All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
Let's talk about Lockheed.
Okay, good.
I'm glad I have your agreement.
Mark Sheffield keeps the blog Policy on Point at policyonpoint.com and he's got this great piece called Screwing the Swedes, Lockheed versus Saab and boy, oh boy, I just learned how so darn much about how the world works by reading this piece.
It's great.
Welcome to the show, Mark.
How are you?
Good, thanks for having me, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here and so the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II JSF, that's Joint Strike Fighter, had its free market test at the end of 2008, your article begins.
How's that?
Well, basically the co-development group consisted of a few European countries.
You get Denmark, the United States, the UK, the Netherlands, Norway, Australia's in there, Turkey's in there.
I might be forgetting one, but basically what makes this Norwegian competition important, it was the first one, the first country from that co-developing group to get to take a crack at actually buying the F-35 and so they held the competition at the end of 2008 and picked, they chose to buy 48 F-35s over 48 Saab Gripens.
Saab Gripens, okay.
Right.
And then you got the WikiLeaks motherlode going on here and some really great analysis of the politics going on behind the scenes as the US state intervenes on behalf of Lockheed in this deal.
First of all, can you tell us about, do you have much expertise or much knowledge at all about the differences between the two different aircraft and whether you know, for the so-called mission?
I wouldn't consider myself a hardware expert, but maybe a little bit of a hardware geek.
I mean, if you gave the decision of which fighter to pick to the Norwegian fighter pilot, they would most surely pick the F-35.
But it's extremely expensive coming in at about 120 million and then if you put out the maintenance costs over time, it'll be about double that.
Gripen comes in between 40 and 60 million plus maintenance costs.
Really, it was...
Our guys in Lockheed could have been said to be a little bit freaking out because there was a strong media campaign against the F-35 taking place in Norway at the time.
So they decided to call in what they described as high-level Washington advocacy to bring this deal home.
And the cables, you know, when you read these cables, it's easy to think that, wow, this is just insane.
I can't believe they're doing this.
But really, I would like to stress that this kind of thing probably goes on in every single arms competition we're involved with to some degree or another.
But it's just that we have the cables now to actually see exactly how we went about securing this deal.
Well, I think that's really the bitter truth of the article in total, is that wow, they really... not that we didn't already know this, right?
It's filling in the details.
It's like reading a novel by a guy who used to have that job or something.
You just kind of get a little bit more kind of context to how this works.
And how it works is so-called Uncle Sam is the muscle behind the biggest corporate interests in this country and pushing whatever it is, particularly, I guess, weapons as in this case, on the governments of foreign countries.
You are going to pick the American company that, you know, we would like to think, presume, is separate from the US state somehow.
They really seem to be one in the same thing.
Lockheed is like the British East India Company or the Jamestown Company under the crown of England.
But you also have to assume that part of that concerted media effort against the F-35 and Lockheed, you know, Saab and the Swedish government probably had something to do with that.
It's not like they're going to dump their domestic corporation into foreign waters without any help.
It's just that we're better at it, and we have more resources.
So, yeah, I wouldn't say that we're being totally unfair, but it's also not a level playing field by any means.
Right.
All right.
Well, so fill in some details.
Show us what's so shocking about these WikiLeaks here.
Well, the first, you have a string of cables coming out of the Oslo Embassy, the American Oslo Embassy.
One from September, one from October, November, and December.
And then it's supplemented by a really striking cable coming out of the Stockholm Embassy in that July.
And the first, the first cable coming out during September is basically just calling for help.
It lays out all the problems they're having, the media campaign against it.
Most of the media campaign was about the the capabilities of the F-35 and saying that they weren't as good as the Gripen.
But, I mean, that's not really true.
It was a, I can't, I think the paper over there is called the Aftenbladet.
The Norwegian paper of record.
And they kind of got on board with the Swedes in a very, very intensive campaign against the F-35.
So while the U.S. government had been working with Lockheed the whole time to try to seal this deal, they decided to call in some some cavalry, I guess you could call it, called in the assistant state secretary, deputy secretary of defense, and a lot of other high-level officials.
And they also continued their own campaign.
And it was basically to publicly stress the benefits of picking the F-35 as far as capabilities go, while getting everybody on board behind the scenes to push as hard as possible to get them to get the Norwegians to pick the F-35.
So they call in the cavalry in September, and then the next next cable coming out in October lets you know that it's been working.
I think the words they use are, the tide has turned in Norway.
And this comes as a direct result from these high-level visits from Washington officials.
And Lockheed's whole involvement in this lobbying process is not really delineated in the cables whatsoever, but I'm sure they were integral to in attending state-to-state meetings and roundtable discussions with high-level Norwegian officials.
And so, you know, on the surface it seems like their lobbying efforts paid off.
They reversed the current negative opinion in the press.
And after that point, there's a few quotes in there where you have Norwegian officials telling the Americans just don't rock the boat.
Don't rock the boat.
Because they have to sell this to the Swedish people, I mean to the Norwegian people.
You know, it's the biggest arms purchase in Norwegian history.
So they can't be viewed as pressured by Washington on making this decision.
So, Barside, I think he was the deputy MOD of Norway, he just told us, you know, if you believe you have the aircraft, just sit still in the boat, I think are the words he used.
And come November, we get the next cable.
They pick the F-35.
Everything's going as planned.
Yeah, and then they just go into lessons learned.
And I think one reason, you know, we talked about earlier how this is not some extraordinary event that the U.S. government is doing this for Lockheed or any of their other arms development corporations.
Right, it's just an extraordinary window into the goings-on.
Exactly.
But what might make this a little bit more important is since this was the first group, the first nation involved in the co-development of the F-35, this competition was going to be followed quickly by Danish competition and the Dutch competition.
So any snubbing of Lockheed by the Norwegians could have long-term consequences for the future of their contracts in Europe.
Well, now, you know, I would just assume, perhaps incorrectly, maybe I'm just thinking of the 1990s or whatever, but that any sales of Lockheed products to NATO countries are paid for by the American taxpayer anyway.
We give them the aid and then we make them buy Lockheed planes with them.
It's just a welfare program for Lockheed stockholders and executive vice presidents and that kind of thing.
Basically.
But is that the case here or are they actually having to spend their own money on our planes now?
I'm not sure how much military aid we give to Norway and then force them to turn it back into our industries.
I know that we do that in a lot of countries, but Norway is fairly rich and they might actually be able to afford their own purchases from their own industry.
So that I am not actually clear on.
I'm not sure if that's our money being given to Lockheed or if that's actually Norwegian, North Sea oil money or something, you know.
All right.
Well, I'm Scott Horton.
It's Anti-War Radio and I'm talking with Mark Sheffield from policyonpoint.com and we're talking about Lockheed and the Wikileaks.
And we'll be back after this short break.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Hang on.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Mark Sheffield from policyonpoint.com.
Screwing the Swedes.
Lockheed versus Saab and a Bradley Manning Wikileaks provided window into the politics and business of Lockheed sales to NATO countries.
Very exciting stuff.
And I guess this is the part of the interview where I got to bring up Bruce Jackson and the committee to expand NATO in the 1990s, which was really the template and the forebear of the committee to liberate Iraq, which did so much to push the Iraq war and anti-Iraq propaganda in 2002 and 2003 in the lead up to the invasion there.
And Bruce Jackson was the executive vice president at Lockheed.
And at least to hear James Bamford tell it, he's a true believer in America's benevolent global hegemony.
He's not just selling planes.
He's he really agrees with Paul Wolfowitz or whatever.
And anyway, that's really, I guess, in my estimation, that's what NATO is, is it's a giant welfare program for Lockheed.
Maybe a little bit of, you know, general dynamics and Northrop Grumman thrown in for good measure.
Chase Bank.
But anyway, so Mark, tell me some more about the the politics of these WikiLeaks.
I guess when we were going out to break, you were talking about how the Norway was really a test that that this this same decision, whether to buy F-35 joint strike fighters or whether to go ahead and buy the Saab Gripen was, you know, being this.
This decision was being entertained by many four or five NATO countries, plus Australia, too, and that the Norway test was really a benchmark to see where everybody else is going to go.
Right.
Well, yeah, there was a lot riding on it.
I mean, our statesmen refer to to that area is kind of the northern flank.
We're still guarding it, guarding it against the Russians.
We need to have we need to have all Scandinavia linked up with the nicest fighters so they can control the ice cap basically is what I can glean from that.
And Norway, as it is there, they have a standing F-16 fleet or they did at this time.
Sorry.
And they train all of their fighters in the US.
We have really close ties with the military, especially the Air Force, obviously establishment in Norway.
And, you know, this was either the continuation or the end of that sort of nice little bilateral environment that we exist in with Norway.
And so we really we really needed Norway to choose the F-35 just so it would sweep across the rest of the co-development group.
Because once they pick the F-35, what are the Danes going to pick the Gripen?
Then there's no interoperability there between the F-35 and the Gripen.
So, I mean, it's all about that interoperability in between the Scandinavian countries and NATO and the Scandinavian countries.
And without the F-35 being chosen, we would lose out on a lot of that interoperability, along with cooperation between our militaries and our firm.
And one of the biggest one of the one area that Saab really dominated in this whole deal was their their economic involvement program would have brought jobs to every single province of Norway.
And the Gripen also contains 50 percent US materials, avionics, weapon systems, engines, whatever.
So it's not like in the very last cable coming out of December, they discussed, you know, the lessons learned and things like that.
And it's not like sales of the Gripen would have been bad for US industry, considering 50 percent of its hours.
But it's just that interoperability.
We wanted our northern flank to be totally secure against the Russians.
And, you know, how big of an issue is that?
I mean, what's wrong with it?
It doesn't seem like that big of one to me, but maybe I'm not.
I don't know.
I'm not privy to all the secret information that they must be privy to to rationalize this.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, did they say anything about what the what the problem is, if there is one at all?
They in one of the cables, they mentioned increase.
I believe it was increased military mobility on the northern flank on the Russian side.
They did not specify what that meant.
If they're building a new giant airbase to go send bombers over the Arctic or, you know, whatever.
They didn't specify at all.
It's just very vague.
As far as you know, the the Gripen is just as fast, carries the same NATO standard weapons, bombs and bullets.
The F-35, I believe, is faster and it's just a lot more stealthy.
The Gripen's fourth gen coming on fifth gen, F-35 solidly fifth gen.
But one of the main things, you know, when you look at it from just these Oslo cables, you get, wow, we're really good at lobbying.
Basically, that's the that's the message you get behind the scenes in the public arena.
We're just really good at it.
But then you come across this Stockholm cable from July, and it really lets you know how far we're willing to go to secure these deals.
Raytheon, and I believe Northrop Grumman has its fingers in there somewhere.
But I didn't I didn't cite that.
But Raytheon produces this AESA radar.
I believe it's active electronically scanned array or something like that.
And what this radar does is instead of sending out your radar pulses at one frequency, which makes it pretty easy to pinpoint where you're shooting it from, it spreads it out over a variety of frequencies to where, you know, it's very hard to figure out where the plane is.
And so the Gripen being fourth gen, being not stealthy, really needed this to be competitive in the in the competition.
So what do we do?
We delay the deliverable until after the Norwegian competition, specifically until after the competition is done and the Norwegians pick the F-35s.
Yeah, so I mean, that really just shows you we'll come at you from all angles if you want to if you want to fight us on these deals.
Yeah, well, you know, I don't want to just make fun of people or anything, but it seems like the guys at Saab made a really bad decision to I mean, assuming that it was any of their own money that they invested in a plane to compete with the American Empire's, you know, standard product here.
And by the way, when you say the F-35 is stealthy, is that even true?
I thought the thing was a giant station wagon in the sky that didn't live up to any of what they claimed it could do.
Well, as far as I know, it's got stealth capabilities, but you might be right.
They could be overblown.
I'm not entirely sure on that.
Well, I mean, you also see that, I mean, you're right.
They should not have even tried to put it up against the F-35, but you see where the Gripen has been relegated to.
And I'm not saying anything bad about the, you know, the Indian Air Force or anything like that, but it is going to non-NATO countries.
Yeah, it's not, they're not, you know, the Gripen is not going to be covering our northern flank whatsoever.
It's all the F-35.
Do you know how many F-35s are already deployed as, you know, active duty in the American military?
Um, in the American military, no.
I know that Norway is going to be getting their first shipment in 2016.
And I believe, I believe the Danes in Denmark, that's when the production is really going to start rolling off the line.
It's in 2016.
I mean, I know that in any Hollywood movie that the Pentagon makes, there are no more F-18s or F-15s or anything.
Everything is, you know, next generation on for sure.
You got your B-2s and your F-38s.
Yeah, but I wonder whether that's the reality at all, or whether they still just use the F-18s and F-14s and 15s to get things done, you know, 16s.
Well, I would have to say that we still use the older planes because the maintenance costs on the F-22s and F-35s are ridiculous.
You know, I believe on the F-22, I don't know this figure on the F-35, but it was, I think it was 30 hours of maintenance for one hour of flight time on the F-22.
I mean, it's absurd.
Once the technology gets up to a certain point, the maintenance just becomes this astronomical cost.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, and even as you say in here, just the upfront cost per plane, what was the comparison again between the Gripen and the F-35?
It's $122 million upfront for the F-35, and depending upon your package on the Gripen, it's in between $40 and $60.
Um, so when they say $122 million, we should figure that means $244 million, you think?
Right, but you should also apply that to the Gripen cost.
Yeah.
Because, but maybe, maybe it's not as, maybe, you know, that double, that double is just kind of a guess, you know?
Right.
But, but it's probably pretty accurate to say it's a quarter million a pop if you take it over the, you know, 25, 30 years that we expect them to be flying them.
Do you know how that compares to the cost of just maintaining F-15s and 16s or how much their upfront cost for a new one is?
Do they still even produce those anymore at all?
Um, I'm actually not sure on that.
I know that as far as the production of the F-16s and the F-15s go, or at least the F-16s, I know that sometimes we can outsource production.
Um, so it just depends on what country we're dealing with.
Because I believe, you know, take Egypt, for example, they were producing some of their own weaponry inside the state, but it was still under our licensing.
Right.
For our corporation's names.
They were making their own fighter jets there?
No, I doubt it, but they were making their own Abrams.
Ah, I see.
But I mean, I'm not exactly sure on the cost of the F-16s and F-15s, no.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I really wonder about the F-22 and the F-35.
I mean, it seems like, you know, from watching weekday wings and whatever, uh, a fleet of F-15s can kill any air force on the planet.
Just from the radar in the nose cone.
They can kill you from 600 miles away.
Why would we need any of these?
Luck, you need them.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, cheers, Bruce Jackson.
Pretty much it.
Yep.
Well, um, you know, I want to thank you for your time on the show and thank you again for this article.
It's, um, it's, uh, long and good that way.
It's, uh, it's a very in-depth, uh, exploration of the politics and the finagling behind this massive Lockheed deal to these NATO countries.
And it, uh, as we were saying at the beginning, it makes kind of, for overall, a great little window into, you know, how these things work on a daily basis when we're not thinking about them, you know?
Right.
Very good stuff.
Great window into, uh, the operations of the empire here.
So really appreciate your time on the show today and this article.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
Have a go.
Everybody, that's Mark Sheffield from policyonpoint.com.
And we'll be right back.
