BY SEAN HEALY
Killing people is big business. In 1999, the United States spent US$276 billion on its military, just over a third of the world's total military expenditure. In 2000, the Pentagon's budget is expected to hit US$310 billion.
Pentagon figures show it paid out US$118 billion to contractors for goods and services in 1999. Of that, US$32 billion went to the industry's giants, the companies progressive defence analyst William Hartung has called "the four lumbering behemoths of the Apocalypse": TRW, Raytheon, Boeing and, the largest of them all, Lockheed Martin.
Lockheed Martin is the industry's 400-kilogram gorilla, the final product of a decade of industry consolidation which began during the early years of the Clinton administration.
The conglomeration of already huge contractors Lockheed, Martin Marietta, Loral and General Dynamic's combat aircraft division, Lockheed Martin owns US$30 billion in assets, employs 147,000 people and has facilities in 447 US cities and 56 countries and territories around the world.
By revenue, Lockheed Martin is the 52nd largest corporation in the US, with sales of US$25.3 billion in 1999. Of this, US$12.6 billion came from Pentagon contracts, making it the US military's largest supplier.
Death from the skies
As US military strategy has come to rely bombing countries from the air, Lockheed Martin has grown in importance. The company is the largest manufacturer of US combat aircraft — such as the F-16 Flying Falcon and the F-117A "stealth" fighter — and also makes rocket systems such as Trident, the mainstay of the US's nuclear missile arsenal.
The company boasts, "The F-16 has been the most successful fighter in modern times ... The F-16 is the backbone of the [US Air Force] and the air forces of 18 other countries ... the F-16 will constitute 56 percent of the USAF's fighter force through year 2010."
The F-16 was, in the company's words, the "workhorse" of the 1991 US air war against Iraq. Two hundred and fifty F-16s flew 13,500 sorties against Iraqi targets, more than any other aircraft, dropping 18,000 tonnes of bombs. Up to 100,000 Iraqi soldiers and civilians died during this bombing, a fact Lockheed Martin's project notes on the aircraft neglect to mention.
The F-117A was one of the mainstays of the US air war against Serbia in 1999. The F-117A ran bombing raids against bridges, factories, government buildings and the Serbian television station, raids which again entailed significant loss of life.
Lockheed Martin is likely to maintain its dominant position as the US military's provider of choice for death from the skies. The company is the main contractor for the USAF's two next-generation fighter jets: the joint strike fighter (with Boeing), which will be phased in over the next decade as a replacement to the F-16, and the US$200 million each F-22.
The US$67 billion F-22 project was initially designed to allow first strike capability against the Soviet Union, but, since the Soviet Union no longer exists, the project's aims have been rewritten: to provide the air power to allow the US to conduct two major regional wars at once. If full-scale production begins, as is expected within the next two years, the fighter will ensure US air supremacy for decades to come.
Lockheed Martin is also the major supplier of jet fighters to US allies. At the end of the Cold War, the company took rapid steps to offset any loss in income from (feared but eventually insignificant) reductions in US military spending by expanding massively overseas.
The company's aircraft have since become first choice for notorious human rights abusers. Lockheed Martin runs an F-16 factory in Ankara, Turkey, for example, which has produced 240 of the fighters, which have been used to bomb Kurdish villages in the south-east, conduct air raids on Kurdish rebel camps in northern Iraq and "buzz" Greek government officials overflying Cyprus.
Lockheed Martin has also benefited from provoking regional arms races. In 1999, the United Arab Emirates signed a deal to buy 80 F-16s for US$8 billion; within months, to maintain its regional air superiority, the Israeli military negotiated a purchase of 50 of the jets.
Power and influence
Growing fat on military largesse is not a passive process; the company's senior executives do more than sit back and enjoy. The company and the industry have followed a deliberate, decades-long strategy to purchase political influence in Washington.
The US arms industry is the largest contributor to both Democrat and Republican coffers, beating the tobacco industry by a margin of $32.3 million to $26.9 million in 1991-97, according to the US Center for Responsive Politics. Lockheed Martin, TRW, Boeing and Raytheon have made US$6 million in contributions during the current presidential campaign. In addition, the industry's six largest contractors spent $51 million on lobbying in 1998-99, according to William Hartung.
Lockheed Martin's connections with the Republican Party run deepest. The Republicans' ticket for the November election — George W. Bush for president, Dick Cheney for vice-president — has been widely described as the arms industry's "dream ticket".
As Texas governor, Bush has unsuccessfully sought to sell Texas' welfare system to Lockheed Martin, only to be overruled by Washington, while Cheney's wife is on the board of the firm. Lockheed Martin vice-president Bruce Jackson was reported by Hartung to have boasted at a 1999 industry conference that he would "write the Republican platform" on defence if Bush was nominated.
But the company also has deep links with Democrats. In 1997, it gave the party $232,782, about half what it gave the Republicans, but clearly enough to buy considerable influence: Clinton and Gore have thrown billions at new defence projects, such as the F-22.
This outlay reaps considerable benefits. Since the Republicans took control of Congress in 1995, it has routinely added US$5-10 billion to the Pentagon budget beyond what the Clinton administration asked for, particularly for new weapons acquisition. Since 1978, for example, the USAF has asked for five Lockheed Martin C-130 transport planes; Congress has given it 256.
According to a special report by Janice Shields for Foreign Policy in Focus, arms manufacturers also receive $8 billion in subsidies and tax breaks from the US government each year, including $3.3 billion in grants to foreign countries to buy US armaments and $2 billion to pay foreign countries' outstanding debts to arms companies. The US government also pays for most of the industry's research and development.
Writing policy
Lockheed Martin wields considerable influence over US foreign and defence policy. Its linkages with generals, politicians, government officials and right-wing academics and analysts are unparalleled.
In 1997, it successfully lobbied the Clinton administration to lift the 20-year ban on jet fighter sales to Latin America, in part by paying campaign contributions of US$1 million each to the 38 senators and 78 representatives who helped it.
In 1998, its executives headed a massive multi-pronged lobbying effort to ensure Senate support for the expansion of NATO to central and eastern Europe, in the expectation of major arms purchases from these countries. It even funded the pro-NATO side in Hungary's 1997 referendum on NATO membership.
In 1999, it was the loudest cheerleader for the bombing of Serbia, its vice-president writing articles in the Capitol Hill newspaper, Roll Call, urging legislators to properly fund the war effort. The company stands to make millions from weapons sales to restock US arsenals depleted by the bombing campaign.
The single largest example of Lockheed Martin's influence over US policy is the Clinton administration's resurrection of former president Ronald Reagan's Star Wars missile defence scheme.
Since 1983, successive administrations have spent US$70 billion on testing a National Missile Defence (NMD) project, according to the Arms Trade Resource Centre. Lockheed Martin is one of four major contractors on NMD (along with Boeing, Raytheon and TRW), manufacturing the Theatre High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system, which detects incoming missiles, and the missile systems of the rockets fired to intercept them.
To date, nearly every test of the systems has been a failure. According to Hartung, THAAD has two successes from eight tests, while the rocket systems are one from three (and the one is allegedly fraudulent). At each failure, the arms manufacturers and attached lobbyists and politicians have prevailed on Clinton to increase funding, rather than shelve the project.
While Clinton has deferred the decision on another three years of funding to after the US elections, it is again expected to favour the contractors. THAAD has already received clearance to proceed to the engineering and manufacturing development stage, which will be worth US$4 billion to Lockheed Martin.
Reagan's original scheme was supposed to provide protection from a massive Soviet nuclear strike and would also have ensured safety if the US chose to strike first. Now, the justification for the NMD program is to prevent a nuclear strike by North Korea, which presently has no capacity to produce intercontinental ballistic missiles (and won't for 10 years from the time it decides to build them).
Russia, meanwhile, has warned that NMD's implementation would violate the anti-ballistic missile treaty and possibly kick off a whole new nuclear arms race. China has reacted similarly.
But, hey, what's the risk of nuclear holocaust next to more dollars in the pockets of those making the weapons? Lockheed Martin needs to preserve its market share, after all — even if its market is in death.