Senate to vote on banning $23 billion UAE arms sales next week
…from Defense News
[ Editor’s Note: Next week we will see if the UAE gets coal in its stocking, or stuffed like a turkey. The senators in the big weapons production states will have a lot of pressure on them to bring home the arms sales bacon.
They mention below that if the US blocks the sale, the UAE will buy from someone else, and that is self evident. Rest assured that whatever technology we were to put in UAE’s hands that can be transferred and sold to others, will be transferred and sold.
The Israelis in particular have been looting US weapons technology for decades, using not only their extensive military intelligence offensive networks here, but twisting the arms of the Congressional committee chairs and even White house national security advisers to get what they want, one way or another.
The Pentagon is rife with stories about how technology transfers were denied, only to find out later that the Israelis did an end run around Congress to get what they wanted. I remember one report that they had aggressive spied on US weapons technology under development, and they would steal it to work on themselves, and where their version came out sooner and better than ours.
Of course, such activities never saw the light of day publicly due to the political scandals that would have ensued. Israel, like Turkey, ran what we call ‘wholesale’ offensive espionage here. It would steal everything it could get its hands on, keep what it wanted, and then sell of the rest to Russia and China to help pay the cost of the operation.
Even if the US found out, there was no way it could ever admit it. As VT has published a number of times, the Jonathan Pollard operation was primarily to steal stuff for the Russians, where Israel got the million pretend-a-Jew immigrants in return to replace a million low end Palestinian jobs in Israel for ‘enhanced security’.
Pollard’s handler was a top White house official (never identified) that was feeding him the file names to get, where he would simply get them, copy, and pass along.
They also got the entire US Eastern European Cold War agent list, 1000 people, two decades of work. The contacts were subsequently decimated, a story too horrible to ever admit. That is why the defense community fought so hard for so many years to prevent Pollard from being pardoned… Jim W. Dean ]
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First published … December 04, 2020
WASHINGTON ― The Senate will vote next week on legislation to halt the Trump administration’s $23 billion sale of F-35 fighter jets, Reaper drones and munitions to the United Arab Emirates, a lawmaker said Thursday.
Four pending joint resolutions of disapproval offer lawmakers a chance to block the Trump administration’s 11th hour proposal to transfer arms to the Emirates. Critics say the sales, meant to bolster the UAE against Iran, ignores risks to Israel and to sensitive military technology posed by UAE’s ties to Russia and China.
Asked about the legislation, Sen. Bob Menendez, who is sponsoring the effort to bar the weapons sale with Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., told reporters:
“It’s ripe, it’s ready, it has privilege on the floor. We are gathering support for it and I would think sometime next week.”
The deal includes 50 F-35s, 18 MQ–9B Reapers, as well as thousands of munitions and hundreds of missiles. It was approved by the U.S. State Department in November after the UAE agreed to formalize diplomatic relations with Israel.
You read the full Defense News story here.
Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus. He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022. He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews. He now writes and posts periodically for VT.
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We cannot allow weapons to be developed that cost billions, and then just sell them to anyone.
This does not make us great again, it makes us idiots. The MIC needs a boot in the ass.
Disgusting,… “Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35 jet, the world’s costliest weapons program, just got even costlier. The estimated total price for research and procurement has increased by $22 billion in current dollars adjusted for inflation, ”
Tax payers deserve better. Boycott Lock-heed Martin
And all the expensive military equipment for a country, the UAE, that would probably only last a few hours against a determined serious opponent, just like the Kuwaitis in 1990.
UAE should be grateful if they don’t to flush down the toilet billions of dollars with that F-35’s piece of metal junk that’s a giant scam.
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