Joint Strike Fighter billion-dollar failure

This video from the USA says about itself:

F-35 JOINT STRIKE FIGHTER IS A LEMON

11 Sep 2010

Military expert WINSLOW T. WHEELER explains why the F-35 will not cut it on the modern battlefield.

By William Boardman in the USA:

Fail! The $400 Billion Military Jet That Can’t Fly in Cloudy Weather

The F-35 joint strike fighter is an unbelievable failure, and the perfect illustration of everything that’s wrong with our military industrial complex.

According to one of its supporters, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is not “what our troops need,” is “too costly” and “poorly managed,” and its “present difficulties are too numerous to detail.”

The F-35 is a case study of government failure at all levels – civilian and military, federal, state, local, even airport authority. Not one critical government agency is meeting its obligation to protect the people it presumably represents. Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who wrote the F-35 critique above, is hardly unique as an illustration of how government fails, but he sees no alternative to failure.

Up for re-election in 2014 and long a supporter of basing the F-35 in Vermont, Leahy put those thoughts in a letter to a constituent made public March 13. This is Leahy’s most recent public communication since December 2012, when he refused to meet with opponents of the F-35 and his web site listed a page of “public discussion” events mostly from the spring, including private briefings with public officials, without responding to any substantive issues.

The F-35 is a nuclear-capable weapon of mass destruction that was supposed to be the “fighter of the future” when it was undertaken in 2001. Now, more than a decade overdue and more than 100% over budget, the plane is expected to cost $1.5 trillion over its useful life, of which about $400 billion has already been spent.

100th F-35 Being Built, None Yet Operational

In January, the Lockheed Martin production facility in Fort Worth, Texas, reported it was well along “in the final phase of building the wings” of the 100th F-35 constructed by the Bethesda, Maryland, company. Of the first 99 F-35s, none are yet operational.

The F-35 isn’t even close to fully operational – it can fly only on sunny days. It can’t fly at night. And it can’t fly in clouds or near lightning. We know this because the Pentagon tells us so, in a report written for the Secretary of Defense by the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, J. Michael Gilmore, dated February 15, 2013.

Although some media hyped the report as a “leaked document,” Gilmore clearly expected the report would become public, since he included a description of its wide distribution within the government, concluding with the reminder: “By law, I must provide Congress with any test-related material it requests.”

By March 5, Gilmore’s report was on the internet and giving the Canadian government second thoughts about buying the plane at all. Of the ten other countries partnering in F-35 development, Italy has already reduced the number of plane it will eventually buy. Norway, Turkey, and others are also having second thoughts – as is even the United States. Leahy indicates in his letter that “the jet is too costly to proceed with purchases at today’s planned levels,” which are about 2,400 planes at a currently projected cost of $120 billion each, give or take $30 billion.

Gilmore’s report covers the F-35 training program at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida for two months in the fall of 2012, a program originally scheduled to begin in August 2011, but the F-35 wasn’t ready then. Even a year later, the training program “was limited by the current restrictions of the aircraft.” The program partially trained 4 pilots in 46 days.

If the Pilot Can Eject, He’ll Be Lucky Not to Drown

The report’s executive summary gives a sense of what some of the “current restrictions” of the F-35 are:

Aircraft operating limitations prohibit flying the aircraft at night or in instrument meteorological conditions, hence pilots must avoid clouds and other weather. These restrictions are in place because testing has not been completed to certify the aircraft for night and instrument flight.
The aircraft also is currently prohibited from flying close formation, aerobatics, and stalls, all of which would normally be in the familiarization phase of transition training?.
The F-35A does not yet have the capability to train in these phases, nor any actual combat capability, because it is still early in system development.
Also, little can be learned from evaluating training in a system this immature?.
The radar, the pilot’s helmet-mounted display (HMD), and the cockpit interfaces for controlling the radios and navigational functions should be improved.

The report also notes that the pilot escape system is not yet reliable, especially if a pilot were to eject over water.

Related articles

• Pentagon Report: The F-35 Won’t Stand A Chance In Aerial Combat (warnewsupdates.blogspot.com)
• Pentagon grounds entire Joint Strike Fighter fleet (stripes.com)
• Test Pilots: F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Blind Spot Will Get It ‘Gunned Every Time’ (infiniteunknown.net)
• “F-35 super stealth plane will get pilots shot down in aerial combat” new leaked report says (theaviationist.com)
• | The most expensive fighter jet ever built, by the numbers! (truthaholics.wordpress.com)
• F-35 Forced to Land in Texas After Caution Light Comes On (theepochtimes.com)
• Pentagon grounds entire F-35 Joint Strike Fighter fleet (news.cnet.com)

Lockheed merchant of death sacked for marital infidelity

As we wrote today, CIA boss General Petraeus resigns, not because of war crimes under his watch in Iraq or Afghanistan, or of CIA torture. Not because of rape. Because of a consensual sexual relationship.

On the same day, the same happens with the boss of Lockheed Martin merchants of death corporation. Not for being a merchant of death. Not because of rape. Because of a consensual sexual relationship.

This video is about Lockheed Martin and the census in Britain.

From the BBC:

9 November 2012 Last updated at 22:42 GMT

Lockheed Martin executive quits over relationship

US defence company Lockheed Martin says its incoming president and chief executive officer has resigned over a relationship with a subordinate.

Christopher Kubasik resigned after an internal ethics investigation confirmed the “close personal relationship”, the company said in a statement.

He was due to take over as head of the company next year after serving as its chief operating officer.

Another Lockheed executive, Marillyn Hewson, will now become CEO in January.

…

Lockheed Martin is a defence and aerospace company based in Maryland that employs some 120,000 worldwide.

Its net sales for 2011 were $46.5bn (£29bn).

Related articles

• Meet the woman taking over Lockheed Martin (postcards.blogs.fortune.cnn.com)
• Lockheed Martin exec in line to be CEO resigns (bizjournals.com)
• Lockheed Martin CEO-to-be fired over relationship with subordinate employee (cbsnews.com)

Lockheed war profiteers sack workers to make Romney president

This video from the USA is called Meet the 0.01 Percent: War Profiteers.

No matter how many wars United States President Obama is waging, for some war profiteering fat cats and Pentagon bureaucrats it is never enough …

By Dina Rasor, Truthout in the USA:

Three Ploys the Department of Defense Uses When Their Budget Is at Risk

Thursday, 19 July 2012 10:42

I have been at this for too long. Since I first started looking at the Department of Defense (DoD) and its budget in 1979, I have seen the Pentagon, its largest contractors and its fellow travelers in the Congress predict economic crash and the end of the world as we know it when faced with large or even small budget cuts. With the possibility of the DoD cutting near $500 billion in ten years with the new budget, and near $500 billion in nine years if Congressional “sequestration” happens by the end of this year, the Pentagon is swooning and predicting doom. However, even with the sequestration cuts, the Pentagon would be going back to 2006 levels, where George Bush and Dick Cheney were fighting two wars and threatening other parts of the world while buying giant overrun weapons like the F-22 and the F-35. After all these years monitoring and exposing fraud and waste in the DoD, I am used to promises of doom whenever the DoD bureaucracy does not get exactly what it wants. However, with the unlikely sequestration cuts looming, the Pentagon and its contractors are acting apocalyptic.

Solutions – Making Government Work

Last year, after the so-called Super Committee created by Congress was unable to come up with a bipartisan compromise on cutting the government and raising revenues, the Congress decided to come up with a poison pill blend of cuts that would force both sides, Democrats and Republicans, to come up with a solution or face unpleasant cuts. Called sequestration, this exercise would have around $500 billion taken from social programs and around $500 billion taken from defense, unless the Congress could be scared into a compromise. Few thought that either side of Congress would let this happen because the cuts would be from favorite programs on each side. Most of Washington really doesn’t think it is going to happen, but the DoD and the contractors are raising a stink and making dire threats if it does materialize.

As soon as Leon Panetta became secretary of defense, he made it clear that he would not accept these levels of cuts in the DoD and go back to dangerous 2006 levels. I wasn’t surprised at this because of all the pressure by the entrenched DoD bureaucracy that will not accept any cuts, but I was surprised when, earlier this year, President Obama startled Panetta and the DoD by claiming that he would not get rid of the defense side of the cuts. Despite the hysteria by the DoD and its contractors, the Congressional Budget Office showed that even this level of cuts is not unreasonable for the DoD to absorb:

Defense spending cuts slated to take effect automatically in January if the two parties cannot agree on a more balanced budget would still leave the Defense Department with more funding than it received six years ago, according to a report Wednesday from the Congressional Budget Office.

It projects that the so-called sequestration of military and other funds, ordered by a law enacted last year, would cut the Pentagon’s requested FY 2013 budget of $526 billion to $469 billion, an amount it said was still “larger than it was in 2006 (in 2013 dollars) and larger than the average base budget during the 1980s.”

Sequestration would cut spending for the Pentagon by about $1 trillion over the next decade. The pending cut has prompted panic from Defense Secretary Panetta, who said it would cause “an unacceptable risk in future combat operations.” Lawmakers such as House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-California) have said they want to block any cuts to defense spending – whether through sequestration or through President Barack Obama’s plan to keep the defense budget mostly level over the next ten years.

Gordon Adams, a former Office of Management and Budget associate director for national security and international affairs under President Bill Clinton who is now at the Stimson Center, a nonprofit think tank, said he doubts sequestration will happen at all but that “the fact is Defense would not really suffer under those automatic cuts. 2006 was a very healthy level for defense spending.”

Tell that to the defense drama queens in the Congress and the DoD. On Tuesday this week, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who at one time actually cut some defense spending when he was secretary of defense but also ironically said that deficits don’t matter, came up to Capitol Hill to brief the Republicans on how it would be catastrophic to allow the cuts. Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contactor, has threatened to send out termination notices to its employees right before Election Day to scare the Democrats back into line. On Wednesday, the House Armed Services Committee, chaired by McKeon, had its defense contractors, including Lockheed, affirm to the committee the deadly consequences of cutting any defense money. There was a lot of partisan bickering with the Democrats claiming that the defense contractor CEOs only cared about their piece of the pie and were not looking out for the long-term view to help the country. You might remember my column on how McKeon’s wife was running for California state legislator and Lockheed and other defense contractors contributed money for her election effort, while, as I was told, never expecting to receive any quid pro quo from Chairman McKeon.

Even though most in Washington think that there will be a compromise before this sequestration will happen, the DoD has fallen back on three ruses that they always use when their budget is threatened; jobs will be lost and greatly affect the economy, our soldiers will not get the best weapons in the world and our enemies will take advantage of our weaknesses and kill us.

The jobs threat is usually the first threat that they use in bad economic times. Lockheed and the DoD have predicted that a million jobs will be killed over the ten years of these cuts and could plunge us back into the recession. I heard this a lot during the Reagan recession when the DoD budget was rocketing up. The DoD threatened this last fall when there was talk of budget cuts and suggested that DoD spending should be increased to stimulate the economy. I wrote a Solutions column in September 2011 on how that was a bad idea, especially since the DoD budget had doubled since the attack on the World Trade Center.

Lockheed and other companies continue to make threats on jobs and affect the election by sending out pink slips right before the election. These companies claim that they have to send out these pink slips right before the election according to the law – a charge that has been called bogus and a scare tactic. This could affect the election because areas with high defense jobs could be thrown to vote for the Republican candidates. This is especially true in Northern Virginia, especially the defense-job-laden Fairfax county, which is seen as crucial to winning the state.

The next threat, that any budget cuts could hurt our troops, is being played out by the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) with the help of New Hampshire Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte. In the past, the DoD has spent billions on boondoggle weapons while shorting troops on things that they really need, especially during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as I laid out in my book, “Betraying Our Troops.” Troops in Iraq had to bolt on any metal they could find on their Humvees to protect themselves from IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices), while some of their senior officers spent the war in Saddam’s luxurious palaces and the Pentagon wasted billions of dollars on harebrained schemes to stop IEDs.

Military Industry Descends on Capitol Hill to Fight for Their Perceived Right to Profit: here.

“I will not cut the military budget” -Mitt Romney: here.

Unlike Mitt Romney, Most Americans Want to Cut US Military Spending: here.

Romney‘s London Fundraisers Will Take Him to Heart of Scandal-Plagued Banking Industry: here.

Mitt Romney Avoided Major Tax Hit By Shifting Stock Of Offshoring Firm: here.

Romney scandal worse than it seems: here.

Foreign income kept flowing into Romney’s accounts well after he left Bain: here.

Management at Bain-owned plant were playing golf in the office during mass layoffs: here.

Mitt Romney Made Over $25 Million In Foreign Income While Governing, Campaigning: here.

Dina Rasor and Jason Leopold, Truthout: “How is it possible that, for two decades now, Mitt Romney has successfully avoided revealing any details about his vast wealth, has been able to manipulate and stash wealth overseas with no public accountability, has not been held to account for his complete lack of transparency, has painted himself as a creator of thousands of jobs even though the public record shows business decisions he presided over resulted in the loss of jobs because of mass wealth being scooped out of the assets of these same companies?” Here.

Mr. Romney thinks we should give big oil companies another $3.8 billion a year in tax breaks: here.

Conservative newspaper calls for Romney to release more tax returns: here.

Romney Campaign’s Race-Baiting Strategy Could Have Dire Consequences for America: AlterNet: here.

Mitt Romney, in his first trip abroad as the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, is trying to walk back comments he made questioning London’s Olympics preparation — comments that have drawn a sharp response from Prime Minister David Cameron: here.

Tel Aviv professor calls Romney’s remarks at his fundraiser in Israel “anti-Semitic”: here.

McCain defends Palin pick against Cheney, says Cheney was wrong on torture too: here.

Harry Reid: Romney ‘Didn’t Pay Any Taxes For 10 Years’: here.

Half Of American Households Hold 1 Percent Of Wealth: here.

Oxford university-merchants of death links

This video says about itself:

Shocking new allegations of corruption and fraud on a massive scale which have emerged in further British and American media reports covering the Carroll Foundation Trust and the parallel Carroll Maryland Trust cases have revealed that BAE Systems based at the Farnborough Airport Hampshire executed serious multi-million dollar fraudulent transactions “in concert” with HSBC Holdings Plc.

The US Senate oversight committees are understood to be also taking a close interest in the combined Carroll Trust case following these new disclosures which center around the Carroll Aircraft Corporation global reach operations which were based at the world renowned Ministry of Defence Farnborough aviation establishment under the umbrella of the Farnborough Aerospace Development Corporation Plc. (FADC) the Carroll Aircraft Corporation Plc. (CAC) and the Strategic Research & Development Corporation Plc. (SRDC).

The Carroll Aircraft’s interests are understood to have embraced over two hundred and fifty million dollars of military-industrial complex investment holdings on a world wide basis including aviation assets which are thought to have involved a full spectrum of civilian/military jets and helicopters. In a sensational further twist it has emerged that HSBC were one of the main banking institutions for the Carroll Global Corporation Group which ultimately fell victim of a co-ordinated multiple criminal seizure operation over a number of years which saw the virtual vaporisation of one of the Ministry of Defence’s primary external operating contractors known at the time of these shocking events as the Farnborough Aerospace Development Corporation Plc and the Carroll Aircraft Corporation Plc.

Sources have now disclosed that the Carroll Aircraft Corporation group structures were utilised within the framework of a co-ordinated trans-national crime syndicate operation which effectively impulsed the criminal liquidation and tax fraud embezzlement of over a staggering one billion dollars of the Carroll Trust’s world wide interests. Further sources have revealed that the FBI Washington DC field office elite law enforcement officers charged with this case of international importance have recently obtained Carroll Aircraft Group case files which are understood to contain a startling litany of forged and falsified Delaware corporations directly linked to fraudulent HSBC International offshore numbered bank accounts incorporated in the Bahamas Gibraltar the British Virgin Islands and the City of London.

The BAE Systems chairman Dick Olver continues to refuse to issue a detailed public statement to the world’s media hungry for an explanation about these serious criminal allegations which now confront Europe’s largest defence contractor.

International News Networks:

http://baesystems.blogspot.com/

By Rory MacKinnon in Britain:

Students shine light on Oxford blood money

Friday 10 June 2011

Oxford University was exposed today for hosting an international “Serious Study of Peace” conference at the same time as ploughing millions of pounds into weapons development.

Students at the university’s Anti-War Action group published a dossier of dirty dealings in this week’s Lancet with the help of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade.

It showed that between 2008 and 2010 Oxford’s endowment and capital funds invested an average of £4.5m a year into arms dealers through third-party funds.

Recipients included BAE Systems, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and others, they said.

BAE grabbed headlines in March when its armoured personnel carriers were used to crush dozens peaceful protesters in Bahrain, while Lockheed Martin – in which the university held a £1.4m stake as recently as last April – is a known manufacturer of banned cluster bombs.

The period of the group’s investigations encompasses the May 2009 peace event held at the university’s St John’s College.

At the time Chancellor Lord Patten of Barnes said in a message to attendees that the world had become much better at preventing and resolving conflict.

“But as I know from my work as co-chair of the International Crisis Group

not really a peace group since it sometimes lobbies for so-called ‘humanitarian’ war

there is much more that we could do to resolve conflicts and avoid the conditions which help produce and sustain them,” he said.

That same month the university launched a socially responsible investment review committee specifically to address arms manufacturing.

In its official recommendation last March the committee advised against investment “directly or indirectly” in companies selling weapons banned under Britain’s arms control treaties.

But the university’s council overruled the recommendation, saying that screening out such arms manufacturers would be difficult due to a lack of reliable information.

Vice-chancellor Andrew Hamilton said that council members felt investment in arms dealing “was actually very difficult to achieve as such a tiny minority of companies manufactured such weapons or munitions.”

But the report’s authors said Oxford had a choice.

“They can channel their considerable capital to worthy enterprises, shaping the future in a responsible way – or they can continue to provide the financial wherewithal to produce potentially ever deadlier and more indiscriminate means of destruction.”

A university spokesman said they had no response at this time.

BAE Systems Retains Control of Money it Owes the Tanzanian People: here.

Some of Britain’s top universities have accepted millions of pounds from the arms industry giving the controversial trade “a veneer of respectability,” campaigners said today: here.

USA: Defender of the Capitalist System: Department of Defense Worst in Competitive Contracts. Dina Rasor, Truthout: “The Department of Defense (DoD) came in the lowest in the government on competing their procurement contracts…. In the DoD, unlike the past, once a company makes a weapon, it almost always gets the follow-on contract. Some of these weapons … go through generations of technical changes and use of totally difference technology, but because it was originally competed up to decades earlier, these follow-on contracts can be considered ‘competitive’”: here.