Quote:Rebuilding U.S. Inventories: Six Critical Systems

As the United States transfers massive amounts of weapons, munitions, and supplies to Ukraine, questions arise about the health of U.S. inventories. Are inventories getting too low? How long will it take to rebuild those inventories? An earlier CSIS commentary identified those inventories that are at risk as a result of transfers to Ukraine. This commentary continues that analysis by examining inventory replacement times. Most inventories, though not all, will take many years to replace. For most items, there are workarounds, but there may be a crisis brewing over artillery ammunition.
Summary

The table below lays out weapons and munitions where concerns have arisen about inventories.



Note: The table is built from DOD sources plus estimates based on administration statements, news reports, interviews with officials, and the author's experience in the military as an artillery officer and with acquisition in the Pentagon. The number transferred to Ukraine comes from periodic DOD fact sheets. Production rates come from DOD budget documents, particularly the Army's procurement justification books for missiles and ammunition. "Recent" production reflects levels funded in the last few years. "Surge" reflects higher rates where DOD has said it would increase production. This higher rate is either the "1-8-5" or "MAX" level depending on where current production is. It takes one to two years to get to this higher level. For munitions, the production applied to rebuilding inventories is reduced to account for U.S. peacetime training and stockpile testing. “Manufacturing lead time” is the period between when a contract is signed and when the first item arrives. This interval is typically about 24 months but varies by system. “Production time” is how long it would take to produce all the required inventory. “Total time to rebuild” includes both manufacturing lead time and production time. The color code indicates the difficulty of the rebuilding effort.
....

Causes for Optimism and Pessimism

Optimism – Most inventories are okay. These six systems do not represent the full spectrum of U.S. inventories. Most items provided to Ukraine have been in small numbers, or from areas that have large inventories or production capacities. For example, the United States has provided 108 million rounds of small arms ammunition, but U.S. production is about 8.6 billion rounds per year, so this transfer is easy to accommodate. The United States provided 300 M113 armored personnel carriers but has thousands available because the Army is moving to a different system.

Pessimism – Not enough data to assess. Replacement times for several important systems cannot be calculated because not enough data is publicly available. For example, DOD cites sending Ukraine over 46,000 “other anti-armor systems” (not Javelin but types not specified), over 50 counter-artillery radars (various kinds), laser-guided rocket systems, unmanned aerial systems, and unmanned coastal defense vessels. It might be that some of these systems have inventory challenges, but the data are insufficient to make a judgment.

What Does the Future Hold?

As the September commentary noted, low inventories do not mean the end of equipment transfers. They do mean that the United States will need to pursue other mechanisms. DOD has, indeed, been pursuing all these but will need to intensify its work as the flow of aid becomes a multi-year operation.

The bottom line is that military aid will continue, and Ukraine will still be able to resist, but inventory replenishment will become an increasingly pressing problem. DOD has many tools to mitigate the problem of “empty bins” and will need to use all of them to avoid a slackening of military support to Ukraine.

Quote:Department of the Navy Releases Strategic Blueprint for a Blue Arctic

Greater access is further opening new Arctic undersea fiber optic cable routes linking Europe, Asia, and North America. Nation-states and other actors are mounting cyberattacks on Arctic ship-building, energy, and shipping sectors–especially the researchn and development communities that underpin them.

The People’s Republic of China views the Arctic Region as a critical link in its One Belt One Road initiative.

The state of Maine which you rarely ever hear about will play an increasing strategic role:

Public-private partnerships and innovative solutions, such as NavalX tech bridges, leveraging relevant civilian expertise within the reserve components, and the Alaska Regional Collaboration for Technology Innovation and Commercialization (ARCTIC) led by the Office of Naval Research will help transform the operating abilities – and regional understanding – of naval forces. Maine has taken bold steps to advance their Arctic connection, including recent participation in The Arctic Circle Assembly and relationship with Eimskip, an Icelandic international shipping company, which has a regional hub in Portland.

Quote:In the last few weeks, I’ve found myself writing columns that touch on the rapid advance of artificial intelligence, the mystery of unidentified flying objects haunting American skies and the enthusiasm in certain circles for taking mind-altering substances that yield a feeling, illusory or not, of contact with supernatural-seeming entities.

These are very different stories, in a way. The A.I. revolution belongs to the realm of serious and lavishly funded science. The U.F.O. phenomenon hovers on the paranormal and pseudoscientific fringe. The spiritual dimensions explored by users of drugs like DMT belong primarily to the terrain of psychology and religion — either as manifestations of some sort of Jungian unconscious or else, well, as actual spiritual dimensions.

But there is a shared spirit in these stories, a common impulse to the quests: the desire to encounter or invent some sort of nonhuman consciousness that might help us toward leaps that we can’t make on our own.

This impulse is an ancient one: The idea that one might bind a djinn, create a golem or manipulate a god or fairy to do your bidding is inscribed deep in the human imagination. Once upon a time this magician’s art seemed like a plausible rival to scientific technique, or a complementary means of mastery over nature; indeed, the scientist and the magician were often overlapping figures in the early modern imagination, blurring together in vocations like alchemy and characters like Dr. Faustus.

They separated primarily because the scientific method simply worked in a way that magical conjuring did not. Or as C.S. Lewis put it 80 years ago, in “The Abolition of Man,” “The serious magical endeavor and the serious scientific endeavor are twins: One was sickly and died, the other strong and throve.”

But now we are in an era when people talk increasingly about the limits of the scientific endeavor — the increasing impediments to discovering new ideas, the absence of low-hanging scientific fruit, the near impossibility, given the laws of physics as we understand them, of ever spreading human civilization beyond our lonely planet or beyond our isolated solar system. Meanwhile, the speculations of scientific theorists and philosophers are reaching beyond the very confines of our universe — to an ever-multiplying multiverse whose branches never touch, or an infinite-seeming hall of simulations run by some civilization with godlike capacities relative to ours.

So it’s not surprising, in this age of frustration and re-mystification, that our thoughts and efforts might turn back to the magician’s art, in search of powers that might help us escape the limits of our island planet, our paltry life span, the crooked timber of our nature. But not simply back to the old magic of spells and incantations (though there is a lot of that these days as well). Instead in the U.F.O. fascination and the A.I. enthusiasm and the drug-enabled “psychonaut” explorations, we see attempts to link magic to science, or to deploy science to do magic, using telescopes or chemicals or vast computing powers to discover or create what the old magicians tried to conjure — namely, beings that can enlighten us, elevate us, serve us and usher in the Age of Aquarius, the Singularity or both.

The hardheaded reader will object that one of these examples isn’t like the others. Simple common sense tells us that the U.F.O. speculators are probably not about to get in touch with extraplanetary aliens. The materialist premises of modern science reassure us that our hallucinogen-ingesting psychonauts are not actually in touch ‌‌with the originals of Titania and Oberon, Jupiter or Odin. Whereas the A.I. project seems to be advancing rapidly, with no speculative leaps required to see its promise. So why lump it in with the dubious and paranormal? Why invoke sorcery to explain a straightforward scientific triumph?

Stipulate for the sake of argument that the A.I. project is more likely to have immediate practical effects than the search for extraterrestrial life or any drug-aided communion with the spirit realm. There are still good reasons to analyze its efforts in terms of djinns, golems and the like.

First, because this is how its own enthusiasts talk. Here’s Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas, Austin, and one of the most accessible online writers on issues related to computer intelligence, on his own reaction to the new chatbots:

Quote:An alien has awoken — admittedly, an alien of our own fashioning, a golem, more the embodied spirit of all the words on the internet than a coherent self with independent goals. How could our eyes not pop with eagerness to learn everything this alien has to teach? If the alien sometimes struggles with arithmetic or logic puzzles, if its eerie flashes of brilliance are intermixed with stupidity, hallucinations, and misplaced confidence … well then, all the more interesting! Could the alien ever cross the line into sentience, to feeling anger and jealousy and infatuation and the rest rather than just convincingly playacting them? Who knows? And suppose not: is a p-zombie, shambling out of the philosophy seminar room into actual existence, any less fascinating?

Or consider a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed essay by Henry Kissinger, the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher of MIT, which effectively repurposes Arthur C. Clarke’s admonition that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” as a kind of boast. With the emergent forms of A.I., they argue, we have created an intelligence that can yield answers the way an oracle might, or a magic 8-ball: through processes that are invisible to us, permanently beyond our understanding, so complex as to be indistinguishable from action in a supernatural mind.through processes that are invisible to us, beyond our understanding, so complex as to be indistinguishable from action in a supernatural mind.

As such, they argue, the A.I. revolution represents a fundamental break with Enlightenment science, which “was trusted because each step of replicable experimental processes was also tested, hence trusted.” The knowledge granted us by “generative AI” will be far more mysterious; its truth will need to be “justified by entirely different methods, and it may never become similarly absolute.” Their vision of the human-to-AI relationship evokes Delphic priestesses channeling Apollo or mediums reaching through the veil: “We will have to ask continuously: What about the machine has not yet been revealed to us? What obscure knowledge is it hiding?”

And this kind of magical language mostly describes A.I. as an answer machine, Aaronson’s “embodied spirit of all the words on the internet.” It doesn’t even get into the question of whether an A.I. can actually attain consciousness, where the sorcerous aspect of this project is even more explicit.

After all, we don’t really understand our own consciousness, we haven’t even begun to solve the so-called hard problem of the mind and its relationship to matter. Yet here we are telling ourselves, in hope and also fear, that these machines whose workings we don’t fully understand might make the leap to self-awareness if only we keep making their processes more sophisticated, more beyond our ken.

In this sense what we’re doing resembles a complex incantation, a calling of spirits from Shakespeare’s “vasty deep.” Build a system that imitates human intelligence, make it talk like a person and answer questions like an encyclopedia and solve problems through leaps we can’t quite follow, and wait expectantly to see if something infuses itself into the mysterious space where the leaps are happening, summoned by the inviting home that we have made.

Such a summoning is most feared by A.I. alarmists, at present, because the spirit might be disobedient, destructive, a rampaging Skynet bent on our extermination.

But the old stories of the magicians and their bargains, of Faust and his Mephistopheles, suggest that we would be wise to fear apparent obedience as well.

Quote:AI’s capacities are not static but expand exponentially as the technology advances. Recently, the complexity of AI models has been doubling every few months. Therefore generative AI systems have capabilities that remain undisclosed even to their inventors. With each new AI system, they are building new capacities without understanding their origin or destination. As a result, our future now holds an entirely novel element of mystery, risk and surprise.

In the Age of AI, riddles are solved by processes that remain unknown. This disorienting paradox makes mysteries unmysterious but also unexplainable. Inherently, highly complex AI furthers human knowledge but not human understanding—a phenomenon contrary to almost all of post-Enlightenment modernity. Yet at the same time AI, when coupled with human reason, stands to be a more powerful means of discovery than human reason alone.

The essential difference between the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of AI is thus not technological but cognitive. After the Enlightenment, philosophy accompanied science.

Generative AI is similarly poised to generate a new form of human consciousness. As yet, however, the opportunity exists in colors for which we have no spectrum and in directions for which we have no compass. No political or philosophical leadership has formed to explain and guide this novel relationship between man and machine, leaving society relatively unmoored.

The lack of citations in ChatGPT’s answers makes it difficult to discern truth from misinformation. We know already that malicious actors are injecting reams of manufactured “facts,” and increasingly convincing deepfake images and videos, into the internet—that is to say, into ChatGPT’s present and future learning set.

We must include one caveat to this prediction: What happens if this technology cannot be completely controlled? What if there will always be ways to generate falsehoods, false pictures and fake videos, and people will never learn to disbelieve what they see and hear? Humans are taught from birth to believe what we see and hear, and that may well no longer be true as a result of generative AI. Even if the big platforms, by custom and regulation, work hard to mark and sort bad content, we know that content once seen cannot be unseen. The ability to manage and control global distributed content fully is a serious and unsolved problem.

The answers that ChatGPT gives to these issues are evocative only in the sense that they raise more questions than conclusions. For now, we have a novel and spectacular achievement that stands as a glory to the human mind as AI. We have not yet evolved a destination for it. As we become Homo technicus, we hold an imperative to define the purpose of our species. It is up to us to provide the real answers.

Fox News


That purpose was to make money doing what they've always done as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Synthetics like fentanyl are so much easier and cheaper to produce than other drugs that the only surprising thing is that it didn't take off until 2014.

If you're wondering if 80,000 customers dying a year is bad for business, the answer is no because they're making more money selling pills than they ever made from heroin because people think pills are safer and fentanyl only lasts a couple of hours so customers buy more of it. The DOJ is playing this card for geopolitical reasons. Same with the FBI now supporting the lab leak from China theory on COVID. There is nothing serious at all when it comes to the US Govt agencies, everything is propaganda in service to the big game.




U.S. Government Helped Rise of Mexican Drug Cartel: Report



CIA Assets and the Rise of the Guadalajara Connection



House Hearing, 111 Congress

As of Dec 2017, Augustine Carstens is the current Int'l banking cartel boss of bosses over in the tower of Basel, aka Bank for International Settlements (BIS) leading the global charge for CBDCs.

From summer 2021, 1 min esplainer straight from Agustin Carstens, the head of the BIS:

Israel's new government has a proposal to overturn some of the past supreme court rulings the present coalition government does not like. I find it interesting that a population where so many are armed; not a shot was fired by the protestors as there have been some serious protest going on.

Welcome Chiefsmom, we were starting to worry!!

 

The following video discusses Israel's relation with Russia and the why some of the things we read about are going on. I found the discussion on Syria interesting along with how many Russians live in Israel. I knew that in the old days the Mossad was made up of many X-pat Russians or second and third generation Russians..

This is another thought provoking video done by Shattered History about the many large craters that still exist upon the land masses of different continents. There really is a mystery I suppose but I am not 100% sure her conclusions are also 100% correct.  Either way the presentation is interesting to me and hopefully you too..

This was posted by Xuenchen @ ATS
https://nypost.com/2023/02/27/10-myths-t...-debunked/

Quote:10 myths told by COVID experts — and now debunked
By
Marty Makary
February 27, 2023 9:50pm
Updated



More On: Coronavirus

• China cryptically warns Musk about sharing posts on COVID lab leak theory
  
• FBI chief confirms agency’s belief COVID came from Chinese lab leak
  
• Biden is not a king — if he wants to pay student loans, he needs Congress
  
• Fauci has an ‘open mind’ on COVID lab leak?! Let’s rewind the tape
  

In the past few weeks, a series of analyses published by highly respected researchers have exposed a truth about public health officials during COVID:
Much of the time, they were wrong.
To be clear, public health officials were not wrong for making recommendations based on what was known at the time.
That’s understandable. You go with the data you have.
No, they were wrong because they refused to change their directives in the face of new evidence.
When a study did not support their policies, they dismissed it and censored opposing opinions.
At the same time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention weaponized research itself by putting out its own flawed studies in its own non-peer-reviewed medical journal, MMWR.
In the final analysis, public health officials actively propagated misinformation that ruined lives and forever damaged public trust in the medical profession.
Here are 10 ways they misled Americans:
Misinformation #1: [b]Natural immunity offers little protection compared to vaccinated immunity[/b]
A Lancet study looked at 65 major studies in 19 countries on natural immunity. The researchers concluded that natural immunity was at least as effective as the primary COVID vaccine series.
[/url]
Public health officials downplayed concerns about vaccine-induced myocarditis — or inflammation of the heart muscle.AP/Nathan Papes
In fact, the scientific data was there all along — from 160 studies, despite the findings of these studies violating Facebook’s “misinformation” policy.
Since the Athenian plague of 430 BC, it has been observed that those who recovered after infection were protected against severe disease if reinfected.
That was also the observation of nearly every practicing physician during the first 18 months of the COVID pandemic.
Most Americans who were fired for not having the COVID vaccine already had antibodies that effectively neutralized the virus, but they were antibodies that the government did not recognize.
Misinformation #2: Masks prevent COVID transmission
Cochran Reviews are considered the most authoritative and independent assessment of the evidence in medicine.
And one published last month by a highly respected Oxford research team found that masks had no significant impact on COVID transmission.
When asked about this definitive review, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky downplayed it, arguing that it was flawed because it focused on randomized controlled studies.
A study recently found that masks didn’t have much of an effect on preventing COVID-19 transmission.Jeenah Moon/Pool via REUTERS
But that was the greatest strength of the review! Randomized studies are considered the gold standard of medical evidence.
If all the energy used by public health officials to mask toddlers could have been channeled to reduce child obesity by encouraging outdoor activities, we would be better off.
Misinformation #3: School closures reduce COVID transmission
The CDC ignored the European experience of keeping schools open, most without mask mandates.
Transmission rates were no different, evidenced by studies conducted in Spain and Sweden.
Misinformation #4: [b]Myocarditis from the vaccine is less common than from the infection[/b]
Public health officials downplayed concerns about vaccine-induced myocarditis — or inflammation of the heart muscle.
They cited poorly designed studies that under-captured complication rates.
A flurry of well-designed studies said the opposite.
We now know that myocarditis is six to 28 times more common after the COVID vaccine than after the infection among 16- to 24-year-old males.
Tens of thousands of children likely got myocarditis, mostly subclinical, from a COVID vaccine they did not need because they were entirely healthy or because they already had COVID.
Misinformation #5: Young people benefit from a vaccine booster
Boosters reduced hospitalizations in older, high-risk Americans.
But the evidence was never there that they lower COVID mortality in young, healthy people.
That’s probably why the CDC chose not to publish its data on hospitalization rates among boosted Americans under 50, when it published the same rates for those over 50.
Ultimately, White House pressure to recommend boosters for all was so intense that the FDA’s two top vaccine experts left the agency in protest, writing scathing articles on how the data did not support boosters for young people.
President Biden pushed extreme policies to attempt to get every American vaccinated.Christopher Sadowski
Misinformation #6: Vaccine mandates increased vaccination rates
President Biden and other officials demanded that unvaccinated workers, regardless of their risk or natural immunity, be fired.
They demanded that soldiers be dishonorably discharged and nurses be laid off in the middle of a staffing crisis.
The mandate was based on the theory that vaccination reduced transmission rates — a notion later proven to be false.
But after the broad recognition that vaccination does not reduce transmission, the mandates persisted, and still do to this day.
A recent study from George Mason University details how vaccine mandates in nine major US cities had no impact on vaccination rates.
They also had no impact on COVID transmission rates.
Misinformation #7: COVID originating from the Wuhan lab is a conspiracy theory
Google admitted to suppressing searches of “lab leak” during the pandemic.
Dr. Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, claimed (and still does) he didn’t believe the virus came from a lab.
Ultimately, overwhelming circumstantial evidence points to a lab leak origin — the same origin suggested to Dr. Anthony Fauci by two very prominent virologists in a January 2020 meeting he assembled at the beginning of the pandemic.
According to documents obtained by Bret Baier of Fox News, they told Fauci and Collins that the virus may have been manipulated and originated in the lab, but then suddenly changed their tune in public comments days after meeting with the NIH officials.
The virologists were later awarded nearly $9 million from Fauci’s agency.
The theory that COVID-19 originated from a Chinese lab in Wuhan proved to be true.HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images
Misinformation #8: It was important to get [b]the second vaccine dose three or four weeks after the first dose[/b]
Data were clear in the spring of 2021, just months after the vaccine rollout, that spacing the vaccine out by three months reduces complication rates and increases immunity.
Spacing out vaccines would have also saved more lives when Americans were rationing a limited vaccine supply at the height of the epidemic.
Misinformation #9: Data on the bivalent vaccine is ‘crystal clear’
Dr. Ashish Jha famously said this, despite the bivalent vaccine being approved using data from eight mice.
To date, there has never been a randomized controlled trial of the bivalent vaccine.
In my opinion, the data are crystal clear that young people should not get the bivalent vaccine.
It would have also spared many children myocarditis.
Misinformation #10: One in five people get long COVID
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claims that 20% of COVID infections can result in long COVID.
But a UK study found that only 3% of COVID patients had residual symptoms lasting 12 weeks. What explains the disparity?
It’s often normal to experience mild fatigue or weakness for weeks after being sick and inactive and not eating well.
Calling these cases long COVID is the medicalization of ordinary life.
[url=https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/NYPICHPDPICT000006996961.jpg] The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claims that 20% of COVID infections can result in long COVID, but other studies say differently. MediaNews Group via Getty Images
What’s most amazing about all the misinformation conveyed by CDC and public health officials is that there have been no apologies for holding on to their recommendations for so long after the data became apparent that they were dead wrong.
Public health officials said “you must” when the correct answer should have been “we’re not sure.”
Early on, in the absence of good data, public health officials chose a path of stern paternalism.
Today, they are in denial of a mountain of strong studies showing that they were wrong.

From the "How could this end up anywhere good?" files:

Quote:US Military Signs Contract to Put Facial Recognition on Drones

Operators will use the tech on small drones to help them with intelligence gathering, reconnaissance, and identifying targets.

The United States is set to deploy facial recognition technology on drones. The tech, called SAFR, is owned by the company RealNetworks. According to a contract between RealNetworks and the U.S. Air Force, the facial recognition software will be used on small drones as part of special operations missions.

The Air Force paid RealNetworks $729,056 for SAFR. “Through this effort, we will adapt the SAFR facial recognition platform for deployment on an autonomous [small unmanned aircraft system] for special ops, [intelligence, surveillance, and target acquisition] , and other expeditionary use-cases,” the contract said. “This will require integrating the SAFR software with the hardware and software stack of the [small drones], including its onboard compute, communications systems, and remote controller software to enable operation in [disconnected, intermittent, and limited] communications settings, support actionable insight for remote human operators, and open the opportunity for real-time autonomous response by the robot.”

The small drones of the U.S. military are typically not armed. Small UAVs like the RQ-11B Raven are often hand launched by soldiers in the field and used for reconnaissance. This contract does not describe putting facial recognition software on large Predator and Reaper drones that will make decisions about who to assassinate in a war zone. The contract describes a use-case where teams of special operations soldiers use the facial recognition technology on smaller reconnaissance drones during operations in foreign countries.

But the contract did describe a world where sUAS will be used by America’s operators for intelligence and target acquisition. It’s possible this software will be used to identify targets, it’s just that a different human—or machine—will be pulling the trigger. Larger drones identify targets through a combination of high powered cameras and cell phone tracking. They make mistakes all the time.

For years, privacy advocates have been worried about the pairing of facial recognition technology with drone technology. For the most part, the cameras and sensors used for facial recognition have not been of a resolution high enough to work on drones that fly high above people. This contract suggests the technology has improved to a point where that is no longer true.

At a glance, it sounds like using facial recognition software would help the people who operate drones make fewer mistakes. But facial recognition software is also famously faulty and prone to errors, and deploying facial recognition is a step on the path toward fully autonomous drones.

By now you have heard the Covid Lab leak theory is being pushed once again.


NY Times (archived)

I'll tell ya what is a conspiracy theory...that whole damn story. The "Energy Dept."? Say wut?!






17 Labs in 17 Minutes



This is a bit odd. The Dept of Energy's much-ballyhooed determination that Covid likely leaked from Wuhan Institute of Virology Lab is significantly based on the analysis of their "Z-Division." But Z-Division had already made that same assessment all the way back in May 2020.

Quote:Little-known scientific team behind new assessment on covid-19 origins (WaPo, February 27, 2023)

Small shift in favor of ‘lab leak’ theory was prompted by new data and group of weapons-lab scientists

An analysis by experts from the U.S. national laboratory complex — including members of a storied team known as Z-Division — prompted the Energy Department to change its view earlier this year about the likely cause of the 2019 coronavirus outbreak, the officials said. Though initially undecided about covid-19’s origins, Energy officials concluded as part of a new government-wide intelligence assessment that a lab accident was most likely the triggering event for the world’s worst pandemic in a century.

“The bottom line remains the same: Basically no one really knows,” one of the officials said.

“‘Lab’ does not equal ‘man-made,’ the official said. “Even if it was a leak from a lab, they still think it would be a naturally occurring virus.”
Among the nine intelligence entities involved in the assessment, only the FBI had previously concluded, with “moderate” confidence, that covid-19 started with a lab accident. The Energy Department was the only agency that changed its view, while the CIA and one other agency remained undecided, lacking enough compelling evidence to support one conclusion over the other, officials said.

The labs were established as part of the U.S. nuclear weapons program and operate largely in the classified realm. The department’s cadre of technical experts includes members of the Energy Department’s Z-Division, which since the 1960s has been involved in secretive investigations of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons threats by U.S. adversaries, including China and Russia.

Quote:EXCLUSIVE: Classified study found COVID-19 could have originated in Chinese lab (May 3, 2021)

A classified study of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 conducted a year ago by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Department of Energy’s premier biodefense research institution, concluded the novel coronavirus at the heart of the current pandemic may have originated in a laboratory in China, Sinclair has learned.

Researchers at Livermore’s “Z Division,” the lab’s intelligence unit, issued the report May 27, 2020, classified “Top Secret.” Its existence is previously undisclosed. The Z Division report assessed that both the lab-origin theory and the zoonotic theory were plausible and warranted further investigation. Sinclair has not reviewed the report but confirmed its contents through interviews with multiple sources who read it or were briefed on its contents.
...
Asked about the Z Division report, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), ranking member on the House foreign affairs committee, declined to comment on classified material but emphasized the need for further study. “From what I have seen and read, you absolutely cannot dismiss the notion that the WIV lab is a potential source of the virus,” McCaul said in a statement to Sinclair. “And if you listen to the leaders in the previous and current administrations, they have said exactly the same thing.”

Quote:People familiar with the study said that it was prepared by Lawrence Livermore’s “Z Division,” which is its intelligence arm. Lawrence Livermore has considerable expertise on biological issues. Its assessment drew on genomic analysis of the SARS-COV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, they said.

U.S. Report Found It Plausible Covid-19 Leaked From Wuhan Lab (WSJ, June 8, 2021)