{"id":2289,"date":"2013-10-09T16:15:56","date_gmt":"2013-10-09T22:15:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=2289"},"modified":"2013-10-09T16:15:56","modified_gmt":"2013-10-09T22:15:56","slug":"us-drone-lobbys-power-points-to-revived-military-industrial-complex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/us-drone-lobbys-power-points-to-revived-military-industrial-complex\/","title":{"rendered":"US drone lobby\u2019s power points to revived military-industrial complex"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Geoff Dyer, Financial Times
\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n

Last year the\u00a0Department of Homeland Security\u2019s inspector general\u00a0<\/a>wrote a scathing indictment of the department\u2019s use of drones to patrol US borders.<\/p>\n

With its fleet of 10 Predator\u00a0drones<\/a>, the department\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n

Yet when the Senate debated immigration legislation in July, the bill had a welcome surprise for the border patrol \u2013 an amendment that included $4.5bn in funds to buy more drones and other associated technologies to provide 24-hour surveillance of the border.<\/span><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n

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).<\/p>\n

But it also demonstrated the way that\u00a0drones and their makers\u00a0<\/a>have become a central fixture of what critics still dub the \u201cmilitary-industrial complex\u201d, the backroom process whereby congressional purse strings are loosened for big-ticket items, sometimes even over the objections of important parts of the bureaucracy.<\/p>\n

According to Tom Barry, a researcher at the Center for International Policy, demand for drones is being pushed by a mixture of \u201cborder hawks, immigration hardliners and congressional voices for the military contracting industry\u201d, many of whom \u201chail from districts with drone industries or bases\u201d.<\/p>\n

\n
\u201cThis is the way that defence contractors have worked for decades, through lobbying, political contributions and close personal relationships with key figures in the bureaucracy,\u201d says Mr Barry.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Over the past decade, drones have partly replaced an important slice of the Pentagon\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cIt is clear the military does not have enough unmanned vehicles,\u201d President George W Bush said in 2001.<\/p>\n

Most of the main manufacturers of drones for the military \u2013 including General Atomics,\u00a0Northrop Grumman\u00a0<\/a>and Aerovironment \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cdrone caucus\u201d has 50 members and describes its goal as pushing \u201cfurther development and acquisition of more systems\u201d. (It was renamed last year as the \u201cUnmanned Systems Caucus\u201d, a reflection of the language used by the industry).<\/p>\n

\n
This\u00a0is the way that defence contractors have worked for decades, through lobbying, political contributions and close personal relationships with key figures in the\u00a0bureaucracy<\/q>– Tom Barry, a researcher at the Center for International Policy<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In the 2012 election, Mr McKeon, who was the keynote speaker at the drone industry association\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The most striking example of the sector\u2019s political clout involved Northrop Grumman\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s budget.<\/p>\n

In May, Mr McKeon and Jim Moran, a Democrat whose Virginia constituency includes Northrop Grumman\u2019s 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 \u201cunambiguous\u201d instructions from Congress to purchase the aircraft, they said.<\/p>\n

The Global Hawk programme has operations in 22 states, with final assembly for the drones taking place in Palmdale, in Mr McKeon\u2019s California district. Northrop Grumman says that it has employees in each of the 53 California congressional districts.<\/p>\n

\u201cCongress has an oversight role and as a result it asks a lot of questions,\u201d says Jim Zortman, one of Northrop Grumman\u2019s senior executives for unmanned systems. \u201cThey 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Geoff Dyer, Financial Times click here for original article Last year the\u00a0Department of Homeland Security\u2019s inspector general\u00a0wrote a scathing indictment of the department\u2019s use of drones to patrol US borders. With its fleet of 10 Predator\u00a0drones, the department\u2019s border protection unit is one of the few arms of the US government that has permission […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2290,"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":[168],"class_list":["post-2289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-drones"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/b9186408-997b-4ef6-bc8a-9e7860ea2ae0.jpg?fit=119%2C153&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2289","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=2289"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2291,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2289\/revisions\/2291"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}