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January 11, 2011 Tomgram: William Hartung, Lockheed Martin's Shadow Government
As a boy in the 1950s, I can remember my
father, a World War II vet, becoming livid while insisting that our
family not shop at a local grocery store. Its owners, he swore, had
been “war profiteers” and he would never forgive them. He practically
spat the phrase out. I have no idea whether it was true. All I know
is that, for him, “war profiteer” was the worst of curses, the most
horrifying of sins. In 1947, Arthur Miller wrote a wrenching play on
the subject of war profiteering,
All My Sons,
based on a news story about a woman who turned her father in for
selling faulty parts to the U.S. military during my father’s war. It was
a hit and, in 1948, was made into a movie starring Edward G. Robinson.
Now, skip 42 years. In September 1990, I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times with the title “Privatize the Pentagon,” a distinctly tongue-in-cheek column suggesting that it was time for the U.S. to develop what I termed a “free-enterprise-oriented military.” “Looking back,” I wrote then, “isn’t it odd that unlike the environment, the post office, the poor, and Eastern Europe, the military has experienced no privatizing pressures?” No privatizing pressures? Little did I know. Today, if my dad were alive to fume about “war profiteers,” people would have no idea why he was so worked up. Today, only a neocon could write a meaningful play with “war profiteering” as its theme, and my sarcastic column of 1990 now reads as if it were written in Klingon. Don’t blame my dad, Arthur Miller, or me if we couldn’t imagine a future in which for-profit war would be the norm in our American world, in which a “free-enterprise-oriented military” would turn out to be the functional definition of “the U.S. military,” in which so many jobs from KP to mail delivery, guard duty to the training of foreign forces, have been outsourced to crony capitalist or rent-a-gun outfits like Halliburton, KBR, Xe Services ( formerly Blackwater), and Dyncorp that think it’s just great to make a buck off war. As they see it, permanent war couldn’t be a dandier or more profitable way to organize our world. If one giant outfit gives war profiteering its full modern meaning, though, it’s Lockheed Martin. You’ll know what I’m talking about when you read today’s post. As much as any robber baron of the nineteenth century, that corporation has long deserved its own biography. Now, William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, has written Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex, the definitive account of how that company came to lord it over our national security world. It’s a staggering tale that would leave my father spinning in his grave. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Hartung discusses the unsettling reach of Lockheed Martin, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom Is Lockheed Martin Shadowing You? |
