Bill LaPlante, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, said that he expects Congress to grant the authority to allow wartime purchasing power at a level not seen since the Cold War, Defense News reported on Monday.
To continue arming Ukraine, LaPlante has been calling for the Pentagon to be granted the authority to lock in multiyear contracts for weapons purchases, which are typically reserved for procuring naval vessels and warplanes. The idea is to get arms makers the incentive to ramp up production.
The Senate has added an amendment to its version of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act to grant the authority. It would allow the Pentagon to make multiyear purchases through 2023 and 2024 of certain arms made by Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace, and Raytheon, the former employer of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
The Senate is expected to vote on its version of the NDAA sometime this month, and it will then negotiate the final version of the spending bill with the House. LaPlante expects the wartime purchasing powers to make it into the finalized version that will reach President Biden’s desk.
“They are supportive of this. They’re going to give us multiyear authority, and they’re going to give us funding to really put into the industrial base ― and I’m talking billions of dollars into the industrial base ― to fund these production lines,” LaPlante said on Friday.
“That, I predict, is going to happen, and it’s happening now. And then people will have to say: ‘I guess they were serious about it.’ But we have not done that since the Cold War,” he added.
When the NDAA amendment was first reported, a senior congressional aide told Defense News that the authority could also be used to prepare for war with China. “We can’t pussyfoot around with minimum-sustaining-rate buys of these munitions. It’s hard to think of something as high on everybody’s list as buying a ton of munitions for the next few years, for our operational plans against China and continuing to supply Ukraine,” the aide said.
The Senate’s NDAA also includes $10 billion in military aid for Taiwan that will be disbursed over the next five years. While the number still needs to be finalized in negotiations with the House, there is strong bipartisan support for arming Taiwan, which will ensure tensions with China will continue to rise.
Warmongers. They act like fans at a football match, waving flags, cheering. Someone has paid for their seats and their hot dogs, etc. It’s all just exciting voyeurism.
Yes. It’s really creepy.
Sam, if you REALLY want to get creeped out, visit politicalwire. I do so occasionally just for a chuckle; the articles and comments there are BEYOND creepy. All those Ukie flags waiving around…gag.
$10 Billion Bucks for Taiwan?… It is a good thing they are not starving because we’d never give 10 Billion bucks for food, only war. Sometimes I think about these situations as ‘potentials’. Since we are not giving it to them in a lump sum, it seems they want to build the war potential gradually, slowly and methodically. Just to get under China’s skin. The tensions will continue to build until the moment comes when the other shoe will drop and it could be over the simplest of things… $10 Billion Bucks is not chump change and I can only imagine there is a dark room somewhere in D.C. or thereabouts where folks are huddled at a table gaming out their strategies… While simultaneously, we are dealing with Ukraine and Russia… Maybe, this time, they will get their wish: War with China and Russia, which would be nuclear. Welcome to the Third World War… Then, lights out………………………………………
Enjoy life while you still can, Donna!
Great post!
Enjoy life while you still can, Donna!
Great post!
What if Russia, China, North Korea fired off missiles at us. No way we could intercept even 1%. (It would never happen,but the thought kind of bothers me.)
After many years of poking Russia and China, they got at last some response from them. So, now they got what they wanted – more money for the military industrial complex. This strategy works well. Now they will carry on with poking Russia and China more actively.
When are not in a war according to the Pentagon? We’re apparently always at war with someone even though nobody has invaded us since the inception of this country.
we were invaded by neocons and they never went away
As well as neolibs.
neoa**holes
And after all that, if it seems they’ve over bought to an embarrassing degree—no problem! They’ll just start another war.
What “wartime”? Show me the declaration of war. Or is this more shredding of the Constitution in order to rob the people to make the Military Industrial Complex rich and put us all at jeopardy?
Yep
remember the patriot act that bush jr passed? that rendered the constitution null and void.
and the patriot act has never been rescinded.
And according to Chris Hedges, ByeDone takes credit for the Unpatriotic Act.
Bragged about it.
Yep. There is no habeus corpus from the border to 100 miles inland. Where I worked, I worked with attorneys. When the Patriot Act became law, even the conservative attorneys were aghast.
Well said, Samantha!
My thoughts exactly. WWII made my father a pacifist. What he saw and endured I can only imagine, because he didn’t talk about it. The only thing he did tell me was if I wanted to know about war to go to the VA Hospital in Long Beach, California and go to a specific ward.
The full and glorious flowering of the Warfare State. These Washington types can hardly contain themselves breaking out into a chorus of the Horst Wessel Lied ….
On March 28, 2022, the Biden-Harris Administration submitted to Congress a proposed Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 Budget request of $813.3 billion for national defense, $773.0 billion of which is for the Department of Defense (DoD).
And we got Medicare for all, right?
Yep. Wartime funding followed by super-wartime funding = next Soviet Union
The Russians were never this stupid.
The Pentagon admits that Russia spends its money more wisely than we do. Imagine, Russia has been preparing for more than 30 years.
From 1991 to 2000 Russia was busy with unilateral disarmament.
One thing they don’t like is oversight
80 billion so far and counting. This is more than the yearly Russian defense budget. Where has all the money gone?
The masks of democracy have come off. If Ukraine wants to be democratic again then they need to oust the illegal Nazi regime in Kiev and hold democratic elections. If Ukraine wants to be sovereign again they need to stop assassinating opposition leaders, they need to re-instate 13 political parties banned and they need to release the leaders of these parties from captivity.
Russia has intervened to protect the ethnic Russian population from genocide. This bloody genocidal war that the Nazi’s in Kiev are undertaking has been ongoing for nearly 9 years.
This winter the Europeans are going to be cold, hungry and in the dark. If US/NATO escalates they will also be dead.
Pretty much sums it up.
“they need to oust the illegal Nazi regime in Kiev” – all NATO countries are supporting Kiev regime. It can be ousted only by Russian army.
Or, in other words, it can’t be ousted.
Putin decides whether it should be ousted or not. If he wanted to finish it quick, he would mobilize the sufficient forces for this task and destroy the railroad and the bridges long time ago.
Disarm and Denazification. The process is ongoing, it would appear that Russia is also taking on the task to Disarm and Denazify the Western NATO Powers.
The Russian MOD is disarming NATO, tank by tank, artillery by artillery, air defense by air defense. What they loose in the Ukraine, they loose for the final global war.
Russia is inflicting a 10:1 kill ratio. And NATO overall has the following equipment losses; 332 Aircraft, 171 helicopters, 2465 UAV’s, 388 Anti Aircraft systems, 6448 tanks inc. APC’s, 884 multiple rocket launchers, 3563 rocket launchers and 7127 military automotive equipment.
Here in New Zealand our Dictatorship voted in support of Nazism at the UN. This is a total disgrace, the WEF runs New Zealand. Jacinda Ardern will go to the Hague to answer for her many many crimes against humanity.
Only US and their close allies dare to support Nazism openly. Turkey is only one member of NATO who abstained from the vote. The other NATO countries openly supported Nazism. Overwhelming majority of the humankind voted against the glorification of Nazism.
The New Zealand pretend Government had to vote in support of Nazism or insult US/Ukraine. They couldn’t supply arms and money to Nazi Battalions and then condemn them. The New Zealand dictatorship is a disgrace and i condemn them. There is no justification for support of Nazism and speaks to holocaust denial, antisemitism, racism and bigotry.
The West is ruled by the oligarchy. In the oligarchy, the forces of the evil always are getting the upper hand.
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Unsurprisingly enough, the head of the ukro-nazzi regime in kyiv is full-heartedly in total support of now Big Time “ukrainian” nazzism, which “speaks to holocaust denial, antisemitism, racism and bigotry”. Being ethnically semitic does not prevent or indeed exonerate him from being the most loyal ukro-nazzi servant.
After all, the specimen in kyiv knows exactly what would’ve happened to him and his family if he was not.
Exactly.
War is our most important product…. Purchasing, Training, Execution, Body Count, Satisfaction!
Sit back and enjoy that well-earned cigar…
Yup, Bear, our biggest “export”.
Biden loves to spend borrowed money. When he couldn’t get the votes even in his own party for huge domestic spending, he found a way to do it with military spending. Two things weigh particularly heavy on my mind: One is the thought that this war could be more about getting reelected than “national security”. The other thought is that Biden and Trump may both thought that it was necessary to pump the economy with fiscal spending to keep it afloat.
Anybody remember this oldie but goodie?-
“The Congress shall have power to … raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years”
But that’s not one of the rules in the rules based order.
My unpublished letter to the local warpaper pointed out it cost around $2 trillion each to lose in Afghanistan and Iraq, and since China has 50x the population of those countries, plus a navy and air force, I figure it will cost around 50×2=100x as much to lose to them, which would be $200 trillion. So we’ll need more printing presses. I don’t know how much winning would cost, but it would clearly be out of our price range. This of course assumes that for whatever reason the war with China doesn’t go nuclear, in which case all the printing presses and everything else will be blown up. And the incredible thing is that this is the closest thing you will find to a rational analysis on this.
Money will be created like the Donnie being able to declassify documents – with the minds of the geniuses in D.C. Just imagine it and voila’.
Here in New Zealand our Dictatorship voted in support of Nazism at the UN. This is a total disgrace, the WEF runs New Zealand. Jacinda Ardern will go to the Hague to answer for her many many crimes against humanity.
Here is the official Government response…..”New Zealand unequivocally condemns any form of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia or related intolerance, including Nazism and neo-Nazism.”
Except they voted at the UN in support of Nazism and against their official statement. What a duplicitous lying bunch of disgusting people they are. When you work for the WEF you have to sell your country out.
For freedumb and demockracy
“Pentagon Expects Congress to Provide Wartime Purchasing Power The Senate introduced an amendment to its version of the NDAA”
Since congress has not declared war on anyone then NO to this ridiculous spending spree.