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Trump's War of Terror on the Territorial Integrity of the United States
Presented by WEXMAC 2.2 TITUS and LOGCAP V JTF-SB
PRESENTED BY WEXMAC 2.2 TITUS and LOGCAP V JTF-SB
Given that Trump has just signed the $839 billion Department of Defense appropriations title today, and Congress will spend at least the next two weeks debating the Department of Homeland Security [sic] funding package, let’s talk about how the regime is bending the U.S. military to its fascist war on the American people.
(TLDR: Easily.)
As many have noted, Trump’s paramilitary police state is the inevitable outcome of the U.S. government’s “War on Terror” response to the September 11 attacks twenty-five years ago. There’s Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump in 2022. And Richard Beck, author of Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life in 2024. Here’s David Wallace-Wells, in a review of Beck’s Homeland:
We watched as federal agents infiltrated American mosques and local police departments grew more militarized, partly with equipment shipped back from the war’s front lines. We noted growing suspicion and skepticism about American leadership abroad, and clocked a new elite impunity and an unapologetic looseness around the rule of law at home. To this day, it is striking how many champions of the invasion of Iraq in particular remain in positions of authority and status, not just in politics and policy but in the media and commentariat, as well.
One of the strongest voices in the darkness is Karen Greenberg, the author of Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump in 2021. As she wrote in January, 2024:
Whether it’s an endlessly expansive authorization for eternally conducting war around the world, the redefinition of surveillance powers to include Americans under the guise of a foreign threat, or the seemingly lackadaisical acceptance of Guantánamo as an institution, there is certainly one lasting lesson from the war on terror. Once powers previously outlawed or at least restrained in the name of fair, just, and responsible laws and norms become codified and implemented, the road back to normalcy is tantamount to impossible. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that wiser heads will prevail in the days to come. It is, however, a terrifyingly fragile approach, given the outlook for the 2024 election.
After Trump’s election, Greenberg knew exactly what Trump was going to do, because it’s what he and his lieutenants promised on the campaign trail:
Notably, in the run-up to the 2024 election he had already made it crystal clear that the path from the war on terror abroad to his internal policy plans would be important to his administration.
Fifty days in, she wrote “The War on Terror Comes Home.”
Racism, a lack of deference for the courts, the failure to hold individuals and organizations accountable for informally rewriting the nation’s laws, the pervasive embrace of secrecy, and an unwillingness to erect strict guardrails to prevent the future manipulation of both laws and norms — all those realities of the war on terror years created a distinctly undemocratic template, however different in scale, for this Trumpian moment of ours. An unwillingness to be accountable or to circumvent secrecy during the war on terror led the country straight into today’s quagmire.
More recently, Obama’s national-security speechwriter-turned-podcaster Ben Rhodes shares regrets about the “war on terror” and “homeland defense”:
Minneapolis has resembled a counterinsurgency campaign more than a law enforcement operation because that’s what it is — complete with tactics, equipment and legal authorities derived from the war on terror. Mr. Trump may have been the one who ordered the crackdown we’re living through, but it’s possible only because of the architecture of D.H.S. “homeland defense,” which is now beginning to feel German in the ways Rumsfeld feared.
I bring all this up because yesterday the tireless Pablo Manríquez caught my attention with a piece entitled “How the Pentagon is Quietly Building Trump’s Concentration Camps.” He takes a (slightly incorrect) look at NAVSUP WEXMAC 2.2 TITUS (Region 27), one of the acronymic vehicles the Trump regime is using to put the U.S. military’s awesome logistical capacity at work building the concentration camps financed by the One Big Brutal Bill Act and the measureless Pentagon budget.
The alphabet soup stands for:
NAVSUP: Naval Supply Systems Command, the logistics branch of the U.S. Navy;
WEXMAC: Worldwide Expeditionary Multiple Award Contract, an umbrella vehicle collaboratively managed by NAVSUP and ACC, Army Contracting Command for picking contractors used during the Biden administration exclusively for overseas missions, including the Afghanistan evacuation, Ukraine support, Sudan evacuation, and the ill-fated Gaza pier;
WEXMAC 2.2 TITUS: Territorial Integrity of the United States, the second iteration (after 2.1) of the domestic concentration-camp project launched last year by the Trump regime, now with a ten-year spending cap of $65 billion;
Region 27: The United States and Outlying Territories, allowing major contractors to receive up to $2.5 billion per specific contract; it supplants WEXMAC 2.0’s Region 23 designation, which was limited to small businesses and small contracts.
WEXMAC 2.x TITUS is the U.S. military’s concentration-camp campaign. As the WEXMAC 2.1 solicitation, drafted in June, details:
The objective of this contract is to obtain all infrastructure, including temporary housing structures, physical plant, staffing, resources, services, and supplies necessary to house aliens in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a safe and secure environment to effectuate their removal from the United States….
ICE is establishing a staging location at Fort Bliss located in El Paso County, Texas to house and supervise aliens pending their removal from the United States…
The facility will be used for short-term detention (~2 weeks) of single adult populations (male and female) of all housing classifications (low, medium-low, medium-high and high-level security) in preparation for their removal from the United States or for transfer to a long-term ICE detention facility…
The contractor shall enforce disciplinary actions against any detainee who does not comply with the facility rules and procedures in accordance with applicable ICE detention standards and applicable ICE policy. In cases where there is a conflict in requirements, the most stringent shall apply.
The $10 billion WEXMAC 2.1 TITUS solicitation went live on July 8, less than a week after Trump signed the One Big Brutal Bill Act into law. OBBBA gave ICE $45 billion to build concentration camps (Sec. 90003) and the U.S. military $1 billion to support the concentration-camp effort (Sec. 20011). By September, the list of contractors on the concentration-camp rolodex was established. On December 31, WEXMAC 2.2 TITUS raised the cap to $65 billion, and dozens of new contractors were brought on in January.
It’s important to understand that the new $65 billion cap under WEXMAC 2.2 TITUS does not reflect actual expenditures, and that Naval Supply Systems Command is essentially acting as the general contractor for ICE, which is in most cases responsible for picking up the tab.
What normal people would consider a contract—with money actually being spent on a real outcome—are the WEXMAC 2.2 TITUS Task Orders; so far, $1.1 billion has been spent on about 60 contractors (another 30 contractors have received token payments of $500 to stay on reserve for future projects). Most of the money spent has gone to Acquisition Logistics, a shadowy company that is widely understood to be a pass-through to exploit “small-business” loopholes in the contract award process and hide the identify of the actual death-camp profiteers.
When the OBBBA spigot turned on, Acquisition Logistics won a $1.5 billion contract with ICE through the Department of Defense to build the nation’s largest concentration camp, Camp East Montana, on the grounds of Fort Bliss in Texas, work that has been quietly subcontracted to Trump-adjacent contractors like Nathan Albers’s Disaster Management Group and logistics giants like the engineering firm Amentum. Three inmates have died in the concentration camp, most recently one murdered by the guards.
The regime, of course, did not wait until the One Big Brutal Bill to start its reign of terror. The Army’s Joint Task Force, Southern Border (JTF-SB) was created in March in response to Trump’s inauguration-day executive order, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” in order “to form an experienced, agile, and technologically advanced command, designed to leverage unique military capabilities in support of DHS”:
Specific tasks include detection and monitoring, warehousing and logistics, transportation, vehicle maintenance, training support, data entry, aviation operations, military engineering, and intelligence analysis. This assistance enhances DHS and CBP’s ability to carry out their law enforcement and immigration-related missions.
Through JTF-SB, increasing numbers of troops are deployed within the United States in all of the states bordering Mexico.
In April, the mega-defense-contractor KBR (formerly Kellogg Brown & Root), was given $12 million (now $21 million) in an emergency no-bid contract to build up the facilities for the Fort Bliss deportation-and-detention blob, justified by Trump’s inauguration-day declaration of a national emergency at the southern border. That contract, in support of ARNORTH (Army North Command) and JTF-SB and paid out of the Army’s massive Operations and Maintenance budget, came through KBR’s long-running LOGCAP V (Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, Fifth Iteration) umbrella contract.
Today, 21 House Democrats, strongly aligned with the military-industrial complex, voted to help Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La., no relation) pass the appropriations deal and let 21 House Republicans vote against it. The FY2026 Army Operations and Maintenance budget they appropriated is set at $58,249,178,000.
As Congress debates its appropriations bill, the Department of Homeland Security retains access to its five-year $190.6 billion Brutal Bill slush fund and $2.5 billion in continuing funds for the next two weeks. ICE has already spent $2.27 billion on private contractors this fiscal year. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has throttled the Federal Emergency Management Agency in favor of the ICE and CBP domestic war of terror. Last week, she released long-delayed funds for recovery from dozens of fossil-fueled climate disasters—$2.2 billion for 1,721 recovery projects, about what has been spent so far on the concentration camp at Fort Bliss.
Hearings on the Hill:
10:15 AM: House Natural Resources Committee
Federal Lands Subcommittee
Using the L.A. Wildfires to Promote Logging10:15 AM: House Energy and Commerce Committee
Energy Subcommittee
Oversight of FERC10:30 AM: House Appropriations Committee
Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Subcommittee
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of Inspector General
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