The US military faces five “big challenges,” Ash Carter told the Economic Club of Washington on Tuesday.
Those challenges are: Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and ISIS.
So essentially, the exact same “challenges” Washington has been trotting out for years to justify hundreds upon hundreds of billions in defense spending, only with one CIA pet project gone horribly awry added to the list.
There Is No Freedom Without Truth
Paul Craig Roberts
Russian authorities have confirmed that Saudi Arabia have uncovered and arrested members of a known CIA-ISIS terror network operating in Saudi Arabia, after Russian intelligence pointed Saudi authorities to an ISIS terror network funded and armed by the CIA. The arrests come weeks after President Putin warned Saudi Arabia that Russia had “finite patience” regarding their complicity with the US CIA in arming and funding ISIS militants in Syria and Iraq.
America’s Mideast “allies” are less eager to take on Islamic State terrorists themselves than to urge the U.S. military to do so, raising questions about whether much of today’s campaign-trail tough-guy/gal talk about Washington taking the lead really means doing the dirty work for Saudi Arabia, Israel and others, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar…
In his final State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama noted in passing that the United States spends as much on defense as the next eight countries combined. He might have added that the proportions are similar for the Foreign Service and the intelligence community, which cost $50 billion and an estimated $80 billion respectively. The president might well have asked why, if that is so, is there so little bang for the buck in terms of what the U.S. taxpayer gets in return.