Media Fear Over Russia and China Is Making the Military Industrial Complex Filthy Rich at Your Expense

Sunday, February 24, 2019
By Paul Martin

The new cold war, which was stirred up by the establishment over the last few years has become a boon for war profiteers. Fear is money.

TheFreeThoughtProject.com
February 24, 2019

(RT) — US politicians and media peddling scary stories about Russia and China may have a more pedestrian motive than defending ‘American values and way of life’ – a return to the halcyon days of the Cold War and the Pentagon gravy train.

If there’s one thing mainstream Democrats and Republicans agree upon, it’s that Russia and China are the new global threat, ready to pounce at the first sign of a week spot in American defenses to topple the benevolent US dominance of the globe.

If there’s another – never on the record, of course – it’s that war is good for business. Not actual war, what the Pentagon calls ‘kinetic military action’, as that would be destructive. The ideal conditions for the political class in Washington is the bygone Cold War, when it could funnel billions of dollars in taxpayer money to defense contractors, with these corporations repaying the largesse with hefty contributions to politicians.

With a military budget of $717 billion in 2019 – which is about four times that of China and 15 times that of Russia – Washington war hawks are still lamenting how the “underfunded” US military could lose the next war against either. There’s only one way to avoid that – spend more.

F-35: Pie in the Sky
As the US aggressively asserted the right to intervene anywhere around the world, Russia and China began rebuilding their air forces and augmenting them with new-generation warplanes. For the US Air Force and the aerospace industry, this was like the answer to three decades of prayer.

Lockheed finally had the justification for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, which produced the first prototype in 2006. There were only two tiny little problems with the F-35: nobody could get the plane to actually work as intended, and it was incredibly expensive. The total lifetime program cost was estimated at $1.5 trillion in 2015 dollars, the bulk of which would be for “operations and sustainment.”

The most expensive Pentagon project to date is plagued by some of the most expensive problems – but while Lockheed Martin could not make the F-35 actually work as advertised, it did manage to spread its production over 45 US states, ensuring the program is almost impossible to kill politically. Powerful Republican senators have thrown their weight behind the F-35, warning the Pentagon against taking funding away from it in favor of a simpler F15X update proposed by Boeing.

Lucrative digital battlegrounds
The looming shadow of the ‘Russian hacker’, infiltrating (not really) American political parties and power grids, has spurred the push for cyber security – and the contracts to go with it.

Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), a program that seeks to provide the US military with secure cloud services, has attracted big tech with its $10 billion contract – which Amazon now seems increasingly likely to win, thanks to its reported inroads with the US administration. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was unapologetic, saying the US is a “great country” that “needs to be defended.” Executives at the other two big-name contenders – Microsoft and Google – were equally enthusiastic, with the Microsoft president vowing to give all the tech the company creates to the “ethical and honorable” US military.

The Rest…HERE

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