(channeling Country Joe for a second, there)
Well, the results are in. And we have a brand new face in the Pentagon's top ten contractors list for fiscal year 2003! Guess who?
- Lockheed Martin Corp. - $21.9 billion
- Boeing - $17.3 billion
- Northrop Grumman Corp. - $11.1 billion
- General Dynamics Corp. - $8.2 billion
- Raytheon Co. - $7.9 billion
- United Technologies Corp. - $4.5 billion
- Halliburton - $3.9 billion
- General Electric Co. - $2.8 billion
- Science Applications International Corp. - $2.6 billion
- Computer Science Corp. - $2.5 billion
(The Pentagon overall awarded $209 billion in prime contracts, or $28.2 billion more than in fiscal 2002)
Although Raytheon does have some large time-and-materials contracts, Halliburton is the top contractor on the list who does things for the Pentagon, as opposed to primarily making things.
Hallliburton is up from #37 in 2002. And it is now the Army's #1 contractor, up from #19 in 2002.
The incestuous relationship between policymaking and profitmaking is in full flower, and the privatization of functions heretofore performed by the military is having a devastating impact.
Check out this chock-full-o-goodies New Yorker piece titled "Contract Sport: What did the Vice-President do for Halliburton?"
...Halliburton blamed the high costs on an obscure Kuwaiti firm, Altanmia Commercial Marketing, which it subcontracted to deliver the fuel. In Kuwait, the oil business is controlled by the state, and Halliburton has claimed that government officials there pressured it into hiring Altanmia, which had no experience in fuel transport. Yet a previously undisclosed letter, dated May 4, 2003, and sent from an American contracting officer to Kuwait's oil minister, plainly describes the decision to use Altanmia as Halliburton's own "recommendation." The letter also shows that the Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that oversees such transactions, supported Halliburton's decision to use the expensive subcontractor-which may explain why it has been reluctant to criticize the deal.
Scott Saunders, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, confirmed the authenticity of the letter, and acknowledged that Halliburton had picked Altanmia. "Halliburton told us that only Altanmia could meet our requirements," he said.
Experts in the Persian Gulf oil business say that the Altanmia deal looks suspicious. "There is not a reason on earth to sell gasoline at the price they did," Youssef Ibrahim, the managing director of the Strategic Energy Investment Group, a consulting firm in Dubai, said. "Halliburton and their Kuwaiti partners made out like bandits." A well-informed Kuwaiti source called the prices charged by Altanmia "absurd," and said that Halliburton's arrangement to buy Kuwaiti oil through a middleman, rather than directly from the government, was "highly irregular." He added, "There is no way that this could have transpired without the knowledge and direction" of Kuwait's oil minister, Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah. Two sources told me that the oil minister's brother, Talal Al-Fahad Al-Sabah, may have secret financial ties to Altanmia. (The brothers are also nephews of the Emir and the Prime Minister of Kuwait.) "There are calls in parliament to open an investigation," the Kuwaiti source said. "It could shake the government."
...Around this time, in 1968, Dick Cheney arrived in Washington. He was a political-science graduate student who had won a congressional fellowship with Bill Steiger, a Republican from his home state of Wyoming. One of Cheney's first assignments was to visit college campuses where antiwar protests were disrupting classes, and quietly assess the scene. Steiger was part of a group of congressmen who were considering ways to cut off federal funding to campuses where violent protests had broken out. It was an early lesson in the strategic use of government cutbacks.
Instead of returning to graduate school, Cheney got a job as the deputy for a brash congressional colleague of Steiger's, Donald Rumsfeld, whom Richard Nixon had appointed to head the Office of Economic Opportunity. The O.E.O., which had played a prominent role in Johnson's War on Poverty, was not favored by Nixon. According to Dan Guttman, who co-wrote "The Shadow Government" (1976), Rumsfeld and Cheney diminished the power of the office by outsourcing many of its jobs. Their tactics were not subtle. At nine o'clock on the morning of September 17, 1969, Rumsfeld distributed a new agency phone directory; without explanation, a hundred and eight employee names had been dropped. The vast majority were senior career civil servants who had been appointed by Democrats.
...As Defense Secretary, Cheney developed a contempt for Congress, which, a friend said, he came to regard as "a bunch of annoying gnats." Meanwhile, his affinity for business deepened. "The meetings with businessmen were the ones that really got him pumped," a former aide said. One company that did exceedingly well was Halliburton. Toward the end of Cheney's tenure, the Pentagon decided to turn over to a single company the bulk of the business of planning and providing support for military operations abroad-tasks such as preparing food, doing the laundry, and cleaning the latrines. As Singer writes in "Corporate Warriors," the Pentagon commissioned Halliburton to do a classified study of how this might work. In effect, the company was being asked to create its own market.
Halliburton was paid $3.9 million to write its initial report, which offered a strategy for providing support to twenty thousand troops. The Pentagon then paid Halliburton five million dollars more to do a follow-up study. In August, 1992, Halliburton was selected by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do all the work needed to support the military during the next five years, in accordance with the plan it had itself drawn up. The Pentagon had never relied so heavily on a single company before. Although the profit margins for this omnibus government contract were narrower than they were for private-sector jobs, there was a guaranteed profit of one per cent, with the possibility of as much as nine per cent-making it a rare bit of business with no risk.
...Yet Sam Gardiner, the retired Air Force colonel, told me that the success of private contractors in the battlefield has had an unforeseen consequence at the Pentagon. "It makes it too easy to go to war," he said. "When you can hire people to go to war, there's none of the grumbling and the political friction." He noted that much of the scut work now being contracted out to firms like Halliburton was traditionally performed by reserve soldiers, who often complain the loudest.
...There are some hundred and thirty-five thousand American troops in Iraq, but Gardiner estimated that there would be as many as three hundred thousand if not for private contractors. He said, "Think how much harder it would have been to get Congress, or the American public, to support those numbers."
...For months there has been a debate in Washington about when the Bush Administration decided to go to war against Saddam. In Ron Suskind's recent book "The Price of Loyalty," former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill charges that Cheney agitated for U.S. intervention well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Additional evidence that Cheney played an early planning role is contained in a previously undisclosed National Security Council document, dated February 3, 2001. The top-secret document, written by a high-level N.S.C. official, concerned Cheney's newly formed Energy Task Force. It directed the N.S.C. staff to coöperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the "melding" of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies towards rogue states," such as Iraq, and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."
A source who worked at the N.S.C. at the time doubted that there were links between Cheney's Energy Task Force and the overthrow of Saddam. But Mark Medish, who served as senior director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs at the N.S.C. during the Clinton Administration, told me that he regards the document as potentially "huge." He said, "People think Cheney's Energy Task Force has been secretive about domestic issues," referring to the fact that the Vice-President has been unwilling to reveal information about private task-force meetings that took place in 2001, when information was being gathered to help develop President Bush's energy policy. "But if this little group was discussing geostrategic plans for oil, it puts the issue of war in the context of the captains of the oil industry sitting down with Cheney and laying grand, global plans."
...Halliburton's 2002 annual report describes counterterrorism as offering "growth opportunities."
After all, as Cheney said in a speech to the CATO Institute, 23 June 1998, "The good lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratic regimes friendly to the United States... Unfortunately, Iran is sitting right in the middle of the area and the United States has declared unilateral economic sanctions against that country. As a result, American firms are prohibited from dealing with Iran and find themselves cut out of the action..."
Unless, of course, you can work through foreign subsidiaries - and avoid taxes to boot.
Then, there's an article in The Nation, adapted from William D. Hartung's How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy? A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration:
...The bread and butter for the Big Three are weapons systems like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (Lockheed Martin), the F/A-18 E/F combat aircraft (Boeing/Northrop Grumman), the F-22 Raptor (Lockheed Martin/Boeing) and the C-17 transport aircraft (Boeing). Northrop Grumman is also a major player in the area of combat ships, through its ownership of the Newport News, Virginia and Pascagoula, Mississippi, shipyards. All three firms are also well placed in the design and production of target-ing devices, electronic warfare equipment, long-range strike systems and precision munitions. For example, Boeing makes the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), a kit that can be used to make "dumb" bombs "smart." The JDAM was used in such large quantities in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that the company has had to run double shifts to keep up with Air Force demand.
...The Big Three are also poised to profit from President Bush's plan to colonize the moon and send a manned mission to Mars, both of which are stalking horses for launching an arms race in space. Boeing and Lockheed Martin were already well positioned in the military-space field through major contracts in space launch, satellite and missile defense work, plus a partnership to run the United Space Alliance, the joint venture in charge of launches of the space shuttle. Northrop Grumman bought into the field through its acquisition of TRW, a major space and Star Wars contractor. The new presidential commission charged with fleshing out Bush's space vision is being chaired by Edward "Pete" Aldridge, the Pentagon's former Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and a current member of Lockheed Martin's board of directors. Meanwhile, over at the Air Force, the under secretary in charge of acquiring space assets is Peter Teets, a former chief operating officer at Lockheed Martin. His position was created in accordance with the recommendations of the Commission to Assess US National Security Space Management and Organization, an advisory panel that published its blueprint for the militarization of space just as Bush was taking office. The group, which included representatives of eight Pentagon contractors, was presided over by Donald Rumsfeld until he left to take up his current post as Bush's Defense Secretary. Rumsfeld has been dutifully implementing the commission's recommendations ever since.
The Big Three are also wired into numerous other sources of federal contracts for everything from airport security to domestic surveillance, all in the name of fighting what the White House now calls the GWOT (Global War on Terrorism). The $20 billion-plus total that Lockheed Martin receives annually is more than is spent in an average year on the largest federal welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a program that is meant to provide income support to several million women and children living below the poverty line. Under Bush and company, corporate welfare trumps human well-being every time.
"...plenty good money to be made, supplying the army with the tools of the trade..."