currently working on.

The budget bill will include $150 billion in military spending that can be spent over the next four years, but under the White House proposal, it will mostly be spent for the 2026 fiscal year. Sen. Mitch McConnell complained in a statement that the administration wasn’t asking Congress to appropriate the entire $1.01 trillion.

“It is peculiar how much time the President’s advisors spend talking about restoring peace through strength, given how apparently unwilling they’ve been to invest accordingly in the national defense or in other critical instruments of national power,” McConnell said. “Make no mistake: a one-time influx reconciliation spending is not a substitute for full-year appropriations.”

The pushback from leading Senate Republicans suggests that Congress may draft a higher military budget than Trump requested. “Fortunately, Presidential budget requests are just that: requests. Congress will soon have an opportunity to ensure that American power – and the credibility of our commitments – are appropriately resourced,” McConnell said.

The US has never officially had a $1 trillion military budget, but the actual cost of US military spending has exceeded $1 trillion for years. According to veteran defense analyst Winslow Wheeler, based on the $895 billion NDAA, US national security spending for 2025 was expected to reach about $1.77 trillion.

(antiwar.com)

Is there any doubt that the War Department will not get their desire?

Maybe this was the reason for DOGE to help expand the spending by the most wasteful part of the government.

Do not fret over higher prices or education for your children or the poor’s plight we may get a new plane that cannot fly….rejoice….rejoice.

Wait a colossal waste of taxpayer money!

This does NOTHING to make America great again……but rather padding the pockets of the defense industry and the Congress they buy.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

Pentagon Does It Again

The War Department has wasted truckloads of money on weaponry…..the F-35 comes to mind (it is called a ‘flying brick’ because it spends more time on the ground than in the air)….wasted money that that cannot let go and just scrap the POS.

This and a story I read over the weekend reminds of a movie about the design of a new tank for our troops….the movie is called the Pentagon Wars and it describes the process of a new weapon with humor.

For those interested the movie is clever and can be watched here…..https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0144550/

The Bradley Fighting Vehicle project, already stalled in development for seventeen years and at the running cost of $14 billion is the charge of Major General Partridge. In an effort to curtail further excessive Pentagon spending, Congress appoints U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel James Burton to observe the Bradley’s field development and tests.

Burton delves into the extensive and protracted development history, beginning in the 1960s originally under design supervision of then Colonel Robert L. Smith, who quickly becomes frustrated with the continuous change of design by the higher ups, eventually leading to the Bradley being drastically changed from its original role as a light troop carrier into a bulky tank-like vehicle that can only carry half of its original capacity.

The report that I referred to is about a new tank that has a similar humorous outcome.

As the 101st Airborne Division prepared last year to receive their first M10 Bookers—armored combat vehicles designed specifically for infantry forces—staff planners realized something: eight of the 11 bridges on Fort Campbell would crack under the weight of the “light tank.”

It turns out that though the vehicle was initially conceptualized as relatively lightweight—airdroppable by C-130—the twists and turns of the Army requirements process had rendered the tank too heavy to roll across the infrastructure at the infantry-centric Kentucky post, and nobody had thought about that until it was too late.

“This is not a story of acquisition gone awry,” Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer, told Defense One. “This is a story of the requirements process creating so much inertia that the Army couldn’t get out of its own way, and it just kept rolling and rolling and rolling.”

It’s a twist on the classic Pentagon procurement snafu—a program that moves so slowly that it’s outdated by the time it reaches the field.

In this case, the Army knew early on that it wasn’t going to be able to make the thing it had set out to make, but it was bound and determined to make something. So it made something it doesn’t actually need.

https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2025/04/army-made-tank-it-doesnt-need-and-cant-use-now-its-figuring-out-what-do-it/404877/

Classic case of stupidity….wasting butt-loads of cash all in the name of national defense.

Can you now see the problem with the War Department and its defense industry co-conspirators?

On an unrelated topic….Hogsbreath (Hegseth)…..the idiot Donny put in charge of the US War machine….

Apparently he still using unsecured lines of communication and betting on sports.

Remember when defense secretary of the United States Pete Hegseth, the man at the center of all the “Signalgate” drama, accidentally texted a journalist about the need to maintain “100 percent OPSEC” about secret war plans?

As the New York Times reports, the same phone Hegseth used when he accidentally shared those covert military maneuvers is also his personal one. And embarrassingly, its number could easily be found online on a variety of public apps as recently as March, including WhatsApp, Facebook, Airbnb, and — we kid you not — a sports betting website.

“There’s zero percent chance that someone hasn’t tried to install Pegasus or some other spyware on his phone,” Mike Casey, the former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, told the NYT. “He is one of the top five, probably, most targeted people in the world for espionage.”

According to security experts, it’s not surprising that Hegseth’s personal number is on the web, since he was a private citizen before being sworn in. Instead, the former Fox News host’s staggeringly stupid mistake was using the same phone number to do all his official top secret military stuff, like announcing the details of an airstrike in Yemen against Houthi forces in a group chat that also had his wife and brother (we should clarify: that was a separate incident from when he accidentally leaked stuff to a journalist).

As the NYT notes, even low-level government employees are forbidden from using personal devices for work-related tasks — and here’s the guy in charge of the entire nation’s defense efforts, leaving it all out in the open.

https://futurism.com/head-pentagon-personal-phone

This is what we get when amateurs are allowed to govern….if these transgressions do not worry then you need to return to head in sand.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Feeding The Insatiable Monster

The monster in question is the War Department….while all departments of the government are being cut to the bone and valuable programs are being sidelined the Pentagon smiles and wants more money.

The eyes of a new generation were opened in an episode that seemed like dark science fiction for those of a certain age, and an unyielding nightmare regardless: a genocide streaming into smartphones around the world in real time. Many American eyes were opened for the first time to the reality not only in Palestine, but in the places in the world that are meant to be forgotten, where the U.S. and its allies may tread at their will and pleasure. At the center of this system of license and aggression is the Department of Defense, as it is now euphemistically named. What we call “defense” spending in the United States is actually spending on weapons and war-making, and it has continued its unabated rise in both red and blue presidential administrations.

The U.S. spends far more on its military than any other country – it spends more than the next nine countries combined, and as a share of GDP, its military spending far outpaces that of other rich countries in the G7 group. The Department of Defense is massive, “with $4 trillion in assets dispersed across fifty states and over 4,500 locations worldwide,” and its sheer size is at the heart of pathological accounting failures in recent years. Last November, the Pentagon flunked its seventh audit in a row, again failing to properly account for its budget – over $800 billion. A Stimson Center policy brief published last July called the Pentagon’s wild spending “a budgetary time bomb set to explode in the next twenty years,” noting the explosion in Pentagon spending in the years since 9/11. “Adjusted for inflation, defense spending has increased more than 48% in just the first 24 years of this century.” The U.S. imperial military is a truly global enterprise. According to data compiled by political anthropologist David Vine at American University, there were about 750 bases outside of the United States as of 2021, scattered throughout the world in 80 countries and colonies. Vine points out that given the “sheer number of bases and the secrecy and lack of transparency” around the information, a complete list is impossible:

https://original.antiwar.com/David_DAmato/2025/04/08/the-all-devouring-machine-pentagon-malfeasance-and-insatiable-empire/

Pentagon has no cuts and no problem getting more than they want…..

So far, the only agency that seems to have escaped the ire of the DOGE is — don’t be shocked! — the Pentagon. After misleading headlines suggested that its topline would be cut by as much as 8% annually for the next five years as part of that supposed efficiency campaign, the real plan was revealed — finding savings in some parts of the Pentagon only to invest whatever money might be saved in — yes! — other military programs without any actual reductions in the department’s overall budget. Then, during a White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 7th, Trump announced that “we’re going to be approving a budget, and I’m proud to say, actually, the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military . . . $1 trillion. Nobody has seen anything like it.”

So far, cuts to make room for new kinds of military investments have been limited to the firing of civilian Pentagon employees and the dismantling of a number of internal strategy and research departments. Activities that funnel revenue to weapons contractors have barely been touched — hardly surprising given that Musk himself presides over a significant Pentagon contractor, SpaceX.

(counterpunch.org)

Like I said all departments are suffering from the drag of Elmo and his scalpel (DOGE)…and yet the War Department is untouched by all these senseless cuts….they get money shoved up their butts without question…..to illustrate my point….

House Republicans will seek a $150 billion Pentagon spending hike as part of their party-line megabill, according to three people familiar with the process, granted anonymity to describe private deliberations, abandoning a lower defense target and aligning with plans set by their Senate counterparts.

The upward move by the House is a win for defense hawks, who have been pushing to use GOP’s control of Congress and the White House to maximize military spending.

The House Armed Services Committee will debate its portion of Republicans’ reconciliation package next week when lawmakers return from their recess and committees begin to advance their respective sections of the sprawling domestic policy legislation.

A budget framework that cleared both chambers earlier this month proposed $150 billion in additional defense spending on the Senate side, while the House settled for a lower $100 billion Pentagon goal. The instructions for House committees in the budget blueprint, however, can be waived with the same majority vote needed to pass a final bill.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/23/house-gop-pentagon-spending-bump-00307100

It is so sad that the rest of the country means so little to Little Donny and his GOP…..while children go hungry the defense industry gets everything they want, whether needed or not, just to keep the money rolling in for their campaigns (to me it is still a bribe).

When will people come first and not what the Fat Cats want?

Thoughts?

Side note–did you see that after 2 disastrous security breeches Hogsbreath has installed a new internet line to by-pass security?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had an internet connection that bypassed the Pentagon’s security protocols set up in his office to use the Signal messaging app on a personal computer, two people familiar with the line told the AP. Known as a “dirty” internet line in the IT industry, it connects directly to the public internet where the user’s information and the websites accessed do not have the same security filters or protocols that the Pentagon’s secured connections maintain. The existence of the unsecured internet connection is the latest revelation about Hegseth’s use of the unclassified app and raises the possibility that sensitive information could have been put at risk of hacking or surveillance.

What is this fool’s game?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Chaos In The War Department

+++Breaking News:  Pope Francis has died at ago 88+++

I said from the beginning when Hogsbreath was confirmed that the Pentagon was in than hands of an amateur and he seems to prove my prediction almost weekly.

After the firing of 3 of his most knowledgeable advisers the whole thing is going to crap.

The Pentagon is reeling as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faces growing instability within his ranks following the sudden departure of his chief of staff – the fourth staffer exit amid the fallout of the disastrous Signal chat leak.

…

t the center of the ongoing controversy is a Signal group chat – a secure messaging app known for its privacy protections – created by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz to coordinate US military responses to Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.

However, the group inadvertently included editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, raising immediate concerns over the exposure of sensitive and potentially classified information.

Hegseth and others shared detailed operational plans within the chat, including timelines and specifics about US military assets.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14627737/Pete-hegseth-pentagon-chaos-signal-chat-fallout.html

A good administrator would learn from his blunders but apparently Hegseth is not the sharpest pencil in the box…..

They are calling all this chaos ‘signalgate’……

Signalgate is expanding: Four people tell the New York Times that, in addition to the infamous Signal chat that inadvertently included a journalist, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also used the messaging app to send sensitive military information to his wife, brother, and personal lawyer. The sources say that on March 15, Hegseth shared essentially the same details of upcoming strikes on Yemen in the two separate Signal chats: one titled “Houthi PC small group” (created by national security adviser Mike Waltz) to which Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added, and another titled “Defense | Team Huddle” (created by Hegseth himself) that included the aforementioned trio along with others from his inner circle.

The sources say Hegseth created the “Team Huddle” group chat prior to his Senate confirmation, and that after he was installed at the Pentagon, several advisers encouraged him to move the chat to government channels, but he did not. Per the Times, the chat generally included “routine administrative or scheduling information,” and it’s not clear why the information about the Yemen strikes was shared there, but Hegseth’s inclusion of his wife and brother in his job has previously raised eyebrows.

Also included in the “Team Huddle” group chat were two of Hegseth’s senior advisers who were recently fired following accusations of leaking sensitive information to the media, accusations they denied in a public statement. The White House has decried the Times article as a “non-story,” insisting “no classified information was shared” and blaming the fired advisers for leaking the story to the newspaper, the AP reports. The chaos at the Pentagon has some speculating that Hegseth could be ousted soon, Axios reports.

Amateurs!  Can you see it now?

At what point is this juvenile person allowed to continue?

Please get rid of this clown before he does some real damage to this country.  (It may alreadsy be too late)

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

The One DOGE Missed

The now infamous DOGE is raising all kinds of chaos in DC….but the one place that needs slimming down and budget cuts is somehow missing from the long list of targets.

CDC slashed to the bone, IRS being attacked, Social Security under a cloud, etc etc….but what about the one department with the most obscene budget and little to no oversight…..the War Department?

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said Monday that the Pentagon will soon have its first $1 trillion budget despite the Trump administration’s pledges to cut government spending.

Hegseth made the announcement on X while sharing a video of President Trump saying that his administration approved a plan for a $1 trillion military budget. “Nobody’s seen anything like it. We have to build out military, and we’re very cost-conscious, but the military is something we have to build, and we have to be strong,” he said while hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump said he was “proud to say” it will be the biggest military budget “we’ve ever done.”

Hegseth wrote on X, “Thank you Mr. President! COMING SOON: the first TRILLION dollar [Defense Department] budget.”

Hegseth said the Pentagon would “spend every taxpayer dollar wisely,” but he is currently overseeing a massive bombing campaign in Yemen that’s failed to achieve its stated goal of stopping Houthi attacks and will soon cost over $1 billion in just a month of operations.

While the Pentagon has never had a $1 trillion budget, the actual cost of total US military spending has exceeded $1 trillion for years.

The 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which President Biden signed into law in December 2023, totaled $895 billion. According to veteran defense analyst Winslow Wheeler, based on the $895 billion NDAA, US national security spending for 2025 is expected to reach about $1.77 trillion.

Wheeler’s estimate accounts for military-related spending from other government agencies not funded by the NDAA, such as the Department of Veteran Affairs and Homeland Security. It also includes the national security share of the interest accrued on the US debt and other factors.

Trump and Hegseth’s comments suggest the president will request a $1 trillion NDAA for 2026, which would really bring total US military spending close to $2 trillion.

(antiwar.com)

Seriously?

This is obscene…..this is pathetic…..this is stupid.

Does this country need to spend $2 trillion on war prep?

I think not!

Thoughts?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Finally A Cut In War Spending?

I have been bitching about the money thrown at the War5 Dept for decades….there should be less of it and more spent helping the Average family….

Finally that amateur SecDef has stated that there will be some cuts to his budget…

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered Pentagon leaders to develop plans to make sweeping cuts to the Defense Department’s budget, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

According to a memo obtained by the Post, Hegseth’s order calls for an 8% cut to the Pentagon budget each year for five years. The Pentagon budget for 2025 is about $850 billion, and an 8% cut for five years would bring it down to roughly $560 billion, a reduction of $290 billion.

Hegseth wants the proposed cuts to be drawn up by February 24, and the memo included a list of 17 categories that would be exempt from the spending cuts.

The Post report said the exemptions include operations at the southern border, modernization of nuclear weapons and missile defense, and acquisition of submarines, one-way attack drones, and other munitions

(antiwar.com)

When I read the news I was impressed but that did not last very long….

Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert G. Salesses said in a statement on Wednesday night that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered a review of Pentagon spending to realign spending to fund priorities of the Trump administration.

The statement from Salesses came after a report from The Washington Post said that Hegseth ordered a plan to cut Pentagon spending by 8% each year over the next five years. But according to the statement from Salesses, the idea is to redirect spending and not actually make cuts to the budget.

“Secretary Hegseth has directed a review to identify offsets from the Biden Administration’s FY26 budget that could be realigned from low-impact and low-priority Biden-legacy programs to align with President Trump’s America First priorities for our national defense,” Salesses said.

“The Department will develop a list of potential offsets that could be used to fund these priorities, as well as to refocus the Department on its core mission of deterring and winning wars. The offsets are targeted at 8% of the Biden Administration’s FY26 budget, totaling around $50 billion, which will then be spent on programs aligned with President Trump’s priorities,” he added.

On Thursday, Hegseth said that the Trump administration would be taking $50 billion away from “woke Biden-era non-lethal programs and instead spend that money on President Trump’s America First, peace through strength priorities.”

…

Salesses said spending priorities from the Trump administration include the “Iron Dome for America,” referring to an order from the president to establish a major new missile defense system, a project that would be a boon for the weapons makers and likely start a new arms race. Trump has also backed a budget plan drawn up by House Republicans that would increase military spending by $100 billion.

(antiwar.com)

This is becoming all too familiar Donny makes a statement or one of his lackeys and then someone has to ‘clarify’ what was meant.

This is a perfect example of why you should not take news reports at face value there is always something hiding in the meat of the discussion.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Is This Assault On Free Press?

The Trump retribution continues.

Around every corner someone is bitching about the loss of a free press….the Right says the Left is doing it….the Left is accusing of the Right of assaulting the press on many levels….but now there is yet even more and it stems from the trump admin.

Four major news outlets will no longer have highly coveted office space at the Pentagon after the Defense Department released an internal memo announcing it’s giving their space to other outlets. CNN’s Haley Britzky posted the memo on X that said NBC News, the New York Times, NPR, and Politico will each need to vacate their offices at the Pentagon on Feb. 14 to give space to the New York Post, One America News Network, Breitbart News Network, and the Huffington Post. As CNN reports, three of the outlets are relatively small and conservative organizations that are openly pro-Trump.

The internal memo said the Pentagon calls the plan its “annual media rotation program,” and spokesman Jonathan Ullyot said the outgoing outlets will remain full members of the Pentagon Press Corps with “the same media access” as before. But they won’t have office space in the building this year. Ullyot said the rotation program will “broaden access to the limited space of the Correspondents’ Corridor to outlets that have not previously enjoyed the privilege and journalistic value of working from physical office space in the Pentagon.” Officials chose one outlet each from print, online, radio, and TV mediums to give up their space for one year.

Members of the Pentagon press corps can only speculate if the decision is related to intense coverage of the Senate confirmation of Pete Hegseth as defense secretary last week. Hegseth is a former Fox News host, and his confirmation followed weeks of coverage about allegations of sexual abuse and heavy drinking. NBC News, which had reported on the allegations, released a statement saying, “We’re disappointed by the decision to deny us access to a broadcasting booth at the Pentagon that we’ve used for many decades. Despite the significant obstacles this presents to our ability to gather and report news in the national public interest, we will continue to report with the same integrity and rigor NBC News always has.”

You were wondering when Trump would make his move….well wonder no more.

Making sure the Liberal publications are excluded from the press conferences for the Pentagon.

Supposedly it is for only a year but my bet it will be continuing even after the year.

Controlling the narrative has always been Trump’s aim and now he has started…. where will it end?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

One More Reason To Reform The War Department

I know I am one of the biggest critics of the War Department but I do have my reasons for my dislike of the organization.

The latest audit of the Pentagon shows that they piss money away and are not held accountable for their carelessness.

The Pentagon announced late last week that it failed its seventh consecutive audit as the sprawling, profiteering-ridden department wasn’t able to fully account for its trillions of dollars in assets.

As with its past failures to achieve a clean audit, the U.S. Defense Department attempted to cast the 2024 results in a positive light, with the Pentagon’s chief financial officer declaring in a statement that “momentum is on our side.”

The Pentagon is the largest U.S. federal agency and is responsible for roughly half of the government’s annual discretionary spending, with its yearly budget approaching $1 trillion despite long-standing concerns about the department’s inability to account for vast sums of money approved by lawmakers and presidents from both major parties.

The latest financial assessment published Friday by the Defense Department’s inspector general office estimates that the Pentagon has $4.1 trillion in assets. It is the only major federal agency that has never passed a clean audit, as required by law.

“Of the 28 reporting entities undergoing stand-alone financial statement audits, nine received an unmodified audit opinion, one received a qualified opinion, 15 received disclaimers, and three opinions remain pending,” the Pentagon said Friday.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/pentagon-seventh-audit

Let me ask you….what if this was a corporation that consistently failed its audit what would happen?

I will tell you….the leadership would be held accountable and it would be fired and cuts made to bring it back into line….but not the War Department…..it is our cash they cannot held so why do they stay in control and continuously lose and mismanage our money?

Apparently no one gives a shit about their waste because we go through life thinking we are all that and that we have an efficient defense mechanism….we do not!

And Biden as a parting gift to Ukraine wants to send them more cash….

The Biden administration has asked Congress to approve $24 billion in additional spending on Ukraine as it’s working to ramp up the proxy war as much as possible during President Biden’s final weeks in office.

POLITICO Pro obtained a request from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget that asked Congress to include additional Ukraine spending in a continuing resolution that’s expected to be voted on next month. Two congressional aides said Congress received the proposal on Monday.

The request asks for $8 billion for the Ukraine Security Assistance initiative, a form of military aid that allows the US to purchase weapons for Ukraine, and $16 billion to replace US military equipment that’s been sent to Ukraine.

(antiwar.com)

I am sick and tired of watching Ukraine get attention and the nation is secondary…..such bullshit…but it appears that I am not aslone in my disgust…

CBS News/YouGov poll has revealed that most Americans support ending U.S. military aid to Ukraine. 

The poll, which was conducted November 19–22, found that 51 percent of Americans believe that the United States should not send further weapons or military aid to Ukraine. At the same time, 49 percent of Americans back further military aid to Ukraine. The finding comes at a time that the Biden administration has rapidly escalated the conflict

This nation’s people should be priority one but that has not been the case in about 40 years….these days it is about who can throw the most money at politicians and the peasants like you and me settle for scraps.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

This Is What I Have been Talking About!

Since the US has taken it upon its checkbook to finance the war in Ukraine I have been bitching about the money that is being wasted with very little return.

I recently read a story about this conflict and the War Department’s lack of oversight.

More than $1 billion in weapons that were shipped to Ukraine have not been properly tracked by the Pentagon, a report from the Defense Department’s inspector general has found.

The report examined $1.699 billion in weapons sent to Ukraine that are subject to enhanced end-use monitoring (EEUM), which includes Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, night vision goggles, AIM-9X air-to-air missiles, Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles, and other types of weaponry.

The IG report found that the majority of the EEUM arms, nearly 40,000 weapons in total worth approximately $1.005 billion, have not been accounted for after being sent into Ukraine. Smaller, more portable weapons are subject to EEUM since they’re more likely to be smuggled and sold on the black market.

Robert P. Storch, the Pentagon’s inspector general, said there’s “no record” of inventories being taken. “It doesn’t mean they’re not there, or they’re not being used,” he said, according to The New York Times. “[But] because of their sensitivity, their vulnerability to diversion, or misuse, or the consequences of that, it’s particularly important to have this additional tracking and accountability in place.”

The US policy of pouring weapons into Ukraine has been done with very little oversight, and the shipments examined in the IG report are just a fraction of the over $40 billion in military equipment the US has provided or committed to Ukraine since the Russian invasion last year.

(antiwar.com)

This is a continuing problem and no one seems to care that this situation continues war after war.

This is what we get when we allow lobbyists and special interests run our foreign policy.

But let’s not worry about this…..better yet lets pretend the border is more important or cutting Social Security or Food programs.

You should be shouting from the treetops that your money is being mishandled in such a way….but sadly you will not.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

“Why I Oppose The Pentagon Budget”

My regular visitors know that I oppose that massive War Department budget that is being considered….I feel it is just a step for a total war….I believe tax payer cash should be spent on the tax payers not some mud hole half way around the world….and I have been very vocal for decades on the amount of cash authorized for our ‘defense’…..we are not defending the US just instigating and funding multiple wars around the globe.

Sen. Sanders has written an op-ed on why he opposes this waste of tax payer money…..

The US Senate is now debating an $886bn defense authorization bill. Unless there are major changes to the bill, I intend to vote against it. Here’s why.

As everyone knows, our country faces enormous crises.

As a result of climate change our planet is experiencing unprecedented and rising temperatures. Along with the rest of the world, we need to make major investments to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into more efficient and sustainable energy sources, or the life we leave our kids and future generations will become increasingly unhealthy and precarious.

Our healthcare system is broken. While the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry make hundreds of billions in profit, 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured, our life expectancy is declining, and we have a massive shortage of doctors, nurses, mental health practitioners and dentists.

Our educational system is teetering. While we have one of the highest rates of childhood poverty of almost any major country, millions of parents cannot find affordable and quality childcare. The number of our young people who graduate from college is falling behind many other countries and 45 million Americans are struggling under the weight of student debt.

Our housing stock is totally inadequate. While gentrification is causing rents to soar in many parts of our country some 600,000 Americans are homeless, and 18 million are spending more than half of their limited incomes on housing.

These are some of the crises our country faces. And we’re not dealing with them.

Why I Oppose the Pentagon Budget

Bernie is so much more eloquent than me…..I agree with every word of his op-ed….I do not stand against the Pentagon but it should live up to it’s name, the Defense Department, money saved should be used where it is most needed….in this country.

Making this country strong internally would be the best defense against any troublemakers.

I am sure someone has an opposing opinion….even if it is wrong.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”