{"id":2060,"date":"2013-09-05T10:01:07","date_gmt":"2013-09-05T16:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=2060"},"modified":"2013-09-05T10:01:07","modified_gmt":"2013-09-05T16:01:07","slug":"6-major-corporations-that-profit-from-u-s-aid-to-the-egyptian-military","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/6-major-corporations-that-profit-from-u-s-aid-to-the-egyptian-military\/","title":{"rendered":"6 Major Corporations that Profit from U.S. Aid to the Egyptian Military"},"content":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Noel Brinkerhoff and Danny Biederman, AllGov
\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n

Geopolitical reasons have been cited repeatedly to explain why the United States continues to provide more than $1 billion in military aid to\u00a0Egypt<\/a>\u00a0since the overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi and the subsequent crackdown on his political party, the Muslim Brotherhood. But there are also many American domestic reasons\u2014at least six\u2014that clarify why the Obama administration is reluctant to cut off Egypt\u2019s military support.<\/p>\n

About $1.3 billion is authorized each year to bolster Egypt\u2019s military, one of the most powerful in the Middle East. That aid covers 80% of all of Egypt\u2019s military purchases, according to a recent congressional\u00a0assessment<\/a>\u00a0(pdf). This assistance has totaled nearly $42 billion since 1948, and nearly all of it has gone to buy American weaponry and hardware.<\/p>\n

In fact, the appropriated funds never make their way directly to Egypt. \u201cIt goes to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then to a trust fund at the Treasury and, finally, out to U.S. military contractors that make the tanks and fighter jets that ultimately get sent to Egypt,\u201d wrote Julia Simon of National Public Radio (NPR).<\/p>\n

Presently, six U.S. defense contractors benefit from the billion-dollar assistance given to Cairo.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s clearly a major subsidy program for these companies,\u201d Shana Marshall, an expert on military aid to Egypt and associate director and research instructor at the\u00a0Institute for Middle East Studies<\/a>\u00a0at George Washington University, told AlterNet. \u201cIt\u2019s kept open their production line when they would have otherwise been closed down and it\u2019s a source of really reliable profits for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the companies is\u00a0Lockheed Martin<\/a>, manufacturer of fighter jets like the F-16. Under the terms of a 2010 arms deal worth $2.5 billion, Lockheed Martin was supposed to provide 20 F-16s to the Egyptian military. So far, 14 aircraft have been delivered, with the remaining six scheduled for delivery by December 2014. For now, the last shipment of planes has been delayed, while the Obama administration decides how to handle the ongoing crisis in Egypt.<\/p>\n

Lockheed Martin also has benefited from a $46 million contract given to one of its Florida subsidiaries to supply night vision sensor systems for Apache helicopters in Egypt.<\/p>\n

The Apache helicopter is made by another U.S. arms merchant:\u00a0Boeing<\/a>. The second largest military contractor in the world has made nearly a billion dollars since 2000 selling the attack helicopter as well as related equipment to Egypt.<\/p>\n

Then, there is\u00a0General Dynamics<\/a>, manufacturer of the M1A1 tank. Egypt has purchased more than 1,000 of them at a cost of $3.9 billion over the years.<\/p>\n

A fourth company benefiting from Egypt\u2019s assistance is\u00a0L-3 Communications<\/a>, which produces communications, surveillance and reconnaissance equipment. In 2010, the company made $24 million to assemble a sonar system for the Egyptian navy, and this year, L-3 Communications was awarded a $10.5 million contract to provide high-frequency transceivers for Egypt\u2019s military.<\/p>\n

Two more contractors making out from the Washington-Cairo relationship are\u00a0General Electric<\/a>, which signed a $13.6 million deal to provide \u201cservice life extension kits\u201d for engines used in the Lockheed F-16s owned by Egypt, and\u00a0Exelis<\/a>, a Virginia-based company specializing in electronics, communications, cybersecurity and intelligence that has made at least $30 million over the past two years in deals with Egypt.<\/p>\n

Although U.S. law mandates that aid to Egypt be ended in the event of a\u00a0coup<\/a>, which is what recently occurred, the profits realized by these corporations may continue to make that an unlikely prospect.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery time someone mentions a suspension of aid or rethinking the aid program, they send a team of defense industry lobbyists to Capitol Hill to knock on doors to make sure that there\u2019s no suspension of the aid program,\u201d Marshall told AlterNet.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most telling is the fact that much of the military hardware that the U.S. provides to Egypt is neither used nor needed. Speaking of the 1,000 M1A1 tanks, Marshall told NPR, \u201cThere’s no conceivable scenario in which they’d need all those tanks short of an alien invasion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, more than 20% of the tanks have never been used, according to Robert Springborg, an Egyptian military expert at the\u00a0Naval Postgraduate School<\/a>. \u201cThey are crated up and then they sit in deep storage, and that’s where they remain,\u201d he told NPR.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Noel Brinkerhoff and Danny Biederman, AllGov click here for original article Geopolitical reasons have been cited repeatedly to explain why the United States continues to provide more than $1 billion in military aid to\u00a0Egypt\u00a0since the overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi and the subsequent crackdown on his political party, the Muslim Brotherhood. But there are also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2061,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[169],"class_list":["post-2060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-boeing"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/195c5070-b192-491f-afe5-b0336e8c5390.jpeg?fit=151%2C180&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2060"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2062,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2060\/revisions\/2062"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}