Military Spending

Someone used a $3 million Patriot missile to destroy a store-bought quadcopter
Someone somewhere thought it was a good idea to use a $3 million Patriot missile to take out a rogue quadcopter. Militaries face a real challenge: the adaptation of cheap civilian tech. Are quadcopters the new IEDs? [...]
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US Marines’ New Chopper to Be More Expensive Than F-35 Disaster
The US Marines’ King Stallion will not only be the world’s priciest helicopter but also it is poised be acquired at a higher per-unit cost than the US Air Force’s insanely expensive F-35A. Both aerial vehicles share at least one other characteristic, aside from their absurdly high cost and regular poor performance, as they are both manufactured by Lockheed Martin or subsidiary Sikorsk [...]
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‘US Republicans & Democrats both addicted to war and militarism’
When the global military empire takes money from programs that poor people depend on and gives it to rich military contractors - it is a theft and looting of the national budget, says Brian Becker, the National Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition. [...]
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Bully nation: Is America hardwired for war & aggression?
Watching Washington attack one sovereign state after another since the collapse of the Soviet Union prompts the question: Are we Americans behaving out of some inherent aggression, or is this just old-fashioned empire building by a global superpower? [...]
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US power trip over? ‘Washington overextended itself economically & militarily policing the world’
NATO needs to change its mission and the NATO-Russian Council should be revitalized, said former Pentagon official, Michael Maloof. Defense analyst, Ivan Eland, said Russia would like to know it is not facing a hostile alliance right on its borders. [...]
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Forever Grounded? What’s Behind US Media Reports on Sad State of Navy Aviation
Commenting on the recent US media reports that nearly two-thirds of US Navy's strike fighters can't fly due to undergoing maintenance and that there is a lack of funds available to fix them, Russian defense analysts explain what might be behind such reports. [...]
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Almost Two-Thirds of US Navy Fighter Jets Can’t Fly
Nearly two-thirds of the US Navy’s fleet of Super Hornet and F/A-18 jet fighters are not airworthy. The aircraft are grounded awaiting parts or maintenance as part of a lack of funding for repairs that has left over half of the Navy’s aircraft on the ground. Money problems have also led to a growing backlog of aircraft that need repairs, and for three years almost every carrier has taken [...]
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Cosmonaut on How to End All Wars: ‘Gather Up Politicians & Send Them Into Space’
Yuri Usachov is no stranger to space travel, with four spaceflights, seven spacewalks and 553 days in orbit under his belt. He's also well-versed in person-to-person diplomacy, spending three of his missions interacting with foreign astronauts. Speaking to Radio Baltkom, Usachov revealed how the world's conflicts might be brought to a peaceful end. [...]
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America is Tired
The major takeaway from the US Presidential election, and from the events which have shaped the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s Presidency - both his actions and the reactions of his opponents - is that America is tired. It is not difficult to see why since the US has for decades been behaving in a way that was guaranteed eventually to exhaust it. [...]
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F-35 Fallout: How World’s Most Expensive Fighter Launched ‘Strike’ on Pentagon
With the new Pentagon chief already ordering the review of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, RT's Viktor Astafyev looks into what went wrong with the most expensive weapon in history. Earlier this week, US Secretary of Defense James Mattis sent two memorandums for Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work to review the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program to "determine opportunities to signifi [...]
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First-Rate MiG-35 Multirole Jetfighter to Join Russia’s Fleet
The MiG-35 multirole jetfighter fully meets the demands of modern-day aerial combat and will be a welcome addition to Russia’s fleet of light frontline fighters, the Russian Airspace Forces’ former deputy commander, Col. Gen. Nikolai Antoshkin told RIA. [...]
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F-35 has 276 deficiencies and counting, unfit for combat operations –  Pentagon report
The F-35 stealth fighter jet suffers from hundreds of problems and won’t be fully combat-capable before 2020, says a scathing report from the Pentagon’s top evaluator. New issues keep cropping up, and fixing them all may cost over $1 billion. [...]
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US Arms Makers Invest in a New Cold War
Behind the U.S. media-political clamor for a new Cold War with Russia is a massive investment by the Military-Industrial Complex in “think tanks” and other propaganda outlets, writes Jonathan Marshall. The U.S. military has won only a single major war since the end of World War II (the Gulf War of 1990-91). But U.S. military contractors continue to win major budget wars in Congress nearly e [...]
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The Reason College Isn’t Free in America: US Army ‘Misreported’ $6.5 Trillion
The Department of Defense finds itself in a controversy that continues to unfold in the wake of an Inspector General Report in June that found that the US Army's financial summaries misstated balances by $6.5 trillion. A June report by the Defense Department’s Inspector General uncovered that the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 201 [...]
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Obama’s Offering of Largest Military Aid Package Ever Is Not Enough for Israel
Israeli officials play hardball, demanding that the Obama Administration pony up more than the record $40 billion ten-year offering made by the US -- by a cool $10 billion Last week, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford met with his Israeli counterpart at the Pentagon to discuss the new multi-billion-dollar military assistance package currently in negotiation between the Obam [...]
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Trident nuke renewal plan blown out the water by govt’s own watchdog
Britain’s new multibillion-pound Trident nuclear submarine fleet may be in jeopardy after the government’s own watchdog warned the project faces “major risks.” The Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) has cast doubt on the Trident renewal plan. [...]
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Why has NATO chosen Russia as its enemy instead of ISIS?
According to statements made at last weekend’s summit in Warsaw, NATO regards Russia as a bigger threat than ISIS. Of course, that's ludicrous but when you scratch beneath the surface, the use of these falsehoods makes perverted sense. [...]
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Israel to Receive ‘Largest Military Aid Package in US History’
While criticizing Israeli policy, US National Security Advisor Susan Rice has nonetheless promised to provide a large military aid package to the Middle Eastern nation. Speaking at the American Jewish Committee Global Forum on Monday, Rice spoke of the necessity of a peaceful two-state solution. [...]
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US still uses floppy disks to control nuclear bombers & ballistic missiles
Three-quarters of federal agencies’ IT budgets go on operation and maintenance rather than upgrades, and some legacy technologies, such as floppy disks used by the Pentagon for nuclear missiles, are over 50 years old. The overview of how the US government continues to use archaic technologies in some vital areas was given in a report released on Wednesday by the Government Accountability Offi [...]
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