Defense Contractors Gone Wild
By Matt Taibbi
Created Sep 20 2006 - 9:46am
There are small news stories, there are really small news stories, and then
there is "Defense Institute Head Resigns," a little maggot of a news item
that blipped into the "D" section of the Washington Post last Wednesday. 356
words in all, about half the length of an AP NFL game account, and the Post
was the only paper in the country that ran the story. So how important could
it have been?

Actually, the Post item about the resignation of Dennis C. Blair from the
federally-funded Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) spoke volumes about
the utter insanity of the modern American media landscape. In a month when
Katie Couric redefined the "scoop" as an advance glimpse of celebrity
idiot-spawn Suri Cruise, and investigative journalism according to
muckraking icon 60 Minutes meant sappy profiles of Howard Stern and Bill
Romanowski, it made all the sense in the world that the denouement of a
spectacular tale of massive government waste and fraud would go completely
unnoticed by virtually the entire journalism community.

The name of Dennis C. Blair became somewhat infamous on the Hill this summer
when he became wrapped up in a minor controversy surrounding appropriations
for the F-22 Raptor jet fighter. Blair, a former Navy admiral who once
headed the U.S. Pacific Command, was until last week the president of the
IDA, a federally-funded non-profit research center which provides the
government with "independent" analyses of weapons programs and defense
legislation.

Earlier this year, the IDA had been asked by the Pentagon to assess the
viability and potential cost of a three-year, $60-plus billion Multi-Year
Procurement (MYP) of F-22 jets. The details here are complicated, but in
essence the MYP proposed as an amendment to the Senate's 2007 Defense
Authorization bill by Georgia's Saxby Chambliss would lock the government
into a bulk purchase of three years' worth of F-22s, instead of the
traditional yearly individual purchases.

Blair's IDA did as ordered, ultimately issuing a report showing that the
MYP, by allowing suppliers to sell to the government at reduced bulk rates,
would save the government a quarter of a billion dollars. This contradicted
the findings of both the Government Accountability Office and the
Congressional Research Service, which blasted the procurement as an
indefensibly stupid waste of money, but the IDA's "congressionally mandated
independent study" (as Chambliss called it) was the one legislators chose to
listen to.

Chambliss's amendment passed 70-28, with wide bipartisan support. Most all
of the Senators who voted for the bill, including Democrats like Joe
Lieberman, Chuck Schumer and Daniel Inouye, had received generous campaign
contributions from Lockheed-Martin, the maker of the F-22, and from
subcontractors like Pratt and Whitney.

Moreover, it subsequently came out that Blair himself sat on the board of
EDO, a subcontractor on the F-22 project. EDO makes a missile launching
system for the plane. Though such conflicts of interest are not barred by
the Pentagon, Blair last week resigned voluntarily -- quietly, with only the
Post noticing, at a time when Katie Couric was neatly innovating the network
news concept by giving platform-impoverished radio jock Rush Limbaugh a
guest slot on her news show. Blair's resignation was a de facto admission
that a key study supporting one of the largest defense procurements in
history was seriously compromised, even beyond the built-in conflict of
interest inherent in a congress heavily funded by defense contractors.

The ongoing bureaucratic drama surrounding procurement for this project is a
kind of fairy tale for the system of legalized corruption in this country,
in which taxpayer money is basically stolen and shot into space by an open
conspiracy of legislators, defense contractors and Pentagon officials,
colloquially known as the "Iron Triangle." The F-22 project is particularly
offensive since its cost -- $65 billion -- mirrors very closely the $50
billion in "emergency" cuts to social programs congress made last year,
ostensibly to help pay for Katrina reconstruction.

Many of those post--Katrina cuts are just beginning to hit communities
around the country now. The state of Texas, for instance, recently announced
that it may have to lay off as many as 1,700 employees because of federal
budget cuts for various social programs. I was in congress last year when
both the House and the Senate voted to slash funding for child support
collection in response to the Katrina disaster; a year later, a state like
Texas will be laying off as many as two--thirds of the employees in its
child--support division.

So what programs was congress protecting, when it decided last year to take
money away from single mothers, teachers, Medicaid and student loans? Ladies
and gentlemen, we give you the Raptor.

The F-22 is a symbol of everything that is wrong and stupid and corrupt
about the United States government. Often called "the Maserati of fighter
planes," the successor aircraft to the F--15 is a defense contractor's wet
dream, a preposterously expensive and extravagantly useless hunk of hi-tech
metal rigged with every conceivable luxury bell and whistle, a plane whose
brochure comes riddled with the kind of hot and steamy selling points that
pitches tents in industrial parks all over the country -- Mach 2 cruising
speed, stealth skin, the most advanced avionics and software package ever
invented.

But there are three basic problems with the F-22.

One, it was conceived in the mid-eighties, with the aim of combating Warsaw
Pact aircraft, which, in case Washington hasn't noticed, are no longer a
threat to this country. The chief weapon of our current enemy -- again in
case no one in Washington noticed -- is the homemade roadside bomb,
triggered by a cell phone or garage-door opener. While no one is saying
America doesn't need fighter planes, the F-22's technological selling points
are completely irrelevant to the security challenges currently facing the
country. The F-16 is just fine for fighting the likes of al-Qaeda.

Two, the plane has the comically horrible performance history common to most
hot Pentagon projects, with the jet plagued by cost overruns, crashes and
glitches, the most recent occurring this spring, when a pilot in a prototype
was trapped inside his canopy for five hours (firefighters eventually did
over $180K in damage rescuing him from the plane). Moreover, the plane's
chief selling point -- its stealth -- is, hilariously, a mirage. In order to
detect enemy aircraft beyond visual range, the plane needs to turn on its
radar, immediately rendering it visible to even the most primitive detection
system. In fact, at a symposium last year for the Center for Defense
Information, well-known aircraft analyst Pierre Sprey graded the F-22 on
four criteria -- seeing the enemy first, outnumbering the enemy,
outmaneuvering the enemy, and killing the enemy quickly.

"The Raptor is a horrible failure on almost every one of those criteria,"
Sprey said.

Thirdly, according to an estimate issued by the Government Accountability
Office earlier this year, the cost to the taxpayer of the first 183 planes
will be -- get this -- over $361 million per plane. Now, that number
includes design and development costs; the ultimate "fly-away" cost, meaning
how much it costs to simply manufacture the aircraft, will be about $137
million per plane. But even that number is about four times the cost of the
plane it's replacing, the F-16, which goes for about $35 million per unit.

Moreover, there is this to consider. One of the original reasons for
developing the F-22 was that foreign sales of the F-15 and F-16 had diluted
America's technological superiority over other nations. But this summer,
Texas congresswoman Kay Granger, whose district contains a Lockheed factory
that makes the F-22 midsection, offered legislation to lift a ban on foreign
sales of the plane. The measure passed in a June voice vote in the House
after only 11 minutes of discussion. Groups like the Project on
Congressional Oversight freaked out, noting that potentially antagonistic
nations like Pakistan have the F-16 and that the consequences of putting
F-22 technology on the open market were potentially severe, but the vote
went through anyway. The Senate has yet to take up the issue, but is
expected to soon, with the same result.

So to recap: a weapon that was designed to fight an enemy that no longer
exists, which may be a spectacular design failure, and which costs as much
as ten times as much as the last generation's still-excellent and
still-superior weapon, is to be mass-produced by a government steeped in a
budget crisis of its own making, at a time when vital social services are
being slashed. The funding bill for this plane was endorsed by a research
group whose president is a board member of a subcontractor, and was passed
by a Congress heavily subsidized by the F--22's chief contractors. In just
this one election year of 2006, members of congress received $1,124,646 in
contributions from Lockheed-Martin alone ($949,271 to House reps, $175,375
to Senators), and that doesn't even account for the huge contributions from
other contractors like Connecticut-based Pratt and Whitney (still wonder why
Chris Dodd and Joe Lieberman voted for the Chambliss amendment?) and Texas
Instruments.

Defense appropriations remain the most hideously undercovered ongoing story
in America. Some of this is probably due to the fact that defense companies
have a long history of owning major media outlets (Westinghouse and GE being
prime examples), but even beyond that there seems to be an instinctive
reluctance on the part of reporters to even consider covering military waste
stories.

An example: House and Senate conferees this week quietly restored some $109
million in funding for the Pentagon's Joint Cargo Aircraft program, after
the Senate had slashed those funds from the budget earlier this year. The
only news outlet to cover the conference decision was congress's own The
Hill. Such subterranean conference restorations of defense appropriations --
there was a similar restoration of $230 million for the notorious V-22
Osprey program last year, at almost exactly the same time as the
better-publicized "emergency" social cuts -- almost never make the news.

Since both parties are heavily subsidized by defense contractors and
accustomed to giving them whatever they want, whenever they want
(Lockheed-Martin even has the contract for the internet server in congress,
for Christ's sake), neither party ever raises the issue with reporters. This
allows people like John Boehner to keep a straight face when he sighs and
says things like, "Look, we're broke," before slashing $600 million in
foster care funding, as he did last year. And while Democrats may object to
these same cuts, you'll hardly ever hear any of them mention -- oh, by the
way -- that they just voted to buy 183 of the world's most useless airplanes
at $361 million a pop. The F-22 -- useless as tits on a bull against
al-Qaeda, but it sure will look nice flying over next year's World Series
opener! Why not? It's not their money.

What a joke American journalism is. Our entire army is on its knees before a
few thousand gun-toting religious fanatics in the Arabian desert, and here's
our government, taking food out of the mouths of foster kids and single moms
to go binge-shopping with our tax money in the Sharper Image catalog of the
industrial world. And what's on TV? Fucking Suri Cruise? Are you kidding me?
_______

About author Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107

"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson