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Tag: defense contractors
Raytheon Awarded $49 Million DoD Contract Weeks After Former Board Member Lloyd Austin Confirmed as Defense Secretary
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stands to profit from a new Department of Defense contract with arms contractor Raytheon, even after he promised to divest from Raytheon holdings he acquired as a civilian.
A new $49 million contract was awarded to Raytheon last week, just weeks after the company’s former board member Lloyd Austin was confirmed as the new Secretary of Defense. The contract is for engines for VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aircraft.
Austin joined the board of Raytheon Technologies in 2016, the same year he retired from the armed forces. As of 2020, his disclosed Raytheon stock and compensation holdings amount to more than $1.4 million, and it’s likely he’ll sell his Raytheon shares at an inflated price due to the latest contract while in office as Secretary of Defense.
Politico’s Defense News, Brought to You by Northrop Grumman
Since its inception 14 years ago, Politico has risen to become an internet news giant. Now employing over 700 people and reaching 50 million people per month, the website and newspaper has become one of the most trusted sources of information on political issues in the United States. Key to this is its range of influential newsletters, which reach millions every day.
And yet the organization has entered into a number of very troubling partnerships that could potentially undermine the credibility and independence of its reporting. Both its defense and space newsletters, which keep readers informed and up to date on those topics, come sponsored by giant military and aerospace contractor Northrop Grumman.
To its credit, Politico is upfront about their partnership, with those sections bearing an advertisement label stating “presented by Northrop Grumman.” The question is whether readers can truly trust the outlet to accurately report and scrutinize those areas that are so critical to its chief sponsor. Does taking Northrop Grumman’s money make Politico less likely to call out the Pentagon’s enormous and bloated military budget, war crimes committed overseas, or the gross wastage of public funds?
Weapons biz bankrolls experts pushing to extend Afghan War
Earlier this month, a study group established by Congress recommended that President Joe Biden extend the May 1 deadline for withdrawing troops from America’s longest war. It’s a strategy that many experts say runs the risk of abrogating the U.S.-Taliban agreement and potentially setting back the potential peace process in Afghanistan — or even dooming it to failure.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a striking similarity in the backgrounds of the individuals involved in these critical recommendations, which are likely to influence whether Biden maintains a “conditions based” U.S. military footprint in Afghanistan. Two of the group’s three co-chairs and nine of the group’s 12 plenary members, comprised of what the group refers to as “members,” have current or recent financial ties to major defense contractors, an industry that soaks up more than half of the $740 billion defense budget, and stands to gain from protracted U.S. military involvement overseas.
There was more diversity in views and financial interests among the 26 “senior advisers” that the group consulted. At least three of these advisers have warned publicly that the suggested troop withdrawal extension may pose significant risks. But the study group’s plenary is deeply intertwined with the military industrial base, with nearly $4 million the group’s co-chairs and plenary have received in compensation for their work on the boards of defense contractors.
DOD Formalizes Program Giving Companies More Access to Classified Info
The Pentagon has formally created a group of defense companies that can get broader access to classified initiatives known as special-access programs, hoping that more insight will make contractors more efficient and cost-conscious.
In a Dec. 15 memo to the defense industrial base, Pentagon acquisition boss Ellen M. Lord formalized the SAP Contractor Portfolio Program, which ran as a pilot initiative for several years. The effort will help companies balance the need to understand technology development with the need to protect that information.
“As the world sees a return to great power competition, the Department of Defense must strengthen its engagement with the defense industrial base in order to respond to the national security challenges facing the United States in a more responsive and cost efficient manner,” Lord wrote.
“However, the new phenomenon of rapid technology proliferation has also increased the level of technology protection necessary to maintain the United States’ competitive edge. This increased protection, resulting in many activities being secured in special access programs, challenges the DOD’s ability to share critical information and to collaborate with the DIB to deliver capability to the warfighter,” she said.
GOP/Democrat COVID-19 Package Bails Out Defense Contractors, Excludes Stimulus Checks for Americans
A COVID-19 relief package, reportedly negotiated between a handful of Senate Republicans and Democrats, includes a bailout for Defense Department contractors while excluding a second round of stimulus checks for Americans.
A draft of the relief package, obtained by The Daily Poster, reveals that the spending bill does not include a plan by Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to provide Americans with $1,200 stimulus checks but does provide a bailout for defense contractors.
Slipped into the package, seemingly on the final 525 pages, is an extension of a CARES Act provision that allows federal agencies to pay taxpayer money to defense contractors who are not working during the Chinese coronavirus crisis.
“There are no direct payments for regular working people, people living off tips,” a congressional aide told Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist. “But they made sure there’s a provision in there to help defense contractors who aren’t working right now. They get what they’re looking for.”
U-2 Spy Plane Taps Into Computers On The Ground To Expand Data Processing Ability Mid-Mission
Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works advanced projects division recently demonstrated the ability of a U-2S Dragon Lady spy plane to remotely use computers on the ground to help process data from onboard sensors and other systems in flight. The U-2S did this by leveraging a system that Skunk Works and the U.S. Air Force recently used to show how these aircraft, as well as others, will be able to receive updates for their mission computers, including new code to add previously unavailable functionality, in mid-air in the future.
This “distributed processing” flight test took place in November, according to Skunk Works. The U-2S involved was able to establish a link to “a ground node” via a computer cloud, through which it was able to better disseminate sensor information. Doing this allowed the aircraft to make use of additional computer processing power offboard the aircraft.
The defense-industry swamp is eager to engulf the Biden administration
Just days after the presidential election, a new investment firm called Pine Island Acquisition Corporation quietly began trading on the New York Stock Exchange, with the prospect of becoming a notable player in the $2 trillion defense and aerospace industry. The company’s greatest asset was not its relatively modest bankroll goal of $200 million, but its connections — deep ties to policy establishment figures shaping the incoming Biden administration.
In describing itself to potential investors, Pine Island’s prospectus boasted a leadership team with “extensive access, insight, expertise and management skill” in the defense sector.
In the dawning Biden era, that might be an understatement.
Diversity!
Biden Picks Raytheon Board Member To Lead US War Machine
Joe Biden has selected former general Lloyd J. Austin III to be the next secretary of defense, assuaging fears among antiwar activists that the position would go to bloodthirsty psychopath Michele Flournoy as commonly predicted.
As has become the standard ritual for Biden’s cabinet picks, the mass media are holding a parade to celebrate the fact that Austin would be the first Black chief of the U.S. war machine while virtually ignoring the murderous agendas he has facilitated throughout his career.
As head of Central Command Austin actively campaigned to resurrect the Pentagon’s spectacularly failed program of trying to arm “rebels” in Syria to fight ISIS, and in 2014 he backed immunity for U.S. troops from war crimes prosecutions by the government of Afghanistan.
He helped spearhead the Iraq invasion, and he is a member of the same private equity fund which invests in defense contractors as Flournoy and Biden’s warmongering pick for Secretary of State Tony Blinken.
Hellbound and Down 
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