Lockheed Martin, Making Money the Old-Fashioned Way

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-hartung/lockheed-martin-making-mo_b_9486334.html



Lockheed Martin, Making Money the Old-Fashioned Way
William Hartung
03/17/2016 11:45 am ET |

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The news of the year was the company's purchase of Sikorsky from United Technologies, a move that will make Lockheed Martin the primary source of helicopters for the U.S. military. It was the company's largest acquisition since the 1990s, when Lockheed and Martin Marietta merged, aided by hundreds of millions in taxpayer subsidies to pay for such questionable items as golden parachutes for executives impacted by the merger.

Lockheed Martin wasn't the only company to grow through merger during that era -- Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas, Northrop and Grumman merged, and dozens of other deals were made. At the time, the argument for allowing -- and subsidizing -- these combinations was that it would reduce overhead and result in better weapons prices for the U.S. government. But as former Pentagon official Lawrence Korb noted at the time, "past history indicates that these mergers end up costing rather than saving the government money." And so it has been, as Lockheed Martin has racked up multi-billion dollar cost overruns on major programs like the F-35 combat aircraft and the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS).

Rather than saving money, the mergers created industrial behemoths with greater leverage over the Pentagon. With only a handful of major firms to turn to in the procurement of major weapons systems, the Department of Defense's ability to keep a lid on mushrooming weapons costs has been diminished. And a company like Lockheed Martin, which has $46 billion in revenues and claims to have a presence in every state in the union, has enormous financial and political clout. This gives Lockheed Martin the ability to prolong programs that serve its corporate interests whether or not they are in the national interest.

A case in point is the F-35 program. If it goes forward as planned, Lockheed Martin will end up being the only supplier of fighter aircraft to the U.S. government, leaving the taxpayers in a "take it or leave it" position with regard to the company's product. A recent analysis by the Project on Government Oversight has catalogued the myriad performance problems with the F-35. Most importantly, even as the Pentagon accelerates spending on F-35s and assures us that the plane is ready for prime time, the Pentagon's office of independent testing has noted that it won't even be known whether the aircraft will be sustainable in combat until 2022. Thus far, test aircraft at Edwards Air Force Base have only been able to fly about six sorties per month due to excessive down time for maintenance. The high tech testing simulator that is supposed to assess the F-35s capabilities has itself had serious development problems. And the aircraft coming off the assembly line now have even more problems than the ones that came before.