|
CounterPunch
January
7, 2003
Pentagon, Inc.
The Godmother of Boeing Makes
a Soft Landing
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Darleen Druyun proudly calls herself the Godmother
of the C-17, the unwieldy transport plane that will be doing
much of the heavy lifting during the roll up to Bush's war on
Iraq. The plane's performance has gotten mixed reviews, but as
chief acquisitions officer at the Air Force Druyun pushed relentlessly
to have more of those cargo planes bought and at a premium price.
As a kicker, Druyun drafted a quaint provision that would have
inoculated the C-17 contract from any pesky government oversight
over the likely runaway costs of the program. By the way, the
C-17 is made by Boeing.
Druyun's unceasing efforts at the Pentagon
to push this sweetheart deal on behalf of Boeing eventually prompted
an internal investigation by the Defense Department's Inspector
General and even aroused a rare public rebuke from Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld.
Druyun recently left the Pentagon, but
now she has made a soft landing at the very company she had labored
for so zealously in public office: Boeing.
In a January 3 company press release,
Boeing executives gloated that Druyun will head up the company's
missile defense division headquartered in Washington, DC. This
is one of the more plum positions in town. Boeing is the prime
contractor for what the Pentagon calls the Ground-based Midcourse
Defense Segment and serves as the lead contractor for the Missile
Defense National Team's Systems Engineering and Integration program.
These contracts have already generated billions in revenues for
Boeing, but much more is on the way. The company expects to do
a brisk business now that Bush has officially jettisoned the
ABM Treaty and given the greenlight for the rapid deployment
of the latest version of the Star Wars scheme. Druyun's duties
at Boeing will also include hawking the Airborne Laser program
and the Patriot anti-missile system, which seems likely to get
another big boost in sales to Israel and Kuwait with the upcoming
war on Iraq.
"Darleen Druyun helped drive acquisition
reform within the Air Force," said James Evatt, Boeing's
senior vice-president for its Defense programs. "Her 'Lightning
Bolt' initiatives, which jump-started the reform process. Her
personal passion and drive are well known within the defense
industry, and we expect her to be a key player in our future
success."
Pentagon watchdogs have a somewhat different
recollection of Druyun's tenure at the Air Force. They say that
the Godmother's initiatives favored the defense contractors,
while looting the treasury and putting Air Force pilots in relatively
untested and even unsafe planes. The C-17 affair is perhaps the
most brazen example of her labors on behalf of the weapons lobby.
In 1990, Congress approved an Air Force
plan to buy 120 C-17s from Boeing for $230 million apiece. That
contract runs out later this year. In the fall of 2000, the Air
Force said it wanted another 60 planes. But Boeing wanted to
sell them many more. And they engaged in a bit of blackmail to
get their way. Boeing officials claimed that they couldn't afford
to keep the C- 17 in production unless they built a minimum of
15 planes each year. Yet, the even the Air Force admitted it
didn't need that many planes. And the General Accounting Office
contends that the Air Force actually only requires about 100
heavy transport planes, 20 fewer than it has already got. With
other big ticket items like the F-22 and the Joint Strike Force
Fighter on the Air Force's wish list, the C-17 seemed unlikely
to survive congressional scrutiny.
So a plan was hatched to make the new
fleet of planes quasi-private. Under this scenario, some of the
C-17s would essentially be rented out to private haulers, who
would then be in a position to receive financial kickbacks for
using the aircraft. According to Pentagon sources, the idea to
reclassify the C-17 contract from a military to a commercial
project originated with Boeing. It's not hard to figure out what
office they went to with the idea. This scheme contained another
nifty prize for Boeing. By reclassifying the deal as a commercial
operation, it alleviated many of the detailed reporting requirements
that go along with defense contracts.
Druyun seized on the idea and wrapped
the program in the then ripe rhetoric of the Clinton/Gore reinventing
government scheme. "This program is very appealing to all
parties involved: the Air Force, the commercial operators, the
manufacturers and the American taxpayer," Druyun boasted
in December of 2000. In a sign of things to come, this quote
appeared in a Boeing press release.
Druyun also raved that the new contract
would enable Boeing to employ "streamlined processes"
in the production of the plane--never a welcome sign when it
comes to building military aircraft, at least from the pilot's
point of view.
All this prompted the Pentagon's chief
testing official to object the plan as a potentially hazardous
operation. "Policies and procedures flowing from the push
toward commercial acquisition are leading the C-17 down a risky
path," wrote Philip Coyle, then director of the Defense
Department's Operational Test and Evaluation Division. "A
lack of fiscal, technical, and testing realism may be creating
fleets that cannot meet effectiveness, sustainability, or interoperability
requirements."
After the scheme was exposed by the Project
on Government Oversight and by a
subsequent report in CounterPunch, the C-17 plan fell
apart. When the dust finally settled, Druyun cashed in her chips
with Boeing. Now she's stalking bigger game: missile defense,
a multi-billion dollar bonanza for defense contractors, with
Boeing at the head of the trough.
"Ms. Druyun is now officially an
employee of the company whose interests she so ardently championed
while she was supposedly representing the interests of the taxpayers,"
says Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project
on Government Oversight. "This is one of the most
egregious examples of the government revolving door in recent
memory."
Of course, plucking operatives from the
halls of the Pentagon is nothing new for Boeing. Over the years,
the company has festooned its corporate board and the halls of
its lobby shop with a bevy of top brass.
Recently, Boeing's board has boasted
both former Defense Secretary William Perry and John M. Shalikashvili,
the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 2001, Boeing
also hired Rudy de Leon, Clinton's Deputy Secretary of Defense,
to run its Washington office. Although De Leon is known as a
proud hawk and a masterful dealmaker, his hiring may have been
a rare misstep for Boeing, since congressional Republicans howled
that the company should have picked one of their own from the
Pentagon's rolls.
But by adding the Godmother of the C-17
to the company's DC hangar, the defense contractor seems to be
well on the road toward making amends and, naturally, fattening
Boeing's bottom line courtesy of the federal treasury.
Jeffrey St. Clair can be reached at: stclair@counterpunch.org
Yesterday's
Features
Chris White
Deceptions
in Military Recruiting: an Ex-Insider Speaks Out
Tim Llewellyn
Baghdad
Before
Steve Perry
Trent
Lott's Big Sin:
He Was Sooo Old-School
Walter A. Davis
Death's
Dream Kingdom: the American Psyche after 9/11
Anthony Gancarski
Come Fly With Me:
If 9/11 Was a Joke, TSA Was the Punchline
Bernard Weiner
Ellsberg's Secrets and Bush's War
Kurt Nimmo
Desperately Seeking Emmanuel Goldstein
Asif Devji
Yes, Virginia, Santa Really Is American
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- CounterPunch Special:
The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
and the FBI;
- Reeling Democrats: Is Pelosi the Answer?
- Gandhi v. Hitler: the Secret Race for the Nobel
Prize;
- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
- Earn While You Learn: Chris Whittle and Child Labor;
The Case of the Pompous
Professor;
- The Class Struggle in
Boston: All that
Effort, But What Did They Get?
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
January
4, 2003
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Something
About Butte
Saul Landau
The Bush Vision and the Culture of Power
Annie Higgins
Six Soldiers
Michael Ortiz
Hill
Bush's Armageddon Obsession
Francisco Armada and Carlos
Mutaner
Venezuela: Chomsky's Tropical Nightmare
James T. Phillips
Targeting Americans
Jack Bice
A Fresh World Vision
Robert Fisk
Double Standards in the War on Terror
Chris Clarke
Is a Blue Rose a Rose?
Frank Fugate
How the West (Bank) Was Won
Anis Shivani
Bleak Prospects for Dems
Ben Tripp
Does Bush Know Korean?
Adam Engel
Les Miserable and the Hackers from Hell
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|