03/12/13 – Jeremiah Goulka – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
Next up is Jeremiah Gulka.
He's a regular at tomdispatch.com.
He used to be an analyst at the Rand Corporation, where he was co-author of a study about the Mujaheddin-e-Khalq communist terrorist cult, which is very important, but a topic for another day.
And he writes about American politics and culture for a few different places.
I think I saw you at the American Prospect and a couple other things there.
Welcome back to the show, Jeremiah.
How are you doing?
I'm really good, Scott.
Thanks for having me again.
Very happy to have you here and very happy to read about this subject.
A great piece of work you put together here about Lockheed and the C-130.
It's called C-130 Math.
I love that there's a special kind of math named after a plane.
I can't wait to find out what that means.
C-130 Math and Cargo of Pork.
What is C-130 Math, Jeremiah?
It's a slang term that picked up on Capitol Hill as lobbyists and staffers and members saw a way to really make a killing.
So the C-130 Hercules is a venerable old transport plane.
It's been around since the 50s, and it's gone through different additions over time, but it's been around for decades.
Hold on.
Describe one real quick for the people because everybody's seen one, but let's make sure that they know what you're talking about here.
Sure.
Good point.
It's a big, round, sort of sausage-shaped plane.
It's got overhead wings, four propellers, two on each wing, kind of a snub-nosed.
It's real likely that listeners will have seen them parked out at civilian airports as they're taking off or landing at anywhere.
I first started seeing them at O'Hare Airport because they're parked at a reserve wing there.
They're out at National Guard wings, and that is a direct result of C-130 Math.
What happened was in the Carter administration, the Air Force decided that it had enough of the planes, so it didn't want any more, and it was going to start looking into a newer version of a transport plane.
Lockheed, which makes the planes, didn't really like that idea at all, and so it got its lobbyists busy.
Through congressional earmarks, they got Congress to order a ton more of them than the Air Force wanted.
Over 20 years after the Carter administration said no more, the Air Force asked Congress for a total of five of the planes, but Congress, in its wisdom, provided 256 of them.
So at a ratio of 50 to 1, that's C-130 Math.
You get the Pentagon to ask for one, you get Congress to provide 50 more, and if you're a military contractor, you're rolling in the dough.
So 50 to 1, that's C-130 Math.
But what did the Air Force have to do with them?
They didn't want these planes, and they didn't have the means to deal with them.
So they basically just handed them off to Air Force Reserves and Air National Guard, which then went and parked their wings out at different civilian airports, and they basically sat there for years.
So that's where I grew up, actually, outside Chicago.
So whenever we'd fly through O'Hare, I'd look out the window and see them, and I was all excited until I learned why they were there.
Yeah, you know, it's funny because I think a lot of us, like you, we've grown up seeing these things.
They're the all-purpose gigantic plane that the Army uses.
Anybody who's ever seen a movie or watched the History Channel for, you know, 10 minutes after the Hitler special is over or whatever, you see this is the plane with the trucks and the tanks in the back or full of paratroopers jumping out or, as you say, you can turn it into a gunship, meaning, you know, have a bunch of high-powered machine guns, you know, bristling off of every part of the plane, that kind of thing, like during the invasion of Somalia, special forces used.
So it's kind of a ubiquitous plane.
I was actually quite surprised to hear you describe it as really quite useful for everything except flying into war zones in, say, for example, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Is that right?
Yeah, well, here's the funny thing about it.
The plane was basically fine.
You know, it did its job.
It did its job well.
You know, I've flown on them before, you know, and you kind of feel safe.
They're fine planes in the older versions.
The issue is the newer version, the C-130J Super Hercules, which the Pentagon didn't actually directly ask for, but Lockheed in their wisdom knew that they could just keep selling them, and they'd get Congress to buy them, and they'd get foreign militaries to buy them, and they'd get Congress to buy them to give to foreign militaries.
So they put a billion dollars of their taxpayer-funded profits into developing the new C-130J, which looks more or less the same as the older C-130s, but was a substantially different plane.
And that thing had loads of problems, but even so, Congress kept ordering them, and then the military, in its wisdom, started choosing to order them.
And that's the plane that is currently being purchased in many different versions.
The military's current excitement about those planes is focused on the gunship versions and the special operations supporting versions.
But like you said, they've been grounded at different times in Afghanistan, and these days the military is trying to use the H versions rather than the J versions because they don't think the Js are safe enough to do what they want to do.
Amazing.
And you cite an inspector general's report all about this, too, I guess.
Well, when did that come out, and did that make much of a splash when it did come out?
Well, the project and government oversight certainly tried to get that news out.
I'm not sure how much of a splash it made.
These are the sort of things that kind of pop up and off of people's radars.
As we're seeing right now, for instance, Lockheed's F-35 fighter plane is getting a fair amount of attention for its problems.
There have been new stuff, but I think it's partly with the sequestration in mind.
People are thinking of cuts, and here's this just ridiculous, pork, useless plane that's getting nicked.
I don't have to look.
Actually, when that IG's report came out, I think it was in the 90s.
Oh, about the super Hercules?
Yeah.
Actually, while we're talking, I'll look it up real quick.
Well, but that sounds pretty much close enough for government work and whatever, right?
The one they've had since the 1950s is just fine.
The new and improved version is a death trap, and nobody wants to fly in it.
That sounds about right.
Exactly.
The Inspector General report, 2004.
I see.
Okay.
Now, you talk about that C-130 math.
It got named that after the first time, but now that was a long time ago.
How many extra C-130s has the Pentagon bought beyond what they said they needed this whole time?
If we take what they said they needed at face value.
Oh, right, right, which is always such a question, right?
So it was 251 extras during the 70s to the 90s.
Since then, the military started asking for the planes again.
And so when you look at what the Pentagon asked for in its regular budget, as well as what it asked for in its supplemental war on terror budget, they did start asking for planes.
Then there's also this thing where the branches can ask for their unfunded requirements list, which is like their Santa's wish list.
And so the question is, what are added on top of that?
And so the math is not as extreme now because the military is asking for planes.
But, for instance, even last year, the Air Force asked for seven new planes, and the House Appropriations Committee and Armed Services Committee, they weren't as keen on only asking for seven, so they tried to put in funding to get 14 of them bought.
So that's seven more than the military even wanted.
So, you know, that lowers the 130 math, but it's still 100 percent more than the military even asked for.
Now, the one stat that I was hoping to find, and I'm not sure, I might have just read right past it, but the one thing that I didn't see in your article that I really want to know is, like, total revenues or total profits over, you know, this many or those many years for this particular company, Lockheed Martin, or whatever.
Lockheed Martin, Marietta, and all this stuff.
Over the years is a good question.
I only put in the 2011 information from Lockheed's annual report $5 billion, $5 billion in profit in 2011, $5 billion in profit in 2010, $5 billion in profit in 2009.
And despite all the hoo-ha about defense cuts, theoretical cuts, and sequestration, Lockheed projected that they were going to have record profits this year.
Now, I'm not good enough to do the decimal points and all that live on the air.
I don't know if you're that good at math or what, but maybe someone in the chat room can help us out with the percentages.
When you say that they're spending, let's round it off to $15 million a year lobbying Congress to do what they want, and then they get to turn that around into $5 billion worth of profit a year.
That's really something else.
That's the number one best game in town, and all they got to do is sort of kind of churn out planes, churn out planes, some that'll work, some that won't, you know.
Yeah, they figured it out pretty well.
It's really kind of an incredible math.
I don't have that math either, but it's more than 50 to 1, that's for sure.
Yeah, it is absolutely mind-boggling.
Now, you know, Richard Cummings did this great article for Playboy.com back in, what, 06 or something, called Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels about how in the 70s they abandoned the market completely.
I always forget the name of the plane, but they had a plane that was competing with the DC-10 or something like that, and nobody wanted it.
I think Delta or American bought a few of them, and then it just wasn't as good as the planes it was competing against, and so that was it.
They lost out, but they had spent billions developing the damn thing, and so they said they had a big board meeting and decided that's it.
We're only selling to the Pentagon from now on, and then that's it.
They've just been on welfare this whole time.
They're probably bigger welfare cheats than Citigroup even.
They get 1% of their work is to U.S. commercial or other customers, as they say in their annual report.
82% of their sales are to the U.S. government, and then 17% are to international customers, most of which are government, and a fair chunk of that is paid for by the taxpayer under the rubric of foreign military aid.
Yeah, it's crazy, and it's funny.
Actually, you mentioned that story, and that was the Lockheed L-1011 passenger plane wasn't working out so well, and all around the same time, Lockheed got a huge bailout from the government, which was the size and the directness of the bailout was unusual at the time, as I learned from reading Bill Hartung's excellent book on Lockheed called Prophets of War, and they also at the same time were getting in trouble for a huge bribery scandal where they were bribing, and they had these agents who would bribe foreign officials to want to buy Lockheed planes as opposed to something else, and that bribery scandal helped lead to the creation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by Congress.
Yeah, that's funny, and of course now they just shovel the money straight into the Congress and get around all those problems, right?
It's just an amazing form of recycling of taxpayer dollars, the idea that they're being paid by taxpayer dollars to build things that theoretically they should build well, but they're not, and then they take their profits from taxpayers, put it into lobbyists' hands, who then give it right back, and lobbying and campaign donations.
Yeah, it's pretty ugly.
All right, so I just got an email from a friend of the show, Robert, who says, Hey Scott, I loaded, unloaded C-130s in 1969 in Vietnam.
The airplane was already venerable in 1969.
Not really huge, big enough for a few pickup trucks, 42,000 pounds cargo.
So is it the C-123 I'm thinking of, or which one is the super huge one that you can fit two or three tanks in there, or is that just my imagination, or what am I thinking?
Oh, there are others, right?
So there's the C-5 Galaxy, which is massive, which was itself another huge issue of a plane that was over budget and didn't work, and guess who made that one?
Yep, Lockheed.
And then there's the C-17, huge, super huge one now, and then there's, you know, so yeah, the Hercules is a mid-sized transport plane.
I got you.
Yeah, I like that, venerable, back in 1969, which, you know, hey, that's good.
If the enlisted guys let it have a reputation for being a worthy aircraft, that's the kind of thing you want to listen to, you know?
Yep.
Not the salesmen at the top.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Yeah, well, of course they needed to improve it and ruin it.
All right, and of course all of this is in context of the budget, and as you say in the article, the military and their partisans, which is all of them on Capitol Hill, screaming that any reduction in the rate of growth of spending on the Pentagon is basically national suicide, leaving us helpless before our various superpower enemies in the world.
Yep.
Yep, and it seems to work fairly well as a sales pitch, or at least it works well enough in Capitol Hill, which is where it matters.
And you look at the numbers, I mean if something like half or more of the country is really quite ready to spend a lot less on national security, and of course if you cast it in those words like you just used and making it sound like it's all about keeping us safe at home and patriotism and people back off, but every time you mention a specific obvious waste coming from contractors, the military, or whatever, basically you never find anyone disagreeing.
I mean even your hockeyist militarist is not going to get up and say, oh yes, I'm really excited to fund something that doesn't work.
Even the hockeyist militarist wants things that work, unless they're actually in Congress or working at some place that is funded by the Pentagon or by military contractors.
Yeah, but even then everybody's got to recite the mantra that they want to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.
Yeah, except when it affects them.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And of course they never mean close down the bases in Kyrgyzstan, because what are you trying to get into a fight with Russia and China?
What are you crazy?
Get the hell out of Kyrgyzstan.
Oh, and by the way, save a little bit of money too, you know.
Right, right, right.
I don't know how much we're spending on the bases in Kyrgyzstan, but it's too much.
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, and people, it's funny as you hear that, because everyone's also fighting over their own little bucket.
You're not going to hear people saying in order to get out of Kyrgyzstan we should build more aircraft carriers or something, right?
Everyone says we should build more of everything, and that way we have, of course, every arrow in our quiver.
In fact, every arrow that everyone's thought of yet.
Right.
Yeah, that's the good way to get compromises is all parties get what they want instead of everybody has to sacrifice at the same time.
Right.
And now here's the part that I think, I don't know, in a way it kind of blows my mind, but on the other hand, at least it's sort of consistent with his schtick, if not his actual behavior.
I'm not sure I really understand it, but I'm referring to Donald Rumsfeld, and you describe him in the article as actually trying to do something about this.
He had this whole thing about transforming the military into what he wants it to be instead of what it used to be, and I guess this particular plane came up on his chopping block, which is odd to me because, in fact, part of that Lockheed stock article really talks a lot about and really develops the ties between, I think it was, each and every one of the members of the neocon Dick Cheney network in the first Bush Jr. administration that led us into war with Iraq all had ties to Lockheed.
Stephen Hadley was the furthest removed, and he was a lawyer for a company that represented him.
The rest of them almost all worked just directly for Lockheed at one point or another.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it's wild, and Lockheed's even bigger since Lockheed persuaded the Clinton administration to give them the better part of a billion dollars in order to buy up other companies and then lay off loads of people.
I mean, they've cornered the market.
It's extraordinary.
And so when thinking about this, yes, Rumsfeld did try to axe the C-130J, but that's not like he was axing Lockheed.
They still had the F-22 percolating, the F-35 percolating, and so when Gates killed the F-22 program, he did it also in favor of Lockheed's other plan, the F-35.
And as part of the deal to cut it to get Lockheed to go along, he had to agree to buy even more F-35s.
So the J program, when Rumsfeld was going to try to kill that and say that they had enough of them, it was amazing because the Air Force got busy with Lockheed to say no.
And, you know, actually the Project and Government Oversight unearthed an award that the Defense Department, Defense Contract Management Agency, which is supposed to keep its eye on the pill, it gave an award to one of its staffers for working really hard on behalf of the Air Force and Lockheed to undermine Rumsfeld's decision in killing the program.
Sweet.
Yeah, and the Air Force made up some fake numbers about what it would cost to close down the production line, overestimating the cost by over a billion dollars.
Yeah, it's pretty hard to cause change on Capitol Hill.
Yeah.
Well, and then didn't they decide they're going to go ahead and keep the F-22 anyway?
At least it flies, unlike the F-35.
Right, right.
What, is that saying too much?
Does it even fly, the damn thing?
Yeah, well, you know, it's more expensive per unit and so on and so on.
And, of course, when they talk about cutting a program, that starts getting into are they cutting how many future planes as opposed to the ones that are currently being flown would have already been how many that have been purchased or have been agreed to be purchased.
But, you know, one thing that's really crazy about this is that the F-16 is a great plane.
Lockheed makes it, and Lockheed still makes it.
It's not like those are no longer made.
They still make them, but only for foreign governments.
Right.
They're a lot cheaper.
Yeah, and, you know, at least from what I learned on the Discovery Channel, what now takes up the nose cone of an F-15 Strike Eagle is an entirely different thing from back when they were invented.
And it's the kind of electronics package that can help the missiles under those wings kill you from way over the horizon.
And that really, and I know I've talked with Air Force people who confirm this as well, that pretty much one flight of F-15 Eagles can dominate any airspace in the world.
I mean, assuming they have refueling nearby or whatever, that they could kick the ass of any collection of MiGs or whatever, mostly with their software and their radar capabilities and that kind of thing and change the whole, you know, they already changed the nature of dogfighting where it's advantage U.S. by 1,000 to 1 anyway.
And they don't need any of this crap.
F-15s and F-16s would be fine to dominate the entire planet, at least in terms of fighter planes, from now on.
Yeah, that's the thing.
It's so ridiculous about this.
We have so many more planes.
We have these good old planes that we have souped up that do a great job.
And that's even without asking the big questions about what other planes do and what you need the planes to do.
We don't do dogfights.
We haven't had a dogfight since, like, Korea or Vietnam.
I forget which, but it's not after that.
You know, we're not worried about having to actually go, you know, guns to guns, head to head with MiGs or anything.
That just doesn't happen.
I mean, that's not the last war.
That was many wars ago.
So when they're talking about the F-35 not being safe for dogfights because you can't see behind you because of the way the thing is designed, I mean, it's like you can make an ironic defense of the thing to say, well, we don't do dogfights anymore, so who cares if our new fighter plane can't do dogfights.
But what do they do?
I mean, things that they do we could do fine mostly with drones anyhow, and they cost hardly anything in comparison, you know, $4 million, $9 million in comparison to $200 million plus.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing, the bombing civilians where they live rather than fighting another major power.
That was Gates's point about the F-22 was the F-35, at least in cartoon form, will one day be able to bomb targets on the ground where the F-22 is only really equipped for air-to-air combat, and like you're saying, who to fight.
Yeah, and we've already got other things that can do those bombing things, and you can launch missiles from far away because we have those too.
We have bombers that can do the bombing.
We have special forces guys you can drop in from C-130s.
I mean, none of this stuff is really necessary.
It's all talking about this notion that the Defense Department lives on with this dream that we need to be able to fight two major theater wars like World War II as well as every fake threat that comes up, like every version of terrorism anywhere.
And we can already do that a lot, and it's such overkill.
It's just mind-boggling.
All right, thanks very much for your time, Jeremiah.
Hey, Scott, thanks for having me.
All right, everybody, that is Jeremiah Gulka, formerly an analyst at the RAND Corporation, and now you can find him writing all the time over there at TomDispatch.com.
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