US drone lobby’s power points to revived military-industrial complex

By Geoff Dyer, Financial Times
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Last year the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general wrote a scathing indictment of the department’s use of drones to patrol US borders.

With its fleet of 10 Predator drones, the department’s border protection unit is one of the few arms of the US government that has permission to operate drones in American air space. According to the inspector general, the DHS had not allocated the resources to either operate the drones safely or to maintain them. As a result, the aircraft flew only one-third of the hours that had been expected.

The bipartisan amendment revealed a lot about the politics of immigration. The final resistance in the Senate was overcome not by arguments over demographics, but by a large new spending bill and the promise of a technological fix to the issue of illegal entry. (It has yet to pass the tougher hurdle in the House).

But it also demonstrated the way that drones and their makers have become a central fixture of what critics still dub the “military-industrial complex”, the backroom process whereby congressional purse strings are loosened for big-ticket items, sometimes even over the objections of important parts of the bureaucracy.

According to Tom Barry, a researcher at the Center for International Policy, demand for drones is being pushed by a mixture of “border hawks, immigration hardliners and congressional voices for the military contracting industry”, many of whom “hail from districts with drone industries or bases”.

Over the past decade, drones have partly replaced an important slice of the Pentagon’s industrial backbone. Since the end of the second world war, southern California had been the home of defence-related aerospace. However, with the Pentagon cuts of the 1990s as the Cold War wound down, more than 120,000 defence-related jobs were lost in the Los Angeles area alone.

Yet in the early 2000s, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq convinced the Pentagon that drones could play a central role in modern warfighting, both for their ability to conduct surveillance over difficult terrain and for firing missiles at small groups of alleged terrorists. “It is clear the military does not have enough unmanned vehicles,” President George W Bush said in 2001.

Most of the main manufacturers of drones for the military – including General Atomics, Northrop Grumman and Aerovironment – are based in Los Angeles or San Diego. With the help of a group of politicians from the state, drone sales have filled some of the gap left by the aerospace cuts a decade before.

In the process, the drone industry has built itself the sort of political relationships that the defence sector has always relied on to keep the contracts flowing in Washington. In the House of Representatives, the bipartisan “drone caucus” has 50 members and describes its goal as pushing “further development and acquisition of more systems”. (It was renamed last year as the “Unmanned Systems Caucus”, a reflection of the language used by the industry).

This is the way that defence contractors have worked for decades, through lobbying, political contributions and close personal relationships with key figures in the bureaucracy– Tom Barry, a researcher at the Center for International Policy

The group is led by Buck McKeon, the Republican congressman from the Los Angeles area who is also chair of the House armed services committee, and Democrat Henry Cuellar from a border area of Texas who has been a major supporter of using drones to patrol the frontier with Mexico.

In the 2012 election, Mr McKeon, who was the keynote speaker at the drone industry association’s annual conference that year, was the biggest recipient in the House of donations from General Atomics, the San Diego company that builds the Predator drone. Among his biggest donors was also Northrop Grumman, one of the other biggest manufacturers of drones.

The most striking example of the sector’s political clout involved Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk drones. In 2011, when the Pentagon unveiled a new round of budget cuts, one of the few programmes it cut was the Air Force’s use of a new Global Hawk model called Block 30. The Air Force said it would mothball the aircraft it had bought already and would keep using the U-2 spy plane to conduct the same surveillance operations, which it said would save $2.5bn over five years. Air Force officials said that the drones had registered a string of problems, including unreliability and cost overruns.

However, despite public statements in support of the decision by Pentagon boss Chuck Hagel and chair of the joint chiefs of staff Martin Dempsey, the Air Force has been obliged to continue using the Global Hawk drones and to purchase new ones after coming under intense pressure from members of Congress, who reinstated funding for the drones into the Pentagon’s budget.

In May, Mr McKeon and Jim Moran, a Democrat whose Virginia constituency includes Northrop Grumman’s headquarters, wrote a strongly worded letter to Mr Hagel urging him to comply with the budget passed by Congress which calls for the Air Force to buy three more of the drones. The service had been ignoring “unambiguous” instructions from Congress to purchase the aircraft, they said.

The Global Hawk programme has operations in 22 states, with final assembly for the drones taking place in Palmdale, in Mr McKeon’s California district. Northrop Grumman says that it has employees in each of the 53 California congressional districts.

“Congress has an oversight role and as a result it asks a lot of questions,” says Jim Zortman, one of Northrop Grumman’s senior executives for unmanned systems. “They are asking why the Air Force is parking new planes at the same time that it is sending money to refit 40- to 50-year-old aircraft.”