Mohammed bin Salman hired top retired American military personnel

American documents revealed that at least 15 American generals worked directly with the Saudi Ministry of Defense headed by Mohammed bin Salman and were paid astronomical salaries ranging between 200 and 300 thousand dollars only for providing advice.

The Washington Post published an extensive investigation into the presence of more than 500 retired U.S. military personnel, including dozens of generals and admirals, who have worked in lucrative jobs since 2015 in Saudi Arabia and the UAE serving regimes known for human rights abuses and political repression.

The newspaper’s investigation was titled Retired U.S. Generals, Admirals Take Top Jobs with Saudi Crown Prince.

It revealed that 15 retired senior officers in the U.S. Army have been working as advisors to the Saudi Ministry of Defense since 2016 to assist bin Salman.

According to the newspaper, one of bin Salman’s military advisers who receive their salaries from the Saudi Ministry of Defense is retired Marine General James L. Jones, who worked as a national security adviser to former U.S. President Barack Obama.

The vast majority of ex-military personnel involved in the investigations worked in countries in the Middle East, where the U.S. military has been involved in a series of wars in recent decades.

Retired Marine General James L. Jones began working with MBS in 2017 when the Saudi government recruited him to “perform an organizational assessment” of the Saudi military.

For the project, the former general hired “about a dozen former senior Pentagon officials, including William S. Cohen, who served as Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration,” according to the newspaper.

The news raises serious questions about how secondary considerations — such as having a comfortable job after retirement — can influence the decision-making process of the U.S. military leadership.

The base salary of even the country’s top generals is about $200,000 a year, many of whom have made much more than that in serving foreign governments.

As the Washington Post noted, some officers “negotiated jobs with foreign governments while they were still on active duty,” and others worked in the countries where they were on active duty.

The investigation stems from a trove of documents obtained by POGO and Post from the Pentagon in a pair of lawsuits.

Since former soldiers and officers can be called up for active duty at any time, they are not allowed to receive anything of value from a foreign government, like all current U.S. officials.

But in 1977, Congress gave the Pentagon and State Department the power to issue waivers on that rule. As a result, these documents constitute many files obtained in the investigation.

Although the executive branch can deny requests for exemptions for many reasons, 95 per cent of them have been approved since 2015, meaning the process is little more than a rubber stamp.

The newspaper found that “dozens of retirees are on LinkedIn who say they have held military contracting jobs in the Gulf, but have no record of federal approval,” meaning that many veterans do not take the time to ask for permission. In other words, it is still challenging to determine the actual scale of the problem.

The documents reveal that the veterans have been authorized to work for at least 50 foreign governments. In addition, the Middle Eastern countries include Singapore, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Georgia, Djibouti, and Australia.

Furthermore, this may mean that retired officers earn six or seven-figure salaries abroad while earning lucrative taxpayer-financed pensions back home.

It turns out that American defence contractors have also become more involved in the military-industrial complex of foreign countries. For example, as noted by The Post, Northrop Grumman has opened a joint venture called Vinyl Arabia Ltd with Saudi Arabia’s Arab Builders for Trading. According to the newspaper, vinyl employs “hundreds of Americans” tasked with training the Saudi National Guard.

The revelations add to concerns about how foreign countries, including many authoritarian governments, expand their influence over American institutions.

Last month it was revealed that former Senator Norm Coleman, a prominent Republican fundraiser, is working as a paid lobbyist in Saudi Arabia.