September 1, 2016
Exclusive: Behind the
U.S. media-political clamor for a new Cold War with Russia is a massive
investment by the Military-Industrial Complex in “think tanks” and other
propaganda outlets, writes Jonathan Marshall.
By Jonathan Marshall
The U.S. military has won only
a single major war since the end of World War II (the Gulf War of 1990-91). But
U.S. military contractors continue to win major budget wars in Congress nearly
every year, proving that no force on earth can resist their lobbying prowess
and political clout.
Consider the steady march to
victory of the biggest single weapons program in history — the planned purchase
of advanced Lockheed-Martin F-35 jets by the Air Force, Navy, and Marines at a
total projected cost of more than $1 trillion.
The Air Force and Marines have
both declared the Joint Strike Fighter ready for combat, and Congress is now
forking over billions of dollars a year to acquire what is slated to become a
fleet of 2,400 jets.
Yet the world’s most expensive
fighter bomber still doesn’t work properly and may never perform as advertised.
That’s not “dezinformatsiya”
from Russian “information warfare” specialists. That’s the official opinion of
the Pentagon’s top weapons evaluator, Michael Gilmore.
In an Aug,
9 memo obtained by Bloomberg News, Gilmore warned senior Pentagon
officials that the F-35 program “is actually not on a path toward success but
instead on a path toward failing to deliver” the aircraft’s promised
capabilities. He said the program “is running out of time and money to complete
the planned flight testing and implement the required fixes and modifications.”
The military testing czar
reported that complex software problems and testing deficiencies “continue to
be discovered at a substantial rate.” As a result, the planes may fail to track
moving targets on the ground, warn pilots when enemy radar systems spot them,
or make use of a newly designed bomb. Even the F-35’s gun may not function
properly.
Devastating Assessments
The internal Pentagon
assessment was just the latest in a long list of devastating
critical assessments and development setbacks for the plane. They
include repeated groundings of the plane due to fires and other safety issues;
the discovery of dangerous engine instability; and helmets that can cause fatal
whiplash. The plane even got soundly beaten in a mock engagement with a much
older (and cheaper) F-16.
Last year, an article in
the conservative National Reviewargued that “the biggest threat the U.S.
military faces over the next few decades is not the carrier-killing Chinese
anti-ship ballistic missile, or the proliferation of inexpensive quiet
diesel-electric attack subs, or even Chinese and Russian anti-satellite
programs. The biggest threat comes from the F-35 . . . For this
trillion-dollar-plus investment we get a plane far slower than a 1970s F-14
Tomcat, a plane with less than half the range of a 40-year-old A-6 Intruder . .
. and a plane that had its head handed to it by an F-16 during a recent
dogfight competition.”
Likening the F-35 to a
previous failed fighter jet program, retired Air Force Colonel Dan Ward observed
last year, “Perhaps the truly best scenario for the Joint Strike Fighter is
for it to follow in the footsteps of the F-22 and provide a combat capability
that is irrelevant to actual military needs. That way, when the whole fleet
gets grounded because of an unsolvable flaw, the impact on our defense posture
would be nil.”
Lockheed’s “Pay-to-Play Ad
Agency”
Coming
to the program’s defense most recently was military analyst Dan Goure,
in the blog of the respected magazine, The National Interest. Goure
belittled critics in the Pentagon’s Operational Test and Evaluation Office as
“green eyeshade people, like the goblins at Gringott’s in the Harry Potter
series.”
Describing the F-35 as “a
revolutionary platform,” he declared, “Its ability to operate undetected in
hostile airspace, gathering information and even targeting data on enemy air
and ground targets, before launching surprise attacks demonstrates a decisive
advantage over existing threat systems. . . . The Joint Strike Fighter test
program is making progress at an accelerated rate. More to the point, even
before it has completed the rigid performance template laid out by DOT&E,
the F-35 has demonstrated capabilities that far exceed any current Western
fighter.”
If that reads a bit like a
Lockheed-Martin marketing brochure, consider the source. In his article, Goure
identified himself only as a vice president of the Lexington Institute, which bills itself as
“a nonprofit public-policy research organization headquartered in Arlington,
Virginia.”
What Goure didn’t say — and
the Lexington Institute doesn’t generally disclose — is that “it receives contributions
from defense giants Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and others, which
pay Lexington to ‘comment on defense,’” according to a 2010 profile in Politico.
Earlier the same year, Harper’s contributor
Ken Silverstein called the
widely quoted think tank “the defense industry’s pay-to-play ad agency.” He
added, “Outfits like Lexington produce the press conferences, position papers
and op-eds that keep military money flowing to defense contractors.”
Goure’s indirect association
with Lockheed gives a hint as to why programs like the F-35 continue to thrive
despite performance failures, gigantic cost overruns, and schedule delays that
would otherwise trigger headline-grabbing congressional investigations and
produce streams of indignant rhetoric from Fox News commentators about
government failure.
Promoting the New Cold War
Think tanks like the Lexington
Institute are prime
movers behind the domestic propaganda campaign to revive the Cold War
against the diminished Russian state and justify weapons programs like the
F-35.
As Lee Fang observed
recently in The Intercept, “The escalating anti-Russian rhetoric
in the U.S. presidential campaign comes in the midst of a major push by
military contractors to position Moscow as a potent enemy that must
be countered with a drastic increase in military spending by NATO countries.”
Thus the Lockheed-funded
Aerospace Industries Association warns that
the Obama administration is failing to spend enough on “aircraft, ship and
ground combat systems” to adequately address “Russian aggression on NATO’s
doorstep.” The Lockheed- and
Pentagon-funded Center for European Policy Analysis issues a stream ofalarmist reports about Russian military
threats to Eastern Europe.
And the highly influential
Atlantic Council — funded by
Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, the U.S. Navy, Army, Air Force, Marines, and even
the Ukrainian World Congress — promotes articles like
“Why Peace is Impossible with Putin” and declares that
NATO must “commit to greater military spending” to deal with “a revanchist
Russia.”
Origins of NATO’s Expansion
The campaign to portray Russia
as a menace, led by contractor-funded pundits and analysts, began soon after
the Cold War ended. In 1996, Lockheed executive Bruce Jackson founded the
U.S. Committee on NATO, whose motto was “Strengthen America, Secure Europe.
Defend Values. Expand NATO.”
Its mission ran directly
contrary to promises by
the George H.W. Bush administration not to expand the Western military alliance
eastward after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Joining Jackson were such
neo-conservative hawks as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Robert Kagan. One
neocon insider called Jackson — who went on to co-found the Committee for the
Liberation of Iraq — “the nexus between the defense industry and the neoconservatives.
He translates us to them, and them to us.”
The organization’s intense and
highly successful lobbying efforts did not go unnoticed. In 1998, the New
York Times reported that
“American arms manufacturers, who stand to gain billions of dollars in sales of
weapons, communication systems and other military equipment if the Senate
approves NATO expansion, have made enormous investments in lobbyists and
campaign contributions to promote their cause in Washington. . . .
“The four dozen companies
whose main business is arms have showered candidates with $32.3 million since
the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the decade. By
comparison, the tobacco lobby spent $26.9 million in that same period, 1991 to
1997.”
A spokesman for Lockheed said,
”We’ve taken the long-term approach to NATO expansion, establishing alliances.
When the day arrives and those countries are in a position to buy combat
aircraft, we certainly intend on being a competitor.”
The lobbying worked. In 1999, against
Russian opposition, NATO absorbed the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.
In 2004, it added Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and
Slovenia. Albania and Croatia joined next in 2009. Most provocatively, in 2008
NATO invited Ukraine to join the Western alliance, setting the stage for the dangerous
conflict between NATO and Russia over that country today.
The fortunes of American arms
makers soared. “By 2014, the twelve new [NATO] members had purchased close to
$17 billion worth of American weapons,” according to
Andrew Cockburn, “while . . . Romania celebrated the arrival of Eastern
Europe’s first $134 million Lockheed Martin Aegis Ashore missile-defense
system.”
Last fall, Washington
Business Journal reported that
“if anyone is benefitting from the unease between Russia and the rest of the
world, it would have to be Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin Corp.
(NYSE: LMT). The company is positioned to make large profits off what could
very well be an international military spending spree by Russia’s neighbors.”
Citing a big contract to sell
missiles to Poland, the newspaper added, “Officials from Lockheed aren’t
explicitly declaring that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s adventurism
in Ukraine is good for business, but they aren’t shying away from recognizing
the opportunity that Poland is presenting them as Warsaw continues to embark on
a massive military modernization project — one that has accelerated as tensions
grip Eastern Europe.”
Lockheed’s Lobby Machine
Lockheed continues to pump
money into the American political system to ensure that it remains the nation’s
largest military contractor. From 2008 to 2015, its lobbying
expenditures exceeded $13 million in all but one year. The company sprinkled
business from the F-35 program into 46 states and claims that it
generates tens of thousands of jobs.
Among the 18 states enjoying a
claimed economic impact of more than $100 million from the fighter jet is
Vermont — which is why the F-35 gets the support even of Sen.
Bernie Sanders.
As he told one town hall
meeting, “It employs hundreds of people. It provides a college education for
hundreds of people. So for me the question is not whether we have the F-35 or
not. It is here. The question for me is whether it is located in Burlington,
Vermont or whether it is located in Florida.”
In 1961, President Eisenhower
observed that the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large
arms industry” had begun to influence “every city, every State house, every
office of the Federal government.”
In his famous farewell address
to the nation, Eisenhower warned that “we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial
complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and
will persist.”
How right he was. But not even
Ike could have imagined the extravagant costs to the nation of failing to hold
that complex at bay — ranging from a trillion-dollar fighter jet program to the
needless and far more dangerous resurrection of the Cold War a quarter century
after the West achieved victory.
Jonathan Marshall is author or
co-author of five books on international affairs, including The
Lebanese Connection: Corruption, Civil War and the International Drug Traffic (Stanford
University Press, 2012). Some of his previous articles for Consortiumnews were
“Risky
Blowback from Russian Sanctions”; “Neocons
Want Regime Change in Iran”; “Saudi
Cash Wins France’s Favor”; “The
Saudis’ Hurt Feelings”; “Saudi
Arabia’s Nuclear Bluster”; “The
US Hand in the Syrian Mess”; and “Hidden
Origins of Syria’s Civil War.” ]
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