Metal Storm

Posted by "Sayf Maslul"

Courtesy Of "The Discovery Channel and YouTube"



Metal Storm Limited is a Brisbane, Australia based research and development company that specializes in electronically initiated superposed load weapons technology and owns the proprietary rights to the electronic ballistics technology invented by J. Mike O'Dwyer. 

Metal Storm represents both the name of the company and the technology. The company maintains a subsidiary in Arlington, Virginia, U.S.A.

Metal Storm uses the concept of superposed load; multiple projectiles loaded nose to tail in a single gun barrel with propellant packed between them. 

The roman candle, a traditional firework design, employs the same basic concept, however, the propellant continues to burn in the roman candle's barrel, igniting the charge behind the subsequent projectile. 

The process is repeated by each charge in turn, ensuring that all projectiles in the barrel are discharged sequentially from the single ignition. 

Various methods of separately firing each propellant package behind stacked projectiles have been proposed which would allow a "single shot" capability more suitable to firearms.

The distinguishing features of this technology are the absence of ammunition feed and casing ejection systems (the only moving parts are the projectiles), and the electronic ignition of the propellant charges. The relatively simple external shape of the Metal Storm barrel allows for the clustering of Metal Storm barrels into a barrel array or 'pod', or for their attachment (as single units) 'bolted on' to existing weapons mounts, including infantry weapons.

The absence of a mechanical feed mechanism and the inherently compact lightweight nature of Metal Storm systems also makes them suitable for attachment to light robotic ground and aerial vehicles. The electronic ignition allows for the firing of the stacked ammunitions at 'electronic speed' without any delays caused by mechanical ammunition feed mechanisms.

The clustered barrel array has been further developed with the design and building of prototypes of electronic firing control systems, allowing selective firing from any barrel in a cluster, and within each barrel the ability to control the rate of fire. 

This allows for responses which range from the equivalent of a volley gun discharge (all projectiles 'at once') to using (selectively) individual munitions with increasingly serious (but non-lethal) effects and lethal munitions including high explosive and air burst shells (all from different barrels in the array).

To Continue Reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Storm

New Weapons Systems Could Give Pentagon Unprecedented Power Over The Plane

Combining Biometrics, Cyberwarfare, and A Potential Future Aerospace Shield, The Pentagon Is Rushing Toward Uncharted Territory, and Domination.

By Alfred W. McCoy,
Courtesy Of "Alter-Net"

It’s 2025 and an American “triple canopy” of advanced surveillance and armed drones fills the heavens from the lower- to the exo-atmosphere.  A wonder of the modern age, it can deliver its weaponry anywhere on the planet with staggering speed, knock out an enemy’s satellite communications system, or follow individuals biometrically for great distances.  Along with the country’s advanced cyberwar capacity, it’s also the most sophisticated militarized information system ever created and an insurance policy for U.S. global dominion deep into the twenty-first century.  It’s the future as the Pentagon imagines it; it’s under development; and Americans know nothing about it.

They are still operating in another age.  “Our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917,” complained Republican candidate Mitt Romney during the last presidential debate.

With words of withering mockery, President Obama shot back: “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed... the question is not a game of Battleship, where we're counting ships. It's what are our capabilities.”

Obama later offered just a hint of what those capabilities might be: “What I did was work with our joint chiefs of staff to think about, what are we going to need in the future to make sure that we are safe?... We need to be thinking about cyber security. We need to be talking about space.”

Amid all the post-debate media chatter, however, not a single commentator seemed to have a clue when it came to the profound strategic changes encoded in the president’s sparse words. Yet for the past four years, working in silence and secrecy, the Obama administration has presided over a technological revolution in defense planning, moving the nation far beyond bayonets and battleships to cyberwarfare and the full-scale weaponization of space. In the face of waning economic influence, this bold new breakthrough in what’s called “information warfare” may prove significantly responsible should U.S. global dominion somehow continue far into the twenty-first century.

While the technological changes involved are nothing less than revolutionary, they have deep historical roots in a distinctive style of American global power.  It’s been evident from the moment this nation first stepped onto the world stage with its conquest of the Philippines in 1898. Over the span of a century, plunged into three Asian crucibles of counterinsurgency -- in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Afghanistan -- the U.S. military has repeatedly been pushed to the breaking point.  It has repeatedly responded by fusing the nation’s most advanced technologies into new information infrastructures of unprecedented power.

That military first created a manual information regime for Philippine pacification, then a computerized apparatus to fight communist guerrillas in Vietnam.  Finally, during its decade-plus in Afghanistan (and its years in Iraq), the Pentagon has begun to fuse biometrics, cyberwarfare, and a potential future triple canopy aerospace shield into a robotic information regime that could produce a platform of unprecedented power for the exercise of global dominion -- or for future military disaster. 

America’s First Information Revolution 

This distinctive U.S. system of imperial information gathering (and the surveillance and war-making practices that go with it) traces its origins to some brilliant American innovations in the management of textual, statistical, and visual data.  Their sum was nothing less than a new information infrastructure with an unprecedented capacity for mass surveillance.

During two extraordinary decades, American inventions like Thomas Alva Edison’s quadruplex telegraph (1874), Philo Remington’s commercial typewriter (1874), Melvil Dewey’s library decimal system (1876), and Herman Hollerith’s patented punch card (1889) created synergies that led to the militarized application of America’s first information revolution. To pacify a determined guerrilla resistance that persisted in the Philippines for a decade after 1898, the U.S. colonial regime -- unlike European empires with their cultural studies of “Oriental civilizations” -- used these advanced information technologies to amass detailed empirical data on Philippine society.  In this way, they forged an Argus-eyed security apparatus that played a major role in crushing the Filipino nationalist movement. The resulting colonial policing and surveillance system would also leave a lasting institutional imprint on the emerging American state.

When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, the “father of U.S. military intelligence” Colonel Ralph Van Deman drew upon security methods he had developed years before in the Philippines to found the Army’s Military Intelligence Division.  He recruited a staff that quickly grew from one (himself) to 1,700, deployed some 300,000 citizen-operatives to compile more than a million pages of surveillance reports on American citizens, and laid the foundations for a permanent domestic surveillance apparatus.

A version of this system rose to unparalleled success during World War II when Washington established the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as the nation’s first worldwide espionage agency. Among its nine branches, Research & Analysis recruited a staff of nearly 2,000 academics who amassed 300,000 photographs, a million maps, and three million file cards, which they deployed in an information system via “indexing, cross-indexing, and counter-indexing” to answer countless tactical questions.

Yet by early 1944, the OSS found itself, in the words of historian Robin Winks, “drowning under the flow of information.”  Many of the materials it had so carefully collected were left to molder in storage, unread and unprocessed. Despite its ambitious global reach, this first U.S. information regime, absent technological change, might well have collapsed under its own weight, slowing the flow of foreign intelligence that would prove so crucial for America’s exercise of global dominion after World War II.

Computerizing Vietnam         

Under the pressures of a never-ending war in Vietnam, those running the U.S. information infrastructure turned to computerized data management, launching a second American information regime.  Powered by the most advanced IBM mainframe computers, the U.S. military compiled monthly tabulations of security in all of South Vietnam’s 12,000 villages and filed the three million enemy documents its soldiers captured annually on giant reels of bar-coded film.  At the same time, the CIA collated and computerized diverse data on the communist civilian infrastructure as part of its infamous Phoenix Program.  This, in turn, became the basis for its systematic tortures and 41,000 “extra-judicial executions” (which, based on disinformation from petty local grudges and communist counterintelligence, killed many but failed to capture more than a handfull of top communist cadres).

Most ambitiously, the U.S. Air Force spent $800 million a year to lace southern Laos with a network of 20,000 acoustic, seismic, thermal, and ammonia-sensitive sensors to pinpoint Hanoi’s truck convoys coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail under a heavy jungle canopy.  The information these provided was then gathered on computerized systems for the targeting of incessant bombing runs. After 100,000 North Vietnamese troops passed right through this electronic grid undetected with trucks, tanks, and heavy artillery to launch the Nguyen Hue Offensive in 1972, the U.S. Pacific Air Force pronounced this bold attempt to build an “electronic battlefield” an unqualified failure.

In this pressure cooker of what became history’s largest air war, the Air Force also accelerated the transformation of a new information system that would rise to significance three decades later: the Firebee target drone.  By war’s end, it had morphed into an increasingly agile unmanned aircraft that would make 3,500 top-secret surveillance sorties over China, North Vietnam, and Laos. By 1972, the SC/TV drone, with a camera in its nose, was capable of flying 2,400 miles while navigating via a low-resolution television image.

On balance, all this computerized data helped foster the illusion that American “pacification” programs in the countryside were winning over the inhabitants of Vietnam’s villages, and the delusion that the air war was successfully destroying North Vietnam’s supply effort.  Despite a dismal succession of short-term failures that helped deliver a soul-searing blow to American power, all this computerized data-gathering proved a seminal experiment, even if its advances would not become evident for another 30 years until the U.S. began creating a third -- robotic -- information regime.

The Global War On Terror          

As it found itself at the edge of defeat in the attempted pacification of two complex societies, Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington responded in part by adapting new technologies of electronic surveillance, biometric identification, and drone warfare -- all of which are now melding into what may become an information regime far more powerful and destructive than anything that has come before. 

After six years of a failing counterinsurgency effort in Iraq, the Pentagon discovered the power of biometric identification and electronic surveillance to pacify the country’s sprawling cities.  It then built a biometric database with more than a million Iraqi fingerprints and iris scans that U.S. patrols on the streets of Baghdad could access instantaneously by satellite link to a computer center in West Virginia.

When President Obama took office and launched his “surge,” escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, that country became a new frontier for testing and perfecting such biometric databases, as well as for full-scale drone war in both that country and the Pakistani tribal borderlands, the latest wrinkle in a technowar already loosed by the Bush administration. This meant accelerating technological developments in drone warfare that had largely been suspended for two decades after the Vietnam War.

Launched as an experimental, unarmed surveillance aircraft in 1994, the Predator drone was first deployed in 2000 for combat surveillance under the CIA’s “Operation Afghan Eyes.” By 2011, the advanced MQ-9 Reaper drone, with “persistent hunter killer” capabilities, was heavily armed with missiles and bombs as well as sensors that could read disturbed dirt at 5,000 feet and track footprints back to enemy installations. Indicating the torrid pace of drone development, between 2004 and 2010 total flying time for all unmanned vehicles rose from just 71 hours to 250,000 hours. 

By 2009, the Air Force and the CIA were already deploying a drone armada of at least 195 Predators and 28 Reapers inside Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan -- and it’s only grown since.  These collected and transmitted 16,000 hours of video daily, and from 2006-2012 fired hundreds of Hellfire missiles that killedan estimated 2,600 supposed insurgents inside Pakistan’s tribal areas. Though the second-generation Reaper drones might seem stunningly sophisticated, one defense analyst has called them “very much Model T Fords.” Beyond the battlefield, there are now some 7,000 drones in the U.S. armada of unmanned aircraft, including 800 larger missile-firing drones. By funding its own fleet of 35 drones and borrowing others from the Air Force, the CIA has moved beyond passive intelligence collection to build a permanent robotic paramilitary capacity.

In the same years, another form of information warfare came, quite literally, online.  Over two administrations, there has been continuity in the development of a cyberwarfare capability at home and abroad. Starting in 2002, President George W. Bush illegally authorized the National Security Agency to scan countless millions of electronic messages with its top-secret “Pinwale” database. Similarly, the FBI started an Investigative Data Warehouse that, by 2009, held a billion individual records. 

Under Presidents Bush and Obama, defensive digital surveillance has grown into an offensive “cyberwarfare” capacity, which has already been deployed against Iran in history’s first significant cyberwar. In 2009, the Pentagon formed U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), with headquarters at Ft. Meade, Maryland, and a cyberwarfare center at Lackland Air Base in Texas,staffed by 7,000 Air Force employees. Two years later, it declared cyberspace an “operational domain” like air, land, or sea, and began putting its energy into developing a cadre of cyber-warriors capable of launching offensive operations, such as a variety of attacks on the computerized centrifuges in Iran’s nuclear facilities and Middle Eastern banks handling Iranian money.

A Robotic Information Regime  

As with the Philippine Insurrection and the Vietnam War, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have served as the catalyst for a new information regime, fusing aerospace, cyberspace, biometrics, and robotics into an apparatus of potentially unprecedented power. In 2012, after years of ground warfare in both countries and the continuous expansion of the Pentagon budget, the Obama administration announced a leaner future defense strategy.  It included a 14% cut in future infantry strength to be compensated for by an increased emphasis on investments in the dominions of outer space and cyberspace, particularly in what the administration calls “critical space-based capabilities.” 

By 2020, this new defense architecture should theoretically be able to integrate space, cyberspace, and terrestrial combat through robotics for -- so the claims go -- the delivery of seamless information for lethal action. Significantly, both space and cyberspace are new, unregulated domains of military conflict, largely beyond international law.  And Washington hopes to use both, without limitation, as Archimedean levers to exercise new forms of global dominion far into the twenty-first century, just as the British Empire once ruled from the seas and the Cold War American imperium exercised its global reach via airpower.

As Washington seeks to surveil the globe from space, the world might well ask: Just how high is national sovereignty? Absent any international agreement about the vertical extent of sovereign airspace (since a conference on international air law, convened in Paris in 1910, failed), some puckish Pentagon lawyer might reply: only as high as you can enforce it. And Washington has filled this legal void with a secret executive matrix -- operated by the CIA and the clandestine Special Operations Command -- that assigns names arbitrarily, without any judicial oversight, to a classified “kill list” that means silent, sudden death from the sky for terror suspects across the Muslim world.

Although U.S. plans for space warfare remain highly classified, it is possible to assemble the pieces of this aerospace puzzle by trolling the Pentagon’s websites, and finding many of the key components in technical descriptions at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). As early as 2020, the Pentagon hopes to patrol the entire globe ceaselessly, relentlessly via a triple canopy space shield reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, driven by drones armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, monitored through a telescopic panopticon, and operated by robotic controls. 

At the lowest tier of this emerging U.S. aerospace shield, within striking distance of Earth in the lower stratosphere, the Pentagon is building an armada of 99 Global Hawk drones equipped with high-resolution cameras capable of surveilling all terrain within a 100-mile radius, electronic sensors to intercept communications, efficient engines for continuous 24-hour flights, and eventually Triple Terminator missiles to destroy targets below. By late 2011, the Air Force and the CIA had already ringed the Eurasian land mass with a network of 60 bases for drones armed with Hellfire missiles and GBU-30 bombs, allowing air strikes against targets just about anywhere in Europe, Africa, or Asia.

The sophistication of the technology at this level was exposed in December 2011 when one of the CIA’s RQ-170 Sentinels came down in Iran.  Revealed was a bat-winged drone equipped with radar-evading stealth capacity, active electronically scanned array radar, and advanced optics “that allow operators to positively identify terror suspects from tens of thousands of feet in the air.”

If things go according to plan, in this same lower tier at altitudes up to 12 miles unmanned aircraft such as the “Vulture,” with solar panels covering its massive 400-foot wingspan, will be patrolling the globe ceaselessly for up to five years at a time with sensors for “unblinking” surveillance, and possibly missiles for lethal strikes. Establishing the viability of this new technology, NASA’s solar-powered aircraft Pathfinder, with a 100-foot wingspan, reached an altitude of 71,500 feet altitude in 1997, and its fourth-generation successor the “Helios” flew at 97,000 feet with a 247-foot wingspan in 2001, two miles higher than any previous aircraft.

For the next tier above the Earth, in the upper stratosphere, DARPA and the Air Force are collaborating in the development of the Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle.  Flying at an altitude of 20 miles, it is expected to “deliver 12,000 pounds of payload at a distance of 9,000 nautical miles from the continental United States in less than two hours.” Although the first test launches in April 2010 and August 2011 crashed midflight, they did reach an amazing 13,000 miles per hour, 22 times the speed of sound, and sent back“unique data” that should help resolve remaining aerodynamic problems.

At the outer level of this triple-tier aerospace canopy, the age of space warfare dawned in April 2010 when the Pentagon quietly launched the X-37B space drone, an unmanned craft just 29 feet long, into an orbit 250 miles above the Earth. By the time its second prototype landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in June 2012 after a 15-month flight, this classified mission represented a successful test of “robotically controlled reusable spacecraft” and established the viability of unmanned space drones in the exosphere.

At this apex of the triple canopy, 200 miles above Earth where the space drones will soon roam, orbital satellites are the prime targets, a vulnerability that became obvious in 2007 when China used a ground-to-air missile to shoot down one of its own satellites. In response, the Pentagon is now developing the F-6 satellite system that will “decompose a large monolithic spacecraft into a group of wirelessly linked elements, or nodes [that increases] resistance to... a bad part breaking or an adversary attacking.” And keep in mind that the X-37B has a capacious cargo bay to carry missiles or future laser weaponry to knock out enemy satellites -- in other words, the potential capability to cripple the communications of a future military rival like China, which will have its own global satellite system operational by 2020.

Ultimately, the impact of this third information regime will be shaped by the ability of the U.S. military to integrate its array of global aerospace weaponry into a robotic command structure that would be capable of coordinating operations across all combat domains: space, cyberspace, sky, sea, and land. To manage the surging torrent of information within this delicately balanced triple canopy, the system would, in the end, have to become self-maintaining through “robotic manipulator technologies,” such as the Pentagon’s FREND system that someday could potentially deliver fuel, provide repairs, or reposition satellites.

For a new global optic, DARPA is building the wide-angle Space Surveillance Telescope (SST), which could be sited at bases ringing the globe for a quantum leap in "space surveillance.”  The system would allow future space warriors to see the whole sky wrapped around the entire planet while seated before a single screen, making it possible to track every object in Earth orbit.

Operation of this complex worldwide apparatus will require, as one DARPA official explained in 2007, "an integrated collection of space surveillance systems -- an architecture -- that is leak-proof." Thus, by 2010, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency had 16,000 employees, a $5 billion budget, and a massive $2 billion headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, with 8,500 staffers wrapped in electronic security -- all aimed at coordinating the flood of surveillance data pouring in from Predators, Reapers, U-2 spy planes, Global Hawks, X-37B space drones, Google Earth, Space Surveillance Telescopes, and orbiting satellites. By 2020 or thereafter -- such a complex techno-system is unlikely to respect schedules -- this triple canopy should be able to atomize a single “terrorist” with a missile strike after tracking his eyeball, facial image, or heat signature for hundreds of miles through field and favela, or blind an entire army by knocking out all ground communications, avionics, and naval navigation.

Technological Dominion Or Techno-Disaster?

Peering into the future, a still uncertain balance of forces offers two competing scenarios for the continuation of U.S. global power. If all or much goes according to plan, sometime in the third decade of this century the Pentagon will complete a comprehensive global surveillance system for Earth, sky, and space using robotics to coordinate a veritable flood of data from biometric street-level monitoring, cyber-data mining, a worldwide network of Space Surveillance Telescopes, and triple canopy aeronautic patrols. Through agile data management of exceptional power, this system might allow the United States a veto of global lethality, an equalizer for any further loss of economic strength.

However, as in Vietnam, history offers some pessimistic parallels when it comes to the U.S. preserving its global hegemony by militarized technology alone. Even if this robotic information regime could somehow check China’s growing military power, the U.S. might still have the same chance of controlling wider geopolitical forces with aerospace technology as the Third Reich had of winning World War II with its “super weapons” -- V-2 rockets that rained death on London and Messerschmitt Me-262 jets that blasted allied bombers from Europe’s skies. Complicating the future further, the illusion of information omniscience might incline Washington to more military misadventures akin to Vietnam or Iraq, creating the possibility of yet more expensive, draining conflicts, from Iran to the South China Sea. 

If the future of America’s world power is shaped by actual events rather than long-term economic trends, then its fate might well be determined by which comes first in this century-long cycle: military debacle from the illusion of technological mastery, or a new technological regime powerful enough to perpetuate U.S. global dominion.

Pentagon To Continue Developing Weapons After Ratification Of START

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 18, 2010; A02
Courtesy Of "The Washington Post"

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told lawmakers Thursday that the United States continues to encourage Russia to join a European missile-defense system intended to counter the threat posed by Iranian missiles. He also sought to reassure Republicans that the United States would not agree to Russian efforts to limit the U.S. missile-defense capability.

"Whatever talks are going on are simply about trying to elicit their [Russian] willingness to partner with us, along with the Europeans, in terms of a regional missile defense," Gates said, appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee to support ratification of the recently signed U.S.-Russian Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. "But there is nothing in the approaches that have been made to the Russians that in any way, shape or form would impose any limits whatsoever on our plans."

Gates was responding to a question from Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) about a press report of secret negotiations with Moscow involving missile defense.

Republican senators have voiced concerns that the new treaty limits U.S. missile defense programs, a theme repeated at other hearings as the administration works to gain GOP support to reach the 67 votes needed for ratification.

The treaty's critics on the missile defense issue have focused on three items: the preamble, which refers to a relationship between offensive and defensive weapons; anarticle that bars using current land- and submarine-based intercontinental ballistic missiles as launchers for defensive missile interceptors; and a unilateral statement by Russia, in which it reserves the right to withdraw from the treaty if there were a quantitative and qualitative buildup of U.S. missile defenses.

At Thursday's session, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), ranking Republican on the committee, said he needs "to be confident that the treaty in no way limits the administration's ability and willingness to deploy missile defense capabilities, regardless of the statements made by the Russian government."

Gates sought to ease McCain's concern. "The Russians can say what they want. If it's not in the treaty, it's not binding on the United States," he said.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who also appeared at the hearing, pointed out that Russia remained part of the original START agreement even after the administration of President George W. Bush withdrew from a missile-defense pact. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told lawmakers the U.S. had no intention of using current ICBM launchers as part of any missile defense system, arguing that the treaty article had no impact on the program.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) called the missile-defense issue more important than the agreement on nuclear weapons because of the threats from a nuclear-armed rogue nation or terrorist group. He sought an assurance that 10 years from now, the United States would deploy a missile interceptor in the planned European system that could knock down an ICBM even if the Russians objected.

Gates assured Chambliss that he would recommend deploying the interceptor, "especially if we're unsuccessful in stopping Iran from building nuclear weapons."

The Pentagon Is Bankrupting Us

By Jacob G. Hornberger
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Courtesy Of The Future Of Freedom Foundation

Consider this excerpt from The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman that appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post:

Gorbachev had concluded that the sprawling Soviet defense establishment — the army, navy, air force, strategic rocket forces, air defense forces, and all the institutes, design bureaus and factories that supported them — was a monumental burden on the country. “Defense spending was bleeding the other branches of the economy dry,” he recalled. The extent of the bleeding was concealed by such deep secrecy that even Gorbachev said he had trouble obtaining accurate information.

Why can’t the American people recognize that that’s precisely what is happening in the United States today? The U.S. military — euphemistically called the “defense” establishment — or as President Eisenhower described it, the “military-industrial complex” — is a monumental burden that is bankrupting our country, especially in combination with the ever-increasing burden of the domestic welfare state.

First, it takes tax dollars to support soldiers. That’s a burden — a drain — on the private sector. With the dismantling of the wartime military machine, the taxes necessary to support the machine can be ended, leaving all that money in the hands of the private sector. That means more savings, investment, and consumption and increasing wage rates and profits.

The basic idea is more taxes mean more poverty. Lower taxes mean more prosperity and higher standards of living. That’s what Gorbechev was alluding to when he referred to the enormous burden that the military-industrial complex was placing on the Soviet Union.

Second, by being discharged the soldiers themselves cease being non-productive members of society and become productive members of society. As soldiers, they’re not producing anything. They’re a burden, a drain on the private sector. It’s only the private sector that is productive.

Thus, the dismantling of an enormous military-industrial complex would have the doubly positive effect of ending an enormous tax burden on the citizenry and adding productive people to the marketplace.

After every U.S. war, the custom had been to dismantle the military and discharge the soldiers into the private sector, which would cause economic prosperity to soar. After World War II, however, the U.S. military and military-industrial complex convinced policymakers not to dismantle the wartime machine. The Soviet communist threat, the militarists claimed, required the permanent and ever-growing existence of the military and military-industrial complex in American life.

Ironically, the new enemy that the U.S. militarists claimed justified this enormous and ever-growing military burden was the U.S. government’s very own ally in World War II, an ally into whose control the U.S. had just delivered East Germany and Eastern Europe, including Poland, a country to whom Great Britain had promised freedom at the outset of the war.

What happened when the Soviet communist threat ended in 1989? The Pentagon went desperately searching for a new mission to prevent the dismantling of its permanent wartime machine. After poking hornet’s nests in the Middle East throughout the 1990s, it came up with a new enemy after 9/11 — a permanent one — to justify its existence, an enemy that its very own poking had helped to produce — terrorism.

Today, we’ve got the Pentagon telling President Obama that it needs an increase of 40,000 troops in Afghanistan to succeed against “the terrorists” in Afghanistan. But if 9 years of bombing and killing “terrorists” hasn’t been enough to achieve “success” by now, that’s failure itself. The problem, of course, is that the permanent bombing and killing have only served to generate a perpetual terrorist-producing machine.

Why in the world do we need this enormous permanent military burden on America? Why not bring all the troops home, from Iraq, Afghanistan, Europe, Korea, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and everywhere else and discharge them? Why not dismantle the military and military-industrial complex, thereby relieving the private sector of this tremendous burden? Why not restore a constitutional republic to our land, as the Founding Fathers intended? Why not restore peace, prosperity, and harmony to the United States?

Hornberger’s Blog Archives

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation, publisher of Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax by Sheldon Richman.

A ‘Weapons System’ Based On Wishful Thinking

By Andrew Wilder
September 16, 2009
Courtesy Of The Boston Globe

IN APRIL, the US Army published the “Commander’s Guide to Money as a Weapons System,’’ a handbook that provides guidance on how to use aid funding to win the support of the “indigenous population to facilitate defeating the insurgents.’’ This summer the US government indicated that it plans to nearly double (to $1.2 billion) the main fund military commanders in Afghanistan use to support projects intended to “win hearts and minds.’’

This handbook and the surge of aid money illustrate the centrality of development assistance to the United States’ counterinsurgency strategy. The underlying assumption is that aid projects, such as building schools, clinics, and roads, will win the hearts and minds of Afghans, give them more faith in their government, and turn them away from the Taliban. The logic sounds reasonable. But the problem is that there is little evidence to support it.

Some colleagues and I have spent the last year conducting more than 400 interviews in Afghanistan trying to understand the stabilization benefits of the billions of dollars worth of development aid that have been spent so far in Afghanistan. While many projects have clearly had important humanitarian and development benefits, we have found little evidence that aid projects are “winning hearts and minds,’’ reducing conflict and violence, or having other significant counterinsurgency benefits.

In fact, our research shows just the opposite. Instead of winning hearts and minds, Afghan perceptions of aid and aid actors are overwhelmingly negative. And instead of contributing to stability, in many cases aid is contributing to conflict and instability. For example, we heard many reports of the Taliban being paid by donor-funded contractors to provide security (or not to create insecurity), especially for their road-building projects. In an ethnically and tribally divided society like Afghanistan, aid can also easily generate jealousy and ill will by inadvertently helping to consolidate the power of some tribes or factions at the expense of others - often pushing rival groups into the arms of the Taliban.

In the southern province of Urozgan, an Afghan government official said to me: “In this area the family and friends of Karzai get everything. All aid in these areas is to make them more powerful. They are corrupt and cruel people, but donors continue to support them.’’

The most destabilizing effect of aid, however, is its role in fueling massive corruption, which in turn is eroding the legitimacy of the government. Our research suggests that we have failed to win Afghan hearts and minds not because we have spent too little money, but because we have spent too much too quickly, often in insecure environments with extremely limited implementation and oversight capacity.

Significantly, the main cause of insecurity identified by most Afghans we interviewed was not poverty, or a lack of reconstruction, or even the Taliban, but their highly corrupt and ineffective government. In Paktia province, where the US-led Provincial Reconstruction Team has been funding aid projects since 2003, a tribal elder explained:

“Paktia has lots of problems, but the issue of lack of clinics, schools, and roads are not the problem. The main problem is we don’t have a good government . . . Without a clean government, millions of dollars are stolen. If you increase the amount of money it will also be useless because the government will simply steal more. There’s a growing distance between the people and the government and this is the main cause of the deteriorating security situation.’’

The Taliban exploits this sentiment, and seeks to legitimize its movement by promising better security, quick justice, and a less corrupt government, rather than more roads, schools, and clinics.

This is not to say that the United States and other donor countries should not fund development projects in Afghanistan. But foreign aid should focus on promoting humanitarian and development objectives, where there is evidence of positive impact, rather than on promoting counterinsurgency objectives, where there is not. Without compelling evidence to the contrary, the United States should stop wasting money on a “weapons system’’ that seems to be largely based on wishful thinking and the delusion that money can buy Afghan hearts and minds.

Andrew Wilder is a research director at the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University.

© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

Militarising Space: The Fallujah Fallacy

By Eric Walberg
September 9, 2009
Courtesy Of Global Research

The Pentagon has made remarkable strides in militarisation of space this year, but its techno-schemes are built on the same sandy foundations as the rest of its defence policy, laments Eric Walberg In April, Air Force Space Command activated a new unit -- the 24th Air Force at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas -- to keep pace with “the rapid changes in information technology and allow space and cyberspace capabilities to be more accessible to military ground commanders”, according to the Space Command’s top military officer General Robert Kehler. Kehler called the activation “the beginning of what will be a deliberate and focused effort to develop and evolve cyberspace forces and capabilities.” In August, the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) commenced its 12th annual Space and Missile Defense Conference in Huntsville, Alabama, at the shiny new Von Braun Centre, named after the father of Nazi Germany’s missile project and one of the creators of the US ICBM programme, who along with several German colleagues was sent to Huntsville in 1950 (Operation Paperclip) to work on the first live nuclear ballistic missile tests conducted by the Pentagon. Von Braun -- sorry, I mean Kehler -- told the Space and Missile Defense Conference that global deterrence is necessary to encourage restraint, deny benefits and impose costs to those nations and non-nation states that threaten the Reich -- sorry, I mean the US and its allies. The 2,000 participants heard lots more sabre-rattling from the likes of the head of NASA, Charles Bolden, a retired Marine Corps general. Bloomberg news agency predicted correctly in January that “President-elect Barack Obama will probably tear down long-standing barriers between civilian and military space programmes to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect of a new space race with China.” There were no dissenting voices at the inauguration of the 24th Air Force Cyberwar Unit in April or at the Star Wars conference in August. It appears to be conventional wisdom that, as Army Lieutenant General Kevin Campbell told the conference, space is “key terrain” which the US can’t afford to cede. More and more countries have the money to use space, if not to fund their own launch and development programmes, and “we should expect our adversaries to take advantage of that.” Lieutenant General Larry James, commander of the 14th Air Force space forces in California (how many air forces does one country need?) said a major problem commanders face is “space situational awareness” -- knowing what’s in orbit, whom it belongs to and what it’s supposed to be doing. Among the suggested solutions is greater use of commercial partners. How clever, let’s privatise space warfare while we’re at it. Perhaps it will be more “efficient”. The MDA told Von Braun’s disciples that it is accelerating the pace of full spectrum air, sea, land, cyber and space missile shield developments in addition to laser weapons, having just completed a successful sea-based missile interception from Hawaii. A disabled spy satellite was shot down in February 2008 by the USS Lake Erie, an Aegis-class Guided Missile Cruiser, which, as the Pentagon insisted at the time, had no military implications whatsoever. In July, the Pentagon announced plans to integrate its latest generation drone, the Reaper, into the global missile shield system. At the same time, Israel tested its Arrow II interceptor missile, jointly developed with the US, off the coast of California. The US and Israeli Defense Forces will hold a joint missile defense exercise in October, Juniper Cobra, testing the advanced X-Band radar, a farewell gift to the land of Shalom from the Bush administration. The radar is capable of tracking small targets thousands of kilometres away. Thousands of kilometres away means surveillance of not only Syria and Iran but a large swathe of southern Russia. All this makes perfect, if horrible, sense. The US empire is on the march and the Pentagon learned the perils of the draft from the massive public protests it provoked during the Vietnam war. It already operates on a global electronic battlefield where the fighting is increasingly done by robot drones guided by surveillance systems, the idea being to minimise US casualties. This was what Rumsfeld had in mind when he thought he could conquer Iraq and Afghanistan with a handful of troops on the ground. Even so, there is a lack of drafted cannon fodder, so in addition to robots, foreign nationals are offered immediate US citizenship if they sign up, and mercenaries (aka private contractors) -- US and foreign -- are employed to help fight on the ground. Hence the impotence of the peace movement in the face of US multiple wars, although the logic of the Rumsfeld doctrine is already looking pretty threadbare. Defining moments in US military logic: Kim Phuc Phan Thi, centre, gave the Vietnam War a human face as she fled her village after a napalm attack in 1972 (photo: Nick Ut, AP) The killing of four Blackwater mercenaries in March 2004 prompted the US to destroy Fallujah (photo: Karim Sahib, AFP) Iraq offers a heart-breaking example of a war in which mercenaries so inflamed the locals they were sent to “liberate” that, when given the chance in Fallujah, enraged mobs dragged the bodies of four of them through the streets, burned and hung two of them from a bridge. This scene was televised globally and prompted the US to make a punishing, retaliatory assault on Fallujah, causing widespread death and destruction, with no protest from Western governments. The new old logic on the ground is: conquer hearts-and-minds by terrorising and killing those who resist, preferably with robots and mercenaries. The logic in the heavens is merely an extension of this: Star Wars is unashamedly a first strike global missile shield system. “The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy” in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Foreign Affairs (March 2006) states: “It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike. The US Air Force has enhanced the avionics on its B-2 stealth bombers to permit them to fly at extremely low altitudes in order to avoid even the most sophisticated radar.” Deploying short-, medium- and long-range interceptor missile batteries, mobile missile radar stations, long-range super-stealth nuclear bombers, Aegis-class destroyers equipped to sail the world’s seas to hunt down conventional and nuclear missiles, and surveillance satellites and weapons in space is not designed to target non-existent intercontinental ballistic missile threats from Iran or Syria, or even from North Korea, concludes analyst Rick Rozoff, but to blackmail Russia and China and prepare the groundwork to “win” in a first strike nuclear war. On August 11, just a few days before the Von Baunites gathered in Alabama, Russian Air Force commander Alexander Zelin warned, “By 2030 foreign countries, particularly the US, will be able to deliver coordinated high-precision strikes from air and space against any target on the whole territory of Russia. That is why the main goal of the development of the Russian Air Force until 2020 is to provide a reliable deterrent during peacetime, and repel any military aggression with the use of conventional and nuclear arsenals in a time of war.” The following day Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, “Outer space is now facing the looming danger of weaponisation. Credible and effective multilateral measures must be taken to forestall the weaponisation and arms race in outer space.” Make no mistake, the Pentagon is busy shooting for global military supremacy. This year is crucial to get things right before the expiration of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START-1) in December. A joint understanding for a follow-on “agreement” to START-1 was signed by Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in July. The US strategy appears to be to replace the treaty with a less formal agreement that eliminates strict verification requirements and weapons limits. Former US assistant secretary of state Paula DeSutter said in May 2007 that the major provisions of the treaty “are no longer necessary. We don’t believe we’re in a place where we need have to have the detailed lists and verification measures.” More US “logic”, this time dismissing the need for much-hated treaties, which would have to be confirmed by the Senate and, worse yet, adhered to, instead of informal “cooperation”, meaning arm-twisting or merely ignoring protests. The connection between the lack of interest in a replacement for START-1 and Washington’s missile shield designs is not lost on the Russians. The CFR admits that US missile plans in Europe are seen by the Russians “not so much as missile defense as a deployment of first-strike capability.” Zelin revealed that defence upgrading would include developing “new missiles that will be capable of defending against space-based systems.” Despite the fact that there is no popular will for militarising space, there is little standing in its way, with “defence” policy now solidly bipartisan, and Euro-silence and even Euro-cheerleading. Only “authoritarian” Russia and China call for a treaty against space warfare. The US dismisses these calls as designed to block its plans for the missile interceptor system. Well, yes, that is the point. “The practice of seeking absolute strategic advantage should be abandoned. Countries should neither develop missile defense systems that undermine global strategic stability nor deploy weapons in outer space,” Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told the peaceniks in Geneva, as the Von Braunites were promoting peace US-style. He added that China welcomed moves to rid the world of nuclear weapons, including China’s. “The complete prohibition and thorough destruction of nuclear weapons and a nuclear weapon-free world have become widely embraced goals,” Yang said, referring to Obama’s call in April for a “world without nuclear weapons”. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told them much the same. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was conspicuous in Geneva by her absence. Too bad no US generals or senior government officials bothered to drop in on the Geneva conference, where the fallacy in their “logic” could have been explained to them: a treaty signed by the nations of the world, led by all the permanent members of the UN Security Council, would prevent any “adversaries” from taking “advantage” of using space for military purposes. The most touted blaggard, North Korea, cannot even get its satellites into orbit, assuming they are of any military significance. The rogue states that can and do (no names are necessary) would be forced by a treaty to curb their appetites for cyber Armageddon, allowing the world to breathe slightly more easily. Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/ You can reach him at http://ericwalberg.com

Eric Walberg is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Eric Walberg

Japan's Weapons Industry

The Potential Consequences Of Japan’s Resumption Of Arms Exports.

By Gavan Gray
July 13, 2009
Courtesy Of Global Research

Reforms being backed by the Japanese government are likely to see further easing of, if not an outright end to, Japan’s stringent restrictions on military arms exports. That this may well be a necessity due to current trends toward joint development of weapons systems between nations and corporations, should in no way be taken to mean it will not have major consequences for Japan. The Japanese arms industry currently exists to serve the Self Defense Forces but should its raison d’être change from national security to profit-making, Japan is likely to see a major increase in both governmental corruption and the ‘revolving door’ system of conflicts of interest, which have compromised the security of nations such as the UK and USA.

Since the end of WWII the Japanese people have seen their country portrayed, by virtue of its constitution’s renunciation of war, as a uniquely peaceful and nonviolent nation. Yet, in the past decade the push to ‘normalize’ the country, and return to it the full variety of foreign policy options available to other major powers, has seen significant changes occur. Recently, the government has begun to relax a longstanding injunction against the export of weapons, something that will unleash some of the world’s leading industrial manufacturers on the international weapons market. In doing so, Japan greatly increases the influence the arms industry will have upon its national politics. This industry now exists solely as a provider for the Self Defense Forces but, should profitability take over from national security as its raison d’être, the state will, based upon the examples of the US and the UK, have to contend with increased levels of corruption and the promotion of an aggressively militaristic foreign policy.

The Export Ban.

Despite its 62 year old constitution’s proscriptions, Japan began conducting international arms sales in 1953. A ban on sales was first introduced under Prime Minister Sato Eisaku in 1967, though it only forbade trade with what were termed the ‘3 P’s’; states sponsoring terrorism, involved in conflict or under UN arms embargos. In 1976 it was expanded to include all countries though in 1983 Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro granted the US a case-by-case exemption, the first major use of which was the decision in 2004 to allow joint research into Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD). This was followed in 2006 by a decision to permit the export of related technology to the United States. This was hailed as “a significant step forward” by Nippon Keidanren, the Japan Business Federation, and it pushed shares of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries up more than 35% in 2007. Concerns have been expressed by both the Keidanren and the Defence Ministry, that similar future ventures might not be possible should export restrictions remain.

The ruling LDP party is seeking to readjust the ban to its ‘3P’ format. While such calls have been heard for years they have received increased support recently. In October 2007, the Defense Minister, Ishiba Shigeru, issued a Ministerial Directive aimed at pushing the issue to the forefront of Defense policy. Some say that Prime Minister Aso might announce an end to the export ban in early summer with the expectation that Japan’s prowess in miniaturized motors, electronics and robotics will quickly allow Japanese firms to carve out a distinct niche in the global industry.

Japan’s Arms Manufacturers.

Worldwide military expenditure amounted to $1339 billion in 2007, a 45% increase since 1998, with Japan in 5^th place, claiming 4% of the market and $4.8 billion in sales. The leading Japanese manufacturer was Mitsubishi Heavy Industry, ranked 22^nd globally, followed by Mitsubishi Electric (64^th), NEC (79^th) and Kawasaki Heavy Industries (85^th). Unlike leading Western manufacturers, such as BAE Systems whose products are 95% defense related, arms represent only 2-10% of the larger Japanese firms output. The firms are in their entirety, however, as large as the top-ranking companies. NEC with 152,000 employees is just as large as Boeing, the leading international arms producer. As such they have access to all the political and media influence of major corporations.

The majority of their output is split between ‘kokusanka’, i.e. internal development of such weapon systems as tanks, armored personnel carriers, and some missiles and licensed production of foreign systems, such as Fuji Heavy Industries production of a modified version of Boeing’s AH-64D Apache Longbow. Other smaller companies include; Howa, (small arms), Asahi-Seiki (small-caliber ammunition), Nippon Koki, Daikin Kogyo and Komatsu's Defense Systems Division ( large-caliber ammunition), Sumitomo Heavy Industries (machine guns) and Japan Steel Works' Hiroshima plant (medium and large-caliber guns).

Japanese components have also found themselves sold as part of weapons packages through dual-use clauses permiting export of goods with non-military applications. As such, Japanese chips and cameras have become components in missile guidance systems and armored vehicles, while military troops around the world can be seen riding Toyota, Suzuki and Mitsubishi vehicles. Though such trade ensures that Japan has consistently remained a minor member of the arms trade, the government offers no annual accounting of the licenses granted to export such materials, leaving the general public unaware to what extent and in what areas Japan has dabbled in profiting from the sale of military goods. The annual Small Arms Survey this year ranked Japanese weapons firms considerably lower, in terms of transparency and accountability, than European or North American counterparts, leaving us to wonder whether things will simply degenerate further with the changes likely to take place in coming years.

The Future of the Industry.

Japan’s “National Defense Program Guidelines for 2005 and After” laid out the state’s plan to transform its military. Among the requirements were the need for BMD, a next generation fighter aircraft, transport planes and maritime patrol craft, each of which will be major projects for the Arms industry in the near future and all involving some level of joint research with the USA. Such joint projects are run through the US-Japan Security Consultative Committee (SCC) and initial hesitancy to share tech has been largely overcome through the signing of a General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA). Some of the larger ongoing projects are the development of SM-3 Block IIA, the C-X transport craft, the XP-1 patrol aircraft, hull technology research and CBNR defenses.

Perhaps the largest upcoming project is the search for a next generation fighter plane. Concerns over the $200 million cost of the US’ F-22 have seen Japanese officials consider BAE System’s Eurofighter Typhoon, a joint development among European manufacturers with half the price of the F-22. While these negotiations might be a ploy to press the US on price, Hosoya Takatoshi, president of the Society of Japanese Aerospace Companies, has expressed his desire to see Japan develop closer ties to European companies. If the Typhoon is selected the diversification of Japanese research ties beyond their current American connections would be a significant development.

Projects not yet announced but likely to receive greater attention in the near future include development of new naval vessels to reflect the growing importance of littoral capabilities, a fast, sealift capability for US Marines in Guam and joint development of sensors, communication and ground support systems.

Despite this inevitable expansion of the Japanese industry’s joint development projects, Northrop Grumman Chairman Ronald Sugar expressed the opinion that Japanese firms would be unlikely to emerge as significant competitors to US rivals. Sugar fails to take into account the fact that Japanese manufacturers are likely to develop areas of specialization in which they exceed American and European rivals. Japan leads the US in several technical fields such as nanotechnology, where the government invests $800 million annually. The US Defense Technology Office foresees joint US-Japan research as making the best use of each nation’s strong suits. For the US, this is their underlying weapons systems, munitions and aerospace capability, while Japan excels in the areas of miniaturization, robotics and digital optics. These various strengths are almost certain to come together in the future joint development of Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs).

More than 50 nation’s now use unmanned drones for reconnaissance, intelligence gathering and the elimination of targets. Japan began its own UAV development program in 2005, with the goal of producing two prototypes by 2012, while Fuji Industries already produces a helicopter-based drone used for surveillance purposes. Another area in which Japan is ideally suited is Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). Britain’s Special Forces are currently field testing a 28-inch long MAV, called the WASP, in Afghanistan. The remote-controlled drone is used for reconnaissance but can be fitted with explosives giving it lethal potential. The US Air Force Research Laboratory has set a 2015 deadline for a second generation of MAVs the size of birds and, by 2030, hope to produce a third generation the size of insects.

Robots have also become a major new military research field. Today US forces in Iraq make use of some 12,000 robots that can be equipped with missiles, rockets and machine-guns. One of the latest models, the remote-controlled MAARS, comes with speakers to broadcast warnings and commands from its operator and, should they prove insufficient, is capable of deploying non-lethal stun rounds or a decidedly lethal medium machine gun. One Air Force Lieutenant General forecast that by 2030 tens of thousands of robots would be regularly employed in conflict zones, robots with two decades of evolution from today’s clumsy models and with far different capabilities. The center for such development in Japan is the Technical Research and Development Institute (TRDI) which has stated its intention to focus on UAVs, MAVs, Robotics and Unmanned Underwater vehicles (UUVs) as significant areas of future research and development with a projected deadline for preliminary models of 2012-17. That Japan will soon enter into new areas of military development is clear but what costs might be involved is harder to predict.

Costs and Consequences

Development of high tech weapons systems was shown to have inherent dangers when North Korean defectors testified that smuggled Japanese technology has been an integral part of North Korea’s ballistic missile program. Additionally, research in other areas, particularly nanotechnology, is currently moving faster than the ability of regulatory bodies to ascertain potential dangers. Beyond this is the moral issue of where such systems will be used. According to the Congressional research center, in 2005 the US provided more than $11 billion in sales to 25 countries with human rights problems, 10 of which were classified as undemocratic.

Even where the use is sanctioned, human error or malfunction can lead to massive loss of civilian life. Boeing’s Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) is the most widely used ‘smart’ bomb in the US arsenal, yet it has an officially recognized failure rate of at least 2% and has been responsible for killing civilians, allied troops and US Special Forces as well as its intended victims. Similar problems exist with UAVs with Pakistani officials estimating that recent strikes have killed 687 civilians along with the 14 al-Qaeda leaders targeted by the attacks. Should Japan embark on a similar road of providing weaponry to other states, even when not directly involved in the conflict themselves, Japan will still bear a moral burden for any failures, in the design or use of their weapons.

Political Implications.

Efforts to legislate the international arms trade have met with repeated failure at both the UN, where efforts by a group of Nobel Peace Laureates to advance an ‘Arms Trade Treaty’ have borne little fruit since 2003, and in the US where the arm’s industry’s political connections have repeatedly trumped efforts to impose moral guidelines. The political pull of the Arms Industry is lubricated by what

Transparency International estimates to be roughly half of the $80 billion spent annually on political bribes and pay-offs.

In the UK Dick Evans, chairman of BAE Systems, was known to be one of “the few businessmen who can see Blair on request”. Robin Cook, Labour’s Foreign Secretary said: "I came to learn that the chairman of BAE appeared to have the key to the garden door to No 10. Certainly I never knew No. 10 to come up with any decision that would be incommoding to BAE."

Corruption charges brought against Evans were dropped by the Attorney General due to what he referred to as pressure from Downing Street. The UK is also a choice example of the revolving-door system whereby government employees take up work with defense contractors and vice versa. Among many others, Michael Portillo, Defense Secretary from 1995-7, arranged deals worth up to $500 million apiece for BAE and then became a non-executive director of the company. Roger Freeman, former Minister for Defense Procurement became chairman of Thales. And, Jonathan Aitken, another former Minister for Defense Procurement and a chairman of Le Cercle, was jailed for perjury regarding his involvement in arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

In the US similar conflicts of interest could be seen in Dick Cheney’s various entanglements with Halliburton, his wife’s role as former board member of Lockheed Martin and Bush’s nomination of the same company’s ex-President, to serve, consecutively, as Secretary of the Navy, Deputy Secretary for Homeland Security and Deputy Secretary for Defense. Such ties are by no means limited to Republicans though. Richard Blum, the husband of Senator Dianne Feinstein, acting Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, received millions of dollars in profits from the 75% share of stocks he holds in defense contractor Perini. Such ties remain under Obama, who bypassed his own ethics rules to appoint William Lynn, a Senior Vice President at Raytheon, to the position of Deputy Defense Secretary.

Japan’s Moral Fallibility.

Japan has its own version of the revolving door, a system known as ‘Amakudari’, or ‘descent from heaven’. In 2005 alone 106 senior defense officials took up positions with private corporations. Criticism of the system has led to legislation aimed at banning government facilitation of the practice yet this will clearly have no impact upon independent collusion. In 2005 80% of the $20 billion in defense spending was discretionary, allowing wide leeway for bribery and bid-rigging. In 1998 a senior Defense Agency official was charged with cooking the accounts of a contractor in return for an amakudari position. In 2001 two high-ranking former Fuji executives received jail sentences for bribery and the Defense Agency's Parliamentary Vice-Minister took his own life following involvement in the scandal. In 2003 Nippi Corporation admitted it had been overcharging the Defense agency for years, while 2006 saw staff at the Defense Facilities Administration Agency also arrested for bid-rigging.

The largest recent scandal began in 2001 with overbilling of the Defence Agency for $1.5 million by Yamada Corporation. In supporting their claims Yamada forged documents purporting to be from BAE Systems, and, when government ministers sought a face to face meeting with a BAE representative, Yamada hired a stand-in to fill the role. The Vice Defense Minister at the time, Moriya Takemasa, expressed outrage but it was not long before it turned out that he had himself been accepting bribes worth over $30,000 from former Yamada Director Miyazaki Motonobu. In return for Miyazaki’s favours Moriya is alleged to have awarded his company lucrative deals with General Electric. The fallout saw GE end its dealings with Yamada, and Moriya receive a two and a half year prison sentence and $125,300 fine. During his trial Moriya testified that other politicians, including an ex-Defence Agency chief, were also wined and dined by Miyazaki.

These revelations come not long after a regional Defence Facilities Administration Bureau chief revealed that he kept a list of 14 politicians, including 4 Defence Agency Director-Generals, whom he had witnessed helping particular firms win contracts. The problem in Japan is only likely to worsen as the ongoing economic decline means that potential amakudari style rewards are not as lucrative as they used to be. Hirano Hirofumi, chairman of Nikko Principal Investments, says "now we have an entire generation of bureaucrats who are disenchanted with their career prospects."

Studies into conflicts of interest by George Lowenstein at Carnegie Mellon have shown that disclosure of an existing conflict does nothing to raise the scepticism or caution of the public. It does however, lead to greater liberties being taken by the compromised person. The object lesson being that the public’s goal must not simply be to uncover and reveal such situations but to ensure that they are not allowed to occur in the first place.

The Pawning of National Security.

A separate concern is the possibility that arms manufacturers may be taken over by international corporations, lacking any sense of loyalty to the state and guided purely by profit. The Carlyle Group has established a reputation for acquiring smaller firms and selling them on at a profit. Initially the majority of these firms were defense contractors, though the group has diversified considerably since then. One of Carlyle’s most controversial purchases was Qinetiq, the research arm of the UK’s Ministry of Defense. Another was the $2 billion acquisition of Booz Allen, a contractor to all major US intelligence branches whose former Vice President, Michael McConnell, is now current US Director of National Intelligence.

In Japan efforts led by Isayama Takeshi, a 33-year senior official at the Ministry for International Trade and Industry, have allowed Carlyle to make tentative inroads. In October 2004 they took a controlling share in KDDI’s Willcom, by providing 60% of the $2.1 billion purchasing price, stating that Japanese firms were showing increased tolerance to sell subsidiaries to private funds. While the Japanese government has been leery of buyouts, its 40% capital gains tax is likely to be dropped in efforts to entice further investment by such firms, with Trade Ministry sources specifically naming Carlyle as a target.

Pork-Barrel Threats.

Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of the growing influence of the military-industrial complex while his contemporary, Senator Allen J. Ellender stated "For almost twenty years now, many of us in Congress have more or less blindly followed our military spokesmen. Some have become captives of the military." Among the myriad dangers of such captivity is the diversion of funds from social services to military boondoggles that do nothing to protect the nation. Examples appeared in Obama’s latest budget, which called for an end to several over-budgeted or technically dubious projects such as the F-22 fighter and the C-17 transport plane. Each of the projects has, nonetheless, continued its production run following campaigning by the political representatives of the states in which they are manufactured.

Seymour Melman wrote about economic growth as either ‘productive’ or ‘parasitic’. Productive growth being that which either improved people’s standard of living, and parasitic, that which simply acted as a depletion of resources. Beyond the set limit of reasonable necessity, military spending is the classic example of parasitic growth. Even Norman Angell admitted that it would be hopelessly naïve for states to avoid preparing an adequate defense against threats. The caveat being that these must be real rather than imagined.

Following the invasion of Iraq it was found that a large proportion of the deceit which obfuscated the initial case for war with Iraq, originated in a 2002 meeting between Stephen J. Hadley, Deputy National Security Advisor, and Bruce Jackson, Director of Strategic Planning for Lockheed Martin. Hadley informed Jackson that the US would be going to war but that they “were still struggling with a rationale to justify it.” Jackson responded by organizing the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq the results of whose efforts were documented by USAF Colonel Sam Gardiner. They included more than 50 outright lies that were widely accepted as truth, including; the search for WMDs, the rescue of Jessica Lynch and executions of Coalition troops by insurgents. During the invasion of Iraq, despite the fact that at least a quarter of the population was opposed to the war, anti-war voices represented just 3% of sources used by the major television networks while US military personnel represented 47%. Of 840 appearances by U.S. officials, only four were identified as holding anti-war opinions.

That the Japanese media are no more independent than their US counterparts can be seen in the criticism of them following their failure to fully investigate the recent scandal surrounding Ozawa Ichiro. Kyoto University’s Nakanishi Teramasu, feels "the mass media are failing to tell the people what is at stake”, while Journalism Professor Tajima Yasuhiko stated that rather than playing the role of government watchdogs, the media “act more like authority's guard dogs." In Eisenhower’s warning he urged that “only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." In Japan, the presence of this alert and knowledgeable citizenry is open to question. A recent survey of 12 Asian countries found that while Japanese people did not trust government institutions the majority placed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in both newspapers and the military. Meanwhile, only 19% agreed with the statement “I think I have the ability to participate in politics”, the lowest of all nations.

The Arms Industry has shown its ability to acquire extensive power over governments from both the right (the Bush Administration in the US) and the left (the Blair government in the UK). The question is not whether they will wield undue influence over future Japanese governments, but instead ‘how much?’ The answer, as Eisenhower forewarned, depends entirely upon the presence, or lack thereof, of an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry”. There thus remains both time and hope that Japan can avoid falling into the militaristic patterns that have economically and morally compromised other nations.

Gavan Gray lives and works as a teacher in Osaka, Japan, where he is also a postgraduate student at Macquarie University’s Center for Policing, Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism. He can be contacted at gavangray@yahoo.com

Global Research Articles by Gavan Gray