Pentagon

( Tomdispatch.com) – Is China really on the verge of invading the island of Taiwan, as so many top American officials seem to believe? If the answer is “yes” and the U.S. intervenes on Taiwan’s side — as President Biden has sworn it would — we could find ourselves in a major-power conflict, possibly even […]

China

At the Brink of War in the Pacific? The Nightmare of Great Power Rivalry Over Taiwan

Alfred W. McCoy

( Tomdispatch.com ) – While the world has been distracted, even amused, by the diplomatic tussle around China’s recent high-altitude balloon flights across North America, there are signs that Beijing and Washington are preparing for something so much more serious: armed conflict over Taiwan. Reviewing recent developments in the Asia-Pacific region raises a tried-and-true historical […]

National Security State

Children of War: The War on Terror and the Battle for Young Minds

Andrea Mazzarino

( Tomdispatch.com ) – During a Veterans Day celebration in my small Maryland community, a teacher clicked through a slideshow of smiling men and women in military uniforms. “Girls and boys, can anyone tell me what courage is?” she asked the crowd, mostly children from local elementary schools, including my two young kids. A boy […]

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 […]

Climate Crisis

Edwards Air Force Base Near LA to host Largest Solar-plus-storage Project in the World

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Edwards Air Force Base in Kern County, California, near Los Angeles and San Bernardino, is now home to the largest solar power array on any Air Force base in the country, as of this past week. Indeed, with a goal of “1,118 MW of solar photovoltaic (PV) and 2,165 megawatts […]

National Security State

Can the Military-Industrial Complex Be Tamed? Cutting the Pentagon Budget in Half Would Finally Force the Generals to Think

William J. Astore

By William J. Astore | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – My name is Bill Astore and I’m a card-carrying member of the military-industrial complex (MIC). Sure, I hung up my military uniform for the last time in 2005. Since 2007, I’ve been writing articles for TomDispatch focused largely on critiquing that same MIC and America’s […]

China

Climate Change will Supersede Everything: The Pentagon’s Massive Intelligence Failure on China

Michael T. Klare

( Tomdispatch.com) – Given the secrecy typically accorded to the military and the inclination of government officials to skew data to satisfy the preferences of those in power, intelligence failures are anything but unusual in this country’s security affairs. In 2003, for instance, President George W. Bush invaded Iraq based on claims — later found […]

Pentagon

Is America’s bottomless Corporate Welfare for Arms Industry actually Making us Less Safe?

William D. Hartung

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Late last month, President Biden signed a bill that clears the way for $858 billion in Pentagon spending and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy in 2023. That’s far more than Washington anted up for military purposes at the height of the Korean or Vietnam wars or even during […]

Pentagon

Why does the Pentagon Budget Really Keep Growing? When Democracies Pursue Imperial Dominance it doesn’t End Well

William J. Astore

( Tomdispatch.com) – Imagine this scenario for a moment: a “great power” watches another major power fight a war in a nearby nation for 10 years before its army limps home defeated and, not so very long after, that country implodes. A little over a decade later, by then unofficially the “last superpower” on planet […]