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DELRAY BEACH, Fla. (AP) — As unrest spread across dozens of American cities on Friday, the Pentagon took the rare step of ordering the Army to put several active-duty U.S. military police units on the ready to deploy to Minneapolis, where the police killing of George Floyd sparked the widespread protests. Soldiers from Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Drum in New York have been ordered to be ready to deploy within four hours if called, according to three people with direct knowledge of the orders. Soldiers in Fort Carson, in Colorado, and Fort Riley in Kansas have been...

Glenn Fine, the Pentagon's principal deputy inspector general, submitted his resignation on Tuesday. Why it matters: President Trump removed Fine as the Pentagon's acting inspector general in April 7 after a group of independent federal watchdogs selected him to lead the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, which was set up to oversee the rollout of the $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill. The move effectively sidelined Fine from serving as chair of the panel, since the law only allows sitting inspectors general to fill the role. The big picture: His ouster as the Defense Department's acting inspector general came amid Trump's continuing...

Reddit’s premier gathering place for all things UFO—was automatically blocking posts that used the words “Navy” or “Pentagon,” and was also deleting posts about a recent incident in Brazil. This censorship has led to infighting on the subreddit. /r/UFO moderator axolotl_peyotl cried foul when he noticed other moderators culling posts with the word “Brazil” days after people filmed a UFO above Magé When axolotl_peyotl checked the automod, he found that ‘Brazil’ had recently been added to the list of restricted words. “I could also see the history of the edits on the spam filter. And not only that, one of...

Top Pentagon officials late Sunday blasted The New York Times for a Memorial Day weekend editorial that criticized the military for naming bases after Confederate generals. The piece, titled “Why Does the U.S. Military Celebrate White Supremacy,” ran in Sunday’s print edition of the newspaper. It argued that “it is time to rename bases for American heroes — not racist traitors.” The editorial singled out Georgia’s Fort Benning, North Carolina’s Fort Bragg and other installations

A leaked Pentagon memo on Tuesday revealed that top Defense Department officials have been planning for the possibility that the military could be dealing with a “globally-persistent” coronavirus pandemic well into 2021. The memo, obtained by Task and Purpose, also warns of the “real possibility” that a vaccine for COVID-19 won’t be available until “at least the summer of 2021.” “We have a long path ahead, with the real possibility of a resurgence of COVID-19. Therefore, we must now re-focus our attention on resuming critical missions, increasing levels of activity, and making necessary preparations should a significant resurgence of COVID-19...

Democrats have converted an AI project that was initially funded by the department of defense to combat propaganda from ISIS and other extremists, into a tool to track down and counter Trump supporters on social media. The “Defeat Disinfo� group is being advised by retired Army General Stanley McChrystal.The project is called “Defeat Disinfo,� a creation of entrepreneur Curtis Hougland. It was initially funded by the Pentagon’s top-secret DARPA research agency, when the goal of the technology was to identify and counter online narratives from Islamic extremists. Founded by technology entrepreneur Curtis Hougland, it is still advised by retired Army...

The Pentagon has declassified three previously leaked top-secret U.S. Navy videos that show “unexplained aerial phenomena” and that some believe could show Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) in an effort “to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real or whether or not there is more to the videos,” said a Pentagon spokesperson. “The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified'”, the spokesperson added. “The Department of Defense has authorized the release of three unclassified Navy videos, one taken in November 2004 and the other two in...

A legislative bill would require the military to dedicate $6 billion a year to counter China, work with allies -- WASHINGTON—A push to shift U.S. military resources to Asia to counter Chinese influence is drawing new support in Congress, where a leading lawmaker wants to compel the Pentagon to invest at least $6 billion per year in the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. The legislative effort seeks to mirror the dedicated funding stream provided for years to the U.S. European Command to counter Russia. That funding, known as the European Deterrence Initiative, has been the envy of China hawks who believe the...

Washington (AFP) - With an aircraft carrier forced into port and staff at bases handling nuclear missiles hit by COVID-19, the US military wants rivals to understand: don't test us, we have not been weakened. Statement after statement from the Pentagon has sought to deliver that message amid questions this week over whether the US fighting force can maintain full readiness, with cases among service members now at 2,031. "We're still capable and we're still ready no matter what the threat," Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley said Thursday. "I wouldn't want any mixed messages going out there to any...

Pentagon blasts ABC: No, we didn’t warn White House of COVID-19 in November Ed MorrisseyPosted at 8:41 am on April 9, 2020Not only is it rare for intelligence agencies to issue public comments on its operation, it’s even rarer to have them do so to claim they missed a major issue. Yesterday, ABC News claimed that the DIA had warned the White House about the coronavirus outbreak in “late November.” The alleged report from the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), based on “wire and computer intercepts, focused on the threat to US forces in the Asia theater.

Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam confirms COVID-19 cases but details silenced by Pentagon US Army bases in Hawaii restricting non-essential visitors in wake of coronavirus pandemic By Mahealani Richardson | April 2, 2020 at 7:11 PM HST - Updated April 2 at 7:24 PM HONOLULU, Hawaii (HawaiiNewsNow) - Leaders with Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam say there are COVID cases at the intallation, but the Pentagon says military operations cannot publicly release specific numbers to ‘protect operational security.’ “Are there any Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam service members that are sick with COVID, the answer is yes. Until recently we were providing that...

The Pentagon is looking into providing an additional 100,000 military-style body bags for civilian use, as the expected death toll from the coronavirus outbreak continues to rise. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has requested 100,000 body bags, officially called human remains pouches, and the Pentagon is looking to buy more body bags, as it dips into its stockpile of 50,000, Bloomberg reports. The request went through the Defense Logistics Agency, which oversees the distribution of the Pentagon's body bag stockpile. The Defense Department has already sent to two Navy hospital ships to New York and Los Angeles to help...

The Pentagon has ordered military bases and combatant commands to withhold coronavirus case numbers, citing operational security concerns. “As we continue to grapple with the novel nature of COVID19, we are constantly assessing and adapting not only how we respond to combatting the virus, but also how we share critical public health information with our communities,” Pentagon spokeswoman Alyssa Farah said in a statement on Monday. “We will not report the aggregate number of individual service member cases at individual unit, base or Combatant Commands. We will continue to do our best to balance transparency in this crisis with operational...

An active-duty airman and an Air Force contractor who both visited the Pentagon in recent weeks have tested positive for the coronavirus, the Air Force said Friday, in the first confirmed cases of the virus inside the world’s biggest office building. The active-duty member works for the Defense Health Agency in Falls Church, Va., and was in the Pentagon “for less than an hour” on Monday, the Air Force said in a news release. The airman “has since received medical treatment and self-quarantined at home,” it said. Military health and local civilian officials have notified individuals who came into contact...

The portion of Americans who believe the nation’s defense spending as “about right” has reached a record high, at 50 percent, compared to 31 percent who say it is too much and 17 percent who say it is too little, a survey from Gallup found. Those saying spending is about right has nearly doubled from 27 percent in 2016, most of it migration from those who said spending was too little, which fell from 37 percent to 17 percent. The shift in opinion is largely driven by Republicans, who were far less likely to believe the U.S. was not spending...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States waged a series of precision air strikes on Thursday against an Iran-backed militia in Iraq that it blamed for a major rocket attack a day earlier that killed two American troops and a 26-year-old British soldier. The U.S. strikes appeared limited in scope and narrowly tailored, targeting five weapons storage facilities used by Kataib Hezbollah militants, including stores of weaponry for past attacks on U.S.-led coalition troops, the Pentagon said. In a statement, Iraq’s military said the U.S. air strikes hit four locations in Iraq that housed formal Iraqi police and military units, in...

The Defense Department (DOD) will implement a 60-day travel ban for service members, DOD civilians and their families to and from countries whose populations have been the most stricken by coronavirus, the Pentagon announced Wednesday night. The restrictions, which go into effect Friday, ban all travel to, throughout and from locations designated as Level 3 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including China, South Korea, Iran and Italy. In addition, DOD civilians and service members’ families are banned from traveling to Level 2 countries, which currently include Japan, for 60 days. “The Department of Defense's top priority...

A contractor for the Pentagon has been charged with providing classified U.S. intelligence to a Lebanese national connected with terrorist group Hezbollah, the Justice Department announced on Wednesday. The department alleges Mariam Taha Thompson, 61, began transmitting the classified intelligence around December 30, when Iraqi militiamen stormed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Thompson is a linguist who at the time was working at a U.S. special forces base in Erbil in northern Iraq. The classified “files contained classified national defense information including true names, personal identification data, background information, and photographs of the human sources, as well as operations cables...

Lawmakers from both parties told Pentagon leaders on Wednesday that the Defense Department is undermining its own efforts to get military money by diverting billions of dollars for the construction of President Donald Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and the committee’s top Republican warned Defense Secretary Mark Esper that overturning congressional funding decisions to shift money for the wall is an enormous problem that will have consequences. The plan to shift money has triggered rare Republican opposition to one of Trump’s priorities. Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, said the result may be that Congress...

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Pentagon to halt its work on a controversial cloud-computing contract amid a court challenge by Amazon, notching a major win for the tech giant as it seeks to prove that President Trump improperly interfered to keep the $10 billion contract away from Amazon. The Court of Federal Claims is granting Amazon's request to stop the Pentagon from forging ahead with the cloud-computing project until the lawsuit is settled. The Department of Defense was planning to work with Microsoft, the company that received the contract over Amazon last year, to implement a sweeping cloud...