From time to time years ago, I used to write on the business of childhood. At some point I remember exploring the increasingly high-tech toy world of talking dolls. I recall my surprise on discovering that some of the same guys working on, say, the Cabbage Patch Doll that lisped at you how much it adored vanilla ice cream had also been working on talking cockpits for the Air Force. Guns and toys. In our world, it turns out, that’s not such a strange combination. The weaponry of war is woven amazingly deeply into the American landscape, though we’re remarkably unaware of it because, for us, war is something that takes place elsewhere.
Given our military budget, given the weaponry I’ve been describing the last couple of days, given that we must be the only nation on earth imagining generations of bombers for 2020 and 2030, it should hardly come as a surprise that, in a sense, weapons ‘r us. After all, since Eisenhower’s “military-industrial” days, the Pentagon has been used as a major conduit for the government to funnel money into advanced research and high-tech development of all sorts.
Still, I’m always amazed that so much plain old American ingenuity, technological and otherwise, goes into the making of ever more demonic weaponry. There is a long history of our dreaming of new weapons — from the submarine to air power to nuclear weaponry — so horrible that the warriors of the world would be brought to their knees and global peace would ensue. According to H. Bruce Franklin, in his fascinating and largely overlooked book War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, this all began early in the 19th century with Robert Fulton and his dreams of creating a submarine that would so threaten global navies as to bring every state to sue for peace. So perhaps we’ve always been, in part, a nation of Captain Nemos.
But, of course, in our present world, dreams are the least of it, as Conn Hallinan, provost at the University of California, Santa Cruz, suggests in a brief piece on the business of war below, which I found on the Z Magazine website, a site, by the way, which is always stuffed with an amazing array of pieces.
Given how a landscape of weapons creation and production undergirds our American world, I’m also eternally surprised at how little weapons and the companies that make them are actually covered in the press. Certainly, you find enough scattered pieces on individual weapons systems, but almost no overviews of what might be called the kingdom of weaponry, or of how our military-university-industrial complex functions, or of the revolving job-door that leads from the military to the corporations that do the business of war. I suspect, like our buried nuclear landscape, most of this is so deeply ingrained in our world, so basic, that it almost ceases to be noticeable. Tom
War Is Good Business
By Conn Hallinan
ZNET
January 11, 2003War, the expression goes, is a bad business. It’s certainly not a good idea if you’re a soldier or civilian caught in the middle of one, and it tends to raise havoc with things like domestic spending. But if you are Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman or former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair, Admiral (ret.) William Crowe Jr., these are salad days.
For those who make its instruments, war is very good business indeed, and, while the rest of the economy may be tanking, things that go “bang” and kill people are on a roll.
Boeing, for instance, recently doubled its production of JDAM kits ($25,000 a pop), which make dumb bombs smart. Raytheon added a shift to produce its Paveway laser guided bombs ($55,600 apiece), while Alliant Techsystems is churning out 265 million rounds of small arms ammunition ( $92 million).
To read more Hallinan click here
War, the expression goes, is a bad business. It’s certainly not a good idea if you’re a soldier or civilian caught in the middle of one, and it tends to raise havoc with things like domestic spending. But if you are Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman or former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair, Admiral (ret.) William Crowe Jr., these are salad days.
For those who make its instruments, war is very good business indeed, and, while the rest of the economy may be tanking, things that go “bang” and kill people are on a roll.
Boeing, for instance, recently doubled its production of JDAM kits ($25,000 a pop), which make dumb bombs smart. Raytheon added a shift to produce its Paveway laser guided bombs ($55,600 apiece), while Alliant Techsystems is churning out 265 million rounds of small arms ammunition ( $92 million).
To read more Hallinan click here