Military-industrial-academic complex | DMZ Hawai'i/Aloha 'Aina

Looking Back: The National Missile Defense Act of 1999

Post Date July 03, 2009

Comments 0 Comments

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Military Appropriations, Earmarks, Military-industrial-academic complex, The Military in Hawai'i (All Islands)

The National Missile Defense Act of 1999 (the Cochran-Inouye Bill), also nicknamed the missile defense “blank check act” by anti-nuclear activists, was a turning point in the expansion of U.S. missile defense programs and the escalation of a new arms race. This bill committed the U.S. to deploy a national missile defense system “as soon as technologically feasible” and led to the undoing of both the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, two cornerstones of nuclear arms control and reduction.

In 1998, Hawai’i Senators Inouye and Akaka, were two of only four Senate Democrats who supported Cochran’s bill. But opposition from the Democrats in Congress fell apart following the 1998 Republican sweep of Congress.

The National Missile Defense Act of 1999 opened the floodgates for research, development and testing of new, exotic missile defense technologies. Inouye had been preparing for this opportunity, quietly earmarking funds for the refurbishment of the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kaua’i. The controversial Navy University Affiliated Research Center (UARC), also known as the Applied Research Laboratory – University of Hawai’i, and its corrupt origins, were enabled by the National Missile Defense Act of 1999.

The following article posted on the Arms Control Association website gives good analysis of the circumstances and consequences of the Act.

>><<

The National Missile Defense Act of 1999

Greg Thielmann

The National Missile Defense Act of 1999 was described by its chief sponsor, Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), as “the necessary first step to protecting the United States from long-range ballistic missile attack.”[1] Indeed, the act constituted an important milestone on the road to U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, a step that the sponsors of the act advocated. Although the act itself neither authorized any programs nor appropriated any funds, it was misrepresented then and has been misrepresented since as proof of strong congressional support for the urgent and unqualified pursuit of strategic missile defenses.

The National Missile Defense Act gave the United States a clearly stated policy goal: to “deploy as soon as is technologically possible an effective National Missile Defense system capable of defending the territory of the United States against limited ballistic missile attack (whether accidental, unauthorized, or deliberate)….” These simple words essentially became executive branch policy following the election of 2000. They were adopted as a charter for the Missile Defense Agency, appearing prominently today on the home page of the agency’s Web site. Although the meaning of “effective” has been subject to debate and the elections of 2006 and 2008 have affected the implementation of that policy, the act represents an enduring symbol of the potent backing strategic missile defense has received from Congress during the last 10 years.

Ironically, the threat assessments on which the act was based have proven unrealistic with regard to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. None of these countries and no other proliferant states have deployed long-range ballistic missiles in the decade following the act.

The sponsors of the act also identified growing Chinese missile deployments as a source of concern, “perhaps [the] most troubling”[2] in the words of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Yet, the U.S. strategic ballistic missile defenses deployed after passage of the act were never intended to defend against a deliberate Chinese attack.

Those missile defense deployments were also not directed at a deliberate Russian attack, although the act prepared the way for the U.S. decision in 2001 to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, which had been a keystone in the management of the U.S.-Russian strategic relationship. The Russians abandoned START II on the day after U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. In ratifying START II, the Russian Duma had conditioned its approval on continuing U.S. adherence to the ABM Treaty.

The Russian abandonment of START II, which the United States had never ratified, removed any chance of reducing Russian strategic offensive forces under the stabilizing terms of that treaty. Although Russian missile and warhead numbers continued to decline even without START II, the Russians were able to retain “heavy ICBMs” and other land-based ballistic missiles with multiple, independently targetable re-entry vehicles.

In short, China and Russia have increased the quality and, in the case of China, the quantity, of their strategic ballistic missile forces in response to U.S. missile defense programs. However, there is no evidence that the U.S. programs have dissuaded the states of proliferation concern from developing or deploying ballistic missiles.

Cold War Origins

The United States and the Soviet Union deployed limited numbers of strategic missile defense interceptors and radars in the middle years of the Cold War. These defenses were designed to cope with the intercontinental-range (greater than 5,500 kilometers) and intermediate-range (3,000-5,500 kilometers) ballistic missiles, with which the two sides could threaten each other’s homeland. The U.S.S.R. went first, deploying nearly 100 nuclear-armed ABM interceptors around Moscow in the 1960s. The United States began deploying a comparable number of nuclear-armed ABM interceptors at Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 1974. The 1972 ABM Treaty had banned the United States and U.S.S.R. from developing nationwide defenses as well as systems or components for sea-based, air-based, space-based, or mobile land-based ABM deployments. The treaty permitted each side to build ABM systems at two fixed locations for defense of each national capital area and a land-based missile base, with up to 100 interceptors at each site. A 1974 protocol to the treaty reduced that allowance, limiting each side to only one site. The Soviets opted to maintain their system around Moscow while the United States elected to protect a missile field in North Dakota, until Congress cut off funding in 1975. A 1997 agreement on confidence-building measures, negotiated in the ABM Treaty’s Special Consultative Commission, precisely demarcated strategic missile defense interceptors from those that were designed to intercept tactical and theater ballistic missiles. The latter systems were deemed incapable of overcoming the technical challenge of coping with the much faster re-entry of ICBM and sea-launched ballistic missile warheads.

Although the Soviets sought to be able to defend their capital and national leadership against the new U.S. missile threat that emerged in the 1960s, they never succeeded. U.S. warheads and the options for countermeasures were too numerous and the radars on which the Moscow system relied too vulnerable. Yet, bureaucratic inertia, vested interests, and the psychological desire to have some defense, however inadequate, have allowed vestiges of the Soviet/Russian system to survive even to the present day.

The United States was susceptible to the no-less-potent illusion that it could use technology to replace the defensive shield two oceans had historically provided for keeping enemies at bay. Nurtured by an almost unlimited faith in technological solutions and feeling the same natural reluctance as the Soviets to accept vulnerability, Washington plowed ahead until the inevitable logic of cost effectiveness caught up with strategic defenses in the mid-1970s when the Safeguard ABM system was canceled and dismantled. Although a new vision of a defensive umbrella that would render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete” was articulated by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, the Strategic Defense Initiative he launched two years later eventually fell victim to the “cost effectiveness at the margin” criterion advocated by his own special adviser, Paul Nitze. Strategic missile defense planning changed direction successively under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, but research and development funding remained robust throughout both presidencies, and neither administration made any decision to deploy strategic defenses.

Three events were key in creating the political environment for passage of the National Missile Defense Act. First was the 1994 U.S. congressional elections, which gave the Republicans a majority in the House and Senate. The new speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), included “a renewed commitment to a National Missile Defense” in his “Contract With America.”[3] Republicans in both houses consistently and relentlessly pursued this goal as part of the GOP’s political agenda, culminating in passage of the 1999 act.

Report Spurs Action

The second and most important substantive development was the July 1998 release of the Report of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, who had been President Gerald Ford’s secretary of defense. The report’s executive summary warned that North Korea and Iran would be able to inflict major destruction on the United States within about five years of a decision to acquire such a capability and that both placed “a high priority on threatening U.S. territory” and were even then “pursuing advanced ballistic missile capabilities to pose a direct threat to U.S. territory.”[4] The report claimed that any other nation with a well-developed, Scud-based ballistic missile infrastructure could be within five years of an ICBM capability. Finally, the report warned that the United States “might have little or no warning before operational deployment” of these systems.[5]

The dire warnings of the Rumsfeld Commission were subject to considerable criticism and controversy among experts. Senate Democrats were still confident going into the August recess that year that they could sustain efforts by the Clinton administration to avoid congressional passage of an unqualified endorsement of strategic missile defense in reaction to the report. The public, however, which had already been spooked by Rumsfeld’s depiction of a potential near-term threat from “rogue state” ballistic missiles, was about to receive a further jolt. North Korea surprised the world with its August 31, 1998, attempt to place a satellite in space using a three-stage Taepo Dong-1 rocket. Although the attempt was unsuccessful, no missile re-entry vehicle was tested, and the system’s throw weight was inadequate to deliver a nuclear-sized payload to the United States, the political impact of the event was enormous. Proponents of strategic missile defenses skillfully used the North Korean launch as vindication of the Rumsfeld Commission’s warnings and accompanying allegations that previous U.S. intelligence assessments had been overly sanguine.

Most Democratic senators became unwilling to stand behind White House threats to veto the strategic missile defense resolution being pushed by the Republican majority. The alternative strategy the Democrats chose was to make the issue go away by adding language to make the bill uncontroversial. Amendments to the policy bill provided reminders that any national missile defense program funding would have to be subject to annual authorization and appropriation measures and that it was still U.S. policy to seek negotiated reductions in Russian strategic forces. Clinton stressed that the amendments made clear that no deployment decision had been made, but the simple language of the bill implied strongly that Congress recognized U.S. technological obstacles as the only acceptable justification for delay. The Senate bill passed 97-3 on March 17, 1999. The House bill passed the next day, 317-105.

Clinton announced in 2000 that strategic missile defenses, then under the rubric of the National Missile Defense program, were sufficiently promising and affordable to justify continued development and testing but that there was not sufficient information about the technical and operational effectiveness of the entire system to move forward with deployment. He noted that critical elements, such as the booster rocket for the interceptor, had not been tested and that there were questions about the system’s ability to deal with countermeasures.[6]

At the outset of the Bush administration in 2001, the programmatic course of strategic ballistic missile defense and the future of the ABM Treaty were still up in the air. That summer, a bipartisan majority of the Senate Armed Services Committee even voted to reduce missile defense funding.

The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon created an entirely different atmosphere for continuing the debate. In the fearful wake of those attacks, President George W. Bush was successful in supercharging strategic missile defense procurement and deployment. In spite of virtually unanimous international opposition, he announced U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in late 2001 and a commitment to deploy strategic defense interceptors by 2004. The U.S.-based deployments and their “operational” designation were accomplished only after Rumsfeld, whom Bush had appointed secretary of defense, suspended traditional acquisition rules and operational testing criteria, introducing an unconventional and controversial “spiral” development process. By the end of two terms, the Bush administration was able to deploy a set of 20 ground-based missile defense (GMD) interceptors at sites in Alaska and California and to plan for deploying another 24 there and 10 more in Poland.

The ABM Treaty constituted a tacit acknowledgment by both sides that unlimited strategic defenses constituted a threat to the stability of the balance in offensive forces. Each side further demonstrated by its subsequent actions, albeit at different times, that offenses and defenses were inextricably connected. In 1988 the United States demanded that the Soviet Union dismantle the large phased-array radar Moscow was constructing at Krasnoyarsk before Washington would agree to any new offensive arms control limits.[7]

In response to U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty on June 13, 2002, Russia announced one day later that it would no longer consider itself bound by START II, consistent with the Duma’s ratification terms in 2000, which were contingent on continuation of the ABM Treaty. Thus, not for the first or last time, U.S. determination to escape from strategic missile defense strictures led to the loss of an opportunity to secure lower limits and stabilizing measures in strategic offensive forces.

In 2004 the Bush administration began talks with eastern European states to explore the potential use of their territory for deployment of U.S. GMD interceptors and a sophisticated midcourse X-band radar. By the end of his administration, Bush had secured agreements with the Czech Republic for hosting the radar and Poland for hosting the missile interceptors, but the agreements remain to be ratified by the host governments. Meanwhile, on the U.S. side, the pendulum again seems to be swinging away from the urgent priority assigned to strategic missile defense by the Bush administration. President Barack Obama said in his April 5, 2009, Prague speech that he would only go forward with a missile defense system in Europe that was “cost effective and proven.” His revised request for the Missile Defense Agency in the fiscal year 2010 budget was $7.8 billion, a $1.2 billion funding cut in missile defense.[8]

Conclusion

In this tenth anniversary year of the National Missile Defense Act, it is worth noting that the North Korean ICBM seen as imminent when the act was passed has still not been successfully flight-tested. Deployment is down the road, “probably another three to five years minimum,” according to Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [9] Helms worried during the 1999 debate over the act that “Iran may very well be able to deploy an ICBM before America has a missile defense to counter it, even if the United States breaks ground on construction tomorrow morning.”[10] In fact, neither Iran nor any of the other emerging ballistic missile states the Rumsfeld Commission said could have ICBMs by 2003 has them today.

The sponsors of the National Missile Defense Act were correct in predicting that the pursuit of strategic missile defenses outside the ABM Treaty would not necessarily forestall additional reductions in the number of Russian strategic missiles given the state of Russia’s economy after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. That pursuit did, however, derail START II, the next step of negotiated reductions in U.S. and Russian strategic forces. In order to satisfy the requirements of START II, Moscow would have had to deploy only single-warhead ICBMs, leading to a force structure with greater crisis stability and possibly with fewer overall warheads than it currently has. U.S. strategic missile defense deployments also provided additional incentives for the modernization of Chinese strategic forces that so troubled Helms at the time the act was debated. Using formulas familiar to U.S. and Russian strategic planners countering strategic defenses in the past, the Chinese have increased the mobility and number of their deterrent forces while improving the survivability of their re-entry vehicles.

Actual threat history aside, the National Missile Defense Act became an important argument in the continuing policy debate over the direction and pace of the strategic missile defense program. After 1999, whenever skeptics of missile defense raised programmatic issues, the act was cited as proof that an overwhelming and bipartisan majority in Congress had already established a policy of rapid deployment, relegating other issues to a subordinate position. The act prodded the executive branch to move forward with little consideration of the full repercussions. Following the superficial logic of the act, the United States discarded the ABM Treaty even though most of the U.S. missile defense activities that have taken place between then and now could have been accommodated under the broad conceptual framework of the treaty. Moreover, the United States rushed to deploy defenses against the rogue-state ICBM missile threat before that threat materialized and before U.S. defensive systems had been adequately tested. These actions cost the United States dearly in terms of treasure spent and opportunities lost to reduce the threat from its potential adversaries with the most lethal capabilities, against which U.S. strategic forces are still principally directed.

Greg Thielmann is a senior fellow at the Arms Control Association, where he directs the Realistic Threat Assessments and Responses Project. He previously served as a senior professional staffer on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and was a U.S. Foreign Service Officer for 25 years.

ENDNOTES

1. “Senate Backs Missile Defense System,” CNN.com, March 17, 1999, www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/17/missile.defense/.

2. Congressional Record, March 15, 1999, p. S2632.

3. Republican Contract with America, http://www.house.gov/house/Contract/CONTRACT.html.

4. Greg Thielmann, “Rumsfeld Reprise? The Missile Report That Foretold the Iraq Intelligence Controversy,” Arms Control Today, July/August 2003, p. 3.

5. Ibid.

6. Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, “White House Fact Sheet on National Missile Defense,” September 1, 2000.

7. Paul Lewis, “U.S. Ties Arms Deal to a Soviet Radar,” New York Times, September 1, 1988, http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/01/world/us-ties-arms-deal-to-a-soviet-radar.html.

8.”David Morgan, “Pentagon Seeks $1.2 Billion Cut for Missile Defense,” Reuters, May 7, 2009, http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE5465CJ20090507.

9. Gen. James Cartwright, Testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, June 16, 2009.

10. Congressional Record, March 15, 1999, p. S2632.

Source: http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2009_07-08/lookingback

Demonstration Against New Telescope on Haleakala, Maui

Post Date June 06, 2009

Comments 1 Comment

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Action Alerts and Events, Hawaiian Sovereignty, Land, Culture & Human Rights, Military-industrial-academic complex

STOP ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY SOLAR TELESCOPE (ATST) ON HALEAKALA!

OPPOSITION RALLY

June 10, 2009-Wednesday

2:00pm

Maui Community Collage

Meet in front of Pilina Building

Bring everyone with you to oppose unnecessary (UNSUSTAINABLE)Development on Maui’s already OVERDEVELOPED ISLAND

ATST Project can still be built at alternative (California/Spain) sites and achieve all scientific goals without further desecrating and consuming our island!

Come out and speak up for MAUI’s future.

We need LONG TERM SUSTAINABLE-SMART DEVELOPMENT SUPPORTED BY THE PEOPLE!!!

FOR MORE INFORMATION CALL (808) 877-9097

EMAIL:kekahunakeaweiwi@yahoo.com

OPPOSE ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY SOLAR TELESCOPE (ATST) PROJECT

Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement

(SDEIS)

http://atst.nso.edu/SDEIS

More details: http://kilakilahaleakala.org/index.php

SUBMIT COMMENTS BEFORE THE RECORD-OF-DECISION (ROD) IS MADE!

Comments on the SDEIS must be received or postmarked by June 22, 2009.

Section 106 Consultation Meeting

June 8, 2009, Monday
1:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Kula Community Center
East Lower Kula Road
Kula, Maui

June 9, 2009, Tuesday
10:00 am to 4:00 pm
Haiku Community Center
Hana Highway at Pilialoha Street
Haiku, Maui

June 10, 2009, Wednesday
3:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Maui Community College
Pilina Building, Multi-purpose room
310 W. Kaahumanu Avenue
Kahului, Maui

Comments on the SDEIS should be sent to:

Craig Foltz, ATST Program Manager National Science Foundation,
Division of Astronomical Sciences
4201 Wilson Boulevard, Rm 1045,
Arlington, VA 22230
Email: cfoltz@nsf.gov

with a copy sent to:

1. Arden L. Bement
The National Science Foundation-Director
4201 Wilson Boulevard, Room 1205 N
Arlington, Virginia 22230, USA
Tel: (703) 292-8000, Fax (703) 292-9232

Email: abetment@nsf.gov

2. Charlie Fein,
KC Environmental Inc.
P.O. Box 1208,
Makawao, HI 96768
Email: charlie@kcenv.com

3. Mike Maberry, Associate Director University of Hawaii,
Institute for Astronomy
34 Ohia Ku Street,
Pukalani, HI 96768

4. Dept. of Health, Office of Environmental Quality Control,
REF: ATST
235 S. Beretania Street, Rm 702,
Honolulu, HI 96813

More on Superferry bankruptcy

Post Date May 31, 2009

Comments Comments Closed

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Environmental Impacts, Hawaii Superferry Resistance, Military-industrial-academic complex, The Military in Hawai'i (All Islands)

Posted on: Sunday, May 31, 2009

Hawaii Superferry files for bankruptcy

Company claims it’s unable to operate here, lists debts as much as $100 million

By Derrick DePledge
Advertiser Government Writer

Hawaii Superferry filed for bankruptcy protection yesterday, telling a Delaware court that a Hawai’i Supreme Court ruling caused the Alakai to cease operations in March and has sapped the company’s revenues.

Superferry and its parent company, HSF Holding Inc., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware. Superferry listed between $1 million and $10 million in assets and $50 million to $100 million in debts.

Superferry has just $1 million in cash and was facing a $2.9 million principal and interest payment on one of the ferry construction loans yesterday. The company listed fewer than 50 creditors, including the state of Hawai’i, and maintained it should not have to make payments on $40 million worth of state harbor improvements because the operating agreement with the state was voided by a Maui court.

Superferry told the bankruptcy court that it plans to liquidate assets and “wind up their business.” While sources close to Superferry say it is possible for a “white knight” investor to show interest in the Alakai and a sister catamaran, the Huakai, it would likely be for charter operations and not an immediate return to passenger, cargo and vehicle service in Hawai’i.

The two catamarans are docked in a Mobile, Ala., shipyard owned by J.F. Lehman & Co., the project’s main investor.

“As a direct result of the Hawai’i Supreme Court decision last March, Hawaii Superferry had to shut down operations. There has been no relief from that decision,” Superferry said in a statement. “With no ability to operate, the company has had no revenues, only ongoing expenses to maintain the vessels Alakai and Huakai, our second ship.

“Our recent objective was to charter the ships outside of Hawai’i, which would keep Hawaii Superferry operating at some capacity. Although there are potential charter opportunities around the world, they take time and haven’t materialized in time for the company to meet its required financial obligations. Our efforts to refinance and restructure the company for this interim period with additional investment have not been successful, as yet. Accordingly, a filing of Chapter 11 was an unavoidable next step.”

Rough going

The bankruptcy filing could mark an end to Superferry’s stormy history in Hawai’i.

While the state Supreme Court ruling in March was cited as the final blow, the company’s court filing shows that several factors undermined the ambitious plans for high-speed catamarans to connect the Islands.

Just as Superferry was planning its debut in August 2007, the state Supreme Court ruled that the Lingle administration was in error when it exempted the state harbor improvements for the project from environmental review.

Environmentalists, who had challenged the exemption, moved to block ferry service through a Maui court while protesters halted the catamaran on Kaua’i.

The state Legislature in a special session passed a law, signed by Gov. Linda Lingle, that allowed Superferry to operate while an environmental review was completed. But barge problems on Maui delayed the ferry’s immediate return to service.

Superferry argues that the court rulings and delay eroded public confidence in its reliability. Damage to the Alakai in dry dock in February 2008 led to another suspension of service.

Superferry maintains that it demonstrated “outstanding reliability,” with service between Honolulu and Maui between April 2008 and the second Supreme Court ruling in March. The court found that the law which allowed Superferry to operate during the environmental review was an unconstitutional special law written for a single company.

“However, by then, the damage to the debtors’ reputation had already been inflicted,” according to the filing.

Superferry also cited challenging economic conditions last year and in the first quarter of this year that led to lower-than-expected revenues. The recession reduced demand for ferry service among both tourists and local residents.

In addition, Superferry cited an “unprecedented spike” in fuel prices last summer that significantly raised operating expenses. The company said it could not pass the higher fuel prices on to customers because it was competing with airlines for interisland fares.

State caught short

Mike Formby, the deputy director of the state Department of Transportation’s harbors’ division, said he was disappointed to hear Superferry is liquidating assets and going out of business. The state is in the process of comp

"King of Pork"

Post Date May 31, 2009

Comments 0 Comments

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Military Appropriations, Earmarks, Military-industrial-academic complex, Projects and Campaigns, Social and Economic Impacts, The Military in Hawai'i (All Islands)

May 31, 2009

In Battle to Cut Billions, a Spotlight on One Man

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON – Near the end of a two-hour hearing on a special war-spending bill this month, Senator Daniel K. Inouye, in his slow and rumbling voice, finally said the words that defense lobbyists across Washington had been hoping to hear: there was “good reason to be optimistic.”

Mr. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, was answering a fellow senator’s question about the future of Boeing’s mammoth C-17 cargo plane. But from Mr. Inouye, the taciturn new chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the comment was also the latest reminder that, as the Obama administration lifts its ax over hundreds of billions of dollars in military contracts that the Pentagon says it no longer needs, he is the industry’s last line of defense.

Mr. Inouye is best positioned to fulfill or frustrate the administration’s hopes of reining in runaway procurement costs. That makes him the object of intense courtship from industry executives, senators and even a certain Hawaiian in the White House.

“In the Senate, the buck stops with Chairman Inouye,” said David Morrison, a lobbyist for Boeing and a former aide to Mr. Inouye, the company with the most at stake in the proposed cuts.

Critics, though, say Mr. Inouye – a self-described “king of pork” responsible for nearly a billion dollars in earmarks each year – is also the most potent remaining champion of the parochialism that for decades has made major military projects hard to kill.

“There is no question a lot of this stuff is going to get put back by Congress,” said Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma. “And the question is, why? Do we need more C-17s, or are we trying to keep people employed on a weapons system that we already have enough of?” Now, Mr. Coburn said, “We’ll see what the priorities are.”

Mr. Inouye is the last of a vanishing breed of powerful old-school appropriators. His predecessor as appropriations chairman, Senator Robert C. Byrd, 91, Democrat of West Virginia, is enfeebled by age. Another former chairman, Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican whom Mr. Inouye called “brother,” lost re-election last year amid ethics charges.

And in the House, Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, the top Democrat on the defense appropriations subcommittee, is under a cloud because of federal investigations into lobbyists, contractors and other lawmakers with ties to his office.

“Inouye is the last of the old bulls,” said Steve Ellis of the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense, which tracks Congressional spending. “The others have been gored.”

In an interview, Mr. Inouye said he seeks only the country’s security and its soldiers’ safety as he reviews the budget presented by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. “If we agree with the secretary, we go along,” Mr. Inouye said. “And if we don’t, we act accordingly.”

But he also hinted of conflict ahead when he takes up the main defense budget. “You’ll see some interesting activity when the big bill comes up,” he chuckled.

Elected to Congress in 1959, two years before President Obama was born, Mr. Inouye is known as a war hero and civil rights icon. While other Japanese-Americans were in internment camps, he lost his arm leading an Army unit of Japanese-Americans in World War II.

Honoring that legacy is one of many pet causes to which he has doled out federal money, including in one case to a group he helps oversee. In 2000 he inserted into the annual defense bill $20 million for a project dedicated to the sacrifices of soldiers like himself at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, where he was longtime chairman of the board of governors.

He capitalized on his official power to help finance the project in other ways as well. He helped draw donations from military contractors with big interests before his committee. Boeing recently pledged $100,000 a year for five years, a museum spokesman said. (Mr. Inouye, 84, whose first wife died three years ago, also married the museum’s then-president, Irene Hirano, 60, last year.)

Mr. Inouye has other close ties to lobbyists. His son, Daniel K. Inouye Jr., once the leader of a punk rock band, is a lobbyist for several entertainment and communications companies that lobby the senator intensely because he sits on the commerce committee. (Mr. Inouye’s son says he lobbies only the House.)

Mr. Inouye has rescued military contractors before, most notably when the Clinton administration tried to cut procurement. When the Pentagon balked at buying early C-17s – the plane it again wants to stop buying – Boeing hired a lobbyist close to Mr. Inouye: Henry Giugni, a former Honolulu police officer who had become Mr. Inouye’s closest aide and then, with his help, the Senate’s sergeant-at-arms.

A month later, Mr. Inouye, then chairman of the military spending panel, wrote to the defense secretary urging the acquisition of more C-17s, and production continued for 15 more years. Now, the pressure from all sides is far more intense. The president has repeatedly called the senator, aides say, to talk about priorities like passing the war-spending bill quickly – meaning without adding any big equipment programs.

“He calls me Dan,’ ” Mr. Inouye said. “I call him Mr. President.’ ”

Scores of defense industry lobbyists, meanwhile, are reminding Mr. Inouye of his past support for threatened programs, including the missile defense system, partly based in Hawaii, or the Army’s “future combat systems,” a pet project of his friend and fellow Japanese-American from Hawaii, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, now the veterans affairs secretary.

As Mr. Inouye prepared for the Senate defense budget and a House-Senate conference on the war-spending bill, some of those lobbyists had a chance to speak to him at a fund-raiser this month for his political action committee at the home of the Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta, whose firm’s clients include Boeing, Lockheed Martin and United Technologies. (All three are among Mr. Inouye’s biggest sources of campaign money.)

Dozens of senators are also beseeching Mr. Inouye to save defense jobs in their states, including 19 who have signed a letter asking him to save Boeing’s C-17.

Many lobbyists took Mr. Inouye’s cryptic “reason to be optimistic” comment as a signal that he intended to include the eight C-17s from the House’s version of the war-spending bill when it goes to conference and may add the other eight sought by Boeing in the main defense bill. Supporters of Lockheed Martin’s F-22, a plane the Pentagon has tried for years to stop buying, took heart from Mr. Inouye’s omission of $147 million requested to shut down the production line, leaving it open while the company seeks new sales either to the United States or its allies, as Taxpayers for Common Sense reported.

Mr. Inouye has kept mum about what he may seek to insert in the 2010 military spending bill. But he acknowledged feeling the pressure. “People, whenever a lot of them see me, say, ‘Congratulations, you have got a great job, chairman of the biggest committee,’ ” he said. “I don’t have the time to explain to them that I spend less time sleeping.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/us/politics/31inouye.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Maui Community College degree to serve 'star wars' tracking station and supercomputer

Post Date May 28, 2009

Comments 0 Comments

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Military-industrial-academic complex

New degree signals Maui CC name change

By Craig Gima

POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, May 28, 2009

If the Board of Regents approves a proposal to offer a second bachelor’s degree at Maui Community College, it will likely mean a name change for the Kahului campus to the University of Hawaii-Maui, UH President David McClain said in a memo to the regents.

MAUI COMMUNITY COLLEGE
Established: 1964
Location: Kahului
Enrollment: 2,841
Student-to-Faculty Ratio 16:1

Programs offered
Bachelor’s: 1
Associate degree: 20
Certificates: 37

Source: University of Hawaii Institutional Research Office

Maui CC is asking the regents to allow the campus to offer a bachelor’s of applied science in engineering technology degree. The campus already offers a bachelor’s degree in applied business and information technology, and students can take distance learning classes there for bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UH-Manoa, UH-Hilo and UH-West Oahu.

If a second degree is approved at tomorrow’s meeting, McClain said he would support renaming the campus as UH-Maui. He said community college degrees would still be from Maui Community College, but the bachelor’s degrees awarded would be from a re-named Maui College.

If approved, the changes would likely take place after McClain leaves his post in July.

“We just want to take it one step at a time,” said Maui Community College Chancellor Clyde Sakamoto. “Having two bachelor’s degrees does not a university make, but it allows the university to continue to evolve.”

The proposal comes before the regents amidst some debate within the UH administration. Both UH Vice President for Community Colleges John Morton and UH Vice President for Administration Linda Johnsrud urged caution in moving forward with another bachelor’s degree on Maui.

A second bachelor’s degree would also trigger a move in accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges junior commission to the WASC senior commission, which accredits four-year colleges and universities, McClain said.

But after reviewing the concerns, Maui CC’s capabilities and work force needs on Maui, McClain said he concluded that the regents should approve the degree with the first upper-division courses offered in fall 2010.

Graduates of the program would fill a “critical need” for technicians at the U.S. Air Force observatory and supercomputer facilities on Maui, the UH Manoa Institute for Astronomy facility and high-tech firms on Maui, McClain said.

Sakamoto said the college eventually hopes to offer more than just two bachelor’s degrees.

“It’s simply a matter of our college meeting community needs,” he said.

“I think it’s exciting,” said Maui state Sen. Rosalyn Baker, who, along with other Maui legislators, has been pushing for a four-year college on Maui for decades. “I’m hoping the regents will support it because it is an important step for Maui, for higher education here.”

Source: http://www.starbulletin.com/news/hawaiinews/20090528_new_degree_signals_maui_cc_name_change.html

Superferry vs. Pirates?

Post Date April 22, 2009

Comments 0 Comments

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Hawaii Superferry Resistance, Military-industrial-academic complex, Social and Economic Impacts

Mahalo to Mike Reitz for pointing out that this story of pirates is very deceiving and may be partially about hyping a threat in order to secure funding for the expensive Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), a prototype of which was made by Austal Corporation, the same company that made the Hawai’i Superferry and its soon to be built sisters, the Joint High Speed Vessel (JHSV). The article by John Feffer gives an excellent analysis of the origins of the “pirate” problem in Somalia (they call themselves the coast guard). It also looks at the process by which the defense contractors help to create threats that can be fixed by their product.

======

Source: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175062/john_feffer_the_piracy_problem

posted April 21, 2009 3:54 pm

Tomgram: John Feffer, The Piracy Problem

Sometimes, it seems as if all U.S. global geopolitics boils down to little more than a war for money within the Pentagon. In the best of times, each armed service still has to continually maintain and upgrade its various raisons d’être for the billions of dollars being poured into it; each has to fight — something far more difficult in economic hard times — to maintain or increase its share of the budgetary pie. The remarkable thing is that we are now in the worst of economic times and yet, for one more year, the Pentagon can still pretend that it just ain’t so. After eight years in which the Bush administration broke the bank militarily, an already vastly bloated Pentagon budget will miraculously rise once more, even if by a relatively modest 4%, in the coming fiscal year. But don’t for a second think that the Army, Air Force, Marines, and Navy aren’t already scrambling for toeholds suitable for a more precarious future.

Our unchallenged imperial Navy rules the sea lanes of the planet. Its 11 aircraft carrier battle groups, those vast water-borne military bases, roam the oceans of the world without opposition. But there’s a problem. Right now, as John Feffer, co-director of the invaluable website Foreign Policy In Focus and TomDispatch regular, points out below, the American war of note is on the ground in (and in the air over) the Af-Pak theater of operations, which leaves the Navy scrambling for meaning — that is, future money.

Right now, the Army and the Marines are getting the headlines and the attention, which could mean the lion’s share of future loot, as they recalibrate based on a counterinsurgency future. (One, two, many Afghanistans…) So, thought of in naval terms, the Somali pirates — that is, an actual threat at sea — have arrived just in the nick of time, providing an excuse for a new wave of potential expenditures aimed at creating the equivalent of counterinsurgency warfare at sea. In fact, think of those pirates as just the leading edge of a wave of new naval missions involving various forms of low-intensity operations afloat: not just piracy but also “seaborne terrorism, nuclear proliferation, drug smuggling, and human trafficking” for which naval planners and boosters are already starting to beat the drums.

And of course, no new mission should lack its preferably expensive, high-tech weaponry: in this case, the Littoral Combat Ship, a mighty pile of money in a relatively small package. A third the size of a destroyer, this $500 million craft is meant to patrol the planetary shallows, even if it has so far proved a production-plagued nightmare. Nonetheless, Secretary of Defense Gates has just modestly upped the craft’s production — and there’s more to come from Navy “reformers.” Count on a new array of smaller, shallow-water vessels that could be formed into little armadas already termed by one naval officer “Influence Squadrons.”

Right now, of course, unmanned aerial drones are the hottest thing in the new Air Force counterinsurgency arsenal (and the Navy’s commissioning them as well), so how about unmanned robo-boats? Don’t worry: they’re already being considered as part of the new Navy mission. The sea’s the limit, so to speak. Tom

Monsters vs. Aliens

Why Terrorists and Pirates Are Not About to Team Up Any Time Soon

By John FefferIn the comic books, bad guys often team up to fight the forces of good. The Masters of Evil battle the Avengers superhero team. The Joker and Scarecrow ally against Batman. Lex Luthor and Brainiac take on Superman.

And the Somali pirates, who have dominated recent headlines with their hijacking and hostage-taking, join hands with al-Qaeda to form a dynamic evil duo against the United States and our allies. We’re the friendly monsters — a big, hulking superpower with a heart of gold — and they’re the aliens from Planet Amok.

In the comic-book imagination of some of our leading pundits, the two headline threats against U.S. power are indeed on the verge of teaming up. The intelligence world is abuzz with news that radical Islamists in Somalia are financing the pirates and taking a cut of their booty. Given this “bigger picture,” Fred Iklé urges us simply to “kill the pirates.” Robert Kaplan waxes more hypothetical. “The big danger in our day is that piracy can potentially serve as a platform for terrorists,” he writes. “Using pirate techniques, vessels can be hijacked and blown up in the middle of a crowded strait, or a cruise ship seized and the passengers of certain nationalities thrown overboard.”

Chaotic conditions in Somalia and other countries, anti-state fervor, the mediating influence of Islam, the lure of big bucks: these factors are allegedly pushing the two groups of evildoers into each other’s arms. “Both crimes involve bands of brigands that divorce themselves from their nation-states and form extraterritorial enclaves; both aim at civilians; both involve acts of homicide and destruction, as the United Nations Convention on the High Seas stipulates, ‘for private ends,'” writes Douglas Burgess in a New York Times op-ed urging a prosecutorial coupling of terrorism and piracy.

We’ve been here before. Since 2001, in an effort to provide a distinguished pedigree for the Global War on Terror and prove the superiority of war over diplomacy, conservative pundits and historians have regularly tried to compare al-Qaeda to the Barbary pirates of the 1800s. They were wrong then. And with the current conflating of terrorism and piracy, it’s déjà vu all over again.

Misreading Piracy

Unlike al-Qaeda, the Somali pirates have no grand desire to bring down the United States and the entire Western world. They have no intention of establishing some kind of piratical caliphate. Despite Burgess’s claims, they are not bent on homicide and destruction. They simply want money.

Most of the pirates are former fisherman dislodged from their traditional source of income by much larger pirates, namely transnational fishing conglomerates. When a crippled Somali government proved incapable of securing its own coastline, those fishing companies moved in to suck up the rich catch in local waters. “To make matters worse,” Katie Stuhldreher writes in The Christian Science Monitor, “there were reports that some foreign ships even dumped waste in Somali waters. That prompted local fishermen to attack foreign fishing vessels and demand compensation. The success of these early raids in the mid-1990s persuaded many young men to hang up their nets in favor of AK-47s.”

Despite their different ideologies — al-Qaeda has one, the pirates don’t — it has become increasingly popular to assert a link between radical Islam and the Somali freebooters. The militant Somali faction al-Shabab, for instance, is allegedly in cahoots with the pirates, taking a cut of their money and helping with arms smuggling in order to prepare them for their raids. The pirates “are also reportedly helping al-Shabab develop an independent maritime force so that it can smuggle foreign jihadist fighters and ‘special weapons’ into Somalia,” former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia David Shinn has recently argued.

In fact, the Islamists in Somalia are no fans of piracy. The Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which had some rough control over Somalia before Ethiopia invaded the country in 2006, took on piracy, and the number of incidents dropped. The more militant al-Shabab, which grew out of the ICU and became an insurgent force after the Ethiopian invasion, has denounced piracy as an offense to Islam.

The lumping together of Islamists and pirates obscures the only real solution to Somalia’s manifold problems. Piracy is not going to end through the greater exercise of outside force, no matter what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman may think. (In a recent column lamenting the death of diplomacy in an “age of pirates,” he recommended a surge in U.S. money and power to achieve success against all adversaries.) Indeed, the sniper killing of three pirates by three U.S. Navy Seals has, to date, merely spurred more ship seizures and hostage-taking.

Simply escalating militarily and “going to war” against the Somali pirates is likely to have about as much success as our last major venture against Somalia in the 1990s, which is now remembered only for the infamous Black Hawk Down incident. Rather, the United States and other countries must find a modus vivendi with the Islamists in Somali to bring the hope of political order and economic development to that benighted country.

Diplomacy and development, however lackluster they might seem up against a trio of dead-eyed sharpshooters, are the only real hope for Somalia and the commercial shipping that passes near its coastline.

From the Shores of Tripoli

It would have been the height of irony if the sharpshooters who took out the three Somali youths in that lifeboat with their American hostage had been aboard the USS John Paul Jones, a Navy guided-missile destroyer. Considered the father of the American Navy, Jones was quite the pirate in his day. Or so thought the British, whose ships he seized and looted.

We are left instead with the lesser irony of the sharpshooters taking aim from the USS Bainbridge. This ship was named for Commodore William Bainbridge, who fought against the Barbary pirates in the battles of Algiers and Tunis during the Barbary Wars and was himself taken prisoner in 1803.

The parallels between the pirates of yesterday and today are striking. Then, as now, American observers miscast the pirates as Muslim radicals. In fact, as Frank Lambert explains in his book The Barbary Wars, those pirates actually served secular governments that were part of the Ottoman Empire (much as Sir Francis Drake plundered Spanish ships on behalf of Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century or Jones served the United States in the eighteenth). Then, as now, the pirates resorted to preying on commercial shipping because they’d been boxed out of legitimate trade.

The Barbary pirates took to looting European vessels because European governments had barred the states of Algiers, Tripoli, and Morocco from trading in their markets. Back then, the fledgling United States accused the Barbary pirates of being slavers without acknowledging that the U.S. was then the center of the global slave trade. Today, the U.S. government decries piracy, but doesn’t do anything to prevent the maritime poaching of fishing reserves that helped push pirates from their jobs into risky but lucrative careers in freebooting.

The most improbable link, however, involves the conflation of terrorism and piracy. In the aftermath of September 11, pundits and historians identified the U.S. military response to the Barbary pirates as a useful precedent for striking out against al-Qaeda. Shortly after the attacks, law professor Jonathan Turley invoked the war against the Barbary pirates in congressional testimony to justify U.S. retaliation against the terrorists. Historian Thomas Jewett, conservative journalist Joshua London, and executive director of the Christian Coalition of Washington State Rick Forcier all pointed to those pirates as Islamic radicals avant la lettre to underscore the impossibility of negotiations and the necessity of war, both then and now.

The battle against the Barbary pirates led to the creation of the U.S. Marine Corps (“…to the shores of Tripoli“) and the first major U.S. government expenditure of funds on a military that could fight distant wars. For historians like Robert Kagan (in his book Dangerous Nation), that war kicked off what would be a distinguished history of empire, which he contrasts with the conventional wisdom of a United States that only reluctantly assumed its hegemonic mantle.

Will the current conflict with the Somali pirates, if successfully linked in the public mind to global terrorism, serve as one significant part of a new justification for the continuation of empire and a whole new set of military expenditures needed to sustain such a venture?

The New GWOT?

The United States has the most powerful navy in the world. But what it can do against the Somali pirates is limited. Big guns and destroyers are incapable of covering the necessary vast ocean expanses in which the relatively low-tech pirates operate, can’t respond quickly enough to pin-prick attacks, and ultimately aren’t likely to intimidate what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has quite correctly termed “a bunch of teenage pirates” with little to lose.

“The area we patrol is more than one million square miles and the simple fact of the matter is we just can’t be everywhere at once to prevent every attack of piracy,” says Lt Nathan Christensen, of the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Last year, approximately 23,000 ships passed through the Gulf of Aden. Pirates snagged 93 of them (some large, some tiny). Yet, in part because these trade routes are so crucial to global economic wellbeing, this minuscule percentage struck fear into the hearts of the most powerful countries on the planet.

The failure of the U.S. Navy to stamp out piracy has led to predictable calls for more resources. For instance, to deal with nimble, low-intensity threats like the speedy pirates, the Pentagon is looking at Littoral Combat Ships instead of another several-billion-dollar destroyer. The Navy is planning to purchase 55 of these ships, which, at $450-$600 million each, will come in at around $30 billion, a huge sum for a project plagued with costs overruns and design problems. With the ground (and air) war heating up in Afghanistan and the CIA in charge of operations in Pakistan, the Navy is understandably trying to keep up with the other services. The Navy’s goal of a 313-ship force, which boosters champion regardless of cost, can only be reached by appealing to a threat comparable to terrorists on land. Why not the functional equivalent of terrorists at sea?

Pirates are the perfect threat. They’ve been around forever. They directly interfere with the bottom line, so the business community is on board. Unlike China, they don’t hold any U.S. Treasury Bonds. Indeed, since they’re non-state actors, we can bring virtually every country onto our side against them.

And, finally, the Pentagon is already restructuring itself to meet just such a threat. Through its “revolution in military affairs,” the adoption of a doctrine of “strategic flexibility,” and the cultivation of rapid-response forces, the Pentagon has been gearing up to handle the asymmetrical threats that have largely replaced the more fixed and predictable threats of the Cold War era, and even of the “rogue state” era that briefly followed. The most recent Gates military budget, with its move away from outdated Cold War weapons systems toward more limber forces, fits right in with this evolution. Canceling the F-22 stealth fighter aircraft and cutting money from the Missile Defense Agency in favor of more practical systems is certainly to be applauded. But the Pentagon isn’t about to hold a going-out-of-business sale. The new Obama defense budget will actually rise about 4%.

George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror, or GWOT, turned out to be a useful way for the Pentagon to get everything it wanted: an extraordinary increase in spending and capabilities after 2001. With GWOT officially retired and an unprecedented federal deficit looming, the Pentagon and the defense industries will need to trumpet new threats or else face the possibility of a massive belt-tightening that goes beyond the mere shell-gaming of resources.

The War on Terror lives on, of course, in the Obama administration’s surge in Afghanistan, the CIA’s campaign of drone attacks in the Pakistani borderlands, and the operations of the new Africa Command. However, the replacement phrase for GWOT, “overseas contingency operations,” doesn’t quite fire the imagination. It’s obviously not meant to. But that’s a genuine problem for the military in budgetary terms.

Enter the pirates, who from Errol Flynn to Johnny Depp have always been a big box-office draw. As the recent media hysteria over the crew of the Maersk Alabama indicates, that formula can carry over to real life. Take Johnny Depp out of the equation and pirates can simply be repositioned as bizarre, narcotics-chewing aliens.

Then it’s simply a matter of the United States calling together the coalition of the willing monsters to crush those aliens before they take over our planet. And you thought “us versus them” went out with the Bush administration…

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His writings can be found at his website, and you can subscribe to his weekly e-newsletter World Beat here.

Ferry Tale: Book Review of The Superferry Chronicles

Post Date April 05, 2009

Comments 0 Comments

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Environmental Impacts, Hawaii Superferry Resistance, Military-industrial-academic complex, The Military in Hawai'i (All Islands)

Ferry tale

There’s plenty of blame to go around, but Hawaii court rights ship in end

By Michael Leidemann / Special to the Star-Bulletin

POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Apr 05, 2009

The Hawaii Superferry is gone, probably for good, but the political, legal, financial and ethical stink it leaves behind is going to cling to the islands for a long time. You might as well get used to it, and if you’re still trying to figure out who’s responsible, this book might help.

The Hawaii Supreme Court effectively shut the company down last month, ruling that the special law that it was operating under was unconstitutional. With that, the company announced that it was closing down operations, laying off workers and looking for a new home for its $350 million first ship. “We’re taking our beach ball and looking for a new ocean to toss it in,” Adm. Thomas Fargo, the company’s chief executive office, practically told Hawaii after the ruling came out.

“Good riddance,” some people said.

“See, anti-business,” the old guard said.

“Dang, I wish I’d ridden it at least once before it left,” the rest of us whispered, but not loud enough to be heard.

The court’s ruling that the state cannot set up a special law to accommodate one company, no matter how much money it was bringing into the state, especially if it was done by circumventing our treasured environmental laws, was the right thing and a long time in the making.

Only most of us didn’t see it coming. Were we silent conspirators, blinded by our own desire for a cheap interisland travel alternative, or did we have the wool pulled over our eyes by a high-flying group of investors who found friends in high places at the Legislature and Governor’s Office?

Clearly, the authors of this book think it’s the latter.

“We don’t hate ferries. Actually, we quite love ferries,” the authors say near the end of this collection of pieces that gives an almost fair but hardly balanced view of the ferry fiasco. “We even had a positive reaction to the idea when we first heard about the Superferry. But then, we learned the rest of the story.”

The story they tell is one of greed, manipulation, militarization, political ambition, absentee owners, a near riot and a cast of characters that includes Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, a former secretary of the Navy, a governor in bed with big business, as well as some local “heroes” who never stopped believing that Hawaii and its courts would ultimately do the right thing and make the ferry operations comply with all state laws, not just the one written especially for its benefit.

The book gives a lot of space to those little people who one way or another helped expose the ferry, and perhaps its ulterior motive of using Hawaii waters as a testing ground for a new type of military transport ship. It’s a little less fair to the thousands of people who genuinely wanted to see the ferry company succeed out of the belief that the Hawaii archipelago would be well served with a new kind of transportation. You’ll have to wade through a lot of stuff here to reach your own conclusions about who is really to blame.

Remember the movie “Who Killed the Electric Car?” which was making the rounds a few years ago? The film told the story of a highly successful electric car manufactured by General Motors, which suddenly and inexplicably pulled the product from the market. In the film, the directors leave the question of blame open-ended: big oil, the car companies, state bureaucrats, even consumers who did not buy enough of the cars end up sharing responsibility.

It’s a lot like that here. Sure, the Superferry company cut corners and is now paying a big price. Sure, the Legislature and the governor gave it their best (and, as it turns out, illegal) shot at salvaging the project. Sure, all of us who sat idly by and only prayed that it would all work out peacefully deserve some of the blame, too.

If there are any real heroes here, it’s the justices of the state Supreme Court. As they’ve done on a handful of memorable occasions before, the justices swiftly and quickly stood up for the law, and that means all of us, without any taint of the greed and politics that made this such an otherwise sordid tale.

This story’s probably over, but if it turns out that there’s a new chapter, or a new Superferry, somewhere in Hawaii’s future, we could all do worse than spending a little time with the book to figure out whose side we’re going to be on the next time we have to make a choice.
“The Superferry Chronicles: Hawaii’s Uprising Against Militarism, Commercialism and the Desecration of the Earth”

By Koohan Paik and Jerry Mander

(Koa Books)

320 pages, $20

Source: http://www.starbulletin.com/features/20090405_ferry_tale.html

Hawai'i delegation proud of earmarks

Post Date March 09, 2009

Comments Comments Closed

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Military Appropriations, Earmarks, Military-industrial-academic complex, The Military in Hawai'i (All Islands)

March 8, 2009

Hawai’i delegation proud of earmarks

By John Yaukey
Advertiser Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON – While other senators spent last week arguing over the evils or merits of special project funding they stuffed into a $410 billion spending bill, Hawai’i’s lawmakers have happily boasted about their take, which looks to be considerable.

U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, was expected to be among the top beneficiaries of the so-called omnibus spending bill.

And he is.

But an analysis of earmarks by Taxpayers for Common Sense found that second-term U.S. Rep. Mazie Hirono, a Democrat, led the 435-member House of Representatives with $138.6 million in pet projects – or earmarks – in large part because they were co-sponsored with Inouye.

In fourth place was Democratic U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie, with $111.4 million.

Hirono wa

Business as usual: Democrats drive up military budget with earmarks

Post Date March 09, 2009

Comments 0 Comments

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Military Appropriations, Earmarks, Military-industrial-academic complex

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/07/AR2009030702216.html?hpid=topnews

Pentagon’s Unwanted Projects in Earmarks

Democrats Press Backyard Spending

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Ellen Nakashima

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, March 8, 2009; A01

When President Obama promised Wednesday to attack defense spending that he considers wasteful and inefficient, he opened a fight with key lawmakers from his own party.

It was Democrats who stuffed an estimated $524 million in defense earmarks that the Pentagon did not request into the 2008 appropriations bill, about $220 million more than Republicans did, according to an independent estimate. Of the 44 senators who implored Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in January to build more F-22 Raptors — a fighter conceived during the Cold War that senior Pentagon officials say is not suited to probable 21st-century conflicts — most were Democrats.

And last July, when the Navy’s top brass decided to end production of their newest class of destroyers — in response to 15 classified intelligence reports highlighting their vulnerability to a range of foreign missiles — seven Democratic senators quickly joined four Republicans to demand a reversal. They threatened to cut all funding for surface combat ships in 2009.

Within a month, Gates and the Navy reversed course and endorsed production of a third DDG-1000 destroyer, at a cost of $2.7 billion.

“Too many contractors have been allowed to get away with delay after delay in developing unproven weapon systems,” Obama said, attributing $295 billion in cost overruns to “influence peddling” and “a lack of oversight” that produces weapons meant “to make a defense contractor rich” instead of securing the nation.

He did not mention that since 2006, Democratic lawmakers have presided over a 10 percent increase in the Pentagon’s budget — it now amounts to 46 percent of the government’s total discretionary spending — and have also voted repeatedly to keep funding weapons systems that have had hundreds of billions of dollars in cost overruns.

Although Obama complimented one Democratic and one Republican senator who last month proposed revisions, senior Pentagon officials predict that gaining support on Capitol Hill for ending procurement abuses will be an uphill battle.

“There is equal blame to go around,” a senior defense official said Friday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of political sensitivities. “It’s bipartisan. It’s all about political expediency.”

He added that Gates, who has lately been urging both the Pentagon and Congress to set aside parochial interests in setting budget priorities, is “not naive” — he expects only to improve the process, not to perfect it. Gates is “willing to use the capital he has built up” if necessary, the official said.

But a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) defended the Democrats’ record on defense spending. “This kind of spending can play an important role in our ongoing effort to improve critical national defense programs,” Jim Manley said.

Independent experts say the obstacles to radical change in defense procurement are all familiar: Close ties between contractors and the military services help ensure that waste and inefficiency are unpunished. Lawmakers seeking home-state jobs and a steady flow of campaign contributions have every incentive to keep funding programs that Pentagon officials say they do not need, particularly in an economic downturn.

“A lot of these weapon systems that are big-ticket items now have no purpose,” said William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank. “The Taliban doesn’t have an air force. China and Russia are at least a generation behind us. So at a time when we’re talking about developing unmanned aerial vehicles and want to increase our special forces, we ought to be making a clean sweep of these systems that were built during the Cold War.”

The problem, he added, is that the defense industry, now dominated by a handful of large firms with offices or subcontractors in key congressional districts, plays the political game extremely well.

Tens of thousands of jobs directly related to the F-22, for example, are spread among 44 states, a point emphasized in a letter of support for the program signed by 194 House members on Jan. 21. The fighter was conceived in the mid-1980s, and even though Gates said last year its production should end at a fleet of 183, a bipartisan group of lawmakers appropriated $523 million as a down payment on parts to build 20 more in 2010.

“The F-22 decision is an important national security decision with ramifications for the next 30 years,” said Jeff Adams, a spokesman for Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin, its manufacturer, noting that the Air Force still says it needs more planes.

Each aircraft now costs about $145 million, and senior defense officials note that the plane has not been used in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars. Although the F-22 is built as an air-superiority fighter, the U.S. military has not faced a serious dogfight threat since the Vietnam War, one of the officials said. The signatories to the Jan. 16 Senate letter supporting the additional planes included Vice President Biden, then still a Democratic senator from Delaware, Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

“The thing about weapons and bases is they are backyard issues for members of Congress,” said Gordon Adams, a professor at American University who formerly served as associate director for national security and international affairs for the Office of Management and Budget. “It’s not like foreign aid. It’s about contracts in my district, contributors to my election campaign, things that directly affect my prospects of staying in office and my ability to say to my constituents, ‘I got one for you!’ That’s the heart of a weapons decision.”

Since Democrats took control of the defense appropriations process in 2006, the defense industry has shifted gears: During the 2008 election cycle, more than half of the industry’s estimated campaign donations of $25.4 million went to Democrats, marking the first time in 14 years the party had come out on top, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit group that monitors campaign spending.

The impact of the shift was pronounced in the two committees that control military spending in the House, where Democrats collected 63 and 66 percent, respectively, of all defense industry funds given to committee members in that cycle. The champion was defense appropriations subcommittee Chairman John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), who collected $743,275 of the industry’s money; second place was held by Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), who collected $268,799, according to the center’s tally.

Murtha added more than $100 million in earmarks to the fiscal 2008 defense bill, nearly a fifth of the total inserted by all Democrats, according to the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. Every earmark reflects a project that the Pentagon did not seek in its budget request, and some of Murtha’s earmarks benefited clients of a lobbying firm called PMA Group, now under FBI investigation for possible violations of federal election law. PMA is run by a former Murtha aide, and some of its clients were donors to Murtha campaigns.

“We receive thousands of requests for funding each year, all of which are fully vetted and approved by the committee and the House,” said Murtha spokesman Matthew Mazonkey. “In the end, we recommend funding only those programs that have the most value and merit to the Defense Department.” Some, he added, have produced innovations that brought eventual cost savings.

Murtha also joined other Democrats — including Boxer — in adding billions of dollars to the war budget for 15 Boeing C-17 cargo planes that the Pentagon did not request. “We have said we have enough” of the C-17s, the senior defense official said. “But members keep adding them to every spending bill, every opportunity they can find.” Taxpayers for Common Sense calls the persistent funding “a gift to Boeing.” Boeing spokesman Douglas J. Kennett says that the program’s cancellation would cost “over 30,000 jobs with over 600 aerospace suppliers.”

Reid is no match for Murtha, but he still managed to sponsor or co-sponsor $68 million in unrequested defense earmarks in the 2008 bill, financing the development of a “truck-deployed explosive containment vehicle,” an “integrated imagery network” for the Nevada National Guard, an Army flatbed trailer, Nevada anti-drug operations, an Air Force diesel air quality project, and a propellant agent for “slurry gel” used by the Army.

Three of Reid’s Democratic colleagues — Kennedy, Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.) and Evan Bayh (Ind.) — also helped add almost a billion dollars to the Pentagon budget over the past two years for continued production of an alternate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, though the Pentagon said in 2007 that the engine is unnecessary. The plane is already $55 billion over its budgeted cost, according to the Government Accountability Office. The engine is being developed and built by General Electric and Rolls Royce in Massachusetts, Vermont, Indiana and other states; its production team says the engine will offer more flexibility for the fighter pilots if it is installed.

Kennedy also joined Sens. John F. Kerry (Mass.), James Webb (Va.), Herb Kohl (Wis.) and other Democrats in demanding funding for the third, unwanted DDG-1000 Navy destroyer. “The world has changed markedly since we began the march to DDG-1000 in the early 1990s,” Adm. Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations, said in January, explaining why he sought to cancel the ship in favor of building more of a smaller, cheaper and older alternative vessel.

Intelligence reports have warned that the ship will be unable to fend off missile threats, including an advanced missile being developed by China and simple ones already possessed by Hezbollah. As a result, the Navy agreed to end production of the hard-to-hide 14,000-ton vessels, capping the program at two ships instead of seven.

A Kennedy aide said of the senators’ joint letter to the Pentagon that “we’d like to think that it played a big role in changing their mind.” He confirmed that Raytheon, which makes the destroyer’s electronic components in Massachusetts, had contacted Kennedy’s office about keeping the ship in production. But, he added, “we don’t do Raytheon’s bidding.”

A Navy spokesman said Friday that the service still considers the DDG-1000 “a ship you don’t need.”

The cost of empire

Post Date March 07, 2009

Comments 0 Comments

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category American Empire, Global Justice and Peace Movements, Military-industrial-academic complex, World

March 7, 2009

The cost of empire

Miriam Pemberton: US government spending $100 B annually to maintain 1000 foreign military bases

Last week President Obama unveiled his record-spending 2010 budget proposal, which included a slight increase in funding for the Pentagon when compared with George Bush’s budget of 2009. Though the specific details of the budget won’t be released until April, the President has promised to increase troop recruitment while cutting “cold-war” weapons programs that have yet to be identified. But as the White House undergoes a reassessment of military priorities, there is little discussion about the future of the country’s vast network of foreign military bases, a network that military expert Miriam Pemberton says includes roughly 1000 bases at a cost of $100 billion per year.

Bio

Miriam Pemberton is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. She heads a group that produces the annual “Unified Security Budget for the United States” and she is a former Director of the National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament. She is co-editor, with William Hartung, of “Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War”.