Most military acquisitions are malpractice. Some just cost us miserable taxpayers more than others.
Of all the stinking heaps of corruption in Washing DC, I don’t think any reeks worse that military acquisitions — that’s because there’s just a gigantic myth of noble military service to hide behind.
***
From Air Force magazine:
F-35 Concurrency was “Acquisition Malpractice”: In retrospect, hurrying the F-35 strike fighter into production was, to say the least, a big mistake, according to the Pentagon’s acquisition executive nominee. “Putting the F-35 into production years before the first test flight was acquisition malpractice. It should not have been done. But we did it,” said Frank Kendall, acting acquisition czar, during a Center for Security and International Studies-sponsored address in Washington, D.C., on Monday. Kendall said the department made “optimistic predictions” when it started production that it had good-enough design tools and simulations and modeling such that it wouldn’t have to worry about discovering problems with the aircraft in testing. That “was wrong and now we’re paying the price,” he said. The F-35 program “is probably an extreme example” of transitioning from development to production too early, said Kendall. On the bright side, all three F-35 variants “are making progress,” he noted. “We’re committed to that program. It is the future of tactical air for the Department of Defense.” Further, “we don’t, at this point, see anything that would preclude continuing production at a reasonable rate,” he said. (CSIS’ transcript of event) [emphasis added]
They put the most expensive plane *EVER* into production before a test flight???
Ron Paul’s CNN Walkout interview conducted by reporter-wife of huge war profiteer
Well, well, it turns out hit job specialist Gloria Borger is married to Lance Morgan. Morgan is according to the web site of his employer, Powell Tate,”chief communications strategist at Powell Tate in Washington, D.C. He specializes in developing and executing communications strategies for public policy debates, crisis communications and media training.”
So who might be the clients of Powell Tate, where Borger’s husband is “chief communications strategist and crisis communications” adviser for?
Uncut video shows Paul did NOT ‘storm out’ of CNN interview
The uncut version of a CNN interview between Ron Paul and Gloria Borger surfaced online Sunday, leading many Paul supporters to claim that the footage shows the presidential hopeful didn’t “storm out” of the interview, as some media outlets reported based off the edited version that aired on CNN.
In the interview, Borger pushed the Texas Republican about newsletters from the ’80s and ’90s that bear his name and contained racist and homophobic content. In the originally aired video, Paul seemed to walk out on Borger after a terse rebuttal.
But the uncut version shows that Paul and Borger were standing up for the entire interview, and that Paul actually responded to questions about the newsletter for almost three minutes before walking off, and that the interview was likely over.
Paul was clearly irritated by the line of questioning, which he says he covered at length with CNN in another interview the day before, but early reports seemed to indicate that Paul fled the interview to avoid the issue.
The full interview lasted more than eight minutes, and covered issues not aired by CNN, such as negative campaign advertisements and the payroll tax cut.
A post on a website for Paul supporters described the interview controversy as a “creative editing hit job.”
***
Frum goes after Paul. Typical slander from a typical war mongering, chicken hawk, neo-con.
It’s sad and squalid that Ron Paul finished ahead of Jon Huntsman. Gov. Huntsman has the elements of a president; Ron Paul is not even a fanatic. He’s a bunco artist. May I repeat something I’ve said about him before? (The piece can be read here on CNN.com)
Ron Paul is something more (or less) than a racist crank. As Michael Brendan Dougherty aptly observed in the Atlantic last week:
Al Gore encourages voters to dismiss Ron Paul as a ‘silly’ candidate
Analyzing the returns, Gore said, “He does not have a ceiling in fantasy land, but in the real world when people take a look at his actual positions, when Republicans take a look on at his actual positions, come on.”
Americans’ frustration with the economic and political situation in the country was, Gore said, the only reason Paul would even been considered by voters.
“That all is part of a general attitude that you know, let’s just play 52-card pick up,” he mused, “let’s just up end things and do something radically different. And I think he does culturally, psychologically tap into that.”
“At some point when people look seriously at what his positions are, I mean getting rid of the Federal Reserve,” Gore jeered. “Look, the wars are enormously unpopular, but bringing all the American troops home from no matter what the dangerous situations are? It’s so silly.”
Gore additionally claimed that Paul wasn’t being pummeled sufficiently for so-called “racist” passages in newsletters from the 1980s, which Paul claims he did not write. (Read more & see video)
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Marginalizing Ron Paul
It is official now. The Ron Paul campaign, despite surging in the Iowa polls, is not worthy of serious consideration, according to a New York Times editorial; “Ron Paul long ago disqualified himself for the presidency by peddling claptrap proposals like abolishing the Federal Reserve, returning to the gold standard, cutting a third of the federal budget and all foreign aid and opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
. . . .
It is hypocritical that Paul is now depicted as the archenemy of non-white minorities when it was his nemesis, the Federal Reserve, that enabled the banking swindle that wiped out 53 percent of the median wealth of African-Americans and 66 percent for Latinos, according to the Pew Research Center.
The Fed sits at the center of the rot and bears the major responsibility for tolerating the runaway mortgage-backed securities scam that is at the core of our economic crisis. After the meltdown it was the Fed that led ultra-secret machinations to bail out the banks while ignoring the plight of their exploited customers. (Read more)
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MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Calls Ron Paul A Fraud!
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Ron Paul Booed by Insane Debate Audience for Endorsing the Golden Rule
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CNN’s Dana Bash is Worried About Ron Paul
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Jon Stewart Exposes Ron Paul Media Bias After New Hampshire Primary
National security advisers to the Republican presidential candidates have ties to defense, homeland security and energy companies that have received at least $40 billion in federal contracts since 2008.
Five of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s 41 national security and foreign policy advisers have links to companies that last year alone received at least $7.9 billion in federal contracts, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Government analyst Christopher Flavelle. Of that, $7.3 billion came from the Department of Defense.
Romney and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, who are leading in the polls, have advisers who sit on the board of directors of BAE Systems Inc., which has received at least $37 billion in U.S. government contracts since 2008, the most of any of the companies with ties to Republican national security advisers. (Read more)
1) Starting tonight, Ron Paul will begin winning caucuses. This will be followed by either an assassination, or, in the long term, prosperity. Remember, they killed Bobby Kennedy after he began winning primaries. The chances of this are probably small. I do think there are powerful people and institution who would consider it.
If Ron Paul is assassinated, it’ll be followed by isolated instances of violence against federal institutions. These will be used to discredit anything libertarian. Government will declare new powers for itself, and the gigantic anti-terrorism apparatus will turn its full attention to Americans. An assassination would also be followed by large scale tax protests which would cripple the state. They will resort to printing money and slander tax protesters as domestic terrorists.
If, on the other hand, Ron Paul wins the primary, he will defeat Obama. Democrats will defect en masse to support him. The media mud slingers will realize their impotence. The markets will celebrate, perhaps with the exception of large commercial banks. They will threaten to blow-up the economy as revenge upon a public that elected Ron Paul. We will call their bluff.
2) At least one country will leave the Euro Zone. The EU will remain intact, but calls to end it will grow louder and more insistent. The turmoil in Europe will continue to create the illusion of economic stability in the U.S. and capital will flow away from the headlines, but once things have stabilized there, expect the much bigger and much more destructive problems of the U.S. to resume their unfolding. The prices of precious metals will resume their climb. Let’s hope Ron Paul is in power so the crisis isn’t used to lead us further down the road to serfdom.
3) SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, a thinly veiled attempt to censor the internet will fail. However, it’s proponents will very quickly put another piece of legislation on the table. They will not stop until it is passed.
4) A massive troop reduction will occur in Afghanistan. It will be done for political reasons. The media will spend weeks praising Obama.
5) A galvanizing incident will be provoked or staged in Iran. There will be an outbreak of hostility, but the United States, despite the propaganda from neo-con politicians and the media will not fully commit to a war.
As part of an ongoing investigation into military mortuary services, the Air Force admits it dumped the partial cremated remains of at least 274 servicemembers in Virginia landfills.
Craig Whitlock and Mary Pat Flaherty of The Washington Post report the dumping was hidden from families who had agreed to allow the military to dispose of their loved ones remains in “a dignified and respectful manner.”
The Air Force halted the practice three years ago, just prior to the 2009 ruling by President Obama to lift the ban on news coverage of fallen troops imposed by George H.W. Bush in 1991. Until then, the mortuary activities of the military were hidden from scrutiny.
The Air Force went on to tell The Post that it cannot say how many remains went to the dump and that to find out it would have to search the records of more than 6,300 servicemembers handled by the mortuary since 2001. (Read more)
A few days ago, some Republican senators attempted to lay the groundwork for a shooting war with Russia. I wish I were exaggerating.
Last week, while most senators were focused on the important national issues of war funding and Americans’ constitutional liberties, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) seemed more concerned with the fate of a foreign country. Behind the scenes, Rubio moved to have a unanimous consent vote that would have hastened Georgia’s entry into NATO. The unanimous consent vote never happened because Senator Rand Paul single-handedly prevented it.
This is not a triviality. Make no mistake: Bringing Georgia into NATO could lead to a new military conflict for the United States, which is why any move that would facilitate Georgia’s entry into the alliance should be publicly debated. Rubio’s attempt to push this through by unanimous consent — that is to say, without any formal debate or vote — is highly suspect and calls into question the senator’s better judgment.
But what Sen. Rubio is advocating is nothing new. Examining the political context of McCain’s declaration of solidarity with Georgia in 2008 should give Americans pause about the Washington establishment’s foreign policy agenda. After the 2008 South Ossetia conflict, Pat Buchanan wrote:
Who is Randy Scheunemann? He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States. But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role. He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.
[emphasis added]
Continued Buchanan:
From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 — pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili. What were Mikheil’s marching orders to Tbilisi’s man in Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia. Scheunemann came close to succeeding.
Buchanan’s description of Scheunemann and his activities is instructive because Georgia’s entry into NATO would commit the United States to fighting for Georgia. Buchanan explains what would have happened in 2008 if Georgia had been part of NATO at that time:
Had [Scheunemann succeeded], U.S. soldiers and Marines from Idaho and West Virginia would be killing Russians in the Caucasus, and dying to protect Scheunemann’s client, who launched this idiotic war the night of Aug. 7. That people like Scheunemann hire themselves out to put American lives on the line for their clients is a classic corruption of American democracy.
“The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it’s Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don’t do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, “See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn’t getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately.”
The U.S. may target and kill U.S. citizens when they take up arms with al-Qaeda, top lawyers in the Obama administration said Thursday.
CIA counsel Stephen Preston and Pentagon counsel Jeh Johnson were questioned at a national security conference about the drone strike that killed American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, but they would not comment on it specifically. They did say U.S. citizens don’t have legal rights when they side with al-Qaeda.
Johnson maintained that only the executive branch, not the courts, can decide who qualifies as an enemy on a battlefield. Unfortunately for U.S. citizens, the secret, peremptory nature of such executive decisions is not up to a review of any kind and do not require that any evidence be put forth proving the individual’s guilt or association with al-Qaeda. (Read more)
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Here is a list of who voted for this monstrosity in the Senate. The seven no votes came from:
Coburn (R-OK)
Harkin (D-IA)
Lee (R-UT)
Merkley (D-OR)
Paul (R-KY)
Sanders (I-VT)
Wyden (D-OR)
The 93 other senators voted for it. Terror! Terror! Terror! “War is the health of the state.”
today we have a column from The New York Times‘ Roger Cohen (presumably no relation) that accomplishes that task with even more stunning (though equally unintentional) brilliance.
Cohen observes, quite rightly, that President Obama — who repeatedly vowed to usher in The Most Transparent Administration Ever — has taken U.S. foreign policy almost completely underground and draped it in sweeping, anti-democratic secrecy:
The Obama administration has a doctrine. It’s called the doctrine of silence. A radical shift from President Bush’s war on terror, it has never been set out to the American people. There has seldom been so big a change in approach to U.S. strategic policy with so little explanation. . . . President Obama has gone undercover.
Despite a sustained campaign by the Washington media and political establishment to marginalize him, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, is still a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. That has a lot to do with the support he’s receiving from young voters. In almost every survey and activist straw poll, Paul draws big numbers from voters between the ages of 18 and 29.
The laziest way to explain the counterintuitive phenomenon of youth rallying around the GOP’s oldest candidate is to insist that it’s about kids’ silly college fling with unrealistic libertarianism or that it’s about kids’ affinity for drug use — and more specifically, Paul’s support for legislation that would let states legalize marijuana. This degrading mythology ignores the possibility that young people support Paul’s libertarianism for its overall critique of our government’s civil liberties transgressions (transgressions, by the way, now being openly waged against young people), nor does the narrative address the possibility that young people support Paul’s drug stance not because they want to smoke weed, but because they see the War on Drugs as a colossal waste of resources. Instead, Paul is presented as merely a fringe protest candidate, and the young people who support him are depicted as just dumb idealists, hedonistic pot smokers or both.
One problem with this fantastical tale, of course, is that it insults the intelligence and motivation of young voters. But another, even more troubling facet of this tale is how it uses speculative apocrypha and stereotyping about ideology and drugs to suppress concrete social survey data about the far-more-likely foreign policy motivations of young Ron Paul supporters.
. . . .
The new study tracks how younger voters are now strongly rejecting traditional American hubris in favor of Paul’s more empirical views on foreign policy. For instance, it finds that while older citizens embrace American exceptionalism in insisting our culture is inherently superior, younger voters do not. But the key finding as it relates to Paul’s candidacy has to do with blowback, which Paul frequently discusses on the campaign trail. As Pew reports (emphasis mine):
Two-thirds of Millennials (66 percent) say that relying too much on military force to defeat terrorism creates hatred that leads to more terrorism. A slim majority of Gen Xers (55 percent) agree with this sentiment, but less than half (46 percent) of Boomers agree and the number of Silents who share this view is 41 percent. A plurality of Silents (45 percent) believe that using overwhelming force is the best way to defeat terrorism and 43 percent of Boomers share that view.
These findings have been largely ignored by the media and political establishment. Despite a sustained campaign by the Washington media and political establishment to marginalize him, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, is still a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. (Read more)
F-35 Concurrency was “Acquisition Malpractice”: In retrospect, hurrying the F-35 strike fighter into production was, to say the least, a big mistake, according to the Pentagon’s acquisition executive nominee. “Putting the F-35 into production years before the first test flight was acquisition malpractice. It should not have been done. But we did it,” said Frank Kendall, acting acquisition czar, during a Center for Security and International Studies-sponsored address in Washington, D.C., on Monday. Kendall said the department made “optimistic predictions” when it started production that it had good-enough design tools and simulations and modeling such that it wouldn’t have to worry about discovering problems with the aircraft in testing. That “was wrong and now we’re paying the price,” he said. The F-35 program “is probably an extreme example” of transitioning from development to production too early, said Kendall. On the bright side, all three F-35 variants “are making progress,” he noted. “We’re committed to that program. It is the future of tactical air for the Department of Defense.” Further, “we don’t, at this point, see anything that would preclude continuing production at a reasonable rate,” he said. (CSIS’ transcript of event) [emphasis added] 