By Independent News Roundup
Trump let a private investor, the heir to the Mellon banking family, “help” the US military with a $130M of “donation to cover their paychecks”. Here is Trump discussing this in a video clip: https://x.com/i/status/1981465137291710464/video/1
This is explained as a “good Samaritan” paying for the military’s salaries because “radical Democrats” shut down the government. Translation: Thomas Massie has enough votes in Congress to release the Epstein files… and it just so happens that Mellon’s dad is on the Epstein flight logs, with Mellon involved in the sex trafficking litigation! As we know already:
The amount is not large enough to make any impact on military paychecks, as the DOD employs 1.3 million active duty and a total of around 4.5 million military and civilian staff. It is reported that the monthly costs are around $9 billion. However, the amount given by Mellon is very large nonetheless, and nobody gives this type of “donation” without actually buying something for it. So, what did he buy?
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Are our servicemembers being paid for with money from Trump’s banking “friend” - what can possibly go wrong?
This may be some sort of quid pro quo, however, I am having persistent deja vu these days. During the Soviet Union collapse, deals like these were quite common. It was possible to buy military assets for pennies, or simply take them over and pay for their upkeep (sort of). Eventuality, the privatization and importation of armies via illegal immigration happens quite predictably with collapsing empires, as described by Arnold Toynbee in his “Study of History”. I discussed it here. Every failed empire collapses into fractured militarized authoritarian dictatorship(s), which then fight for the shreds of the remaining assets that had not been looted yet. Trump and his family are some of the most brazen looters, but of course he is not the first “first family” to enrich himself from the office.
Not to put too fine of a point on this - WHOM are “our military” serving now that they are being paid by a private party? I am using quotation marks since my readers know that the US military is not “ours” and hasn’t been for quite some time. So, this purchase-of-the-military move, while astonishing, is not really. It is simply making the known obvious.
I am bringing this up because I have been working on a related question:
The numbers are jaw dropping, even though they are available only for 1 year (2020) and this is difficult to estimate precisely. Different countries counted “deployment” in different ways (some reported people on standby, some gave peak concurrent headcount, others gave cumulative person‑days).
That said, adding up the best official figures that can be found (by Chat GPT and other internet searches) yields a conservative estimate of approximately 600,000 - 800,000 military personnel deployed worldwide by the end of 2020. The true cumulative headcount was almost certainly higher. The breakdown is as follows:
How does this compare to an “actual war”?
As an example, the total number of U.S. military personnel deployed in the Iraq War in the 2003 invasion of Iraq phase involved about 160,000 U.S. troops at its peak in 2007 [Wikipedia]. Over the duration of operations in Iraq (including occupation, surge, draw-down), more than 1.5 million U.S. service members deployed between March 2003 and December 2011, i.e. during 8 years of war [Watson Brown University].
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