Trump: Military Spending Could Be Cut in Half and There’s No Reason To Build New Nuclear Weapons
The president said he wants to have a global conference with Russia and China to discuss cutting military spending
by Dave DeCamp February 13, 2025 , https://news.antiwar.com/2025/02/13/trump-says-military-spending-could-be-cut-in-half-and-that-theres-no-reason-to-build-new-nukes/
President Trump told reporters on Thursday that he believes US military spending could eventually be cut in half and that he wants to pursue the idea as part of an agreement with Russia and China. He also said there was no reason to build new nuclear weapons.
“At some point, when things settle down, I’m going to meet with China and I’m going to meet with Russia, in particular those two, and I’m going to say there’s no reason for us to be spending almost $1 trillion on the military … and I’m going to say we can spend this on other things,” Trump said.
“When we straighten it all out, then one of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China and President Putin of Russia, and I want to say let’s cut our military budget in half. And we can do that, and I think we’ll be able to do that,” he added.
The US spends significantly more on its military than Russia and China combined. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in 2023, the US accounted for 37% of global military spending. China came in second but was still far behind, accounting for 12% of military spending, and Russia was in third at 4.5%.
Discussing nuclear weapons, Trump said, “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many you could destroy the world 50 times over or 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and [Russia] is building new nuclear weapons, and China is building new nuclear weapons.”
The US has been working to modernize its nuclear triad, a project that’s expected to cost $1.5 trillion. Trump also repeated his call to seek “denuclearization” with Russia and said Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed to do so “in a very big way.”
Trump has previously claimed that he was pursuing denuclearization with Russia and China in his first term in office, but the US also withdrew from key arms control treaties during that time.
Russia recently said the outlook was not good for the state of US arms control as the last nuclear arms control treaty between the two powers is due to expire in February 2026, and there’s currently no replacement. But Trump’s talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the Ukraine war could lead to arms control negotiations.
On the other hand, Trump also recently signed an executive order to build a major new missile defense system to cover the US and its military bases abroad, which could lead to a new arms race and will come with a huge price tag. Republicans in Congress are also looking to increase military spending by at least $100 billion.
Two-thirds of Americans still believe climate change is impacting the Earth, despite what Trump contends
As the Trump administration works to dismantle and erase any mention of
climate change on a federal level, a new report has found that the majority
of Americans believe the Earth’s warming is affecting weather across the
country. Two-thirds of those recently surveyed by the Yale Program on
Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for
Climate Change Communication said they think global warming is impacting
U.S. weather. Those who believe global warming is happening outnumber those
who believe it is not by a ratio of more than five to one, the survey also
found.
Independent 14th Feb 2025 https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/trump-climate-change-americans-poll-b2698628.html
Republican urges Trump to overrule court and open Grand Canyon to uranium mining
Shondiin Silversmith, Arizona Mirror, Raw Story 12th Feb 2025
A top Arizona Republican is hoping the Trump administration will do what a federal court wouldn’t: overturn a national monument protecting lands around the Grand Canyon so that mining companies can extract uranium and other valuable minerals from the land.
Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen sent a letter to the U.S. Department of the Interior on Feb. 7 requesting a meeting with Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to discuss ending the “government overreach” of the national monument and ban on uranium mining in the area.
At issue is the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, which President Joe Bidencreated in 2023. Petersen and Ben Toma, who was at the time the speaker of the state House of Representatives, sued to have the designation revoked…………………………………
The Grand Canyon is the ancestral homeland of multiple tribal nations across the Southwest, and tribes still rely on the canyon for natural and cultural resources that are significant and sacred to their communities.
The monument protects thousands of historical and scientific objects, sacred sites, vital water sources and the ancestral homelands of many Indigenous communities. ……… https://www.rawstory.com/after-court-loss-gop-targets-grand-canyon-monument-through-trump/
Trump wants Russia, China to stop making nuclear weapons, so all can cut defence spending by half
SMH, Zeke Miller and Michelle Price, February 14, 2025
Washington: US President Donald Trump says he wants to restart nuclear arms control talks with Russia and China and that he eventually hopes all three countries could agree to cut their massive defence budgets in half.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump lamented the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested in rebuilding the nation’s nuclear deterrent and he said he hoped to gain commitments from the US adversaries to cut their own spending.
“There’s no reason for us to be building brand-new nuclear weapons. We already have so many,” Trump said. “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.”
“We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually, hopefully much more productive,” Trump said.
The US and Russia hold massive stockpiles of weapons built since the Cold War. Trump predicted China would catch up in its capability to exact nuclear devastation “within five or six years”.
He said if the weapons were ever called to use, “that’s going to be probably oblivion”.
Trump said he would look to engage in nuclear talks with the two countries once “we straighten it all out” in the Middle East and Ukraine.
“One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia. And I want to say, ‘let’s cut our military budget in half’. And we can do that. And I think we’ll be able to.”
It is not clear if the other countries with nuclear weapon stockpiles – Israel, Iran, North Korea, France, Britain, Pakistan and India – would be included in such negotiations……………………………. more https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/trump-wants-russia-china-to-stop-making-nuclear-weapons-so-all-can-cut-defence-spending-by-half-20250214-p5lc59.html]
‘Deeply Concerned’ Dems Want to Know If DOGE Can Access Nuclear Weapons Data
Common Dreams, Brett Wilkins, 12 Feb 25
“The nation and the world need to know that U.S. nuclear secrets are robustly safeguarded,” argue Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Don Beyer.
A pair of Democratic U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday asked the Trump administration to clarify whether any members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have access to classified information about the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
Responding to U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s admission that he granted DOGE associates access to the Department of Energy, and to reporting that a 23-year-old former intern at Musk’s SpaceX was allowed into DOE’s IT systems without the requisite security clearances, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.)—both members of the congressional Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group—wrote to Wright to voice their concerns.
“The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), an integral part of the Department of Energy, is entrusted with protecting the nation’s most sensitive nuclear weapons secrets. The nation and the world need to know that U.S. nuclear secrets are robustly safeguarded,” the lawmakers wrote.
“It is, therefore, dangerously unacceptable that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency—including individuals lacking adequate security clearances—has been granted access to DOE’s information technology (IT) system despite legitimate security concerns inside the agency,” they added………………………………………………… more https://www.commondreams.org/news/doge-nuclear-access?fbclid=IwY2xjawIbZXRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHbA6z6FjvC4GlquaoKQ8r8aITLOLFc__JZxKMtuKaj69sCBrQ9lN5_mJ_A_aem_azkG9HYTMg9NxlbYp67XYA
Oops! Trump accidentally fired hundreds of federal workers who maintain our nuclear weapons
Mass layoffs now paused at US nuclear weapons agency.
-ABC News’ Jay O’Brien, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/live-updates/trump-2nd-term-tariffs-trade-war/?id=118643360&entryId=118833343
The Department of Energy has paused the firings of hundreds of employees who work for a key agency maintaining the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, multiple sources tell ABC News.
Managers with the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) are frantically calling employees back and telling them that — as of right now — they’re not fired, despite some receiving termination emails and phone calls on Thursday. Their badges are getting turned back on and access to federal systems is being restored, at least temporarily.
Hundreds of probationary employees were terminated Thursday night in the mass Trump administration layoffs. The move prompted concerns of a national security risk because the agency is responsible for maintaining U.S. nuclear weapons, transporting them, and nuclear counterterrorism, among other missions.
NNSA held an all-staff meeting Friday morning, announcing the DOE had agreed to pause the layoffs, due to the agency’s national security mission.
NNSA staff tell ABC News they are in a holding pattern. They’re still bracing for firings, but possibly not as widespread.
Trump proposes nuclear deal with Russia and China to halve defense budgets
‘We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things,’ the US president said
Guardian staff and agencies in Washington, Fri 14 Feb 2025
Donald Trump said that he wants to restart nuclear arms control talks with Russia and China and that eventually he hopes all three countries could agree to cut their massive defense budgets in half.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump lamented the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested in rebuilding the nation’s nuclear deterrent and said he hopes to gain commitments from the US adversaries to cut their own spending.
“There’s no reason for us to be building brand-new nuclear weapons. We already have so many,” Trump said. “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.”
“We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually, hopefully, much more productive,” Trump said.
While the US and Russia have held massive stockpiles of weapons since the cold war, Trump predicted that China would catch up in their capability to exact nuclear devastation “within five or six years”.
He said that if the weapons were ever called to use, “that’s going to be probably oblivion”.
Trump said he would look to engage in nuclear talks with the two countries once “we straighten it all out” in the Middle East and Ukraine.
“One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia. And I want to say: ‘Let’s cut our military budget in half.’ And we can do that. And I think we’ll be able to.”
Trump in his first term tried and failed to bring China into nuclear arms reduction talks when the US and Russia were negotiating an extension of a pact known as New Start. Russia suspended its participation in the treaty during the Biden administration, as the US and Russia continued on massive programs to extend the lifespans of or replace their cold war-era nuclear arsenals………………………
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/13/trump-nuclear-russia-china
Trump Promises Billions in Defense Cuts
State of the Union: Trump said that Elon Musk’s DOGE will audit the Pentagon and Department of Education.
Mason Letteau Stallings, Feb 9, 2025 more https://www.theamericanconservative.com/trump-promises-billions-in-defense-cuts/
Trump said that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency would soon lead an audit of the Pentagon and “find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse.”
The Department of Education will be another one of Musk’s targets, Trump said. “I’m going to tell him very soon, like maybe in 24 hours, to go check the Department of Education.”
Trump’s comments came during a pre-Super Bowl interview with Bret Baier of Fox News.
National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, in a separate interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” offered that military shipbuilding should be an area of interest for DOGE. “There is plenty to look into in ship building, which is an absolute mess,” he said.
According to Waltz, the Pentagon suffers from widespread problems. “Everything seems to cost too much, take too long, and deliver too little to the soldiers,” he said, adding that “we do need business leaders to go in there and absolutely reform the Pentagon’s acquisition process.”
A New Military-Industrial Complex Arises
This year’s record defense budget of approximately $850 billion includes $143.2 billion for research and development and another $167.5 billion for the procurement of weaponry. That $311 billion, most of which will be funneled to those giant defense firms, exceeds the total amount spent on defense by every other country on Earth.
Now, however, a new force — Silicon Valley startup culture — has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.
The Secret War Within the Pentagon
February 10, 2025 , By Michael Klare / TomDispatch
Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers — Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego — to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon’s costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country’s largest and most powerful defense contractors — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman — posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC.
For decades, a handful of giant firms like those three have garnered the lion’s share of Pentagon arms contracts, producing the same planes, ships, and missiles year after year while generating huge profits for their owners. But an assortment of new firms, born in Silicon Valley or incorporating its disruptive ethos, have begun to challenge the older ones for access to lucrative Pentagon awards. In the process, something groundbreaking, though barely covered in the mainstream media, is underway: a new MIC is being born, one that potentially will have very different goals and profit-takers than the existing one. How the inevitable battles between the old and the new MICs play out can’t be foreseen, but count on one thing: they are sure to generate significant political turbulence in the years to come.
The very notion of a “military-industrial complex” linking giant defense contractors to powerful figures in Congress and the military was introduced on January 17, 1961, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address to Congress and the American people. In that Cold War moment, in response to powerful foreign threats, he noted that “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” Nevertheless, he added, using the phrase for the first time, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Ever since, debate over the MIC’s accumulating power has roiled American politics. A number of politicians and prominent public figures have portrayed U.S. entry into a catastrophic series of foreign wars — in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere — as a consequence of that complex’s undue influence on policymaking. No such claims and complaints, however, have ever succeeded in loosening the MIC’s iron grip on Pentagon arms procurement. This year’s record defense budget of approximately $850 billion includes $143.2 billion for research and development and another $167.5 billion for the procurement of weaponry. That $311 billion, most of which will be funneled to those giant defense firms, exceeds the total amount spent on defense by every other country on Earth.
Over time, the competition for billion-dollar Pentagon contracts has led to a winnowing of the MIC ecosystem, resulting in the dominance of a few major industrial behemoths. In 2024, just five companies — Lockheed Martin (with $64.7 billion in defense revenues), RTX (formerly Raytheon, with $40.6 billion), Northrop Grumman ($35.2 billion), General Dynamics ($33.7 billion), and Boeing ($32.7 billion) — claimed the vast bulk of Pentagon contracts. (Anduril and General Atomics didn’t even appear on a list of the top 100 contract recipients.)
Typically, these companies are the lead, or “prime,” contractors for major weapons systems that the Pentagon keeps buying year after year. Lockheed Martin, for example, is the prime contractor for the Air Force’s top-priority F-35 stealth fighter (a plane that has often proved distinctly disappointing in operation); Northrop Grumman is building the B-21 stealth bomber; Boeing produces the F-15EX combat jet; and General Dynamics makes the Navy’s Los Angeles-class attack submarines. “Big-ticket” items like these are usually purchased in substantial numbers over many years, ensuring steady profits for their producers. When the initial buys of such systems seem to be nearing completion, their producers usually generate new or upgraded versions of the same weapons, while employing their powerful lobbying arms in Washington to convince Congress to fund the new designs.
Over the years, non-governmental organizations like the National Priorities Project and the Friends Committee on National Legislation have heroically tried to persuade lawmakers to resist the MIC’s lobbying efforts and reduce military spending, but without noticeable success. Now, however, a new force — Silicon Valley startup culture — has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.
Along Came Anduril
Consider Anduril Industries, one of two under-the-radar companies that left three MIC heavyweights in the dust last April by winning the contract to build a prototype of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Anduril (named after the sword carried by Aragorn in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings) was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, a virtual-reality headset designer, with the goal of incorporating artificial intelligence into novel weapons systems. He was supported in that effort by prominent Silicon Valley investors, including Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund and the head of another defense-oriented startup, Palantir (a name also derived from The Lord of the Rings).
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Buttressed by such arguments, as well as the influence of key figures like Thiel, Anduril began to secure modest but strategic contracts from the military and the Department of Homeland Security.
……………………………………………………………………………… Anduril’s success in winning ever-larger Pentagon contracts has attracted the interest of wealthy investors looking for opportunities to profit from the expected growth of defense-oriented startups. ……………………………………………………………………..
The Replicator Initiative
Along with its success in attracting big defense contracts and capital infusions, Anduril has succeeded in convincing many senior Pentagon officials of the need to reform the department’s contracting operations so as to make more room for defense startups and tech firms. On August 28, 2023, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, then the department’s second-highest official, announced the inauguration of the “Replicator” initiative, designed to speed the delivery of advanced weaponry to the armed forces.
“[Our] budgeting and bureaucratic processes are slow, cumbersome, and byzantine,” she acknowledged. To overcome such obstacles, she indicated, the Replicator initiative would cut through red tape and award contracts directly to startups for the rapid development and delivery of cutting-edge weaponry. “Our goal,” she declared, “is to seed, spark, and stoke the flames of innovation.”
As Hicks suggested, Replicator contracts would indeed be awarded in successive batches, or “tranches.” The first tranche, announced last May, included AeroVironment Switchblade 600 kamikaze drones (called that because they are supposed to crash into their intended targets, exploding on contact). Anduril was a triple winner in the second tranche, announced on November 13th…………………………………………………………………….
Enter the Trumpians
Kathleen Hicks stepped down as deputy secretary of defense on January 20th when Donald Trump reoccupied the White House, as did many of her top aides. Exactly how the incoming administration will address the issue of military procurement remains to be seen, but many in Trump’s inner circle, including Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance, have strong ties to Silicon Valley and so are likely to favor Replicator-like policies.
Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who recently won confirmation as secretary of defense, has no background in weapons development and has said little about the topic. However, Trump’s choice as deputy secretary (and Hick’s replacement) is billionaire investor Stephen A. Feinberg who, as chief investment officer of Cerberus Capital Management, acquired the military startup Stratolaunch — suggesting that he might favor extending programs like Replicator.
In a sense, the Trump moment will fit past Washington patterns when it comes to the Pentagon in that the president and his Republican allies in Congress will undoubtedly push for a massive increase in military spending, despite the fact that the military budget is already at a staggering all-time high. Every arms producer is likely to profit from such a move, whether traditional prime contractors or Silicon Valley startups. If, however, defense spending is kept at current levels — in order to finance the tax cuts and other costly measures favored by Trump and the Republicans — fierce competition between the two versions of the military-industrial complex could easily arise again. That, in turn, might trigger divisions within Trump’s inner circle, pitting loyalists to the old MIC against adherents to the new one.
Most Republican lawmakers, who generally rely on contributions from the old MIC companies to finance their campaigns, are bound to support the major prime contractors in such a rivalry. But two of Trump’s key advisers, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, could push him in the opposite direction. Vance, a former Silicon Valley functionary who reportedly became Trump’s running mate only after heavy lobbying by Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires, is likely to be encouraged by his former allies to steer more Pentagon contracts to Anduril, Palantir, and related companies. And that would hardly be surprising, since Vance’s private venture fund, Narya Capital (yes, another name derived from The Lord of the Rings!), has invested in Anduril and other military/space ventures.
Michael Klare, Droning Washington
Posted on February 9, 2025
Yes, some of us still remember that the now-famous (or do I mean infamous?) phrase “the military-industrial complex” actually came from the farewell address of former World War II general and then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961. But how often do any of us remember the all-too-painfully appropriate context in which he offered it to the American people — as a warning about a future that today is so much ours, as the budget of the Department of Defense (so it’s still called despite the many disastrous and anything but “defensive” wars the U.S. military has fought in this century) heads for the trillion-dollar mark? Here, then, to introduce military expert and TomDispatch regular Michael Klare’s eye-opening account of where the MIC (the shorthand version of that phrase) is heading in the age of the drone and artificial intelligence, is the larger context for Eisenhower’s first use of the term:
“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.”
And more than 60 years later, with Eisenhower’s grimly visionary statement in mind, let Klare suggest just how eerily on target he was. If you don’t believe me, note that tech giant Anduril is now setting up its first factory in the Midwest — Columbus, Ohio, to be exact — at the cost of an initial billion dollars to produce “autonomous systems and weapons,” as artificial intelligence prepares to go to war. Tom
A New Military-Industrial Complex Arises
The Secret War Within the Pentagon
Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers — Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego — to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon’s costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country’s largest and most powerful defense contractors — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman — posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC.
For decades, a handful of giant firms like those three have garnered the lion’s share of Pentagon arms contracts, producing the same planes, ships, and missiles year after year while generating huge profits for their owners. But an assortment of new firms, born in Silicon Valley or incorporating its disruptive ethos, have begun to challenge the older ones for access to lucrative Pentagon awards. In the process, something groundbreaking, though barely covered in the mainstream media, is underway: a new MIC is being born, one that potentially will have very different goals and profit-takers than the existing one. How the inevitable battles between the old and the new MICs play out can’t be foreseen, but count on one thing: they are sure to generate significant political turbulence in the years to come.
The very notion of a “military-industrial complex” linking giant defense contractors to powerful figures in Congress and the military was introduced on January 17, 1961, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address to Congress and the American people. In that Cold War moment, in response to powerful foreign threats, he noted that “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” Nevertheless, he added, using the phrase for the first time, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Ever since, debate over the MIC’s accumulating power has roiled American politics. A number of politicians and prominent public figures have portrayed U.S. entry into a catastrophic series of foreign wars — in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere — as a consequence of that complex’s undue influence on policymaking. No such claims and complaints, however, have ever succeeded in loosening the MIC’s iron grip on Pentagon arms procurement. This year’s record defense budget of approximately $850 billion includes $143.2 billion for research and development and another $167.5 billion for the procurement of weaponry. That $311 billion, most of which will be funneled to those giant defense firms, exceeds the total amount spent on defense by every other country on Earth.
Over time, the competition for billion-dollar Pentagon contracts has led to a winnowing of the MIC ecosystem, resulting in the dominance of a few major industrial behemoths. In 2024, just five companies — Lockheed Martin (with $64.7 billion in defense revenues), RTX (formerly Raytheon, with $40.6 billion), Northrop Grumman ($35.2 billion), General Dynamics ($33.7 billion), and Boeing ($32.7 billion) — claimed the vast bulk of Pentagon contracts. (Anduril and General Atomics didn’t even appear on a list of the top 100 contract recipients.)
Typically, these companies are the lead, or “prime,” contractors for major weapons systems that the Pentagon keeps buying year after year. Lockheed Martin, for example, is the prime contractor for the Air Force’s top-priority F-35 stealth fighter (a plane that has often proved distinctly disappointing in operation); Northrop Grumman is building the B-21 stealth bomber; Boeing produces the F-15EX combat jet; and General Dynamics makes the Navy’s Los Angeles-class attack submarines. “Big-ticket” items like these are usually purchased in substantial numbers over many years, ensuring steady profits for their producers. When the initial buys of such systems seem to be nearing completion, their producers usually generate new or upgraded versions of the same weapons, while employing their powerful lobbying arms in Washington to convince Congress to fund the new designs.
Over the years, non-governmental organizations like the National Priorities Project and the Friends Committee on National Legislation have heroically tried to persuade lawmakers to resist the MIC’s lobbying efforts and reduce military spending, but without noticeable success. Now, however, a new force — Silicon Valley startup culture — has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.
Along Came Anduril
Consider Anduril Industries, one of two under-the-radar companies that left three MIC heavyweights in the dust last April by winning the contract to build a prototype of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Anduril (named after the sword carried by Aragorn in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings) was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, a virtual-reality headset designer, with the goal of incorporating artificial intelligence into novel weapons systems. He was supported in that effort by prominent Silicon Valley investors, including Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund and the head of another defense-oriented startup, Palantir (a name also derived from The Lord of the Rings).
From the start, Luckey and his associates sought to shoulder aside traditional defense contractors to make room for their high-tech startups. Those two companies and other new-fledged tech firms often found themselves frozen out of major Pentagon contracts that had long been written to favor the MIC giants with their bevies of lawyers and mastery of government paperwork. In 2016, Palantir even sued the U.S. Army for refusing to consider it for a large data-processing contract and later prevailed in court, opening the door for future Department of Defense awards.
In addition to its aggressive legal stance, Anduril has also gained notoriety thanks to the outspokenness of its founder, Palmer Luckey. Whereas other corporate leaders were usually restrained in their language when discussing Department of Defense operations, Luckey openly criticized the Pentagon’s inbred preference for working with traditional defense contractors at the expense of investments in the advanced technologies he believes are needed to overpower China and Russia in some future conflict.
Such technology, he insisted, was only available from the commercial tech industry. “The largest defense contractors are staffed with patriots who nevertheless do not have the software expertise or business model to build the technology we need,” Luckey and his top associates claimed in their 2022 Mission Document. “These companies work slowly, while the best [software] engineers relish working at speed. And the software engineering talent who can build faster than our adversaries resides in the commercial sector, not at large defense primes.”
To overcome obstacles to military modernization, Luckey argued, the government needed to loosen its contracting rules and make it easier for defense startups and software companies to do business with the Pentagon. “We need defense companies that are fast. That won’t happen simply by wishing it to be so: it will only happen if companies are incentivized to move” by far more permissive Pentagon policies.
Buttressed by such arguments, as well as the influence of key figures like Thiel, Anduril began to secure modest but strategic contracts from the military and the Department of Homeland Security. In 2019, it received a small Marine Corps contract to install AI-enabled perimeter surveillance systems at bases in Japan and the United States. A year later, it won a five-year, $25 million contract to build surveillance towers on the U.S.-Mexican border for Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In September 2020, it also received a $36 million CBP contract to build additional sentry towers along that border.
After that, bigger awards began to roll in. In February 2023, the Department of Defense started buying Anduril’s Altius-600 surveillance/attack drone for delivery to the Ukrainian military and, last September, the Army announced that it would purchase its Ghost-X drone for battlefield surveillance operations. Anduril is also now one of four companies selected by the Air Force to develop prototypes for its proposed Enterprise Test Vehicle, a medium-sized drone intended to launch salvos of smaller surveillance and attack drones.
Anduril’s success in winning ever-larger Pentagon contracts has attracted the interest of wealthy investors looking for opportunities to profit from the expected growth of defense-oriented startups. In July 2020, it received fresh investments of $200 million from Thiel’s Founders Fund and prominent Silicon Valley investor Andreessen Horowitz, raising the company’s valuation to nearly $2 billion. A year later, Anduril obtained another $450 million from those and other venture capital firms, bringing its estimated valuation to $4.5 billion (double what it had been in 2020). More finance capital has flowed into Anduril since then, spearheading a major drive by private investors to fuel the rise of defense startups — and profit from their growth as it materializes.
The Replicator Initiative
Along with its success in attracting big defense contracts and capital infusions, Anduril has succeeded in convincing many senior Pentagon officials of the need to reform the department’s contracting operations so as to make more room for defense startups and tech firms. On August 28, 2023, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, then the department’s second-highest official, announced the inauguration of the “Replicator” initiative, designed to speed the delivery of advanced weaponry to the armed forces.
“[Our] budgeting and bureaucratic processes are slow, cumbersome, and byzantine,” she acknowledged. To overcome such obstacles, she indicated, the Replicator initiative would cut through red tape and award contracts directly to startups for the rapid development and delivery of cutting-edge weaponry. “Our goal,” she declared, “is to seed, spark, and stoke the flames of innovation.”
As Hicks suggested, Replicator contracts would indeed be awarded in successive batches, or “tranches.” The first tranche, announced last May, included AeroVironment Switchblade 600 kamikaze drones (called that because they are supposed to crash into their intended targets, exploding on contact). Anduril was a triple winner in the second tranche, announced on November 13th. According to the Department of Defense, that batch included funding for the Army’s purchase of Ghost-X surveillance drones, the Marine Corps’ acquisition of Altius-600 kamikaze drones, and development of the Air Force’s Enterprise Test Vehicle, of which Anduril is one of four participating vendors.
Just as important, perhaps, was Hicks’ embrace of Palmer Luckey’s blueprint for reforming Pentagon purchasing. “The Replicator initiative is demonstrably reducing barriers to innovation, and delivering capabilities to warfighters at a rapid pace,” she affirmed in November. “We are creating opportunities for a broad range of traditional and nontraditional defense and technology companies… and we are building the capability to do that again and again.”
Enter the Trumpians
Kathleen Hicks stepped down as deputy secretary of defense on January 20th when Donald Trump reoccupied the White House, as did many of her top aides. Exactly how the incoming administration will address the issue of military procurement remains to be seen, but many in Trump’s inner circle, including Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance, have strong ties to Silicon Valley and so are likely to favor Replicator-like policies.
Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who recently won confirmation as secretary of defense, has no background in weapons development and has said little about the topic. However, Trump’s choice as deputy secretary (and Hick’s replacement) is billionaire investor Stephen A. Feinberg who, as chief investment officer of Cerberus Capital Management, acquired the military startup Stratolaunch — suggesting that he might favor extending programs like Replicator.
In a sense, the Trump moment will fit past Washington patterns when it comes to the Pentagon in that the president and his Republican allies in Congress will undoubtedly push for a massive increase in military spending, despite the fact that the military budget is already at a staggering all-time high. Every arms producer is likely to profit from such a move, whether traditional prime contractors or Silicon Valley startups. If, however, defense spending is kept at current levels — in order to finance the tax cuts and other costly measures favored by Trump and the Republicans — fierce competition between the two versions of the military-industrial complex could easily arise again. That, in turn, might trigger divisions within Trump’s inner circle, pitting loyalists to the old MIC against adherents to the new one.
Most Republican lawmakers, who generally rely on contributions from the old MIC companies to finance their campaigns, are bound to support the major prime contractors in such a rivalry. But two of Trump’s key advisers, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, could push him in the opposite direction. Vance, a former Silicon Valley functionary who reportedly became Trump’s running mate only after heavy lobbying by Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires, is likely to be encouraged by his former allies to steer more Pentagon contracts to Anduril, Palantir, and related companies. And that would hardly be surprising, since Vance’s private venture fund, Narya Capital (yes, another name derived from The Lord of the Rings!), has invested in Anduril and other military/space ventures.
Named by Trump to direct the as-yet-to-be-established Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, like Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, fought the Department of Defense to obtain contracts for one of his companies, SpaceX, and has expressed deep contempt for the Pentagon’s traditional way of doing things. In particular, he has denigrated the costly, generally ill-performing Lockheed-made F-35 jet fighter at a time when AI-governed drones are becoming ever more capable. Despite that progress, as he wrote on X, the social media platform he now owns, “some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.” In a subsequent post, he added that “manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway.”
His critique of the F-35 ruffled feathers at the Air Force and caused Lockheed’s stock to fall by more than 3%. …………………………
President Trump has yet to indicate his stance on the F-35 or other high-priced items in the Pentagon’s budget lineup. He may (or may not) call for a slowdown in purchases of that plane and seek greater investment in other projects. Still, the divide exposed by Musk — between costly manned weapons made by traditional defense contractors and more affordable unmanned systems made by the likes of Anduril, General Atomics, and AeroVironment — is bound to widen in the years to come as the new version of the military-industrial complex only grows in wealth and power. How the old MIC will address such a threat to its primacy remains to be seen, but multibillion-dollar weapons companies are not likely to step aside without a fight. And that fight will likely divide the Trumpian universe.
Anatomy of an AI Coup
It is political offloading, shifting the messy work of winning political debates to the false authority of machine analytics. It’s a way of displacing the collective decision-making at the core of representative politics.
Tech Policy Press, Eryk Salvaggio / Feb 9, 2025
DOGE is gutting federal agencies to install AI across the government. Democracy is on the line, writes Tech Policy Press fellow Eryk Salvaggio.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology for manufacturing excuses. While lacking clear definitions or tools for assessment, AI has nonetheless seized the imagination of politicians and managers across government, academia, and industry. But what AI is best at producing is justifications. If you want a labor force, a regulatory bureaucracy, or accountability to disappear, you simply say, “AI can do it.” Then, the conversation shifts from explaining why these things should or should not go away to questions about how AI would work in their place.
We are in the midst of a political coup that, if successful, would forever change the nature of American government. It is not taking place in the streets. There is no martial law. It is taking place cubicle by cubicle in federal agencies and in the mundane automation of bureaucracy. The rationale is based on a productivity myth that the goal of bureaucracy is merely what it produces (services, information, governance) and can be isolated from the process through which democracy achieves those ends: debate, deliberation, and consensus.
AI then becomes a tool for replacing politics. The Trump administration frames generative AI as a remedy to “government waste.” However, what it seeks to automate is not paperwork but democratic decision-making. Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are banking on a popular but false delusion that word prediction technologies make meaningful inferences about the world. They are using it to sidestep Congressional oversight of the budget, which is, Constitutionally, the allotment of resources to government programs through representative politics.
While discussing an AI coup may seem conspiratorial or paranoid, it’s banal. In contrast to Musk and his acolytes’ ongoing claims of “existential risk,” which envision AI taking over the world through brute force, an AI coup rises from collective decisions about how much power we hand to machines. It is political offloading, shifting the messy work of winning political debates to the false authority of machine analytics. It’s a way of displacing the collective decision-making at the core of representative politics.
The Cast
We can set the stage by describing the cast. In Elon Musk’s part-time job at DOGE, he takes the lead role. His team aims to use generative AI to find budget efficiencies even as he eviscerates the civil service. The DOGE entity has already attempted to take over the Treasury Department’s computer system to distribute funds and effectively disbanded USAID. Musk hopes to deliver an “AI-first strategy” for government agencies, such as GSAi, “a custom generative AI chatbot for the US General Services Administration.”
…………………………Then there is the supporting cast. ………………………………………………………………….
The Plan
Amidst the chaos in Washington, Silicon Valley firms will continue to build their case that they are the answer…………………………………………………………………………………. The solution will be a “centralized data repository” hooked to a chatbot and a suite of promises.
………………………………………………………….. OpenAI’s ChatGPTGov is a prime example of a system that is ready to come into play. By shifting government decisions to AI systems they must know are unsuitable, these tech elites avoid a political debate they would probably lose. Instead, they create a nationwide IT crisis that they alone can fix.
Weaken the Opposition
As the technical elite embeds generative AI into hollowed-out institutions, the administration will carry on its effort to eviscerate independent research institutions. Trump campaigned in 2023 for an “American University,” an online resource presenting “study groups, mentors, industry partnerships, and the latest breakthrough in computing” that “will be strictly non-political, and there will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed.” Trump proposed that American University would be funded by “taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments.”
………………………………………….. Eventually, this would create a crisis through which higher education, with its commitments to diversity already neutered, could be starved to death. A weakened university research ecosystem would strengthen the private sector by luring scientists to their labs, diminishing independent research oversight.
……………………………………………….DOGE aims to replace government bureaucracy with technical infrastructure. Reversing and dismantling dependencies embedded in infrastructure is slow and difficult, especially when efforts to study systemic bias are prohibited. The ingredients for “technofascism” will be assembled.
Generating a Crisis
Eventually, the shoddy infrastructure of these automated government agencies and services will produce language or code that creates an AI-driven national crisis. Because no AI system is presently suited to the complex task of governance, failure is inevitable. Deploying that system anyway is a human decision, and humans should be held accountable.
The designers of AI have repeatedly told us that it poses a threat akin to the atomic bomb.
……………………………………….. Years of bipartisan lobbying by groups focused narrowly on AI’s “existential risks” have positioned it as a security threat controllable only by Silicon Valley’s technical elite. They now stand poised to benefit from any crisis……………………………………………….
Algorithmic Resistance
The AI coup emerged not just from the union of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. It is born of practices and beliefs now standard among Silicon Valley ideologues that are obscure to most Americans. However, the tech industry’s weakness is that it has never understood the emotional and social complexity of actual human beings.
…………………….Speed is essential to their work. They know they cannot create a public consensus for this effort and must move before it takes shape. By moving fast and breaking things, DOGE forces a collapse of the system where unanswered questions are met with technological solutions. Shifting the conversation to the technical is a way of locking policymakers and the public out of decisions and shifting that power to the code they write.
…………………………………..Do not fall for the trap. Democratic participation and representative politics in government are not “waste.” Nor should arguments focus on the technical limits of particular systems, as the tech elites are constantly revising expectations upward through endless promises of exponential improvements. The argument must be that no computerized system should replace the voice of voters. Do not ask if the machine can be trusted. Ask who controls them.
https://www.techpolicy.press/anatomy-of-an-ai-coup/
America’s nuclear gamble: The dangerous push to resume atmospheric testing
Experts warn of catastrophic fallout as calls grow to restart nuclear weapons tests abandoned since 1963.
By Karl Grossman, February 10, 2025
“The United States may need to restart explosive nuclear weapons testing,” declared Robert Peters, research fellow for nuclear deterrence and missile defense at The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing organization close to the Trump administration, in a lengthy report last month. Issued on January 15, it was titled: “America Must Prepare to Test Nuclear Weapons.”
Peters stated that “the President may order the above-ground testing of a nuclear weapon….And while the United States leaving the [Nuclear] Test Ban Treaty may not be optimal and may indeed have negative downstream effects, doing so may be necessary to stave off further adversary escalation.”
There has not been a nuclear weapon tested above-ground in the United States since 1962, Peters said. That was a year before the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 was signed by the U.S., Soviet Union and United Kingdom. It prohibits nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, underwater or in outer space. It allowed underground tests as long as they didn’t result in “radioactive debris to be present outside the territorial limits of the state under whose jurisdiction or control” the test was conducted.
“Resuming atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons would be disastrous,” says Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project. He cited the “lessons learned from above-ground nuclear weapons testing—the radioactive fall-out that harmed many people, especially infants and children.”
Testimony by a co-founder of the Radiation and Public Health Project, the late Dr. Ernest Sternglass, a physicist, before the then Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, was instrumental in President John F. Kennedy signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
As President Kennedy said in a 1963 national address: “This treaty can be a step towards freeing the world from the fears and dangers of radioactive fallout.” He said that “over the years the number and the yield of weapons tested have rapidly increased and so have the radioactive hazards from such testing. Continued unrestricted testing by the nuclear powers, joined in time by other nations which may be less adept in limiting pollution, will increasingly contaminate the air that all of us must breathe.” Kennedy spoke of “children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs” as a result.
The Heritage Foundation’s 900-page publication “Project 2025” is the “governing agenda” for the Trump administration, writes Susan Caskie, executive editor of the magazine The Week, in its current issue. “Many of its authors and contributors,” she noted, are now members of the administration, some appointed to “even Cabinet posts.” …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Are we, if there is a return to atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, to go back to the years of radioactive fallout—and the resulting health impacts? And, as Kennedy stated, “children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs.” more https://www.nationofchange.org/2025/02/10/americas-nuclear-gamble-the-dangerous-push-to-resume-atmospheric-testing/
Uranium fever collides with industry’s dark past in Navajo country
by Jacob Lorinc, Phys Org, 20Jan 25
A few miles south of the Grand Canyon, thousands of tons of uranium ore, reddish-gray, blue and radioactive, are piled up high in a clearing in the forest.
They’ve been there for months, stranded by a standoff between the mining company that dug them deep out of the ground, Energy Fuels Inc., and the leader of the Navajo Nation, Buu Nygren.
Back in the summer, Energy Fuels had triggered an uproar when it loaded some of the ore onto a truck, slapped a “radioactive” sign over the taillights and drove it through the heart of Navajo territory. Radioactive is an alarming word anywhere, but here in Navajo country, surrounded by hundreds of abandoned uranium mines that powered America’s nuclear arms race with the USSR and spewed toxic waste into the land, it causes terror.
Those fears have only grown in the past couple of years as nuclear power came back in vogue and sparked a uranium rush in mining camps all across the Southwest. So when the news made it to Nygren that morning, he was furious. No one had sought his consent for the shipment. He quickly ordered dozens of police officers to throw on their sirens, fan out and intercept the truck.
The dragnet turned up nothing in the end—the truck snuck through—but the hard-line response delivered a warning, amplified over social media and ratified days later by the governor of Arizona, to the miners: Stay out of Navajo country.
Cut off from the lone processing mill in the U.S.—all the main routes cut through Navajo territory—executives at Energy Fuels stockpiled it by the entrance of the mine. When the heaps of crushed rock grew too sprawling, they pulled the miners out of the tunnels and turned the drilling machines off.
The standoff represents the ugly side of the world’s sudden re-embrace of nuclear power. Yes, there’s the promise of a steady stream of clean energy to fuel the AI boom, fight climate change and, in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, replace Russian oil and gas.
But there’s also the fear—both around the nuclear reactor sites popping up across the world and in the communities surrounding mining operations in Australia, Kyrgyzstan and Navajo Nation, where the locals are still documenting cancer cases decades after the last of the Cold War-era outfits shut down.
It’s like the backlash erupting over all sorts of other mining projects crucial to the transition away from fossil fuels—lithium, nickel, copper, cobalt, zinc—just with the added threat of radioactivity.”Generations and generations of my people have been hurt,” Nygren, 38, said in an interview. “Go find uranium somewhere else.”
Truth is there isn’t all that much uranium at the Energy Fuels mine, known as Pinyon Plain, or any of the other half-dozen mines that opened in the Southwest the past couple years.
In most cases, crews are simply combing through the untouched veins of mines that were closed when the 2011 Fukushima disaster scared global leaders away from nuclear power and crashed the uranium market. Pooled all together, they only hold a fraction of the hundreds of millions of pounds of ore buried in any of the top mines in Canada, Kazakhstan and Namibia.
So the rush of mining activity here serves as a testament to the magnitude of the uranium fever sweeping the globe right now. At just over $70 per pound, the price is up some 200% over the past five years—even after it gave back a chunk of its gains in 2024.
……………………………………………………….At Pinyon Plain, they’re used to setbacks. Prospectors discovered the deposit in the 1970s but by the time all the mining permits were secured a decade later, the global uranium market had collapsed. Just like in 2011, the initial trigger was a nuclear disaster, the Chernobyl meltdown. And then, a few years later, the Berlin Wall fell and the nuclear arms race was over.
Plans were hatched over the years to open the mine as uranium prices bumped higher, but the enthusiasm would die as soon as the rally faded. It took the 2022 price surge to get Chalmers, who’s been scouting out Pinyon Plain ever since he first joined Energy Fuels back in the 1980s, to finally ram it through.
Now, after a single shipment to the mill in Utah, he’s stuck again. As he sees it, routes 89 and 160 are federal highways and, as a result, subject to federal shipping laws. The company doesn’t need the Navajos’ authorization, he says. To Nygren, every single inch of Navajo territory is subject to tribal law……………………..
Animosity towards mining companies runs high on Navajo land. It’s visible everywhere. On huge roadside billboards and small office signs, in fading pinks and yellows and jet blacks, too. They read “Radioactive Pollution Kills” and “Haul No” and, along the main entrance to Cameron, a hard-scrabble village on the territory’s western edge, “No Uranium Mining.”
A few miles down the road, big mounds of sand streaked gray and blue rise, one after the other, high above the vast desert landscape. They are the tailings from some of the uranium mines that were abandoned in the territory last century.
To Ray Yellowfeather, a 50-year-old construction worker, the tailings were always the “blue hills,” just one big playground for him and his childhood friends.
“We would climb up the blue hills and slide back down,” Yellowfeather says. “Nobody told us they were dangerous.”
Years later, they would be cordoned off by the Environmental Protection Agency as it began work to clean up the mines. By then, though, the damage was done. Like many around here, Yellowfeather says he’s lost several family members to stomach cancer. The last of them was his mother in 2022
Yellowfeather admits he doesn’t know exactly what caused their cancer but, he says, “I have to think it has to do with the piles of radioactive waste all around us.” It’s in the construction material in many of the homes and buildings and in the aquifers, too. To this day, drinking water is shipped into some of the hardest-hit areas.
The U.S. government has recognized the harm its nuclear arms projects have done to communities in the Southwest. In 1990, Congress passed a law to compensate victims who contracted cancer and other diseases. It paid out some $2.5 billion over the ensuing three decades.
The EPA, meanwhile, has been in charge of the clean-up of the abandoned mines. Two decades after the program began, though, only a small percentage have been worked on at all.
This is giving mining companies an opportunity to curry favor in tribal communities by offering to take over and expedite the clean-up of some mines. Chalmers has made it a key point in negotiations with Nygren.
…………. the EPA released a detailed study on Pinyon Plain. In it, the agency found that operations at the mine could contaminate the water supply of the Havasupai, a tribe tucked in such a remote corner of the Grand Canyon that it receives mail by mule. The report emboldened Havasupai leaders to step up their opposition to the mine, adding to Chalmers’s growing list of problems.”…….. https://phys.org/news/2025-01-uranium-fever-collides-industry-dark.amp?fbclid=IwY2xjawIUwvtleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHey6Nv6MJqijcV5suiJOZjDx46rSSzwyrFBVrtbA0McaSeoPu-rhCeR0zQ_aem_N06qMIWp_xVHiPlfOH7DG
Trump Says He’ll Audit the Pentagon-Will it prove to be a bridge too far?
Bill Astore, Feb 09, 2025, https://bracingviews.substack.com/p/trump-says-hell-audit-the-pentagon?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1156402&post_id=156757346&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=c9zhh&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
President Donald Trump says he’s ready to tackle the Pentagon, which has failed seven audits in a row. He says America might save “trillions” after effective audits. Will it happen?
The Pentagon budget currently sits at roughly $900 billion for this fiscal year, representing more than half of federal discretionary spending. This vast sum doesn’t include (among other things) Homeland Security, nuclear weapons covered by the Department of Energy, the VA (Veterans Administration), and interest on the national debt due to wasteful failed wars in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
A successful audit of the Pentagon would be a monumental victory for what’s left of American democracy. It may also prove to be a bridge too far for Trump. The National Security State is America’s unofficial fourth branch of government and arguably its most powerful. It is a colossus that hides malfeasance and corruption behind a “top secret” security classification. It deters and prevents efforts at transparency by crying that those who try to expose its crimes are endangering national security. It expects your obedience and praise, not your questions and criticism.
Presidents, of course, are supposed to serve as the commander-in-chief of the U.S. military. They rarely do. Not nowadays. The U.S. system may in theory rest on civilian control of the military, but the military has been out of control since at least 1947, when it rebranded itself the “Department of Defense” instead of the old War Department. Not coincidentally, every war America has fought since then has been undeclared, i.e. lacking a formal Congressional declaration of war.
America has fought a mind-blowing number of wasteful and illegal wars that have been sold to the people through lies, whether in Vietnam (“The Pentagon Papers”), Iraq (No WMD), Afghanistan (“The Afghan War Papers”), and elsewhere. Few things are needed more in America than an honest reckoning of Pentagon spending—and future Pentagon war plans.
Such a reckoning could very well save our lives—indeed, the world, if done honestly and transparently by true patriots. It could also prove to be a bridge too far—for any president.
Is “Bad Faith”‘s Council for National Policy the Atlas Network’s half-brother?
Ed COMMENT. I put this article up on the Australian website. You might think that it has nothing to do with Australia.
But it does! The fascist chaos now developing in the USA could spread to Australia, as the Atlas Network promotes its Australian off-shoot “Advance”. Advance will funnel $millions into Trumpian-style propaganda, to influence the coming Australian federal election.
The long game of the Mont Pelerin Society that spawned the Atlas Network became colonising government and the law, to make them the servants of the largest players in the economy.
February 6, 2025 Lucy Hamilton, https://theaimn.net/is-bad-faiths-council-for-national-policy-the-atlas-networks-half-brother/
The Council for National Policy is the ultra-secret body tracked in the documentary Bad Faith. Are the Mont Pelerin Society fingerprints there just by chance?
The chaos that is erupting from the people around Trump was forecast in the 900 pages of Project 2025 for those paying attention. The firehose of brutality and stupidity is coming too fast for observers to encompass. Whether it’s 25 year olds with the power to alter code in the Bureau of Fiscal Service or a Christian Nationalist-driven freeze on all public spending or trying to deport Navajo people, the whole project reeks of reckless cruelty and apparent irrationality.
Just as Ronald Reagan implemented 2/3 of the first Mandate for Leadership, Donald Trump implemented 2/3 of his first iteration. Now the Mandate is known as Project 2025 and it’s no longer just a “business republican” project. It’s a Christian Nationalist project too. And 2/3 of the first executive orders of this Trump administration came from Project 2025.
The man likely to take the helm of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, was revealed as the Christian Nationalist radical he is in this undercover sting operation last year. The chaos is intended to continue. He has said he intends to put career civil servants “in trauma.” He also intends to use the military to crush protests.
This domestic chaos will be deadly; the freeze on USAID spending will kill people sooner. These radicals around Trump do not care: their eugenicist beliefs run deep. It’s a longterm goal: this 2006 annual Atlas Network report contains an essay repeating disdain for foreign aid as a failed concept by (MPS member since 1984, erstwhile president and critical figure in the growth of Atlas and several junktanks), Leonard Liggio. There is no reflection on how many nations need foreign aid because of MPS-driven restructuring and neoliberal interventions to keep those nations impoverished and dependent.
Ronald Reagan, the first de facto Atlas Network US president said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” The Trump apparatchiks are trying to make that a vicious reality.
The long game of the Mont Pelerin Society that spawned the Atlas Network became colonising government and the law, to make them the servants of the largest players in the economy. They sold the mission as “freedom” in a “free market,” with “small government” staying out of the little guy’s way. That was not the real intent. Democratic projects, rights or a decent life for the individual (below enabler class) were intended by few in the project. Neofeudalism is a more apt label. You are not even to be allowed to protest your (or others’) immiseration.
People committed to the neoliberal project have a firm commitment to making government look ineffective and wasteful. It may be that government efforts to tackle the pandemic risked making people trust government. The steps towards a UBI might have stung badly for people who believe government spending should only serve the already rich. It is likely also that coercive measures like lockdowns, mask wearing and vaccine mandates triggered their socialism-alarms. There is extensive evidence of junktank partners’ investmentin pandemic disinformation and the fighting of public health measures including masking.
It’s possible that the greater inclusivity of a pluralist society might have been enough on its own to repulse the narrow-minds of this machinery; it could be that the pandemic broke them.
Either way, after the worst of the pandemic, one of the Atlas Network’s most pivotal junktanks appointed a Rad Trad Catholic extremist with connections to Opus Dei as its president, in September 2021. Kevin Roberts was an Atlas operative before this. He used to run the Atlas Texas Public Policy Foundation.
He was also however, by 2022, already on the Council for National Policy board.
The Bad Faith (2024) documentary reveals in grim detail how the Council for National Policy (CNP) was the theocratic machine that built the Moral Majority. It was the network that brought together the extremist Evangelical preachers of that movement, media organisations and funders with some of the Republican Party’s most effective strategists. The documentary is based on journalist Anne Nelson’s extensive investigations in Shadow Network.
Key figures amongst the Republican Party strategists that founded the CNP belonged to the Mont Pelerin Society, just as the key operators in the Atlas Network did – and do.
(Atlas has, since it was founded in 1981, vacuumed up other junktanks and networks into its web of shared strategies and personnel connections: whether they are Atlas spawned or interlinked can be complex to disentangle. Whether CNP was in part an MPS project at its foundation is opaque. It could be that class interests of a small band of operatives led to overlaps in strategising. The two networks are, however, overtly operating in concert now with both strongly represented in the Project 2025 Advisory Board.)
Catholic zealot Paul Weyrich co-founded the Heritage Foundation in 1973. Many historic clips of Weyrich uttering his extreme beliefs are to be viewed in Bad Faith. In 1981, the CNP was founded to galvanise the 1978 undertaking to use the issue of abortion to create a Christian Republican voter bloc. (In 1978, abortion was a fringe Catholic issue, of little interest to Evangelicals.)
Weyrich’s co-founder at Heritage was Catholic Edwin Feulner, later an MPS president, but a member from 1972. He is also a CNP member.
The CNP’s Republican founders included Episcopalian (Anglican) Morton Blackwell, an MPS member from 2007, who created the Atlas Network-and-CNP’s Leadership Institute founded in 1979. It aims to increase “the number and effectiveness of conservative leaders in the public policy process. More than 300,000 conservatives have become leaders through Leadership Institute training.”
Fellow CNP founder was Evangelical? Edwin Meese III who worked with Atlas’s Ronald Reagan from 1966, and was later one of his attorney-generals. Meese was involved with Heritage from 1988. A third was Catholic Richard Viguerie who invented the direct mail scam that fostered the demonising of Democrats to scare grannies out of their pittance.
Both Atlas and the CNP receive funding from Charles Koch and his circle including the Bradleys. On the CNP leaked membership list, Lawson Bader is identified. He is an MPS member and has been president and CEO of Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund since 2015. Donors Trust is known as the “dark money ATM of the right.” The Mercer family, that funded Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica, is also listed as a CNP donor. The united Devos and Prince families are key donors. Betsy DeVos has roles at several Atlas junktanks. Peter Thiel, tech plutocrat, is now a significant funder of Donors Trust.
Boeing, Coors, Cinemark, Forbes media and Morgan Stanley all have senior figures affiliated with CNP. (Coors money was central to the Heritage Foundation’s funding, with Joseph Coors, Evangelical and white supremacist, a co-founder.)
Currently the CNP and Atlas share several critical partner organisations apart from Heritage and Leadership such as the Federalist Society which has been described as creating the imperial juristocracy around Donald Trump’s second presidency. Another is the American Legislative Exchange (ALEC) that produces reactionary and anti-labour model bills for state legislatures to reproduce. A thirdis Americans For Tax Reform, which Grover Norquist (CNP member) founded at Ronald Reagan’s “request.”
The Acton Institute, Media Research Center, Capital Research Center, Buckeye Institute, National Center for Public Policy Research, Center for Security Policy, Young America’s Foundation, American Conservative Union (parent of CPAC), Discovery Institute and Americans for Prosperity are other joint members. Tea Party Patriots is a CNP member that is spawned as an astroturf outfit out of Atlas’s Freedomworks.
The CNP’s members include the Club for Growth, which is another Koch-supported entity. It funds Republican candidates who fight labour rights. The farce of fighting for the working man that Trump’s campaign feigns is exposed by the many junktanks here strategising to suppress workers.(1)
The CNP is a particularly ugly partner for the Atlas Network which advertises itself as “strengthening the worldwide freedom movement.” It unites the NRA with Turning Point USA with a range of hate groups promoting Islamophobia and homophobia. Its Christofascist members fight rights for women as well.
A key member is the Alliance Defending Freedom which the SPLC summarises as having supported “the recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the U.S. and criminalization abroad; has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad; has contended that LGBTQ people are more likely to engage in pedophilia; and claims that a “homosexual agenda” will destroy Christianity and society.” Not much freedom there.
The Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) founded by Senator Jim DeMint, former Heritage Foundation president, in 2017, is a CNP member since 2020. This sub-network has spawned a range of extreme election denial and reactionary policy junktanks. One notable CPI entity is America First Legal, white supremacist Stephen Miller’s critical creation. It is largely funded by Bradley donations.
One of the significant names on the CNP list is Steve Bannon. He has been fighting for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” for years. His esoteric traditionalist beliefs call for the destruction of the age of slaves (democracy) to be replaced by the age of priests. His ally Curtis Yarvin, inspiration of many of the tech-fascist oligarchs, argues a CEO-monarch should replace the democratic experiment. It looks like Elon Musk thinks that should be him.
Many of the Christofascist organisations and individuals in the CNP are anti-democratic, believing that a theocracy is the answer to America’s ills. There is, at minimum, no freedom of religion allowed.
The destruction around Trump is a genuine threat to American’s democratic experiment.
That Reagan’s Mandate for Leadership should have become Project 2025 is startling on its own. The linking of Atlas’s ostensible campaign for freedom with the CNP’s campaign for theocratic coercion illustrates starkly that the freedom is only for a few.
* * * * *
Mont Pelerin is a secretive, invitation only organisation, but some of its leaked members can be found here. The Council for National Policy is ultra-secretive but its leaked members can be found here.
(1) (Business donors who had captured former Democrat Kirsten Sinema years back seem to have sent her back from early retirement to vote down Biden’s choice for a Labor Relations Board that might have been able to protect workers’ rights into the Trump era.)
This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.
State Dept. Plans New $7 Billion Arms Sale to Israel
This comes as President Trump talks up an ethnic cleansing plan for the Gaza Strip
by Connor Freeman February 8, 2025, https://news.antiwar.com/2025/02/08/state-dept-plans-new-7-billion-arms-sale-to-israel/
The State Department has formally notified Congress of its plans for a massive arms sale to Israel worth over $7 billion, including thousands of missiles and bombs, the Associated Press reported on Friday. This follows Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington DC this week and Donald Trump’s announcement that the US will “own” Gaza after it is ethnically cleansed of its indigenous Palestinian population.
Per the State Department, Congress was notified of two separate sales, one is worth $6.75 billion. This first sale includes 2,800 500-pound bombs and 166 small-diameter bombs, along with thousands of guidance kits, fuses, bomb components, and other equipment. Deliveries of these bombs would begin later this year. The other package, worth $660 million, includes 3,000 Hellfire missiles and related equipment. Deliveries for this second arms sale are expected to take place by 2028. According to the AP, the use of these missiles will require the IDF to receive supplemental training by the US military.
Officials from the Joe Biden administration informally made Congress aware of the sale last month, at the time they said some of the weapons could be sent from current Pentagon stockpiles but most of the arms would take at least a year, or more likely several years, to deliver.
This comes as a fragile ceasefire in Gaza is still holding, despite the IDF killing dozens of Palestinians in Gaza since it was implemented and amid hostage exchanges on both sides. Israeli officials indicate that the increased military aid and arms sales are meant to compel Netanyahu to see the ceasefire deal through to its second and third phases, following the current 42-day truce. Last month, Trump released a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs that the previous administration had paused over a dispute regarding the Israeli invasion of Rafah last year.
Earlier this week, Trump asked leaders in Congress to approve another $1 billion arms transfer, financed with US military aid, that includes 4,700 1,000-pound bombs worth over $700 million and $300 million worth of armored bulldozers. The bulldozers are infamously used to carry out violent assaults and home demolitions in the occupied West Bank.
The news of the additional arms sales comes as Trump is talking up his plan for Gaza to be ethnically cleansed before the US takes over the Strip and begins a huge real estate development project there. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz ordered the IDF to prepare for the “voluntary departure” of the Palestinians from Gaza in accordance with Trump’s plan. He said the Palestinians should be sent to Western countries like Ireland, Norway, and Spain which have recognized the state of Palestine and been highly critical of Tel Aviv’s genocidal onslaught.
Initially, Trump had insisted that nearly 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza could be sent to Egypt and Jordan but the proposal was sharply rejected by Cairo and Amman along with the Palestinians themselves.
Therefore, in order to pursue this forced displacement plan, the Israelis will have to restart their genocidal campaign in Gaza where, according to a recent study in the British medical journal The Lancet, approximately 70,000 people have been killed as result of Israeli military action.
Scores of American doctors, nurses, and surgeons, who have spent hundreds of weeks combined volunteering in Gaza, wrote in an open letter to the White House last fall that tens of thousands more Palestinians had been starved to death as a result of the US-backed siege and Israel’s consistent blocking of vital humanitarian aid.
Connor Freeman is the assistant editor and a writer at the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He is a co-host on the Conflicts of Interest podcast. His writing has been featured in media outlets such as Antiwar.com, Counterpunch, and the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. He has also appeared on Liberty Weekly, Around the Empire, and Parallax Views. You can follow him on Twitter @FreemansMind96.
1 This Month
26 April – Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown airs on National Geographic on Sunday 26th April from 4pm
29 April – Nuclear Expert Webinar #1 – Radiation Impacts on Families with Mary Olson and Cindy Folkers
- 12:15 PM MT – 1:45 PM MT
- Location: Virtual – REGISTER TODAY
4 May -West Suburban Peace Coalition to discuss Iran war at May Educational Forum
Monday, May 4, 7:00 – 8:00 PM Central Standard Time
Title: : How Trump’s Narrative Tries to Shape the Reality of the War on Iran.
Contact Walt Zlotow, zlotow@hotmail.com 630 442 3045 for further information
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
Pine Ridge Uranium is the real threat, not Tehran- Tell Burgum: Stop the Extraction.
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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