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Tag: Department of Defense

  • Detroit Defense Appoints National Security Expert Michael Bayer to Board of Directors

    Renowned DoD Advisor Joins to Advance Mission and Growth


    DETROIT, May 21, 2025 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Detroit Defense, a leading integrator of mission-critical defense technologies and platforms, today announced the appointment of Michael Bayer to its Board of Directors. Bayer, one of the nation’s most respected advisors on national security, aerospace, and energy, brings decades of senior government and industry experience to the company’s leadership team.

    Bayer currently serves as Chairman Emeritus of the National Defense Industrial Association and has held key roles on nearly every major Department of Defense advisory board, including the Defense Science Board, the Army Science Board (as Chairman), the Defense Business Board (which he chaired three for three Secretaries of Defense,) and the Secretary of the Air Force Advisory Board (as Chairman). His leadership in strategic reviews and crisis response – from post-9/11 terrorism assessments to the Navy’s Cybersecurity and Strategic Readiness Reviews – has shaped U.S. defense policy for over 30 years.

    “Michael’s extensive experience and unparalleled knowledge of national security will help us better serve and empower the warfighter at a time when agility and clarity of mission are more important than ever,” said Pete Roney, CEO of Detroit Defense. “His wisdom and leadership are unmatched, and we’re honored to welcome him to the team.”

    Pierre Chao, Detroit Defense Board Chair and longtime defense strategist, added, “Having worked closely with Michael in The Pentagon on various reform and readiness initiatives, I know of no finer statesman to help guide Detroit Defense as we scale. His presence on the board underscores our commitment to integrity, mission focus, and innovation in support of national defense.”

    Michael Bayer joins the Detroit Defense board as the company accelerates its growth across its core capability areas – platform integration, digital logistics, technical services, and integrated logistics – serving U.S. and allied military forces worldwide.

    About Detroit Defense

    At Detroit Defense, we ensure success for the DoD and its allies with innovative systems, technical services, integrated logistics support, and digital logistics solutions. Combining decades of engineering expertise with a mission-focused approach, we deliver systems and services that enhance readiness, extend platform life cycles, and enable data-driven decision dominance.

    As an OEM-agnostic partner, we bring cutting-edge capability to any system – empowering forces with the capabilities of next, on the platforms of now.

    Source: Detroit Defense

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  • Detroit Defense Launches as New Name and Brand Identity for Ricardo Defense

    Redefining Defense Solutions with Innovation, Agility, and a Relentless Focus on Mission Readiness


    DETROIT, May 19, 2025 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Ricardo Defense today unveiled its new name and brand identity: Detroit Defense, marking a bold new chapter in the company’s evolution as a modern, agile leader in defense innovation, systems integration, and digital logistics.

    The rebrand reflects more than geography. It represents a mindset – one rooted in Detroit’s industrial legacy, but firmly oriented toward the future fight. While proud of its historical ties to the Arsenal of Democracy, Detroit Defense is defined by what comes next: enabling mission success with innovation, speed, and readiness in every solution delivered.

    “Detroit Defense represents who we are and where we’re headed,” said Pete Roney, CEO of Detroit Defense and Co-Founder of Proteus Enterprises. “We’re not just based in Detroit – we’re built by it. And we’re applying that same spirit of creativity, grit, and urgency to meet the evolving needs of our customers. When the mission demands it, we deliver it.”

    The name change follows the December 2024 acquisition of Ricardo Defense by Proteus Enterprises LLC and Gladstone Investment Corporation. That strategic shift has empowered Detroit Defense to expand its capabilities and accelerate delivery of advanced, integrated solutions that enhance readiness and support decision dominance across domains.

    Pierre Chao, Co-Founder of Proteus Enterprises and Detroit Defense Board Chairman added, “Having worked across the Pentagon and industry for decades, I can say with confidence there’s no team better equipped to solve the urgent challenges our warfighters face. Detroit Defense brings together deep engineering roots, modern agility, and a relentless commitment to mission success. This brand marks the beginning of something bold – and overdue – in the defense sector.”

    Detroit Defense will continue providing proven capabilities like the ABS/ESC retrofit kits that have increased survivability for thousands of U.S. Army HMMWVs. Building on that foundation, the company is scaling its impact in digital logistics, intelligent sustainment, and legacy system modernization – solving integration challenges others can’t, and fielding next-gen capabilities that keep warfighters ready for whatever comes next.

    About Detroit Defense

    At Detroit Defense, we ensure success for the DoD and its allies with innovative systems, technical services, and integrated logistics for any military system. Combining decades of engineering expertise with a mission-focused approach, we deliver systems and services that enhance readiness, extend platform life cycles, and enable data-driven decision dominance.

    As an OEM-agnostic partner, we bring cutting-edge capability to legacy systems – empowering forces with the capabilities of next, on the platforms of now.

    Detroit Defense. Behind the Mission. Beyond the Challenge.

    Source: Detroit Defense

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  • Executive One Holding Company Announces Three Extrodinary DOD Leaders to Join Its Advisory Board

    Executive One Holding Company Announces Three Extrodinary DOD Leaders to Join Its Advisory Board

    Devon Bryan, Janice Haith, and John “Oscar” Meier bring their mission and industry experience to CORAS, HumanTouch, & Plasticity


    MCLEAN, Va., October 8, 2024 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Executive 1 Holding Company is pleased to announce the addition of three industry, U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Navy leaders as prominent advisors to its Board. EX1 manages a family of companies in cognitive AI, decision management, and government consulting: CORAS, Human Touch, Plasticity, and DocuGraph. Adding to an existing distinguished board of leaders from defense, technology, and policy sectors, the EX1 advisory brings significant experience, mentorship, and wisdom that inform and refine impactful and incisive delivery strategies for customer missions. Now more than ever, EX1 companies are focused on driving exponential modernization and digital transformation, logistics, global threat postures, and decision capabilities for federal civilian and defense agencies. Welcome our newest board members:

    Moe Jafari, CEO of Executive 1 Holding, said, “Time is a weapon that requires constant cognitive navigation that experienced leaders have both awareness and empathy to apply. It is an honor and a call to action to have Devon Bryan, Janice Haith, and John Meier join our Board to drive our collective mission to support the warfighter and the federal workforce of guardians. These leaders bring their insights, expertise and experience to our decision management platform, expanding our ability to scale and forge cognitive decision navigation and innovation into our customers’ business.”

    Devon Bryan is Carnival Corporation’s Global Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). He is an 11-year veteran of the US Air Force and an award-winning security leader known for his ability to drive global teams in supporting complex business in various industries and mitigating technology risks while enabling top-line business revenue growth. Devon’s career as a CISO spanned MUFG Union Bank (Americas), KPMG North America, The US Federal Reserve System (Fed), ADP Inc., and Deputy CISO for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Devon also serves as a Board member for the non-profit organization he co-founded in 2014, Cyversity, to diversify the cybersecurity workforce through programs geared toward attracting more women and minority security professionals.

    Janice Haith, former Chief Information Officer for the U.S. Navy (USN), is known for her deep understanding of the Federal ecosystem, passion for innovation, and ability to effect positive change. During her tenure as CIO, Janice led many IT modernization strategies including the introduction of cloud-based technology (U.S. NAVY Cloud First), the restructure of the USN’s risk management framework, the implementation of a secure internet protocol network, and an overhaul of the DOD’s personnel security and credentialing management systems. She is also credited with collaborating with other Federal CIOs to drive cybersecurity initiatives.

    John “OSCAR” Meier, a recently retired Commander of the Naval Air Force Atlantic (AIRLANT), spent over 35 years advancing and preserving the U.S. Navy’s mission and vision. Throughout his years, John’s expertise in electronic attack, nuclear propulsion, and other traditional warfighting capabilities grew alongside his visionary leadership and desire to drive innovation and forward thinking to military operations. John’s most recent accomplishment was creating AIRLANT’s Maintenance Operations Center (MOC) to foster a data-driven environment to drive down maintenance costs and further increase mission-capable rates across naval aviation.

    EX1’s growing family of companies serves the Department of Defense, civilian federal government agencies, and commercial organizations with pride. For more information, visit https://www.executive1holding.com/.

    Source: Executive 1 Holding Company

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  • Pentagon Withholds Docs on Whether DEI Hiring Improves National Security

    Pentagon Withholds Docs on Whether DEI Hiring Improves National Security

    U.S. Secretary of Defense, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

    By Casey Harper (The Center Square)

    The U.S. Department of Defense is under scrutiny for refusing to release records about exactly how spending on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion helps with national security.

    The Center to Advance Security in America in May filed with the DOD a Freedom of Information Act Request, the legal pathway to obtain government documents. The FOIA sought to find out what DOD officials estimate is the real impact on national security of DEI spending, for which Congress approved $86.5 million in fiscal year 2023.

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    However, James Fitzpatrick, an Army Veteran who leads CASA, told The Center Square that the DOD has confirmed it received the FOIA request but still has not released any documents more than 100 days later.

    “The Department of Defense has stated that diversity, equity, and inclusion is the American military’s greatest strength but has rarely detailed how,” reads the FOIA, which was obtained by The Center Square. “Given the recent hiring freeze on DEI related positions, it must follow that national security has been affected in some way. The information obtained is necessary to evaluate the impact of DEI initiatives and financing on prioritizing efforts to advance national security.”

    The FOIA request specifically asks for documentation about how DOD estimates a recent hiring freeze on DEI hires will actually impact national security. DOD regularly estimates readiness and national security impacts, especially in its funding requests to Congress for various kinds of equipment, programs and more.

    The most recent National Defense Authorization Act ordered a hiring freeze on new DEI positions while the Government Accountability Office reviews that spending.

    CASA filed suit against the DOD Wednesday, a lawsuit that was exclusively obtained by The Center Square.

    “If diversity, equity and inclusion are truly the military’s greatest strengths, or there have been times where they have said it is critical to the success of the military, then if the DOD is imposing a DEI hiring freeze … then there must be a corresponding lack of national security that goes along with it, if their position is spending more on DEI means military gets better and stronger,” Fitzpatrick told The Center Square.

    DOD officials and documents repeatedly emphasize the importance of diversity in defending the nation.

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    Under FOIA law, federal agencies are generally required to provide documents within about three weeks. THe DOD has staff dedicated to handling these requests.

    “They are legally required to produce records,” Fitzpatrick said. “They haven’t. They are well over the friendly threshold to provide records, and really they just need to engage in a conversation. By this point they very well should have reached out and said they’ve started the search.”

    DEI Pentagon spending has become increasingly common and controversial in recent years. DEI spending includes well-paid DEI hires, training programs on gender pronouns and white privilege for troops, and efforts to recruit non-white Americans for certain roles.

    The DOD’s fiscal year 2022-2023 “Department of Defense Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Strategic Plan” typifies the kind of language federal officials use about the necessity of diversity spending.

    Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness began the report with a message, saying that “leveraging this strategic diversity and expanding access to attract, retain, and advance the best talent our nation has to offer are the only way DoD will be able to outthink, outmaneuver, and outfight any adversary or threat.

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    “The 2022 National Defense Strategy highlights that for DoD to maintain the Joint Force’s military advantage globally and prevent attacks against our homeland, we must build a resilient force by developing and combining our strengths to maximum effect and investing in our people,” he continued. “Advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) across the Department is not about checking a box; it’s about obtaining the critical skills and experience to build the Total Force necessary to secure our nation for years to come.”

    DOD did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

    Syndicated with permission from The Center Square.

    The Center Square

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  • A Vigilante Hacker Took Down North Korea’s Internet. Now He’s Taking Off His Mask

    A Vigilante Hacker Took Down North Korea’s Internet. Now He’s Taking Off His Mask

    “That’s not nice, and it’s not a good norm,” says Schneider. She says that much of the US government’s slow approach to cyberattacks stems from its care to ensure it avoids unintentionally hitting civilians as well as breaking international law or triggering dangerous blowback.

    Still, Schneider concedes that Caceres and Angus have a point: The US could be using its cyber forces more, and some of the explanations for why it doesn’t amount to bureaucracy. “There are good reasons, and then there are bad reasons,” says Schneider. “Like, we have complicated organizational politics, we don’t know how to do things differently, we’re bad at using this type of talent, we’ve been doing it this way for 50 years, and it worked well for dropping bombs.”

    America’s offensive hacking has, by all appearances, gotten less aggressive and less nimble over the past half decade, Schneider points out. Starting in 2018, for instance, General Paul Nakasone, then the head of Cyber Command, advocated a “defend forward” strategy aimed at taking cyber conflict to the enemy’s network rather than waiting for it to occur on America’s turf. In those years, Cyber Command launched disruptive hacking operations designed to cripple Russia’s disinformation-spouting Internet Research Agency troll farm and take down the infrastructure of the Trickbot ransomware group, which some feared at the time might be used to interfere in the 2020 election. Since then, however, Cyber Command and other US military hackers appear to have gone relatively quiet, often leaving the response to foreign hackers to law enforcement agencies like the FBI, which face far more legal constraints.

    Caceres isn’t entirely wrong to criticize that more conservative stance, says Jason Healey, who until February served as a senior cybersecurity strategist at the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. He responds to Caceres’ cyberhawk arguments by citing the Subversive Trilemma, an idea laid out in a 2021 paper by the researcher Lennart Maschmeyer: Hacking operations have to choose among intensity, speed, and control. Even in earlier, more aggressive years, US Cyber Command has tended to turn up the dial for control, Healey says, prioritizing it over those other variables. But he notes there may in fact be certain targets—such as ransomware gangs or hackers working for Russia’s no-holds-barred GRU military intelligence agency—who might warrant resetting those dials. “For those targets,” says Healey, “you really can release the hounds.”

    P4x Is Dead, Viva P4x

    As for Caceres himself, he says he’s not opposed to American hacking agencies taking a conservative approach to limiting their damage or protecting civilians—as long as they take action. “There’s being conservative,” he says, “and then there’s doing fuck all.”

    On the argument that more aggressive cyberattacks would lead to escalation and counterattacks from foreign hackers, Caceres points to the attacks those foreign hackers are already carrying out. The ransomware group AlphV’s catastrophic attack on Change Healthcare in February, for instance, crippled medical claim platforms for hundreds of providers and hospitals, effects about as disruptive for civilians as any cyberattack can be. “That escalation is already happening,” Caceres says. “We’re not doing anything, and they’re still escalating.”

    Caceres says he hasn’t entirely given up on convincing someone in the US government to adopt his more gloves-off approach. Ditching the P4x handle and revealing his real name is, in some sense, his last-ditch attempt to get the US government’s attention and restart the conversation.

    But he also says he won’t be waiting for the Pentagon’s approval before he continues that approach on his own. “If I keep going with this alone, or with just a few people that I trust, I can move a lot faster,” he says. “I can fuck shit up for the people who deserve it, and I don’t have to report to anyone.”

    The P4x handle may be dead, in other words. But the P4x doctrine of cyberwarfare lives on.

    Andy Greenberg

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  • The 4 Big Questions the Pentagon’s New UFO Report Fails to Answer

    The 4 Big Questions the Pentagon’s New UFO Report Fails to Answer

    But what, then, were those programs? Herein lies the most intriguing—and potentially ground-breaking—question that the Pentagon study leaves us wondering: What exactly are the secret compartmentalized programs that the whistleblowers and government witnesses misidentified as being related to UAP technology? What, exactly, are the Pentagon, intelligence community, or defense contractors working on that, from a concentric circle or two away inside the shadowy world of SAPs, looks and sounds like reverse-engineering out-of-this-world technology or even studying so-called “non-human biologics”?

    There are at least four clear possibilities.

    Secret Tech From Foreign Nations

    First, what exotic technological possibilities have been recovered from unknown terrestrial sources? For example, if the government is working on reverse-engineering technologies, those technologies are likely from advanced adversary nation-states like China, Russia, and Iran, and perhaps even quasi-allies like Israel that may be more limited in their technology-sharing with the US. What have other countries mastered that we haven’t?

    A Question of ‘Peculiar Characteristics’

    Second, what technologies has the US mastered that the public doesn’t know about? One of the common threads of UFO sightings across decades have been secret military aircraft and spacecraft in development or not yet publicly acknowledged. For example, the CIA estimated that the U-2 spy plane in the 1950s accounted for as much as half of reported UFO sightings. And the AARO report spends a half-dozen pages documenting how confusion over subsequent generations of secret US government aircraft appear to have also contributed to the great intergalactic game of telephone of UFO programs inside the government, including modern Predator, Reaper, and Global Hawk drones. AARO investigated one claim where a witness reported hearing a former US military service member had touched an extraterrestrial spacecraft, but when they tracked down the service member, he said that the conversation was likely a garbled version of the time he touched an F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter at a secret facility.

    There are surely other secret craft still in testing and development now, including the B-21 stealth bomber, which had its first test flight in November and is now in testing at Edwards Air Force Base in California, as well as others we don’t know about. The government can still surprise us with unknown craft—like the until-then-unknown modified stealthy helicopter left behind on the Pakistan raid to kill Osama bin Laden. And some of these still-classified efforts are likely causing UFO confusion too: AARO untangled one witness’s claim of spotting a UAP with “peculiar characteristics” at a specific time and place and were able to determine, “at the time the interviewee said he observed the event, the DOD was conducting tests of a platform protected by a SAP. The seemingly strange characteristics reported by the interviewee match closely with the platform’s characteristics, which was being tested at a military facility in the time frame the interviewee was there.” So what was that craft—and what were its “peculiar characteristics?”

    Relatedly, the US military has a classified spaceship, the X-37B, that has regularly orbited around the Earth since its first mission in 2010—it just blasted off on its seventh and most recent mission in December—and its previous, sixth, mission lasted a record-breaking 908 days in orbit. The Pentagon has said remarkably little about what it does up there for years at a time. What secret space-related or aviation-related programs is the government running that outsiders confuse as alien spacecraft?

    A Material Matter

    The third likely area of tech development that might appear to outsiders to be UFO-related is more speculative basic research and development: What propulsion systems or material-science breakthroughs are defense contractors at work on right now that could transform our collective future? Again, AARO found such confusion taking place: After one witness reported hearing that “aliens” had observed one secret government test, AARO traced the allegation back to find “the conversation likely referenced a test and evaluation unit that had a nickname with ‘alien’ connotations at the specific installation mentioned. The nature of the test described by the interviewee closely matched the description of a specific materials test conveyed to AARO investigators.” So what materials were being tested there?

    There are some puzzling materials-science breadcrumbs wrapped throughout the AARO report. It found one instance where “a private sector organization claimed to have in its possession material from an extraterrestrial craft recovered from a crash at an unknown location from the 1940s or 1950s. The organization claimed that the material had the potential to act as a THz frequency waveguide, and therefore, could exhibit ‘anti-gravity’ and ‘mass reduction’ properties under the appropriate conditions.” Ultimately, though, the new report concluded, “AARO and a leading science laboratory concluded that the material is a metallic alloy, terrestrial in nature, and possibly of USAF [US Air Force] origin, based on its materials characterization.”

    A Knowledge Limit

    Fourth and lastly is the category of the truly weird: Scientists at the forefront of physics point out that we should be humble about how little of the universe we truly understand; as Harvard astronomy chair Avi Loeb explains, effectively all that we’ve learned about relativity and quantum physics has unfolded in the span of a single human lifespan, and astounding new discoveries continue to amaze scientists. Just last summer, scientists announced they’d detected for the first time gravitational waves criss-crossing the universe that rippled through space-time, and astrophysicists continue to suspect that the universe is far weirder than we think. (Italian astrophysicist Carlo Rovelli last year posited the existence of “white holes” that would be related to black holes, which, he pointed out, were still a mystery just 25 years ago when he was starting his career.)

    Answers here could be almost unfathomably weird—think parallel dimensions or the ability to travel at a fraction of the speed of light. And one of the most intriguing questions left by the UAP “game of telephone” is whether there are truly astounding advances in physics that government scientists, defense contractors, or research laboratories or centers could be feeling around that could also appear from the outside to be UFO-related.

    Garrett M. Graff

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  • How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find its Targets—and Vladimir Putin

    How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find its Targets—and Vladimir Putin

    Most alarmingly, PlanetRisk began seeing evidence of the US military’s own missions in the Locomotive data. Phones would appear at American military installations such as Fort Bragg in North Carolina and MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida—home of some of the most skilled US special operators with the Joint Special Operations Command and other US Special Operations Command units. They would then transit through third-party countries like Turkey and Canada before eventually arriving in northern Syria, where they were clustering at the abandoned Lafarge cement factory outside the town of Kobane.

    It dawned on the PlanetRisk team that these were US special operators converging at an unannounced military facility. Months later, their suspicions would be publicly confirmed; eventually the US government would acknowledge the facility was a forward operating base for personnel deployed in the anti-ISIS campaign.

    Even worse, through Locomotive, they were getting data in pretty close to real time. UberMedia’s data was usually updated every 24 hours or so. But sometimes, they saw movement that had occurred as recently as 15 or 30 minutes earlier. Here were some of the best trained special operations units in the world, operating at an unannounced base. Yet their precise, shifting coordinates were showing up in UberMedia’s advertising data. While Locomotive was a closely held project meant for government use, UberMedia’s data was available for purchase by anyone who could come up with a plausible excuse. It wouldn’t be difficult for the Chinese or Russian government to get this kind of data by setting up a shell company with a cover story, just as Mike Yeagley had done.

    Initially, PlanetRisk was sampling data country by country, but it didn’t take long for the team to wonder what it would cost to buy the entire world. The sales rep at UberMedia provided the answer: For a few hundred thousand dollars a month, the company would provide a global feed of every phone on earth that the company could collect on. The economics were impressive. For the military and intelligence community, a few hundred thousand a month was essentially a rounding error—in 2020, the intelligence budget was $62.7 billion. Here was a powerful intelligence tool for peanuts.

    Locomotive, the first version of which was coded in 2016, blew away Pentagon brass. One government official demanded midway through the demo that the rest of it be conducted inside a SCIF, a secure government facility where classified information could be discussed. The official didn’t understand how or what PlanetRisk was doing but assumed it must be a secret. A PlanetRisk employee at the briefing was mystified. “We were like, well, this is just stuff we’ve seen commercially,” they recall. “We just licensed the data.” After all, how could marketing data be classified?

    Government officials were so enthralled by the capability that PlanetRisk was asked to keep Locomotive quiet. It wouldn’t be classified, but the company would be asked to tightly control word of the capability to give the military time to take advantage of public ignorance of this kind of data and turn it into an operational surveillance program.

    And the same executive remembered leaving another meeting with a different government official. They were on the elevator together when one official asked, could you figure out who is cheating on their spouse?

    Yeah, I guess you could, the PlanetRisk executive answered.

    But Mike Yeagley wouldn’t last at PlanetRisk.

    As the company looked to turn Locomotive from a demo into a live product, Yeagley started to believe that his employer was taking the wrong approach. It was looking to build a data visualization platform for the government. Yet again, Yeagley thought it would be better to provide the raw data to the government and let them visualize it in any way they choose. Rather than make money off of the number of users inside government that buy a software license, Mike Yeagley wanted to just sell the government the data for a flat fee.

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  • Tlaib bill slams door on war cash for politicos and their families

    Tlaib bill slams door on war cash for politicos and their families


    click to enlarge

    Rashida Tlaib/Courtesy photo

    U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib.

    U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib introduced a bill Tuesday aimed at preventing politicians and their families from profiting from war.

    The Stop Politicians Profiting from War Act would bar members of Congress and their spouses and dependent children from having any financial stakes in companies that do work with the U.S. Department of Defense. The legislation would also ban congressional members and their families from trading defense stocks.

    Members of Congress are currently permitted to own and trade stocks, regardless of their committee assignments and access to insider information.

    U.S. lawmakers made 96 transactions in defense stocks in 2023, and eight of those purchases occurred since October, when the war between Hamas and Israel broke out, according to Capitol Trades.

    Tlaib, a Detroit Democrat, said the public’s faith in government has eroded because members of Congress have exploited their positions to line their pockets.

    “My colleagues continue to funnel billions of American tax dollars to the very same defense contractors that many of them are invested in and taking campaign donations from,” Tlaib said in a statement. “The American people deserve representatives who vote in the best interest of our country and our families, not their stock portfolios. It is shameful that some of my colleagues are profiting financially when they vote to support wars and weapons manufacturing. Members of Congress should not be able to use their positions of power to get rich from defense contractors while voting to pass more funding to bomb innocent civilians. The American people deserve better. We are sick of politicians profiting from endless wars.”

    Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, has been a fierce critic of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Since the war began, Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 27,000 people and wounded an additional 66,000.

    Numerous groups are endorsing Tlaib’s bill.

    “Elected officials owning defense contractor stocks while also controlling annual budget allocations is the opposite of a virtuous circle,” Savannah Wooten, who leads Public Citizen’s People Over Pentagon campaign, which is committed to reducing the Pentagon’s budget and spending more on domestic and human needs issues. “It’s an astonishing testament to the deep power of the military-industrial-Congressional complex that owning defense contractor stock while in office hasn’t yet been banned. Rep. Tlaib’s legislation is a long overdue and welcome proposal. The bill should be passed immediately.”

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    Steve Neavling

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  • Department of Defense To Track Military Overdoses, Provide NARCAN | High Times

    Department of Defense To Track Military Overdoses, Provide NARCAN | High Times

    As per a new law, the Department of Defense will begin tracking overdoses within the United States military in 2024 and begin to provide naloxone to service members beginning in 2025. 

    Military overdose deaths have historically not been systematically tracked until the release of a report by Rolling Stone in 2022 detailing the steep rise in overdose deaths at Fort Bragg, which has since been renamed to Fort Liberty. The report detailed the shocking increase in deaths from fentanyl, counterfeit prescription pills laced with fentanyl and deaths in otherwise healthy young men from causes typically sustained from long-term drug use that were not labeled as overdoses.

    In general, Rolling Stone described shoddy record-keeping and experienced a general lack of transparency from the brass at Fort Liberty regarding drug use, drug-related crimes or overdose by military members. Of the 109 deaths that occurred at Fort Liberty between 2020 and 2021, at least 14 soldiers died directly from overdose, though that number is likely higher if you count deaths from drug-related causes, 21 by Rolling Stone’s count, making accidental overdose the leading cause of death at Fort Liberty behind suicide which claimed the lives of 41 soldiers in the same time period. 

    After the Rolling Stone report, pressure built on Congress to do something about the issue and Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) along with other congressmen began to push the Pentagon for increased transparency. This request led to an admission by the Pentagon that fentanyl-related deaths roughly doubled among military members between 2017 and 2021, much like the rest of the country experienced. According to a Military.com report, 330 service members died from drug overdose between 2017 and 2022, and 15,000 soldiers experienced non-fatal overdoses in the same time frame. 

    “Real security means guaranteeing that members of the military and their families can get resources and life-saving treatment necessary to stop the overdose crisis in its tracks,” Senator Markey said in a statement to Military.com.

    The law requiring overdose tracking and NARCAN distribution was signed by President Biden in December of 2022 and goes into effect in 2024. According to Military.com, the Department of Defense will be required to submit an annual report on overdose deaths, overdose locations, demographics, whether the service member had previously sought mental health treatment, or if they’d previously been prescribed opioids, benzodiazepines or stimulants.

    “It’s really just smart public health,” said Professor Alex Bennett to Military.com. Bennett serves as the director of New York University’s Opioid Overdose Prevention Program. “There’s really a lot of drug naivete amongst military personnel,” Bennett said.

    Part of the issue, as is the same with the civilian population, is that fentanyl is often used to make “pressed pills” or fake prescription pills designed to look like pharmaceutical painkillers or benzodiazepines which are often poorly dosed, causing people to unwittingly ingest a lethal dose of fentanyl. The Drug Enforcement Administration has estimated that about 70% of fake prescription pills contain a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl. 

    “We’ve been working with a lot of veterans who use substances while they’re in the military. Transparency with data tracking like the kind the military is set to begin doing is a step in the right direction,” Bennett said. “Closing your eyes to drug problems doesn’t solve anything,” Bennett said. “It just makes things worse.”

    Carole De Nola, whose 23-year-old child died of an overdose while stationed at Fort Liberty, told Military.com that drug education is especially needed among military members as the new law does not require the military to educate service members on the dangers of fentanyl.

    “We should be dealing with this before a service member’s about to overdose,” De Nola said. 

    It was not immediately clear how the military would be distributing naloxone, commonly known as NARCAN, which is a life-saving medication that can halt an opioid overdose in its tracks. Many NARCAN distribution programs have been established at the level of local cities and townships but nothing has been established federally, or by military leadership until the new law was passed. The new law requires that naloxone be made available to all troops by the year 2025. The law also requires all the naloxone distributed by tracked, which could discourage some military members from seeking it out. 

    Patrick Maravelias

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  • Pentagon says Iranian drone 'attack' hit chemical tanker near India

    Pentagon says Iranian drone 'attack' hit chemical tanker near India

    (Reuters) – A drone launched from Iran struck a chemical tanker in the Indian ocean early on Saturday, the U.S. Department of Defense said.

    “The motor vessel CHEM PLUTO, a Liberia-flagged, Japanese-owned, and Netherlands-operated chemical tanker was struck at approximately 10 a.m. local time (6 a.m. GMT) today in the Indian Ocean, 200 nautical miles from the coast of India, by a one-way attack drone fired from Iran,” a Pentagon spokesperson told Reuters.

    The incident highlights escalating regional tensions and new risk to shipping lanes after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

    The Iranian government, as well as its allied militant forces in Yemen, have publicly criticized the Israeli government’s military operation in Gaza. Thousands of Palestinian citizens have been killed in the ongoing conflict, according to aid monitors.

    The Pentagon statement said this was the “seventh Iranian attack on commercial shipping since 2021.”

    There were no casualties as a result of the attack and a brief fire on board the tanker was extinguished. The incident took place only 200 nautical miles from the coast of India.

    A spokesperson for the Iranian delegation at the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    (Reporting by Christopher Bing; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

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  • Rare footage shows “invisible” nuclear bomber flying in California

    Rare footage shows “invisible” nuclear bomber flying in California

    Footage has emerged of the first reported flight of the U.S. Air Force’s new nuclear stealth bomber.

    The Northrop Grumman B-21 “Raider” was captured on video flying outside an aircraft manufacturing plant in Palmdale, California, on Friday. The test flight comes less than a year after the Raider was introduced to the public and less than a month after it was seen carrying out taxi tests on a runway.

    On its website, the U.S. Department of Defense wrote the B-21 Raider “is expected to serve within a larger family of systems for conventional long-range strike, including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; electronic attack; communication; and other capabilities.”

    The Pentagon noted the design of the nuclear-capable aircraft allows it to be manned or operated remotely, and it is capable of employing “a broad mix of stand-off and direct-attack munitions.”

    Perhaps most notable about the B-21 Raider is that it’s considered a “stealth” aircraft, which are often referred to as being “invisible” due to the bombers being hard for adversaries to detect on radar.

    The B-21 Raider is pictured during a ceremony at Northrop Grumman’s Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, on December 2, 2022. Images and videos of the Raider’s first flight on Friday were shared on social media.
    Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images

    Reuters reported there are six test B-21s in production now, and the Air Force is expected to buy at least 100 of the aircraft to replace B-1 and B-2 bombers.

    The Raider’s maiden flight on Friday was not announced by the Air Force, but spectators on the ground captured it in the air and posted images and videos on social media.

    Among those that recorded the Raider was Matt Hartman, a freelance photojournalist, who posted a clip on X (formerly Twitter) of the B-21 soaring overhead.

    Moshe Schwartz, a reporter for the website Yeshiva World News, also posted a clip on X of the B-21 flying near Palmdale.

    Ann Stefanek, a U.S. Air Force spokesperson, told Reuters: “The B-21 Raider is in flight testing. Flight testing is a critical step in the test campaign managed by the Air Force Test Center and 412th Test Wings B-21 Combined Test Force.”

    Newsweek reached out to the U.S. Air Force and Northrop Grumman via email for further comment.

    When the Raider was unveiled in a December 2022 ceremony, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin delivered remarks about the new bomber.

    “It can handle anything from gathering intel to battle management to integrating with our allies and partners,” Austin said. “And it will work seamlessly across domains, and theaters, and across the joint force.”

    Speaking about the Raider’s stealth capabilities, the defense secretary said that “fifty years of advances in low-observable technology have gone into this aircraft, and even the most sophisticated air-defense systems will struggle to detect a B-21 in the sky.”

    Austin added: “The B-21’s edge will last for decades to come.”