July 9, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US has recently paused the shipment of some weapons and munitions to Ukraine “due to worries that U.S. weapons stockpiles have fallen too low,” Politico reported.
This is only the most recent development amid a growing military industrial crisis unfolding across the collective West as Washington and its network of client states wage increasingly intense and protracted wars and proxy wars including in Ukraine against Russia, across the Middle East against Iran and its allies, and as the US prepares for similar conflicts in the Asia-Pacific region against China.
Politico would note air defense systems, other precision guided weapons, and even artillery shells were among the shipments being paused due to concerns regarding depleted US stockpiles.
Since the beginning of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022, initial surges of US-European weapons and munitions have steadily decreased despite promises to expand military industrial production across the collective West. In some cases, US weapons already faced critical shortages even before the conflict in Ukraine expanded in 2022.
In January of 2022, Saudi Arabia announced critical shortages of Patriot air defense interceptors, exhausting them amid its US-backed war with neighboring Yemen. The US, even at that point, was unable to replace Saudi Arabia’s depleted stockpiles forcing Riyadh to borrow missiles from other Persian Gulf states operating the systems.
Lockheed Martin, which produces Patriot missiles, does so at a rate of about 500-600 interceptors a year, with plans to expand production to only 650 by the year 2027. Ukraine’s requirements alone far exceed this quantity with Russia producing between 720-840 Iskander ballistic missiles, according to Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, that only the Patriot missile system is capable of intercepting.
June 11, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - While many believe that under the Trump administration the controversial National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was defunded, dismantled, or otherwise dissolved, the reality is far less dramatic and far more dangerous.
Despite President Donald Trump’s outspoken criticism of global entanglements and calls of"ending the era of endless wars," stretching back all the way to his first term in office, the NED not only continues to receive taxpayer funding under his administration to facilitate instability and conflict worldwide, it has quietly expanded its reach behind a newly adopted policy that makes its activities less transparent than ever.
On its official website, the NED recently revealed what it calls a “duty to care” policy - an internal shift that effectively ends the organization’s long-standing practice of openly listing most of the foreign organizations and movements it finances. This change, framed as a protective measure for recipients in “high-risk environments,” marks a complete reversal of one of the few things that previously distinguished NED operations from covert CIA influence campaigns - the veneer of transparency.
A "Pro-Democracy" Front With Covert DNA
Founded in 1983, the NED was created to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, according to former NED co-founder Allen Weinstein. For decades, it served as the US arm of so-called “soft power,” funneling money to foreign political groups, media outlets, labor unions, and activist organizations deemed favorable to US interests - usually under the banner of “promoting democracy.”
But “democracy” in this context is indistinguishable from regime change. From Venezuela to Belarus, from Hong Kong to Myanmar, NED-funded groups have played central roles in political destabilization and even precipitating war, many of them advocating positions explicitly aligned with US foreign policy and done entirely at the cost of their own nation’s stability and best interests.
The obvious purpose of creating the NED wasn’t to end covert interference around the globe, but rather to continue the CIA’s work Americans and people worldwide were increasingly aware of and opposed to, by whitewashing it and repackaging it as transparently “promoting democracy.”
Since the NED’s founding, the Western media has intermittently admitted the NED has been involved in global-spanning regime change. In 2004, the London Guardian admitted the US government through the NED overthrew governments in Serbia in 2000 and Georgia in 2003, while unsuccessfully attempting to do so in Belarus and Ukraine.
The article described unrest taking place in Ukraine at the time as:
…an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.
Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.
Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.
Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.
The article names the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), and Freedom House by name, all three of which are subsidiaries of the NED.
In 2011, the NYT would admit the US government through the NED was behind the regional destabilization and regime change in 2011 referred to as the “Arab Spring.”
May 29, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - US President Donald Trump announced during his May 2025 trip to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia that the US would be lifting long-standing sanctions on Syria, Reuters reported.
Reuters would also claim:
The end of sanctions on Syria would be a huge boost for a country that has been shattered by more than a decade of civil war. Rebels led by current President Ahmed al-Sharaa toppled President Bashar al-Assad last December.
During this same trip, President Trump would also meet and shake hands with the current Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani who - before taking power - headed the still US State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization al-Nusrah Front, (now referred to as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham or HTS).
In reality, the conflict in Syria was not a civil war, but rather a proxy-war waged by the US alongside its Persian Gulf allies, Turkey, and Israel against the Syrian Arab Republic.
The US sanctions President Trump is now lifting were designed to cripple the Syrian government, economy, and military, prevent reconstruction and economic recovery, and devastate the civilian population, all to hollow out the Syrian state to precipitate its eventual collapse as former US Department of Defense official Dana Stroul stated publicly in 2019.
The proxy-war included a US-led campaign training, funding, equipping, and arming a network of extremists including al-Sharaa/al-Jolani’s terrorist al-Nusrah/HTS.
Throughout the conflict in Syria, even US-based publications like the New York Times admitted as early as 2012 the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was facilitating the flow of billions of dollars in weapons, ammunition, and equipment from Turkey into Syria.
While the official narrative was the US had been arming “moderate rebels,” no explanation was given as to how or why terrorist organizations like al-Nusrah/HTS quickly ended up dominating the Western-backed militancy. If the US and its allies were providing billions in aid to “moderate rebels,” who was providing even greater amounts of aid to extremist organizations allowing them to dominate the US-backed proxy-war in Syria?
Trump Plays Role in Decades-Spanning Proxy-War Waged by the “Deep State”
The answer is simple - there were never any “moderate rebels.” The US planned years before the conflict even began to use extremists as proxies to overthrow governments across the region, including Syria’s.
Seymour Hersh as early as 2007 in his New Yorker article, “The Redirection,” warned:
To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
Preparations to build up militant groups as well as their political wings - especially the Muslim Brotherhood - were already ongoing when Hersh wrote his 2007 article and continued until the US-engineered “Arab Spring” unfolded in 2011 under the Obama administration.
The New York Times would admit in an April 2011 article that:
A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington, according to interviews in recent weeks and American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.
The same article also admitted:
The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department.
The chaos the US-engineered “Arab Spring” created was used as an opportunity to launch multi-wars and proxy-wars across the region including a NATO-led regime change operation against Libya in North Africa, a US-backed Saudi-led coalition targeting Ansar Allah in Yemen, and the US proxy-war in Syria which eventually involved the US invasion and occupation of eastern Syria while NATO-member Turkey invaded and occupied its northern regions.
May 25, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - US President Donald Trump has announced his administration has chosen the architecture for the proposed Golden Dome missile defense system, claiming it will cost $175 billion and be operational in “less than three years” with a “success rate close to 100%.”
During President Trump’s announcement on May 21, 2025, it was claimed the Golden Dome will consist of technology deployed across land, sea, and space capable of intercepting hypersonic, ballistic, and advanced cruise missiles, “even if they are launched from other sides of the world and even if they are launched from space.”
Former-US President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program (also known as the Strategic Defense Initiative) was repeatedly cited during the announcement. That program sought to use space-based weapons to void the doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” allowing the US to conduct a nuclear or non-nuclear first strike on another nation and avoid what had otherwise been an inevitable nuclear retaliation that would destroy both nations in the process.
Specifically because mutually assured destruction was seen as a better deterrence against a first strike by one nuclear-armed nation against another, along with concerns over costs, technological limitations, and then-existing arms control treaties like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), the initiative was never fully realized.
Granting the US Impunity to Attack, Not “Defend” Itself
US Space Force General Michael Guetlein, picked to lead the Golden Dome project and present during its announcement, would claim:
As you're aware our adversaries have become very capable and very intent on holding the homeland at risk. While we have been focused on keeping the peace overseas, our adversaries have been quickly modernizing their nuclear forces, building out ballistic missiles capable of hosting multiple warheads, building out hypersonic missiles capable of attacking the United States within an hour and traveling at 6,000 mph, building cruise missiles that can navigate around our radar and our defenses and building submarines that can sneak up on our shores and worse yet, building space weapons. It is time that we change that equation and start doubling down on the protection of the homeland.
Yet what General Guetlein calls “keeping the peace overseas,” is in reality the United States encroaching along the borders and shores of nations like Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea.
This includes the stationing of not only missile defense systems like Patriot, THAAD, and the Aegis Ashore system in close proximity to these nations in violation of the ABM treaty the US has since abandoned, but also first-strike offensive weapons like the Typhon missile launcher capable of firing both Standard SM-6 anti-air missiles, but also ground-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles previously prohibited under the INF treaty the US has also since abandoned.
May 13, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - Yemen, a nation of approximately 40 million people, is one of the poorest nations on Earth. It has suffered decades of political instability including a US-engineered regime change operation in 2011 followed by a nearly 7 year long war with a US-armed and backed Saudi-led Persian Gulf coalition. The war included air strikes and a ground invasion along with economic sanctions and a naval blockade. Subsequently, the UN has declared Yemen to be one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises with up to 14% of the population displaced by conflict.
Since then, the US has carried out direct attacks on Yemen. Both the previous Biden administration and now the current Trump administration have carried out military campaigns in a bid to subdue Ansar Allah (often referred to as the “Houthis”) - the military and political organization administering Yemen’s capital and surrounding cities along the nation’s western coast.
The most recent military campaign has included strikes on civilian infrastructure including a major port and reportedly a reservoir.
Leaked messages between the US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the US Vice President and other senior officials reveal the deliberate targeting and complete destruction of residential buildings to kill a single suspected enemy individual.
Despite the tremendous power of the US military and the protracted brutality the US has applied to Yemen, Ansar Allah remains a viable political and military organization. It continues to target and destroy US drones conducting surveillance and attacks in Yemeni airspace, as well as targeting US warships in the Red Sea, amid a much wider blockade Ansar Allah has placed on Israeli-bound vessels and now US oil shipments.
While Ansar Allah has regularly claimed to have targeted and forced US warships to flee, a recent CNN article appears to confirm that indeed drones and anti-shipping missiles targeting US ships have not only forced them to take evasive maneuvers, they have also caused material losses including a $60 million F-18 warplane.
The article admits:
A US official said initial reports from the scene indicated the Truman made a hard turn to evade Houthi fire, which contributed to the fighter jet falling overboard. Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed on Monday to have launched a drone and missile attack on the aircraft carrier, which is in the Red Sea as part of the US military’s major operation against the Iran-backed group.
Other Western media outlets have admitted the loss of multiple $30 million drones over Yemen. An April 29, 2025 article by France 24 reported that the US had lost up to 7 MQ-9 Reaper drones over the previous 2 months.
