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US Congress debates Ukraine aid as Pentagon warns money running low

A last-ditch weekend spending agreement avoided a U.S. government shutdown but left pro-Ukraine officials in Washington scrambling on Monday to determine the best path forward for securing approval for billions more assistance for Kyiv.

Leaders in the Senate, which is narrowly controlled by President Joe Biden’s fellow Democrats, promised to take up legislation in the coming weeks to ensure continued U.S. security and economic support for Ukraine.

But in the Republican-led House of Representatives, Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he wanted more information from the Biden administration, and a Republican pushing for his removal as speaker accused McCarthy of cutting “a secret deal” with Biden to allow the House to vote on a bill.

Washington has sent the Kyiv government $113 billion in security, economic and humanitarian aid since Russia invaded in February 2022. President Joe Biden asked Congress in July to approve another $24 billion related to Ukraine, which Ukraine supporters – Republicans as well as Democrats – had hoped could become law as part of a spending bill.

A U.S. official said that, as of Monday, the Defense Department had $1.6 billion left to replace weapons sent to Ukraine, no funds left under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) and $5.4 billion worth of Presidential Drawdown Authority.

Congress passed a stopgap funding bill late on Saturday after McCarthy backed down from a demand by his party’s hardliners for steep cuts in domestic aid programs. But he, and some other Republicans in both the House and Senate, refused to include more aid for Ukraine in the measure.

U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) speaks to reporters in the U.S. Capitol after the House of Representatives passed a stopgap government funding bill to avert an immediate government shutdown, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S. September 30, 2023. REUTERS/ Ken Cedeno/File Photo

REPUBLICAN ANTI-UKRAINE DRUMBEAT CONTINUES
Opponents of Ukraine aid, many of whom are close allies of former Republican President Donald Trump as he seeks re-election to the White House next year, kept up their drumbeat against assistance for Kyiv on Monday.

Republican Representative Matt Gaetz, who said he would try this week to remove McCarthy as speaker, accused McCarthy on Monday of reaching a “secret deal” with Biden for Ukraine aide, amid reports that McCarthy had agreed to allow a House vote on assistance for Kyiv after the spending bill passed.

McCarthy later denied it. He called on the administration to arrange a briefing for House members about the path it sees to reach an end to the conflict.

“Our members have a lot of questions, especially on the accountability provisions of what we want to see with the money that gets sent,” he told reporters.

White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre urged Congress to move quickly. “They don’t have to wait 45 days to get this done,” she told a daily press briefing, where she also expressed confidence the assistance would continue.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-congress-debates-ukraine-aid-pentagon-warns-money-running-low-2023-10-02/

Leaked Pentagon docs reveal Taiwan unready for China strike: report

The classified Pentagon documents stated that Taiwan officials question the ability to “accurately detect missile launches.”
AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File

Secret military documents reportedly included in the mass Discord leak posted by Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira reveal critical weaknesses in Taiwan’s air defenses.

The classified Pentagon assessments of the island nation’s military readiness state that Taiwan officials themselves question their ability to “accurately detect missile launches” from China, the Washington Post reported Saturday.

US analysts found that only half of Taiwan’s aircraft would be “fully mission capable” in the event of a Chinese attack — and suggested that Beijing could successfully control Taiwan’s airspace if it chose to invade.

Last week, three days of Chinese “combat readiness patrols” signaled a warning to independent Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory.

Teixeira, 21, a low-level Air National Guard information technology specialist, is accused of posting hundreds of classified documents related to the Ukraine war and other sensitive military topics to a Discord channel with 20 to 30 members.

The social media site, popular among video-game players such as Teixeira, is cooperating with the investigation, Discord chief legal officer Clint Smith said Friday.

“This recent incident fundamentally represents a misuse of our platform and a violation of our platform rules,” Smith said.

Heavily armed federal agents arrested Teixeira at his mother’s home in North Dighton, Mass. on Thursday.

Teixeira leaked the critical weaknesses in Taiwan’s air defenses.
Dighton-Rehoboth Regional High School

Meanwhile, one of former President Trump’s top national security aides said Saturday that Teixeira could not have acted alone — but is merely the patsy in a much wider intelligence breach.

“It’s just not possible” for Teixeira to have had access to such a highly sensitive trove, Kash Patel, Trump’s former deputy director of national intelligence, told Breitbart News.

“You can be the biggest IT person in [the Department of Defense], and you are still compartmented off of the actual information,” Patel explained.

Patel said he does not believe “for a single second” that “this guy — a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman — ran his operation alone.”

Instead, he said, the explosive revelations are likely part of “an Assange-style operation” — referring to the WikiLeaks founder who faces espionage charges for helping U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal classified diplomatic cables and military files.

“The way it was produced, the way it was put out there — pages, printed photographs taken, published online — that is a methodical way of releasing classified information illegally,” Patel said — calling Teixiera’s arrest “an extensive cover-up.”

Teixeira, who joined the Massachusetts Air National Guard in 2019, worked as a cyber transport systems journeyman with the 102nd Intelligence Wing, responsible for the upkeep of military communications hardware.

Source: https://nypost.com/2023/04/15/leaked-pentagon-docs-reveal-taiwan-unready-for-china-strike/

Why Leaked Pentagon Documents Are Still Circulating on Social Media

Twitter and the social media platform Discord have various policies that might have prompted them to remove the leaked Pentagon documents that Biden administration officials say revealed key information about U.S. intelligence gathering operations.

But gray areas in those rules and uneven enforcement of them make it unclear how, or even if, executives at those companies would decide to remove them.

As of Saturday, Twitter continued to host tweets with the Pentagon’s documents, some of which had been up since at least Wednesday. There is no indication that Elon Musk, who bought Twitter nearly six months ago, will take any action against the tweets with the classified documents.

Two days earlier, Mr. Musk seemed to respond sarcastically to a tweet about the leaked material. “Yeah, you can totally delete things from the Internet — that works perfectly and doesn’t draw attention to whatever you were trying to hide at all,” he wrote.

On Discord, a messaging platform popular with video game players, the Pentagon documents may have been circulating as early as March. Since Discord chat groups — known as servers — are not directly managed by the company like a Facebook or Twitter feed, the distribution of the Pentagon documents would have been difficult to spot.

Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday, and Discord declined to comment. It is not known if the companies, which are both based in the United States, have been asked to remove the Pentagon material.

In the past, Twitter may have removed the material under rules that prohibit the publication and distribution of hacked materials, two former executives told The New York Times. Under this policy, Twitter would remove tweets with “real or synthesized hacked materials” or place warning labels on the material. Some of the Pentagon material circulating on social media may have been manipulated.

But there were caveats to Twitter’s rules, as they were described in a policy document, which was last updated in October 2020. The rules allowed for exceptions for material that forms the basis for reporting by news agencies. And debates inside social media companies about what to allow online have often been similar to discussions that traditional media have about whether leaked or hacked material is of enough public interest to justify publishing.

It was not clear on Saturday whether the Pentagon material was hacked or intentionally leaked — the images circulating appeared to be photographs of documents. The documents could fall into a gray area that, at least in the past, would have led to discussion among compliance officers inside the company about whether they qualified for a takedown.

Twitter used its hacked material policy to block the circulation of an article in October 2020 from the New York Post that said the F.B.I. had seized a computer that purportedly belonged to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter Biden. Twitter’s leaders, including then-chief executive Jack Dorsey, later called the decision a mistake.

The former executives, who spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from Mr. Musk, said that Twitter often received reports of potential violations of its polices from U.S. government organizations.

But since acquiring the company in October, Mr. Musk has shrunk the groups responsible for moderation and more than 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 employees have been fired or left. Ella Irwin, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Twitter has removed or prevented the circulation of content at the behest of governments like India and on Mr. Musk’s whims.

This past week, Twitter also began regulating the circulation and engagement of links to Substack, the newsletter platform, after the start-up unveiled a Twitter-like service. On Friday, many Substack writers found that tweets that had links to their Substack pages could not be liked or retweeted.

Source: https://dnyuz.com/2023/04/08/why-leaked-pentagon-documents-are-still-circulating-on-social-media/

Pentagon Prepares for Space Warfare as Potential Threats From China, Russia Grow

White House’s spending request includes plans for simulators, equipment to train Space Force members for battle

The Pentagon is gearing up for a future conflict in space as China and Russia deploy missiles and lasers that can take out satellites and disrupt military and civilian communications.

The U.S. military long ago dropped the notion of crewed, orbiting space weapons in favor of satellites because the logistics of supporting people outside of Earth’s atmosphere were formidable.

The physics of space also make it impossible to sneak up on an enemy or quickly change orbit or direction. And earthbound tactics don’t work in space, where the U.S., China and Russia are all turning to satellites and sensors to wage and win any conflict.

“You can’t dig trenches in space,” said Marty Whelan, senior vice president of the Defense Systems Group at The Aerospace Corp., a federally funded research group.

“If deterrence fails, you can’t wait until something bad happens to get ready. You have to have the full infrastructure together,” said Mr. Whelan, a former Air Force major general, who led a strategic review of space systems for the Pentagon and the intelligence community.

The White House this month proposed a $30 billion annual budget for the U.S. Space Force, almost $4 billion more than last year and a bigger jump than for other services including the Air Force and the Navy.

The Space Force was created in 2019 as the sixth arm of the military, carving out responsibilities once embedded in the Air Force. A key aim of a stand-alone force was to plan, equip and defend U.S. interests in space for all of the services and focus attention on the emerging threats.

For the first time, the spending request also includes plans for simulators and other equipment to train Guardians, as Space Force members are known, for potential battle. The 16,000 Guardians are charged with running rocket launches, satellites and ground-based communication and sensor equipment.

That training will be critical. The physics and the mechanics of steering objects through space at more than 17,000 miles an hour give attackers the advantage they lack on the ground.

Space is also becoming crowded, with the number of tracked objects in orbit now topping 48,000, more than doubling over the past four years.

The U.S., China and Russia are signatories to the United Nations’ Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, including scientific work. All three also have significant military assets in space.

Source : https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-prepares-for-space-warfare-as-potential-threats-from-china-russia-grow-62a0623b