Israeli agents posed as CIA to recruit terrorists. Pentagon defends plan for leaner military. WASHINGTON – Top Pentagon officials stressed Thursday that even the shrinking military they envision under President Obama's new strategy will be strong enough to take on all comers, a view not shared by some leaders on Capitol Hill. For decades, fighting and winning two wars at once has been an underlying tenet for Pentagon planners. The strategy announced Thursday foresees a smaller Army and Marine Corps, far less appetite for wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, greater emphasis on special operations forces and intelligence-gathering, and shifting focus to China and the Pacific. The new strategy was necessitated by the need to cut military spending by at least $480 billion over the next decade and the winding down of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. STORY: Obama takes flak on defense downsizing Even the downsized military will be strong enough, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Army Gen.
Martin Dempsey maintained. "We can confront more than one enemy at a time," Panetta said. Rep. US 'turns page on a decade of war' Obama's New Defense Plan: Drones, Spec Ops and Cyber War | Danger Room. The President announced his vision for the future of the U.S. military today. Kiss big counterinsurgencies goodbye. Get ready for more shadow wars, drone attacks and online combat, with the military’s eyes on the Pacific, rather than Afghanistan.
In a rare visit to the Pentagon, President Obama declared that the U.S. will be “strengthening our presence in the Asia-Pacific,” while “turning the page on a decade of war.” In practice, that means cutting the Army and Marine Corps and unspecified “outdated Cold War systems,” part of a broad effort to cut what the Pentagon now calculates as $487 billion over 10 years from its budget. But it also means that the U.S. is going to lean hard on other military specialties between now and 2020. Obama identified those as “intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, counterterrorism, countering weapons of mass destruction, and the ability to operate in environments where adversaries try to deny us access.” No longer. Photo: AP. The Elite's Military Problem. What Obama is enunciating is nothing more than a dominant social theme, in our view. The idea is to indicate to the West and to America in particular that the country's war-fervor is abating.
The US will continue to be triumphantly powerful but it won't be so brash or quite so destructive. But really nothing much has changed in terms of power elite goals. What IS changing is the way force is going to be distributed and applied. There is going to be a transition to a more secretive military methodology, in our view. It's already happening. The powers-that-be will seek to advance their agenda via mercenaries and intelligence agencies and to fund these activities via drug dealing and various other black ops. Is there any other choice? Western economies are seemingly almost entirely in the thrall of this elite. It would seem to be the most successful, hidden dictatorship in the history of humankind.
What we call the Internet Reformation is evidently and obviously shaking the power elite. Obama defense plan would end ability to fight two conventional wars at once Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP President Obama speaks during a news briefing Thursday. WASHINGTON — Declaring that "the tide of war is receding," President Obama Thursday ordered a shift from the nation's longstanding capability to fight two major conflicts at once. The new strategy, which critics will surely brand as a retreat, calls for being able to fight one major conventional conflict while conducting numerous unconventional operations elsewhere, such as policing actions, counterterrorism and disaster relief. Obama praised the military services for its successes, including last year's completion of its mission in Iraq and the killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. The Pentagon must, however shed lingering and costly Cold War capabilities to live within new constraints set by Congress to cut debt and budget deficits, he said in remarks at the Pentagon briefing room.
Republican front-runner and former Massachusetts Gov. Obama sought to preempt his critics. With News Wire Services. New Pentagon strategy stresses Asia, cyber, drones. Pentagon-backed 'time cloak' stops the clock. Pentagon-supported physicists on Wednesday said they had devised a "time cloak" that briefly makes an event undetectable. The laboratory device manipulates the flow of light in such a way that for the merest fraction of a second an event cannot be seen, according to a paper published in the science journal Nature. It adds to experimental work in creating next-generation camouflage -- a so-called invisibility cloak in which specific colours cannot be perceived by the human eye. "Our results represent a significant step towards obtaining a complete spatio-temporal cloaking device," says the study, headed by Moti Fridman of Cornell University in New York.
The breakthrough exploits the fact that frequencies of light move at fractionally different speeds. The so-called temporal cloak starts with a beam of green light that is passed down a fibre-optic cable. The tiny difference in speed is then accentuated by placing a transparent obstacle in front of the two beams. Pentagon's non-lethal weapon projects leaked - including a laser beam that 'steers enemy planes' Descriptions of the Pentagon’s very latest non-lethal weapon projects have been leaked online. Publicintelligence.org recently published the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate’s ‘Non-Lethal Weapons Reference Book’, which includes devices in use and some that have been dreamed up for the future. One of the fantasy weapon systems is a laser device fitted to a plane that can actually steer an enemy aircraft away from a restricted area – somehow.
Active Denial System: It causes intense burning sensations from beyond the range of small arms fire It also details some projects that are being worked on right now, including the ‘Impulse Swimmer Gun’. This fires ‘pulsed sound waves’ at scuba divers who have strayed into a restricted zone leaving them with ‘auditory impairment and/or nausea’. Also on the drawing board is a weapon that blocks cars using high-powered microwaves. Plane crazy? Making waves: This non-lethal weapon makes swimmers feel sick. Dennis Cuddy -- The Disarmament of America, Part 1. By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D. January 9, 2012 NewsWithViews.com Shortly after U.S. combat soldiers left Iraq, on December 22 the Associated Press reported 14 terrorist attacks in Baghdad killing 69 people, and an Al-Qaeda front group in Iraq claimed responsibility.
Then on January 5, 2012, bombings targeting Shiite killed at least another 78 people, so there are growing concerns that Iraqi security forces are not up to the job. The result is that the nation could fall apart in another civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. On December 25 in Nigeria for the second Christmas in a row, Boko Haram (some of whose members have links to Al-Qaeda) launched terrorist attacks. This time, two churches and the UN headquarters there were attacked, killing 39 people. On the same day as the 14 attacks in Baghdad occurred, the U.S. military admitted partial blame for the NATO airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers about a month earlier. Agency. . © 2012 Dennis Cuddy - All Rights Reserved. Air Force Will Lose Hundreds of Planes in New Pentagon Plan | Danger Room. Updated 4:45 p.m. The Air Force is preparing to trim hundreds of aircraft from its aging fleet in order to meet an Obama administration austerity order.
The move will strike many Air Force supporters as ironic. Because just as the fleet is set to shrink, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is getting ready to argue, at least implicitly, that the country needs it more than ever. Danger Room has learned that around 200 airplanes, mostly older models, will eventually be retired without replacement. That represents about a 5 percent reduction in the overall fleet of about 4,000 aircraft. Exactly which planes will go is unclear. But under any scenario, the positions of thousands of airmen who fly and maintain those planes will be phased out. On Thursday, Leon Panetta will announce a new American defense strategy — one that military observers say will stress the centrality of the Pacific region, and by extension, the U.S.
“The nation is best served if it modernizes its Air Force and its Navy. United States the Ununited Empire. Politics / US PoliticsDec 23, 2011 - 09:14 AM GMT By: STRATFOR The American president is the most important political leader in the world. The reason is simple: he governs a nation whose economic and military policies shape the lives of people in every country on every continent. The president can and does order invasions, embargos, and sanctions. The economic policies he shapes will resonate in billions of lives, perhaps over many generations. This was driven home to me on the night of the most recent U.S. presidential election, when I tried to phone one of my staff in Brussels and reached her at a bar filled with Belgians celebrating Barack Obama's victory.
Before the end of Obama's first year in office, five Norwegian politicians awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize, to the consternation of many who thought that he had not yet done anything to earn it. The American Emperor Certainly there was talk of empire before this. Many countries have impacts on other countries. Human experiments: First, do harm. Image Slideshow EVOLVING ETHICS Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) were a prime concern for health officials in the 1940s, and many medical studies — including the US experiments in Guatemala — used methods that would be considered unethical today.
Although standards improved over the decades, clinical researchers continued to push the boundaries of acceptable science.Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues 1941 A 12-month-old baby in California is deliberately infected with herpes as part of an experiment. One editor objects to publishing the work, but it appears in 1942 in the Journal of Pediatrics.R. J. Green/SPL 1940s During the Second World War, the US military and Public Health Service combat STDs through an all-out campaign of research, treatment programmes and advertising.US Natl Lib. The injections came without warning or explanation.
Now 87 years old, Ramos says that he has suffered for most of his life from the effects of those injections. Pentagon May Oust Troops Involuntarily to Meet Reductions in Budget Plan. The Defense Department may have to force soldiers, Marines or other members of the military out of the services for the first time since the aftermath of the Cold War to achieve the spending reductions in its budget proposal. The Pentagon plans to cut 67,100 soldiers from active and reserve Army units and the Army National Guard in the five years starting Oct. 1, as well as 15,200 from the active and reserve ranks of the Marine Corps as part of an effort to save $487 billion over a decade, according to the budget sent to Congress today. The Navy and Air Force would lose fewer people -- 8,600 and 1,700 respectively -- because of their role in a strategic shift toward the Asia-Pacific region and the Middle East. “I was surprised that they were going to complete the reductions to the Army and the Marine Corps in just five years,” Sharp said in an interview before the budget was released.
The Pentagon has said it is aiming to a create a smaller, more agile military. Republican Opposition.