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"This election should be fought on this pie chart. Where are we going to spend our collective wealth? On guns, jet fighters and tanks or on schools, hospitals and roads. This will mean that the Democrats will have to have the courage to fight the “soft on terrorism” brickbrats thrown by Newt or Mitt. Ron Paul is already used to hearing this bullshit, and it doesn’t seem to be bothering him."
Pentagon boffinry powerhouse DARPA has announced plans to fit a giant new US military command and control airship - known as "Blue Devil Block 2" - with through-the-air optical links offering bandwidth normally achievable only by fibre cables. This is to be done using newly-applied technology developed in the 1990s for use in astronomical telescopes.
"In this seven-part series of articles on each environmental impact of US militarism, scientist and author Patricia Hynes provides an overview of modern, military pollution and the use of natural resources with a central focus on the US military superpower, a power without precedent or competitor. From Superfund and former nuclear weapons sites in the US to Vieques, Agent Orange, depleted uranium - particularly in Iraq - biowarfare research and the use of fossil fuels in routine military training and wars, Hynes examines the war machine as the true tragedy of the commons."
"This article argues that during the 1990s, military professionals and civilian defense experts in the US used concepts and metaphors from nonlinear science to translate tenets of 1980s battlefield strategy and tactics into theories of international politics and foreign policy that posited the necessity of speed and offense in the face of a supposedly more chaotic and dangerous post-Cold War world. Ultimately, the most militaristic of the lessons supposedly learned from and justified by the ‘new sciences’ made their way to the highest reaches of the US Department of Defense under President G.W. Bush, and served as a foundation for acting quickly and preventively against ‘gathering threats’. In addition to allowing us to understand better the origins of the ‘Bush Doctrine’, this paper improves our understanding of the relationship between the sciences and the state/military in the post-Cold War US — in particular the role of scientific metaphor in national security discourses that have focused on the challenges and opportunities of new information and communication technologies. "
"Official government violence against nonviolent Americans and residents, by contrast, occurs daily. And for the last 30 years it has been increasing at an alarming rate. From the early 1980s to the mid-2000s, University of Eastern Kentucky criminologist Peter Kraska conducted an annual survey on the use of SWAT teams in the United States. Until the late 1970s, SWAT teams were generally used in emergency situations to defuse conflicts with people who presented an immediate threat to others, such as hostage takers, bank robbers, or mass shooters. But beginning in the early 1980s, police departments across the country began using SWAT teams to serve drug warrants.
Kraska found that the number of SWAT deployments in America increased from 3,000 per year in the early 1980s to around 50,000 by the mid-2000s. That’s about 135 SWAT raids per day. The vast majority of those are for drug warrants."
"We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. "
"But the striking thing about military expenditure is that its failure rate is so high. More or less by definition, it’s impossible for both sides to win an armed conflict, but it’s certainly possible (and probably the par outcome) for both sides to lose. So, the US success rate since 1950 is probably about what would be expected."
We have so hollowed out our industrial plant that the only thing we are now producing is weapons of war.
This year the Department of Defense once again failed to include the cost of war in its record-breaking $515 billion defense budget for fiscal year 2009. Instead, it included a placeholder for yet another $70 billion emergency war supplemental—which, co
article on history of network centric warfare and the shift to social network and social science tools for nationbuilding
Much of this growth has been in the so-called "homeland security" sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion--an increase of 20 percent.
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