Lockheed Martin. As a full-service weapons contractor, Lockheed Martin receives over $29 billion per year in Pentagon contracts, or roughly one out of every 10 dollars the Defense Department doles out to private contractors.
They are the largest, they’re the most corrupt, and they have the most political influence. So, for example, they make cluster bombs, which are used in the Middle East. They design nuclear weapons. They make fighter planes. They make combat ships. So they have the full gamut of weapons. But they also have branched out. They work for the CIA, the FBI. They work for the IRS, the Census Bureau. So they’ve become this full-service government contractor, which really is involved in every aspects of our lives. Every time we interact with the government, Lockheed Martin is likely to be there.
They help count the census. They have these people in little Lockheed Martin, polo shirts who they have truckloads of data that they’re processing. They also helped design it. So they’re really in the middle of it. They’re running it, in some sense.
How did Lockheed get so big?
the mergers of the ’90s were one of the big things. World War II was the first. Then, when Norm Augustine engineered the Lockheed and Martin Marietta merger, that’s when they really became by far the biggest company, and they didn’t have a real competitor at that point.
in New York City, Lockheed Martin had the contract with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to basically develop a surveillance system in the subways. they increasingly got into this intelligence gathering or in information systems for local governments
they bought a company that had been involved in a New York City parking violations scandal. And then they branched out into social services in Florida. They tried to get the welfare contract in Texas. they worked on the New York City subway surveillance system, which was a disaster. They were fired after a $212 million contract. So they went into that for about five years, and they had contracts in 44 states. But they just couldn’t get the job done. Finally, they were fired from so many places, they decided to get out of the business.
50 years ago President Eisenhower mentioned the “military-industrial complex”.
He was concerned not just about the size, not just about the budget, but that it was going to undermine our democracy. And I think that’s what Lockheed Martin is about in many ways. They were involved with the Pentagon in doing surveillance on antiwar protesters. They build biometric identification systems for the FBI. The fact that they’re in the IRS makes me kind of nervous. It’s sort of creepy in a way. They’ve got so many kinds of data about us. I’m not sure, a military contractor should really be in that position.
Lockheed Martin makes US foreign policy, has its own foreign policy.
In many ways. not only were they involved in lobbying for the war in Iraq, but they have people in Liberia helping rebuild the justice system. They’re building refugee camps. They helped run elections in the Ukraine. They helped write the Afghan constitution. So, all kinds of things that you would think of as sort of the soft side of foreign policy, they’re making money from. they recruit the monitors who monitor the elections in places like Bosnia.
They spend about $12 million per election cycle, either on lobbying or on candidates in US. And they have people like Buck McKeon, who runs the Armed Services Committee now. They’re the biggest donor to him. They’re the biggest donor to Daniel Inouye, who runs the Appropriations Committee in the Senate.
They get money from the Pentagon, from the U.S. taxpayer, and then decide who they want to elect.
the Bush years were a bonanza for the Lockheed Martin Corporation. They had a guy who went to run military space for the Air Force. They had the deputy national security adviser. They had the guy running the nuclear weapons complex. They had the guy who helped run the Homeland Security Department’s procurement program. All coming from Lockheed Martin.
They’re perhaps the most corrupt of the military-industrial companies. Starting with the cost overruns in the ’60s, they had record cost overruns on their C-5 aircraft. Then they were involved in the bribery scandals of the ’70s, where they bribed, you know, prime ministers in Japan and Italy. They bribed people in Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. So basically they were at the cutting edge of many of these, corruption scandals. They helped get government subsidies for their mergers in the ’90s, in a conflict-of-interest deal that involved William Perry.
For the bribery scandals, a few of their executives had to step down. But no criminal charges were ever brought.
C-5A scandal.
They were supposed an aircraft that could go anywhere, basically what they called a flying military base. And it was going to be, post-Vietnam, a way to intervene more quickly. But what happened was they ran a $2 billion cost overrun, and the thing didn’t work. The Air Force tried to cover it up. And Ernest Fitzgerald, the whistleblower, actually lost his job over exposing this. And only when William Proxmire went to his defense was he restored to his job in the Pentagon.
Reagan doubled Lockheed Martin’s contracts in the first three years he was in office. So they were a little bit behind the curve in the Carter years, when spending dropped. And so, this was the era of the $600 toilet seat, the $7,000 coffee maker, rigged Star Wars tests. All these were done by Lockheed Martin during the Reagan era. So, they got a huge boost in their contracts at the same time that they were bilking the government on all kinds of activities, as well as helping to rig the Star Wars program, which helped Reagan push it along at a time when people were saying, “How is this thing ever going to work?”
Clinton years were good years for them, because that was the merger period. And they got a couple hundred million dollars to help them merge, to close down factories, even to pay executive bonuses for guys like Norm Augustine. We helped pay his golden parachute when he switched from Martin Marietta to Lockheed Martin.
He got $8 million, of which we paid $3 million directly and the rest indirectly, because that’s—we’re the only place they get money from, is the taxpayers.
Obama hasn’t cut military spending. He did stop their F-22 combat aircraft, but he cut $4 billion from that and he added $4 billion to their F-35. So basically that was a wash, even though it was sort of portrayed as getting tough with Lockheed Martin.
Lockheed Martin’s role in interrogating prisoners at U.S. facilities from Iraq to Guantánamo
they bought a couple companies involved in that: Sytex Corporation, Affiliated Computer Services. So they were recruiting interrogators and translators for both Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, some of the other prison camps in Iraq. They now have said that they’re out of that business, but there’s no way to document that, because they still own those companies.
there’s a huge upsurge in weapons exports during the Obama years—up to $30 billion a year now, from about $10 billion at the beginning of the Bush years. And Lockheed Martin is right in the middle of that. They sell F-16 fighters. Their new F-35 is going to be built in 18 different countries, so a lot of the production will be done overseas, which is not normally the case in a fighter plane, but it’s been built in to the way this program has been designed.
the production is overseas, and it’s being sold overseas, but the U.S. subsidizes the corporation. there will be some jobs here, but many, many fewer than they would be advertising.
Obama is in hangover from the Bush years. The deals were struck then, and they’re happening now. Part of it is exports are a huge part of his policy. So, we just concluded a $60 billion deal with Saudi Arabia, which is the biggest deal ever—mostly benefiting Boeing, but also Lockheed Martin as a secondary company. So exports of any kind are a benefit, and he hasn’t really had a plan on controlling arms exports.
$60 billion menas 80 or so fighter planes, hundreds of Apache attack helicopters, everything from ammunition to guns to bombs. It’s pretty much a across-the-board kind of arming of the Saudi both internal security and armed forces.
United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, US spend six times more than the country with the next highest budget, which is China.
the government subsidizes the development of these new technologies that are then—these same companies—then used for other civilian purposes. That it becomes basically sort of a government subsidy for the companies to develop new technological systems to then market to the general population, whether it’s GPS or any of these other systems that we now take for granted, originally developed as a result of military research funded by the government.
Privatization of the military
Its war for profit. And it’s not just logistic. It’s not just, serving food and doing laundry. It’s not just fixing the weapons. It’s people carrying guns, and some of them near the front line. So, it makes it that much harder—if you want to pull out troops, are you really pulling out your full presence there? how do you ride herd over that when it’s not just the Pentagon, it’s not just the armed forces, but it’s this whole concatenation of private companies that also need to be reined in?
it’s a huge business to leave the Pentagon and then go into the private sector. As Bryan Bender showed in the Boston Globe, 34 out of 39 generals and admirals immediately leaving the Pentagon went either to defense contractors or defense consulting firms. So some of them, in their retirement, can make more than they made in their entire military service. And so, this is another source of conflict of interest—and corruption. there’s been people who have gone to jail for the way they’ve helped private companies. When they’re on the inside, they give them a deal, and then on the outside, they go work for them.
Discussion with William Hartung
William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. His latest book is Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.
– from democracynow.org