US Troops in ground war in Syria.
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All the unbuffered error messages
US Troops in ground war in Syria.
She was the first Soviet citizen to be welcomed to the White House. There are pictures of her, smiling with Eleanor Roosevelt, in her Red Army dress uniform; the uniform is simple, not a beribboned affair, but one of the medals on her left chest is the plain star of the Hero Of The Soviet Union.
Bacevich asks the question, “Where is the strategy?”
A nation priding itself on having the world’s greatest military – and we do – unquestionably have the world’s greatest military – has misused its military power on an epic scale. It’s not simply that we have not prevailed, although obviously we have not prevailed, rather it is that through a combination of naivete, short-sightedness, and hubris we have actually made matters worse. (10:17)
Trump wants to bump defense spending another 10%.[wp]
There were scandals a few years ago regarding test-cheating by operators of the US’ strategic missile systems. [nyt] But that’s just cheating. What about “rank incompetence” in the forces that prop up the nihilist triad of ‘mutual assured destruction’?
Our president knows things about uranium! So do I!
“We had Hillary Clinton give Russia 20 percent of the uranium in our country. You know what uranium is, right? It’s a thing called nuclear weapons and other things. Like lots of things are done with uranium, including some bad things” – Donald Trump
Most bombs nowadays are plutonium, but that’s a little detail. Nuclear weapons-making, though, is something that beggars my imagination when it comes to complexity, which is why I’ve always been interested in it. These are a few random factoids that stick in my mind from a lifetime of collecting random factoids…
Military ‘exercises’ are a form of imperial messaging. Right now, the US has troops in Poland in what is being described with Orwellian irony as “anti-Russian aggression NATO exercises”[1]
The troops will rotate training in Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia for the next nine months. The regional training exercises are also designed to test how U.S. forces respond on short notice to a possible conflict with Russia.
Whenever you talk to someone who says that they are “fiscally conservative” (and they usually follow it with “… and socially libertarian”) you are authorized to laugh at them. Indeed, you are deputized hereby to deliver derisive laughter. I’ve said many times that it’s impossible to be “fiscally conservative” and not be mind-blown upset about defense expenditures and pentagon financial fraud.
It’s a little hard to sort out the grifts when they’re so many-layered. So, please bear with me.
Apparently Trump’s pressuring Lockheed Martin squeezed around $700 million off of one of the F-35 contracts.
Trump had big meetings with generals, to talk about bringing down Pentagon costs.
The funny thing is that, if Trump wanted to do that, he should be “draining the swamp” that is Washington and its network of lobbyists and beltway bandit con-artists.