Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “United States Air Force”
Today, America’s foreign policy is a shambles. Its primary features are (1) a perpetual war on terror, and (2) the seemingly inevitable march into a new and unnecessary cold war against Russia and China. At the same time, President Obama is leaving his successor with a budget plan containing a front loaded and political engineered* procurement bow wave that guarantees steeply rising …
Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way, along with the salivating violence of the Chicago police at …
The Obama years have been a boom time for America’s weapons makers. Since 2009, the United States has approved arms deals worth some $200 billion—more than under any other presidency. The deals include sending Apache helicopters to Qatar, “bunker buster” bombs and cluster munitions to Saudi Arabia, and Hellfire missiles all over the place. Predicting an increase in weapons sales …
record number of Air Force drones crashed in major accidents last year, documents show, straining the U.S. military’s fleet of robotic aircraft when it is in more demand than ever for counterterrorism missions in an expanding array of war zones. Driving the increase was a mysterious surge in mishaps involving the Air Force’s newest and most advanced “hunter-killer” drone, the …
Multiple recent reports exposed conventional foods manufactured in China as fake and even toxic: scams involving rice that contains plastic, fake eggs made from chemicals and many food items containing high levels of arsenic. Now that country-of-origin labeling has been removed by Congress (for meat), and companies are struggling to find new sources of food to meet the growing demand for organics …
American Exceptionalism is the belief that, even when the US is flawed in its policies, those politics are justifiable because there is something innately morally superior about being an American. This alleged moral high ground comes from our international commitment to promote and enforce democracy and free-market capitalism–even when it boils down to supporting dictatorships and economic exploitation. This view …
On October 7th, at an “undisclosed location” somewhere in “Southwest Asia,” men wearing different types of camouflage and dun-colored boots gathered before a black backdrop adorned with Arabic script. They were attending a ceremony that mixed solemnity with celebration, the commemoration of a year of combat that left scores of their enemies slain. One of their leaders spoke of comraderie …
Would you pay $400,000 for a single helmet? Of course you wouldn’t – but that is precisely what the U.S. government is doing. Just the helmet for the pilot of the new F-35 Lightning II is going to cost taxpayers nearly half a million dollars. And since we are going to need 2,400 of those helmets, the total bill is …
Mikey Weinstein is an attorney and the founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the nation’s foremost watchdog organization to assure members of the US Armed Forces are guaranteed their constitutional religious freedoms and to challenge Pcoercive activities and infiltration of Christian fundamentalist groups in the military. In the past Mikey served as a legal counsel in the Reagan White House. Before devoting himself full time to his foundation, he served as Ross Perot’s General Counsel and Perot Systems Corporation. Over the years he has filed lawsuits against military services and members of the Bush Administration for violating religious freedom in the armed forces and for proselytizing extreme Christian beliefs thereby creating a hostile environment. Mikey is an honor graduate from the US Air Force Academy and received his jurist doctorate through the Air Force law school program. He has received many awards including the 100 Most Influential People in the US Defense by Defense News. He is the author of several important books including “With God On Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military.” His foundation’s website is MilitaryReligiousFreedom.org
It’s a little-known fact that the Pentagon has for years directly influenced the production [3] of a wide variety of television programming. In fact, in instances where the producing companies are accessing military hardware, the Department of Defense requires approval of the scripts, a process which can result in line-by-line edits by the government of film and television plots and dialogue. …
