Sweeta Singh — U.S. defense companies lift forecasts amid growing security concerns

Top U.S. weapons makers reported better-than-expected quarterly results and raised their full-year forecasts, buoyed by higher demand for fighter jets and tanks amid heightened security concerns around the world....

Mission accomplished.

Reuters

U.S. defense companies lift forecasts amid growing security concerns

Sweeta Singh

Melvin A. Goodman — Learning from the Cold War to prevent war with Russia today

Backgrounder in conjuring up enemies and manufacturing consent to fight them.

Summary: Clinton has stocked her foreign policy team with advisors belligerent and reckless, eager for conflict with Russia. The military-industrial complex’s propaganda mills work to arouse fear and hatred of Russia, as they did during the Cold War. Let’s learn from that history before we starting risk a terrible war. We were told mostly false stories about the Soviet Union. How accurate are those about Russia? {This updates my post from Oct 2009.}

Fabius Maximus
Learning from the Cold War to prevent war with Russia today

Melvin A. Goodman | senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

See also

LobeLog
The Doctrine of Armed Exceptionalism

William Hurting

Larry C. Johnson — Hell Bent on Fighting Russia?

I believe one of the key dynamics driving the policy to promote confrontation with Russia is the need to feed a U.S. defense industry and justify the spending of billions of dollars on weapons systems that really are not needed other than to keep corporations that feed at the U.S. Government trough fat and happy.

No Quarter Usa Net

Hell Bent on Fighting Russia?
Larry C. Johnson, former analyst at the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, who moved subsequently in 1989 to the U.S. Department of State, where he served four years as the deputy director for transportation security, antiterrorism assistance training, and special operations in the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism. He left government service in October 1993 and set up a consulting business. He currently is the co-owner and CEO of BERG Associates, LLC (Business Exposure Reduction Group) and is an expert in the fields of terrorism, aviation security, and crisis and risk management, and money laundering investigations (Wikipedia).

Alex Emmons and Naomi LaChance — Donald Trump, After Blasting Iraq War, Picks Top Iraq Hawk as Security Adviser

Donald Trump Named former CIA director and extremist neoconservative James Woolsey his senior adviser on national security issues on Monday. Woolsey, who left the CIA in 1995, went on to become one of Washington’s most outspoken promoters of U.S. war in Iraq and the Middle East.

As such, Woolsey’s selection either clashes with Trump’s noninterventionist rhetoric — or represents a pivot towards a more muscular, neoconservative approach to resolving international conflicts.

So much for at all that about Donald Trump being a foreign policy realist. Trump is clearly concerned about the neoconservative defection to Killary, as well as strong pushback from the military wing. This gives the impression that Donald Trump is out of his league and has no policy stance but is making it up on the fly in response to political concerns. I was previously that the election of Killary would by a foreign policy catastrophe but Trump only a disaster. Now I am beginning to think in terms of how big a catastrophe they would respectively produce.

Moreover, since leaving government Woolsey has been deeply involved in the military-intelligence-indusstrial-governmental complex. Now he has dollar signs in his eyes.

Woolsey went on CNN on Monday and said that he was principally motivated to support Trump because of his plans to expand U.S. military spending.

Trump gave a speech last week in which he proposed dramatic expansions of the Army and Marines, and hundred-billion-dollar weapons systems for the Navy and Air Force. He offered no justification — aside from citing a few officials who claimed they wanted more firepower.

Woolsey stood by Trump’s proposal on Monday.

“I think the problem is her budget,” Woolsey said of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. “She is spending so much money on domestic programs — including ones that we don’t even have now, and the ones we have now are underfunded — I think there can be very little room for the improvements in defense and intelligence that have to be made.”

The Intercept
Donald Trump, After Blasting Iraq War, Picks Top Iraq Hawk as Security Adviser
Alex Emmons and Naomi LaChance