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Quotations | | | "A longtime rule forbade retired military officers from lobbying the Pentagon on behalf of a private contractor for two years. That rule was repealed in 1996 because it singled out retired military officers while civilian Pentagon employees had to wait only a year." (Merle 2004) | |
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< | "Growing privatization in the US, intense competition and the weakening of rules governing the relationship between contractors and the government have contributed to the “revolving door” phenomenon, which consists of the movement of former federal officials to the private sector, and through their connections and inside knowledge, exerting political influence over the government decision-making process as lobbyists, consultants and board members on behalf of the contractors for whom they work. The revolving door also involves the naming of executives from government contractors to senior positions within the state administration. Spurred by the move to streamline government and involve industry in procurement decisions, contractors and government have developed a symbiotic relationship in the US that is reflected in the fluid movement of key individuals between government and industry. Both Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney – when he held this job before becoming CEO of Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root – have tried their utmost to privatize the American military. For Rumsfeld, following corporate strategy, downsizing means moving to “just in time” hiring, using private firms to provide what the military formerly did for itself. He has insisted that it makes no sense to keep and pay for a well-trained standing army, when the US can purchase every sort of service on an “open market” whenever there is a need for military action. Cheney and other proponents of outsourcing ask why should soldiers cook for themselves, move their trash, provide supplies, run and maintain their technology – why not privatize these activities and free the military to concentrate on core tasks only? Even in the case of actual military duty – guarding public officials from hostile attack, fighting terrorist and guerrilla assaults – much of what soldiers traditionally do can be performed by PMCs. All of these services can be hired only when needed, and the army can be kept small, and hence inexpensive in terms of manpower. Thus, on taking office, Cheney named executives from leading military contractors as heads of the three services. James Roche, the secretary of the Air Force, is a former vice president of Northrop Grumman; Gordon England, the secretary of the Navy, is a former executive at General Dynamics; and Thomas P. White, a former secretary of the Army, came from Enron.325 A recent study of defense contracting in the US identified 224 high-ranking government officials over the past seven years who moved into the private sector to work as lobbyists, board members or executives of contractors. Moreover, at least one-third of these former high-ranking former government employees had held positions that allowed them to influence government contracting decisions. A survey of the revolving door phenomenon concluded that “the revolving door has become such an accepted part of federal contracting in recent years that it is frequently difficult to determine where the government stops and the private sector begins.” (Schreier 2005, pg. 90. footnotes omitted). | >
> | "Growing privatization in the US, intense competition and the weakening of rules governing the relationship between contractors and the government have contributed to the “revolving door” phenomenon, which consists of the movement of former federal officials to the private sector, and through their connections and inside knowledge, exerting political influence over the government decision-making process as lobbyists, consultants and board members on behalf of the contractors for whom they work. The revolving door also involves the naming of executives from government contractors to senior positions within the state administration. Spurred by the move to streamline government and involve industry in procurement decisions, contractors and government have developed a symbiotic relationship in the US that is reflected in the fluid movement of key individuals between government and industry. Both Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney – when he held this job before becoming CEO of Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root – have tried their utmost to privatize the American military. For Rumsfeld, following corporate strategy, downsizing means moving to “just in time” hiring, using private firms to provide what the military formerly did for itself. He has insisted that it makes no sense to keep and pay for a well-trained standing army, when the US can purchase every sort of service on an “open market” whenever there is a need for military action. Cheney and other proponents of outsourcing ask why should soldiers cook for themselves, move their trash, provide supplies, run and maintain their technology – why not privatize these activities and free the military to concentrate on core tasks only? Even in the case of actual military duty – guarding public officials from hostile attack, fighting terrorist and guerrilla assaults – much of what soldiers traditionally do can be performed by PMCs. All of these services can be hired only when needed, and the army can be kept small, and hence inexpensive in terms of manpower. Thus, on taking office, Cheney named executives from leading military contractors as heads of the three services. James Roche, the secretary of the Air Force, is a former vice president of Northrop Grumman; Gordon England, the secretary of the Navy, is a former executive at General Dynamics; and Thomas P. White, a former secretary of the Army, came from Enron. A recent study of defense contracting in the US identified 224 high-ranking government officials over the past seven years who moved into the private sector to work as lobbyists, board members or executives of contractors. Moreover, at least one-third of these former high-ranking former government employees had held positions that allowed them to influence government contracting decisions. A survey of the revolving door phenomenon concluded that “the revolving door has become such an accepted part of federal contracting in recent years that it is frequently difficult to determine where the government stops and the private sector begins.” (Schreier 2005, pg. 90. footnotes omitted). | | | Defense Contractors and Media
"Defense spending on research and development has sparked much innovation. Microchips, radar, lasers, satellite communications, cell phones, GPS, and the Internet all came out of Defense Dept. funding for basic research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and national laboratories. There were breakthroughs at IBM and Bell Laboratories, and all were commercialized by Intel Corp., Motorola Inc., and other corporations. The same is true of artificial intelligence, supercomputers, high-speed fiber optics, and many other breakthroughs. The bulk of information technologies, in fact, were developed through massive R&D investments in military technology." (Cypher 2002) | | | Defense Procurement
"[G]overnment support was an important,possibly essential, force in the evolution of the electronics sector. The influence of the federal government on the development of the industry has been attributed to a variety of mechanisms from antitrust to intellectual property policies but prominence is usually assigned to the funds that the US government provided to the business sector in the form of R&D funding and procurement contracts. As Mowery and Nelson (1999) put it: “[v]irtually all accounts of the rise to dominance of the American semiconductor and computer industries … emphasize the procurement and R&D policies of the U.S. Department of Defense.” Of the two policies, procurement arises as the more influential factor." (Ran 2007) | |
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< | Ari Adut, On Scandal (2008) | >
> | "As military procurement fell by more than 50 percent in the 1990s, mergers and Pentagon policies altered the defense industry in unexpected ways. More than forty firms were joined to form the big four--Lockheed Martin, Boeing McDonnell? Douglas, Raytheon Hughes, and Northtop Grunmman--and a new round of transnational mergers may be on the horizon." (Markusen and Costigen 1999: back cover).
Arming the Future (1999)
"Efforts to buy 'off-the-shelf' commercial components and encourage the integration of civilian and military research and development (R&D) and production activities, right down to the shop floor, have two great payoffs: better electronic, communications, and guidance capabilities for the armed forces, and a defense industrial base that is less dependent on government contracts, ameliorating pork-barreling activities that distort military priorities. But the inclusion of more commercial components raises the potential for more rapid diffusion of the sophisticated weapons that are at the heart of America's security strategy" (Markusen and Costigen 1999: 5) More...Close<-- END twistyPlugin--> But Kolko (2007) says that America doesn't have a coherent security strategy. <-- END twistyPlugin-->
"Liberalizing and promoting arms exports for economic reasons increases the risk of conflict elsewhere in the world, possibly drawing in the United States. It also accelerates pressures for costly next-generation weapons investments." (Markusen and Costigen 1999: 5)
"American-designed arms will be bought and used by more nations in the future, and we may rely more heavily on foreign suppliers for components if not entire weapons systems. Our leaders have no alternative but to explore with our allies international agreements and machinery to streamline the defense industrial base, share its output, and control access globally. Otherwise, large private-sector corporations will be shaping our security strategy." (6) More...Close<-- END twistyPlugin--> Hasn't this latter scenario actually happened? <-- END twistyPlugin-->
"Large-scale mergers were not anticipated [after the Cold War]. The more innovative thinkers were prescribing civil/military integration and dual-use technology development to enhance the quality of military equipment and quicken the pace of civilian technology spin-offs... [A]fter 50 years of relative stasis in the ranks of the largest defense contractors, a rash of defense mergers reduced the major competitors to a small number of relatively heavily defense-dedicated companies: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman... Defense contractors also are becoming increasingly international in orientation, selling larger shares of their output to foreign governments and engaging in strategic alliances, joint ventures, and even mergers with overseas counterparts." (7)
"[F]irms and governments in leading arms-producing countries have become more rather than less rivalrous in arms export markets, hampering progress toward controlling conventional arms proliferation. The U.S. share of world arms exports has risen dramatically, even in a shrinking world market. While American exports have fallen by more than 10 percent in real terms since 1989, the U.S. share has increased from 30 percent to 45 percent... Traditionally viewed as a foreign policy tool, new weapons sales now are frequently approved and defended for economic reasons: to keep production lines 'hot' and lower the cost of weapons to American armed forces by achieving economies of scale. As highly sophisticated weapons are more freely shipped to problematic governments in politically unstable regions, calls have arisen for expensive new weapons research, especially in the United States. To some critics, this process amounts to America engaged in an arms race with itself." (7)
Ari Adut, On Scandal (2008)o pro | | | "Scandals will also have acute polluting powers in groups with strong emotional solidarity and collective liability. Military organizations have both of these characteristics, which explains why they will be so wary of scandals and why court-martials are not open to the public." (30)
"... journalists, at least partially, respond to social demand, and they are constricted by social and legal norms determining what news is publishable -- such as standards of decency and good taste, privacy and defamation laws, as well as notions of public interest and newsworthiness." (78) | | | "in the end Ober decided CBS could not afford to opt out of the pools for commercial and competitive reasons." (23) | |
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> | Crocodyl.org
Boeing: Boeing is one of the largest U.S. federal defense contractors. Its has traditionally also been willing to make huge gambles on developing new generations of planes--seen most recently in the 777 series that will become available in the mid-1990s... corporate misbehavior highlighted by the jailing of Boeing's former CFO, for holding illegal job negotiations with Darlene Druyun, a senior Pentagon official... Boeing's position as a military contractor was tarnished in 1989, when it pleaded guilty and paid a fine of $5 million in connection with charges that it illegally obtained classified Pentagon planning documents... When wartime mobilization began, Boeing began producing hundreds of B-17 Flying Fortresses for the army. A later model, the B-29, was the plane used in the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The company also produced a series of bombers, including the renowned B-52... Once Boeing introduced its new narrow-body 757 and wide-body 767 in the early 1980s, the Seattle company once again took command of the market. As a result the teetering Lockheed, which in the 1970s had been rescued by a federal government bailout program, abandoned the commercial aircraft business in 1981... The Reagan administration's escalation of defense spending fattened the military side of Boeing's operations. In addition to getting more money to build its AWACS airborne command posts, the company began to get more involved in military electronics--though not as much as it hoped to when making a $5 billion bid in 1985 for Hughes Aircraft. Hughes ended up with General Motors instead... In 1991 a team headed by Boeing and the Sikorsky Aircraft division of United Technologies was chosen to build a new generation of combat helicopters for the U.S. Army. The contract could eventually be worth $34 billion. Boeing was also part of a team (along with Lockheed and General Dynamics) chosen to supply 650 Advanced Tactical Fights to the U.S. Air Force--a deal that could be worth $90 billion to the three companies. The Seattle company joined yet another team (including Grumman and Lockheed) to compete for the contract on the U.S. Navy's new A-X attack plane. In 1991 Boeing formed an alliance with the Thomson-CSF subsidiary of Thomson S.A. to pursue opportunities in global military markets. In May 2005, Boeing announced its intent to form a joint venture, United Launch Alliance with its competitor Lockheed Martin. The new venture will be the largest provider of rocket launch services to the US government. The joint venture gained regulatory approval and completed the formation on December 1, 2006. | | | Other
This spring, PBS’s distinguished Frontline series aired a mildly critical account of the lead-up to the Iraq War entitled “Bush’s War.” As the airing of the program was announced, the Bush Administration proposed to slash public funding for PBS by roughly half for 2009, by 56% for 2010 and eliminating funding entirely for 2011. (http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-14/did-pbs-bury-a-frontline-episode-on-torture/) (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/05/bushs-2009-budget-calls-_n_85132.html) |
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