President Kimball...President Trump

[Silver]

Pop Quiz! Who said the following:
We are a warlike people, easily distracted from our assignment of preparing for the coming of the Lord. When enemies rise up, we commit vast resources to the fabrication of gods of stone and steel—ships, planes, missiles, fortifications—and depend on them for protection and deliverance. When threatened, we become antienemy instead of pro-kingdom of God; we train a man in the art of war and call him a patriot, thus, in the manner of Satan’s counterfeit of true patriotism, perverting the Savior’s teaching:

“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

“That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven.” (Matt. 5:44–45.)

And who allows this:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01- ... ort-policy

US Embassy Staff To Become Arms Salesmen As Trump Loosens Weapons Export Policy

by Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/09/2018 - 20:19

A bombshell Reuters report details a major policy change set to be put in place by the Trump administration as early as February, and could result in a massive uptick in arms proliferation and conflict escalation around the world. What's being described as a new "Buy American" plan will involve US diplomats and military attaches stationed across the globe essentially playing the role of middle men for American arms contractors and US defense sales, while also encouraging embassy staff to aggressively promote weapons purchases abroad and allowing for much greater leeway in terms of which foreign entities the US does business with.

Though it sounds like the plot from the movie War Dogs - itself based on true events involving Pentagon contractors' black market East European private gun running scheme - this plan could involve the mainstreaming of just the type of weapons trade previously considered sketchy and illegal, existing at the peripheries legally ambiguous covert ops and off the books contract deals. The plan would take the seedy underbelly of the international arms trade into the light of day as official US policy, and would further deputize American diplomats as at the forefront of arms deals.



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The 2016 movie War Dogs. Image source: Warner Bros. Pictures via The Daily Mail



As crazy as this scenario sounds, Reuters has some jaw dropping selections in its report:

A key policy change would call for embassy staffers around the world to act essentially as a sales force for defense contractors, actively advocating on their behalf. It was unclear, however, what specific guidelines would be established...

“We want to see those guys, the commercial and military attaches, unfettered to be salesmen for this stuff, to be promoters,” said the senior administration official, who is close to the internal deliberations and spoke on condition of anonymity...

Trump, a Republican, has the legal authority to direct government embassy “security assistance officers,” both military personnel and civilians, to do more to help drive arms sales. ...embassy staffers would engage more aggressively with foreign counterparts to push for U.S. arms sales and brief visiting senior U.S. officials so they can help advance pending deals, according to a person familiar with the matter.

"Unfettered" is an interesting word in relation to arms proliferation, especially considering the plan is to encompass not only small arms sales but fighter jets, drones, warships, tanks, troop carriers, artillery and every conceivable weapons system produced by major defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, or Raytheon - all of which who are no doubt ecstatic over the loosening of policy in what is a weapons lobbyist's dream.

Reuters notes that shares of the big five US defense companies are trading at or near all-time highs as clearly the "strategy of having the Pentagon and the U.S. State Department take a more active role in securing foreign arms deals could especially benefit" precisely these major contractors.

The big 5 defense stocks from Obama's 2nd term into Trump's first months.



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U.S. defense stocks easily outperformed the broader market from the beginning of Obama's second term and through the start of the Trump presidency. Both have greatly loosened restrictions of arms sales abroad. Source: Market Watch (above), Statista (below)





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This "whole of government" approach to promoting defense deals will also ease rules and regulations on the export of US military hardware under the DoD, and in the private sector will seek to give manufacturers greater independent decision making over with whom they do business. Of course, current regulations focus heavily on human rights and mitigating the potential for US systems falling into the hands of war criminals and sanctioned regimes. Though it's unclear precisely how the new initiative would preserve the balance of increasing sales abroad while avoiding deals with unsavory actors, it would expand sales with non-NATO allies and partners (like Pakistan, Egypt, The Philippines, etc...) with less restrictions related to human rights issues.

Reuters describes the Trump policy as relegating human rights to the back seat; however, the report also traces the trend of profit over human rights back to the Obama administration, citing that "Foreign weapons sales soared during his [Obama's] tenure, with the United States retaining its position as the world’s top arms supplier." The report continues:

Foreign military sales in fiscal 2017, comprising much of Trump’s first year in office and the final months of Obama’s term, climbed to $42 billion, compared to $31 billion in the prior year, according to the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

The Trump administration has already moved forward on several controversial sales. Those include a push for $7 billion in precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia despite concerns they have contributed to civilian deaths in the Saudi campaign in Yemen’s civil war and the unblocking of $3 billion in arms to Bahrain, which was also held up by human rights concerns under Obama.

We might add that the "oil for weapons" US relationship with Saudi Arabia and the other oil and gas gulf monarchies has been an unfortunate hallmark of US-Mideast policy spanning many decades and across administrations all the way back to Eisenhower. But it appears the weapons spigot will only now flow freer - especially in competition with other major advanced weapons manufacturers like Russia, China, and Israel - and as Trump seeks to create jobs at home by tapping new markets abroad while also reigning in the the US trade deficit from a six-year high of $50 billion.

Before the plan is fully enacted it must clear a process that includes the written policy draft - which was coordinated among State, Pentagon, Commerce, and NSC officials - being approved by senior cabinet members after which the president is expected to sign off. From there a 60-day review period will remain during which changes may occur, after which the plan could be finalized in the form of a presidential "National Security Decision Directive," according to sources cited in the report.

[Silver]

https://theintercept.com/2017/06/12/tru ... is-murphy/

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION MAKES ITS CASE FOR ARMING SAUDI ARABIA IN SECRET
Alex Emmons
June 12 2017, 1:12 p.m.
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION is engaged in a last-ditch lobbying effort to stop the Senate from condemning a $500 million weapons transfer to Saudi Arabia as the kingdom wages a brutal, U.S.-backed war in Yemen.

After President Donald Trump signed a hastily-assembled $110 billion weapons deal during his visit to Saudi Arabia last month, Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Al Franken, D-Minn., introduced a bipartisan resolution of disapproval for a transfer of precision-guided weapons. If passed, it would force the Senate to vote on whether to block the transfer.

Ahead of a vote scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, however, senior officials from the State Department and Pentagon are holding a top-secret briefing on the arms sale to persuade the senators and their staff to support it, according to an invitation obtained by The Intercept.

The briefing, which was organized by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., will be conducted by Tina Kaidanow, the State Department’s acting assistant secretary for political-military affairs, and Timothy Lenderking, deputy assistant secretary for near-eastern affairs. Both are career officials at the State Department, not political appointees. They’ll be joined by an unnamed brigadier general-level Defense Department official.

“It’s really unfortunate that Senate majority leadership decided to hold this briefing in secret,” said Kate Kizer, advocacy director at the Yemen Peace Project, which opposes the arms deal. “Americans deserve to know the conduct of our allies, especially when the U.S. is intimately involved in starving potentially millions of Yemeni civilians by continuing to provide unconditional support to the Saudi-led coalition.”

After Saudi Arabia bombed a funeral hall in October in its war against Houthi rebels in Yemen, the Obama administration put a temporary hold on a sale of precision-guided munition to the Persian Gulf dictatorship. An Obama administration official told Reuters that they halted the sale because of “systemic, endemic” problems with Saudi Arabia’s targeting decision.”They’re not picking the right targets,” the official said, citing the funeral bombing.

The Trump administration, though, wasted no time in reversing the decision and moving forward with the sale.

Amid the bi-partisan clamor against the deal, Murphy, a liberal on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has emerged as a leading opponent of the arms transfer.

“The Saudis will tell you they need these precision-guided missiles to more effectively target Houthi military assets inside Yemen,” Murphy said on a press call last week. “They’re not telling the truth. The fact is, they have deliberately targeted humanitarian and civilian assets within Yemen. They are purposefully trying to create a humanitarian nightmare — that they can starve the Yemenis to the negotiating table. The United States should not be a part of that strategy.”

Since March 2015, Saudi Arabia has waged a brutal war of collective punishment in Yemen. Houthi rebels had ousted the Saudi-backed leader in 2014. A U.S.-supported naval blockade has left 19 million people — more than two-thirds of the country’s population — in need of life saving aid and 7 million on the brink of starvation and famine. Meanwhile, the Saudi air force has deliberately bombed food sources — like farms and fishing villages — as well as factories, hospitals, and children’s schools.

[Silver]

Did the Trump supporters sit around before the election and say to themselves, "Gee, I sure hope that our guy will send a lot of special forces troops to Africa so we can show them who's boss."? Is this what Trump voters thought they were going to get? More militarization, less diplomacy? More death, less Kimball? More tweets, less wisdom?

http://original.antiwar.com/Nick_Turse/ ... ecial-ops/

The Coming Year in Special Ops
by Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt Posted on January 10, 2018
Originally posted at TomDispatch.

If you want to know something about life in America these days, consider how New York Times columnist David Leonhardt began his first piece of the year, “7 Wishes for 2018”: “Well, at least it’s not 2017 anymore. I expect that future historians will look back on it as one of the darker non-war years in the country’s history…”

Think about that for a moment: 2017, a “non-war year”? Tell that to the Afghans, the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Yemenis, the Somalis, or for that matter the parents of the four American Green Berets who died in Niger last October. Still, let’s admit it, Leonhardt caught a deeper American reality of 2017, not to speak of the years before that, and undoubtedly this one, too.

Launched in October 2001, what was once called the Global War on Terror – it even gained the grotesque acronym, GWOT – has never ended. Instead, it’s morphed and spread over large parts of the planet. In all the intervening years, the United States has been in a state of permanent war that shows no sign of concluding in 2018. Its planes continue to drop a staggering tonnage of munitions; its drones continue to Hellfire-missile country after country; and, in recent years, its elite Special Operations forces, now a military-within-the-U.S.-military of about 70,000 personnel, have been deployed, as Nick Turse has long reported at this website, to almost every imaginable country on the planet. They train allied militaries and proxy forces, advise and sometimes fight with those forces in the field, conduct raids, and engage in what certainly looks like war.

The only catch in all this (and it’s surely what led Leonhardt to write those lines of his) is the American people. Long divorced from their all-volunteer military in a draft-less country, we have largely ignored the war on terror and gone about our business just as President George W. Bush urged us to do two weeks after the 9/11 attacks. (“Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”) As those distant conflicts expanded and terror groups spread and multiplied, Washington helped the “non-war” atmosphere along by perfecting a new kind of warfare in which ever fewer Americans would die. Half a century later, its quagmire qualities aside, the war on terror is largely the anti-Vietnam War: no body counts, few body bags, lots of proxy forces, armed robotic vehicles in the skies, and at the tip of the “spear” a vast, ever-more secretive military, those special ops guys. As a result, if you weren’t in that all-volunteer military or a family member of someone who was, it wasn’t too hard to live as if the country’s “forever wars” had nothing to do with us. It’s possible that never in our history, one filled with wars, have Americans been more deeply demobilized than in this era. When it comes to the war on terror, there’s neither been a wave of support nor, since 2003, a wave of protest.

In a sense, then, David Leonhardt was right on the mark. In so much of the world, 2017 was a grim year of war, displacement, and disaster. Here, however, it was, in so many ways, just another “non-war year.” In that context, let Nick Turse guide you into the next “non-war year” and the “non-war” force, America’s special operators, who are likely to be at its heart. ~ Tom

Special Ops at War
From Afghanistan to Somalia, Special Ops Achieves Less with More
By Nick Turse

At around 11 o’clock that night, four Lockheed MC-130 Combat Talons, turboprop Special Operations aircraft, were flying through a moonless sky from Pakistani into Afghan airspace. On board were 199 Army Rangers with orders to seize an airstrip. One hundred miles to the northeast, Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters cruised through the darkness toward Kandahar, carrying Army Delta Force operators and yet more Rangers, heading for a second site. It was October 19, 2001. The war in Afghanistan had just begun and U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF) were the tip of the American spear.

Those Rangers parachuted into and then swarmed the airfield, engaging the enemy – a single armed fighter, as it turned out – and killing him. At that second site, the residence of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, the special operators apparently encountered no resistance at all, even though several Americans were wounded due to friendly fire and a helicopter crash.

In 2001, U.S. special operators were targeting just two enemy forces: al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In 2010, his first full year in office, President Barack Obama informed Congress that U.S. forces were still “actively pursuing and engaging remaining al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.” According to a recent Pentagon report to Congress, American troops are battling more than 10 times that number of militant groups, including the still-undefeated Taliban, the Haqqani network, an Islamic State affiliate known as ISIS-Khorasan, and various “other insurgent networks.”

After more than 16 years of combat, U.S. Special Operations forces remain the tip of the spear in Afghanistan, where they continue to carry out counterterrorism missions. In fact, from June 1st to November 24th last year, according to that Pentagon report, members of Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan conducted 2,175 ground operations “in which they enabled or advised” Afghan commandos.

“During the Obama administration the use of Special Operations forces increased dramatically, as if their use was a sort of magical, all-purpose solution for fighting terrorism,” William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, pointed out. “The ensuing years have proven this assumption to be false. There are many impressive, highly skilled personnel involved in special operations on behalf of the United States, but the problems they are being asked to solve often do not have military solutions. Despite this fact, the Trump administration is doubling down on this approach in Afghanistan, even though the strategy has not prevented the spread of terrorist organizations and may in fact be counterproductive.”

Global Commandos

Since U.S. commandos went to war in 2001, the size of Special Operations Command has doubled from about 33,000 personnel to 70,000 today. As their numbers have grown, so has their global reach. As TomDispatch revealed last month, they were deployed to 149 nations in 2017, or about 75% of the countries on the planet, a record-setting year. It topped 2016’s 138 nations under the Obama administration and dwarfed the numbers from the final years of the Bush administration. As the scope of deployments has expanded, special operators also came to be spread ever more equally across the planet.

In October 2001, Afghanistan was the sole focus of commando combat missions. On March 19, 2003, special operators fired the first shots in the invasion of Iraq as their helicopter teams attacked Iraqi border posts near Jordan and Saudi Arabia. By 2006, as the war in Afghanistan ground on and the conflict in Iraq continued to morph into a raging set of insurgencies, 85% of U.S. commandos were being deployed to the Greater Middle East.

As this decade dawned in 2010, the numbers hadn’t changed appreciably: 81% of all special operators abroad were still in that region.

Eight years later, however, the situation is markedly different, according to figures provided to TomDispatch by U.S. Special Operations Command. Despite claims that the Islamic State has been defeated, the U.S. remains embroiled in wars in Iraq and Syria, as well as in Afghanistan and Yemen, yet only 54% of special operators deployed overseas were sent to the Greater Middle East in 2017. In fact, since 2006, deployments have been on the rise across the rest of the world. In Latin America, the figure crept up from 3% to 4.39%. In the Pacific region, from 7% to 7.99%. But the striking increases have been in Europe and Africa.

In 2006, just 3% of all commandos deployed overseas were operating in Europe. Last year, that number was just north of 16%. “Outside of Russia and Belarus we train with virtually every country in Europe either bilaterally or through various multinational events,” Major Michael Weisman, a spokesman for U.S. Special Operations Command Europe, told TomDispatch. “The persistent presence of U.S. SOF alongside our allies sends a clear message of U.S. commitment to our allies and the defense of our NATO alliance.” For the past two years, in fact, the U.S. has maintained a Special Operations contingent in almost every nation on Russia’s western border. As Special Operations Command chief General Raymond Thomas put it last year, “[W]e’ve had persistent presence in every country – every NATO country and others on the border with Russia doing phenomenal things with our allies, helping them prepare for their threats.”

Africa, however, has seen the most significant increase in special ops deployments. In 2006, the figure for that continent was just 1%; as 2017 ended, it stood at 16.61%. In other words, more commandos are operating there than in any region except the Middle East. As I recently reported at Vice News, Special Operations forces were active in at least 33 nations across that continent last year.

The situation in one of those nations, Somalia, in many ways mirrors in microcosm the 16-plus years of U.S. operations in Afghanistan. Not long after the 9/11 attacks, a senior Pentagon official suggested that the Afghan invasion might drive militants out of that country and into African nations. “Terrorists associated with al-Qaeda and indigenous terrorist groups have been and continue to be a presence in this region,” he said. “These terrorists will, of course, threaten U.S. personnel and facilities.”

When pressed about actual transnational dangers, that official pointed to Somali militants, only to eventually admit that even the most extreme Islamists there “really have not engaged in acts of terrorism outside Somalia.” Similarly, when questioned about connections between Osama bin Laden’s core al-Qaeda group and African extremists, he offered only the most tenuous links, like bin Laden’s “salute” to Somali militants who killed U.S. troops during the infamous 1993 Black Hawk Down incident.

Nonetheless, U.S. commandos reportedly began operating in Somalia in 2001, air attacks by AC-130 gunships followed in 2007, and 2011 saw the beginning of U.S. drone strikes aimed at militants from al-Shabaab, a terror group that didn’t even exist until 2006. According to figures compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the U.S. carried out between 32 and 36 drone strikes and at least 9 to 13 ground attacks in Somalia between 2001 and 2016.

Last spring, President Donald Trump loosened Obama-era restrictions on offensive operations in that country. Allowing U.S. forces more discretion in conducting missions there, he opened up the possibility of more frequent airstrikes and commando raids. The 2017 numbers reflect just that. The U.S. carried out 34 drone strikes, at least equaling if not exceeding the cumulative number of attacks over the previous 15 years. (And it took the United States only a day to resume such strikes this year.)

“President Trump’s decision to make parts of southern Somalia an ‘area of active hostilities’ gave [U.S. Africa Command or AFRICOM] the leeway to carry out strikes at an increased rate because it no longer had to run their proposed operations through the White House national security bureaucratic process,” said Jack Serle, an expert on U.S. counterterrorism operations in Somalia. He was quick to point out that AFRICOM claims the uptick in operations is due to more targets presenting themselves, but he suspects that AFRICOM may be attempting to cripple al-Shabaab before an African Union peacekeeping force is withdrawn and Somalia’s untested military is left to fight the militants without thousands of additional African troops.

In addition to the 30-plus airstrikes in 2017, there were at least three U.S. ground attacks. In one of the latter, described by AFRICOM as “an advise-and-assist operation alongside members of the Somali National Army,” Navy SEAL Kyle Milliken was killed and two U.S. personnel were injured during a firefight with al-Shabaab militants. In another ground operation in August, according to an investigation by the Daily Beast, Special Operations forces took part in a massacre of 10 Somali civilians. (The U.S. military is now investigating.)

As in Afghanistan, the U.S. has been militarily engaged in Somalia since 2001 and, as in Afghanistan, despite more than a decade and a half of operations, the number of militant groups being targeted has only increased. U.S. commandos are now battling at least two terror groups – al-Shabaab and a local Islamic State affiliate – as drone strikes spiked in the last year and Somalia became an ever-hotter war zone. Today, according to AFRICOM, militants operate “training camps” and possess “safe havens throughout Somalia [and] the region.”

“The under-reported, 16-year U.S. intervention in Somalia has followed a similar pattern to the larger U.S. war in Afghanistan: an influx of special forces and a steady increase in air strikes has not only failed to stop terrorism, but both al-Shabaab and a local affiliate of ISIS have grown during this time period,” said William Hartung of the Center for International Policy. “It’s another case of failing to learn the lessons of the United States’ policy of endless war: that military action is as likely or more likely to spark terrorist action as to reduce or prevent it.”

Somalia is no anomaly. Across the continent, despite escalating operations by commandos as well as conventional American forces and their local allies and proxies, Washington’s enemies continue to proliferate. As Vice News reported, a 2012 Special Operations Command strategic planning document listed five prime terror groups on the continent. An October 2016 update counted seven by name – the Islamic State, Ansar al-Sharia, al-Qaida in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb, al-Murabitun, Boko Haram, the Lord’s Resistance Army, and al-Shabaab – in addition to “other violent extremist organizations.” The Pentagon’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies now offers a tally of 21 “active militant Islamist groups” on the continent. In fact, as reported at The Intercept, the full number of terrorist organizations and other “illicit groups” may already have been closer to 50 by 2015.

Saving SOF through Proxy War?

As wars and interventions have multiplied, as U.S. commandos have spread across the planet, and as terror groups have proliferated, the tempo of operations has jumped dramatically. This, in turn, has raised fears among think-tank experts, special ops supporters, and members of Congress about the effects on those elite troops of such constant deployments and growing pressure for more of them. “Most SOF units are employed to their sustainable limit,” General Thomas told members of Congress last spring. “Despite growing demand for SOF, we must prioritize the sourcing of these demands as we face a rapidly changing security environment.” Yet the number of countries with special ops deployments hit a new record last year.

At a November 2017 conference on special operations held in Washington, influential members of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees acknowledged growing strains on the force. For Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, the solution is, as he put it, “to increase numbers and resources.”

While Republican Senator Joni Ernst did not foreclose the possibility of adding to already war-swollen levels of commandos, she much prefers to farm out some operations to other forces: “A lot of the missions we see, especially if you… look at Afghanistan, where we have the train, advise, and assist missions, if we can move some of those into conventional forces and away from SOF, I think that’s what we need to do.” Secretary of Defense James Mattis has already indicated that such moves are planned. Leigh Claffey, Ernst’s press secretary, told TomDispatch that the senator also favors “turning over operations to capable indigenous forces.”

Ernst’s proxies approach has, in fact, already been applied across the planet, perhaps nowhere more explicitly than in Syria in 2017. There, SOCOM’s Thomas noted, U.S. proxies, including both Syrian Arabs and Kurds, “a surrogate force of 50,000 people… are working for us and doing our bidding.” They were indeed the ones who carried out the bulk of the fighting and dying during the campaign against the Islamic State and the capture of its capital, Raqqa.

However, that campaign, which took back almost all the territory ISIS held in Syria, was exceptional. U.S. proxies elsewhere have fared far worse in recent years. That 50,000-strong Syrian surrogate army had to be raised, in fact, after the U.S.-trained Iraqi army, built during the 2003-2011 American occupation of that country, collapsed in the face of relatively small numbers of Islamic State militants in 2014. In Mali, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Honduras, and elsewhere, U.S.-trained officers have carried out coups, overthrowing their respective governments. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, where special ops forces have been working with local allies for more than 15 years, even elite security forces are still largely incapable of operating on their own. According to the Pentagon’s 2017 semi-annual report to Congress, Afghan commandos needed U.S. support for an overwhelming number of their missions, independently carrying out only 17% of their 2,628 operations between June 1, 2017, and November 24, 2017.

Indeed, with Special Operations forces acting, in the words of SOCOM’s Thomas, as “the main effort, or major supporting effort for U.S. [violent extremist organization]-focused operations in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, across the Sahel of Africa, the Philippines, and Central/South America,” it’s unlikely that foreign proxies or conventional American forces will shoulder enough of the load to relieve the strain on the commandos.

Bulking up Special Operations Command is not, however, a solution, according to the Center for International Policy’s Hartung. “There is no persuasive security rationale for having U.S. Special Operations forces involved in an astonishing 149 countries, given that the results of these missions are just as likely to provoke greater conflict as they are to reduce it, in large part because a U.S. military presence is too often used as a recruiting tool by local terrorist organizations,” he told TomDispatch. “The solution to the problem of the high operational tempo of U.S. Special Operations forces is not to recruit and train more Special Operations forces. It is to rethink why they are being used so intensively in the first place.”

[LdsMarco]

Is this just another Trump hating post? Who even wastes their time reading this? LOL Get over it! He's your president - whether you like it or not

[Silver]

Is this just another Trump hating post? Who even wastes their time reading this? LOL Get over it! He's your president - whether you like it or not

Do you know the meaning of irony?