More (#4) from The Shadow World:

Lockheed was responsible for, and benefited financially from, one of the myriad technologies that comprised the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Its Homing Overlay Experiment – interceptor warheads that would unfurl umbrella-like spokes – was tested successfully in June 1984, after three failed tests had threatened the future of the initiative. To this day the company brags about the test which, it turns out, was rigged. A decade later the GAO reported that the mock warhead used in the test had been ‘enhanced’ to make it easier to hit. By that time $35bn had been spent on Star Wars. So, displaying its customary lack of ethics, the company cooperated with the Army to once again dupe the American taxpayer out of billions of dollars.

And:

Under Augustine, Lockheed had set a goal of doubling its arms exports within five years. A real obstacle to achieving this was that few countries could afford the multibillion-dollar cost of the company’s sophisticated weaponry. As Chairman of the DPACT Augustine led the effort to create a new arms export subsidy; a $15bn fund that would provide low-rate US government-backed loans to potential arms-buying countries. With the arrival of Newt Gingrich's conservative revolution in Congress the fund was approved and signed by President Clinton in December 1995.

Armed with this new ‘open chequebook for arms sales’, Augustine and Lockheed’s vice-president for International Operations, Bruce Jackson, determined that their best hope of new business lay in an extended NATO. New entrants to the military alliance would be required to replace their Soviet-era weapons with systems compatible with NATO’s dominant Western members. Augustine toured Eastern Europe. In Romania he pledged that if the country’s government bought a new radar system from Lockheed Martin, the company would use its considerable clout in Washington to promote Bucharest’s NATO candidacy. In other words, a major defence manufacturer made clear that it was willing to reshape American international security and foreign policy to secure an arms order.

And:

The [Defense Policy Board], like a number of defence-related public bodies, blurs the distinction between the public and the private, resulting in the situation where activities undertaken with public money display minimal transparency and accountability. This is consistent with American capitalism, in which the activities of a corporation are seen as the province of that corporation, and neither the public nor Congress has a fundamental right to access information about them. Most notably, the US Freedom of Information Act doesn’t apply to private companies, leading a Democratic representative from Illinois to suggest that ‘it’s almost as if these private military contractors are involved in a secret war’.

By allocating so much public sector work to private companies, the Bush administration created a condition in which the nature and practice of government activities could be hidden under the cloak of corporate privacy. This severely limits both financial and political accountability. The financial activities of these companies are scrutinized primarily by its shareholders if it is a public company and occasionally by government auditors on a contract-by-contract basis. And of course, at a political level, it is not just feasible but common for the government to claim that a contractor had promised to do one thing but then did another, thus absolving government of responsibility.

This opaque operating environment, in addition to the secrecy afforded by national security, makes it extremely difficult to critically analyse and hold to account the massive military-industrial complex that drives the country’s predisposition to warfare and the increasing militarization of American society. What analysis there is tends to focus on the few corruption scandals that see the light of day.