Maybe this is the new big plan for the economy: sell as many weapons to the Middle East as possible. Let a million Rosie the Riveters bloom. That this buildup endangers an entire region, one holding the keys to the current energy infrastructure of the world, is just a sidelight to this, I guess.

On the heels of the drone that landed inside Iran recently, now there’s a report of another drone crash-landing in the Seychelles Islands. This was a crash landing, rather than the apparently intact drone in Iran, which may have been taken over remotely.

There are several ways in which the Defense Department’s extended whine about automatic sequestration cuts to their base budget is a joke, but the White House has apparently sniffed out one of those ways. The Overseas Contingency budget has quickly become a slush fund for the Pentagon. Many earmarked to go toward operations in Iraq and Afghanistan often ends up paying for cherished Pentagon programs. The White House wants to put a stop to this.

Every year the Defense Authorization includes some big controversy. This time it’s provision measure that would mandate indefinite detentions of terrorist suspects in military custody and open the door for those indefinite detentions to extend to US citizens. Mark Udall is trying to strip out that provision.

It’s pretty clear that this is how Washington works. Powerful members of Congress are subject to a special interest feeding frenzy. As soon as the lobbyists and the wealthy contributors find out who has the ability to advance their interests, they run to those members with wallets in hand.

While the over trillion dollars the United States has already spent on our four decade long war on drugs has totally failed to achieve anything, I’m sure throwing another $40 million of good money after bad will be the tipping point that wins the war.

It’s all very neat, how an attack on one of Afghanistan’s safest cities coupled with Karzai’s insistence for big payments–called taxes–on the contractors that keep humanitarian agencies safe would contribute to aide agencies withdrawing from Afghanistan.

You know how I have argued that our country does have an industrial plan, one that is commonly called the Military-Industrial Complex? The government dumps seemingly unlimited amount of money into selected projects. Defense companies make sure to spread the jobs created by defense contracts around, so members of Congress support those contracts in bipartisan fashion. And then we export things like jets–one of the few things we export anymore.

Only, if we allow defense contractors to use prison labor, then the whole scheme sort of breaks down.

We don’t have a deficit problem, we have a corruption problem that happens to increase our deficit.

A new investigation from the Senate Armed Services Committee shows that private security contractors in Afghanistan “rely on warlords and strongmen” to provide security guards that watch US bases. These guards often have ties to the Taliban.