US President Joe Biden may soon approve the largest military spending bill since World War II. It will be ramped up spending to counter China and Russia. The Senate voted down a bipartisan bid by Senators Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee.
- They are to halt $650 million in US arms sales to Saudi Arabia amid the devastating ongoing war in Yemen. The director of the Arms and Security Project William Hartung said,
“The last thing we need to do is throwing more money at the Pentagon. This whole idea that China and Russia are military threats to the United States has primarily been manufactured to jump up the military budget.”
- The military budget includes the largest amount ever requested for research into novel weapons systems, cyber warfare, artificial intelligence, and the development of killer robots.
- However, the United Nations is hosting a Convention on Conventional Weapons conference in Geneva next week. There the rules governing these killer robots will be discussed. The United States is “rejecting…prohibitions or restrictions on the development and acquisition of fully autonomous weapons,” Steve Goose said. At a conference this week, Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley said,
“The nation-state that masters artificial intelligence and integrates it into military operations, combine it with robotics…is going to have an extraordinary advantage. Our ability to hit with long-range precision fires is unprecedented. We can strike anywhere on the globe, at very, very refined levels of accuracy.”
- Meanwhile, the newly elected progressive New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman tweeted that“$770 Billion to the Pentagon just easily passed the house 363-70” after the House passed the NDAA.
“It is astounding how quickly Congress moves weapons but we can’t ensure housing, care, and justice for our veterans, nor invest in robust jobs programs for districts like mine,” he added.
