Free Republic

The European Commission will propose on Tuesday ways for the European Union to boost its arms industry so it can shift to “war economy mode” in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Thierry Breton, the European industry commissioner, will lay out proposals to encourage EU countries to buy more weapons together from European companies, and to help such firms increase production capacity, according to EU officials. “We need to change the paradigm and move into war economy mode. This also means that the European defense industry must take more risks, with our support,” said Breton, previewing the package. Breton, a...

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be might, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. . . . American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. . . . This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we...

Citing Iran’s mission to the UN in New York, Sputnik said after the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, Iran expressed its interest to buy combat aircraft, and Russia was a willing partner. “The mission added that the Su-35 combat aircraft are technically acceptable to Iran, so after October 2020, and the end of Iranian restrictions on purchases of conventional weapons (UN Resolution No. 2231), Iran completed the procedures for the acquisition,” the Russian news agency noted... Earlier, a video emerged showing Iran’s Khordad-3 & Mersad air defense systems coming out of what is reportedly an underground tunnel. Interestingly,...

Top officers in the U.S. Navy warned that the Ukraine war is putting a strain on an already stretched industrial base Tuesday, complaining defense contractors continue to fall behind in keeping up with the Navy’s needs, according to media reports.Defense companies have struggled for years to keep pace with the Navy’s demands, citing pandemic-induced supply chain setbacks and a shortage of available labor, Navy Times reported. As the U.S. continues sending weapons and equipment to Ukraine, heightening the burden on weapons manufacturers, top Navy brass expressed worry that the fleet could fall dangerously low on needed assets if the war...

The U.S. Department of Defense has, once again, failed a comprehensive financial audit. The audit is the fifth comprehensive review the department has completed, and the fifth where auditors were unable to find sufficient record keeping for the DoD to pass off on a clean audit. This year’s DoD-wide audit report involved 27 smaller component audits, of which seven component audits received “unmodified opinions,” which mean that auditors determined the underlying military financial information was recorded fairly and in line with U.S. accounting standards. One component audit received a “qualified opinion,” meaning auditors found material accounting misstatements that were not...

What’s happening in the nearly six-month-old Russo-Ukrainian war? It’s hard to say. Moscow expected a proverbial cakewalk and bungled its initial attack. After rebuffing Russia’s assault, the Zelensky government expanded its objectives, expressing its desire to reconquer portions of the Donbas seized by separatists with Russian support in 2014, as well as Crimea, which had been formally annexed by Moscow.In recent months, however, Russian forces have made slow progress in the Donbas and now occupy a fifth or more of Ukrainian territory. But Ukraine and its advocates have been threatening counteroffensives against Moscow’s supposedly overstretched forces. Conflicting claims have been...

WASHINGTON: The US military’s electronic warfare enterprise needs to take a page from SpaceX when it comes to responding to new threats, the Pentagon’s director for electromagnetic warfare said today. After SpaceX sent Starlink terminals to Ukraine in February in an apparent effort to help Ukraine maintain its internet connection amid war with Russia, SpaceX founder Elon Musk claimed that Russia had jammed Starlink terminals in the country for hours at a time. After a software update, Starlink was operating normally, said Musk, who added on March 25 that the constellation had “resisted all hacking & jamming attempts” in Ukraine....

From sloppy work to blown deadlines to deadly failures, the company has lost its way. It needs tough love — in the form of Congressional investigations.... Taken together, the problems with the 737 MAX, the 787 Dreamliner, the KC-46 Pegasus, the NASA Starliner, and the Space Launch System suggest systemic organizational and cultural failures that the company, unaided, appears incapable of solving... The deadly failures in the 737 MAX program alone suggest major cultural and organizational problems at the company. Though the loss of almost 350 passengers in two crashes have prompted internal investigations, media scrutiny, and an admission by...

Chris Morehouse, Aerospace Engineer at U.S. Air Force (2017-present) We can just put up a bunch of numbers, but I don’t think that gives a full appreciation of scale. So first let’s hit some specific examples. The B-24 This is Willow Run. It was a B-24 plant built by Ford to mass produce the bomber. It ran its line 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and produced a complete B-24 every 63 minutes on average. At peak, it produced 100 bombers in just two days. This plant produced less than half of the total B-24s we built during...

Donna Riley, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech, visited the University Monday to discuss gender-based violence in science, technology, engineering and math fields. Riley discussed and analyzed the engineering, academic and broader U.S. cultures which work together to deny gender-based violence. Riley said gender-based violence not only includes rape, but also stalking, intimate partner violence, harassment, non-consensual sexual contact, verbal abuse and misogynist hate crimes. In the Survey of Academic Field Experiences published by science journal PLOS One in 2014, Riley said two-thirds of women surveyed reported being the victim of sexual harassment while researching in a scientific field, and...

Industry advocates are voicing concern with U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision to cancel NASA’s Moon-bound Constellation program and the threat it poses to America’s aerospace work force and U.S. strategic missile arsenals, but Defense Department officials said the two agencies are forging a plan to sustain the nation’s solid-rocket motor industrial base. Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) is among those railing against Obama’s proposal to scrap NASA’s plan to replace its space shuttle fleet with new rockets and spacecraft in favor of relying on commercial crew taxis to get astronauts to the international space station and back. “This is not money-saving....

The Pentagon is participating in an interagency integrated team convened to explore how best to sustain the rocket motor industrial base — a mandate made all the more urgent given NASA’s planned cancellation of the Constellation program, according to Brett Lambert, the Defense Dept.’s industrial policy director. Each of NASA’s Ares V launchers would have required six RS-68 engines, which are common to the U.S. Air Force’s Delta IV Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV). Already, Air Force officials are seeing an uptick in the per-unit price of each EELV because procurement has slowed to keep pace with delayed satellite programs....

US arms cartel cranking up its presence in Indian weapons bazaar 7 Feb 2010, 0531 hrs IST, Chidanand Rajghatta, TNN Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks Some months before Bob Dylan wrote these lines about the US weapons industry in the song Masters of War, outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower coined the term ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ in his 1961 farewell address. He cautioned...

Russia has provided an "unprecedented" 970 billion roubles (22.6 billion euros, 33.8 billion dollars) to its defence industry this year, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Wednesday. State support for the sector had helped it grow by 3.8 percent since the start of the year despite the economic downturn, Putin said in comments reported by Russian news agencies. "During the recession we have allocated enough money to the military-industrial sector, which is a priority for government support. In 2009 funding reached an unprecedented level for our country: almost 970 billion roubles," Putin said. State aid had taken the form of reduced-rate...

As part of our special investigation "Mission Creep: US Military Presence Worldwide," we asked a host of military thinkers to contribute their two cents on topics relating to global Pentagon strategy. (You can access the archive here.) The following dispatch comes from Katherine T. McCaffrey, an assistant professor of anthropology at Montclair State University in New Jersey and author of "Military Power and Popular Protest: The US Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico".

What Legacy from the Radical Internationalism of 1968? Max Elbaum Seattle used to be just a city. Since December 1999, it has become shorthand for grassroots protest against the injustices of global capitalism. This is hardly the first time a place-name has come to symbolize a watershed in opposition movements. There were a host of such markers in the huge wave of U.S. protests against racism and the Vietnam War during and after 1968: "Chicago" (referring to the 1968 Democratic Convention where police beat demonstrators as they chanted "the whole world is watching"); "San Francisco State" (where a 1968-69 strike...