Arms Sales

Congress Has Been Captured by the Arms Industry: And We’re Paying the Price (and What a Price It Is!)

( Tomdispatch.com ) – On March 13th, the Pentagon rolled out its proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2024. The results were — or at least should have been — stunning, even by the standards of a department that’s used to getting what it wants when it wants it. The new Pentagon budget would come in […]

Arms Sales

Merger Mania in the Military-Industrial Complex: Tackling Pentagon Waste Means Battling the Big Weapons Makers and Asking More of Congress

Tomdispatch

By Julia Gledhill and William D. Hartung | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – It’s early in the new Congress, but lawmakers are already hotly debating spending and debt levels. As they do so, they risk losing track of an important issue hiding in plain sight: massive Pentagon waste. At least in theory, combating such excess […]

Arms Sales

Ukraine war ignites the Arms Race in the Middle East

Middle East Monitor

By Ibrahim Nawar | – ( Middle East Monitor ) – The Ukraine war has cast a shadow over the arms race in the Middle East and ignited it. The Iranian weapons supplies to Russia, the Turkish and Israeli weapons to Ukraine, and Germany’s request from Israel to provide it with a system of Arrow-3 […]

Arms Sales

Corporate Weapons Heaven Is a Hell on Earth: Joe Biden, the National Security State, and Arms Sales

William D. Hartung

( Tomdispatch.com) – Here’s a seldom commented-upon reality of this century and this moment: the United States remains the number-one arms-exporting nation on the planet. Between 2017 and 2021, it grabbed 39% of the total global weapons market and there’s nothing new about that. It has, in fact, been the top arms dealer in every […]

Afghanistan

A Different World is Possible: From Yemen War to Afghan Starvation, Our Tragedies are Exacerbated by Letting the US Military-Industrial Complex Run Wild

Peter G. Prontzos

Vancouver (Special to Informed Comment) – Right now, we have more than enough knowledge, wealth, and the capacity to create a just and prosperous world, but we are nowhere near realizing this dream. One reason is that we are constantly told about so-called “scarcities”, and how expensive it would be actually to help people and […]

Arms Sales

Ukraine war: Iranian ‘kamikaze’ drones can inflict serious damage but will not be a gamechanger

The Conversation

By Dominika Kunertova, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich | – Many Ukrainians are facing the prospect of a winter of power outages after about 30% of the country’s power stations were knocked out in just over a week. The deputy head of the president’s office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, has warned that the country needs to […]

Arms Sales

Iranian drones used by Russia in Ukraine show that there’s already one Victor in that War: Iran

The Conversation

By Aaron Pilkington, University of Denver | – The war in Ukraine is helping one country achieve its foreign policy and national security objectives, but it’s neither Russia nor Ukraine. It’s Iran. That was starkly clear on the morning of Oct. 17, 2022, as Iranian-made drones attacked civilian targets in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. Russia used […]

Arms Sales

Spending Unlimited: Contractors Cash in as Congress Adds Billions to the Pentagon Budget

Tomdispatch

By Julia Gledhill and William D. Hartung | – ( Tomdispatch.com) – Congress has spoken when it comes to next year’s Pentagon budget and the results, if they weren’t so in line with past practices, should astonish us all. The House of Representatives voted to add $37 billion and the Senate $45 billion to the […]

Arms Sales

U.S. Lawmakers Demand Federal Scrutiny of How US Tech got into Turkey’s Drones

ProPublica

By Umar Farooq | – ( ProPublica ) – As countries around the globe add armed drones to their arsenals, federal lawmakers are pressing the Biden administration to investigate how U.S. parts and technology ended up in what has fast become one of the most popular models on the world market: Turkey’s TB2. Manufactured by […]