Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex

by William D. Hartung

Enthralling and explosive, Prophets of War is an exposé of America’s largest military contractor, Lockheed Martin. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his famous warning about the dangers of the military industrial complex, he never would have dreamed that a company could accumulate the kind of power and influence now wielded by this behemoth company.

As a full-service weapons maker, Lockheed Martin receives over $25 billion per year in Pentagon contracts. From aircraft and munitions, to the abysmal Star Wars missile defense program, to the spy satellites that the NSA has used to monitor Americans’ phone calls without their knowledge, Lockheed Martin’s reaches into all areas of US defense and American life. William Hartung’s meticulously researched history follows the company’s meteoric growth and explains how this arms industry giant has shaped US foreign policy for decades.

Genres: War, History, Politics, Nonfiction, Military Fiction, Business, The United States Of America

304 pages, Hardcover

First published October 28, 2010

Reviews

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably a magazine article disguised as a book, this falls for every non-fiction writing cliche in existence (start with an anecdote! make it about people!) but it's eye-opening anyway. I look forward to the day that Lockheed, Apple and Windows merge like Voltron and proceed to take over the world with very pretty, dysfunctional, overpriced consumer goods that can double as weapons systems. All of it will be funded by the government, of course, but not in a socialistic way. No, in this state the share-holders and executives make out with billions of tax-payer money. It's the American Way.

[Haroon Haider · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is Excellent and we'll studied history of Military-Induatrial Complex, everything you want to know about it. I am so impressed and fascinated that I have just bought all other books by Mr. Hartung from ThriftBooks.

American economy is always about War and smuggling. Since the civil war, the economy is built, developed and abused by the military-industrial complex. The Process has always been riddling with waste, fraud and abuse. The acclaimed author Mr. Hartung is among the anti-war people, who are raising their voices to change the three centuries old policy. In FY 17, Lockheed Martin was awarded $50,696 million dollars in government contracts, and that is how it is since decades. Although, Lockheed is not the only contractor but the book is about Fraud, Waste and Abuse by Lockheed Martin, in together with the key players of Government Market. Often during the reading, reader feels the author’s biased view, but that is not the case, but the revelations are truly unbelievable and that makes you think that what the author is saying, can not be true and right there the feeling of author’s biased view are. A further digging reveal, he is not biased at all. Yes, we pay taxes and we never asked the government about the receipts, and in turn government is keeping a blind eye over Lockheed Martin from accountability standpoint. The facts and figures are so disturbing that I strongly encourage you not to go outside immediately after finishing the reading, or you may bump into something.

[Brent · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a tough book to read, both due to the subject matter and to the detail of it; it's not a pleasure read nor one for the beach. More like reading a text book. It's also enough to make a person almost sick, seeing the way geopolitical events have been shaped by military contractors. In the case of this book, the author focuses on Lockheed Martin, but it's clearly not just that particular company, but rather, all the big military contractors. One particularly disheartening example was the push to example NATO membership into the Central European countries seems to have been driven to expand LM's market for F-16 export sales. Also sorry to see were the examples of contractor executives shuttling in and out of government positions in the DOD and State Department and providing influence for the various contractors.

The sad part is that this story isn't easily broken down into meaningful sound bites and I see little, if any, interest in the media reporting on this or the current Congress wanting to fix it.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is a fascinating account of the myriad ways Lockheed Martin has jammed its tendrils down our collective throats without us really noticing. For example, the company is "involved at one level or another in nearly everything the [U.S.] government does, from providing instruments of death and destruction to collecting taxes and recruiting spies." It also does the U.S. and Canadian censuses and handles the U.S. fingerprint database. Oh, and it wrote the new Constitution of Afghanistan. And, for all intents and purposes, Harting argues that the company isn't particularly good at making death machines to begin with. What it's great at is owning government's ass. Its executives, lobbyists and lawyers filled "more than half a dozen important policy posts in the Bush administration," so the company was largely responsible for steering the U.S. war machine into Iraq part deux. The rare times it doesn't get its way in Congress it goes McCarthy and accuses anyone in its way of anti-Americanism and shouts what-if worst-case d-day scenarios to the masses to generate hysteria. The book wasn't particularly well organized and jumped around a lot, but it was worth the slog for the valuable information on how the pork-barrel politics of war really work.

[Nicky Lim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unless you like reading about what goes on in congress, Sally McButterNuts working with Mr Woffles no lobbying $6b for a project that turns out to be $18b, this book is for you. The book is written to shed light on LM's history and involvement in the government but it got pretty boring when it keeps lamenting on details about their lobbying. I also found the narrative to be uncaptivating and possibly only arousing if you are a US politician yourself.

Moral of the story of the book? Active citizenry. There you go.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is full of good content, but it assaults the reader in an over detailed, barrage of stream-of-consciousness-facts about Lockheed's history. It doesn't read too well, nor quickly, and frequently digresses. What I got out of the book:

-Lockheed Martin is part of a revolving door of the U.S. government. Former Lockheed employees go on to "officially" work for the government, and former government employees go on to work for Lockheed.

-The Company is the largest recipient of any military contractor. The government allocates certain amounts of money to them each year, but Lockheed has had a history of underquoting, or "buying in" while causing overruns on purpose. So they continually spend our taxpayer's money. The estimated "Lockheed Tax" for each American citizen is $260 per year.

-The military-industrial complex is comprised primarily by Lockheed. "As part of the growing trend of outsourcing the implementation of U.S> foreign policy to private companies, Lockheed Martin has done everything from supplyinginterrogators for U.S. military prisons at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to staffing ahuman rights monitoring mission in Darfur, to training police in Haiti, to running a postal service nt he Democratic Republic of the Congo, to helping to write the Afghan constitution. On the home front, the company helps scan our mail, designs and runs the U.S. census, processes taxes for the Internal Revenue Service, provides state-of-the-art biometric identification devices to the FBI, and plays a role in building billions of dollars' worth of new ships and communications equipment for the Coast Guard. - Page 29

-"Even listing the govenment and quasi-governmental agencies the company has contracts with is a daunting task: The Dept of Agriculture, Bureau of Land Management, Census Bureau, Centers for Disease Control, Cost Guard, Dept of Defense (including the Army, Navy, Air FOrece, and Missile Defense Agency), Dept of Education, Dept of Energy, the EPA, Federal Aviation Administration, FBI, Federal Technology Dept, Good and Drug Administration, General Services Administration, Geological Survey, Dept of Homeland SEcurity, Bureau of Indian Affairs, the IRS, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Institutes of Health, Social Security Administration, Dept of State, U.S. Customs Service, the U.S. Postal Service, the Transportation Security Agency, and the Dept of Veterans Affairs." - Pages 247-248 In other works, Lockheed Martin is a private company that runs a large part of our government.

-Many, many politicians, liberal and conservative, have defended funding many Lockheed planes, weapons, etc. in the argument for supporting jobs. The military-industrial complex has morphed into such a vast monster, that it seems like it's our last source of manufacturing. I would love to cut military spending by 80%, but I fear it would cause a Great Depression, because our economy is so intertwined with the military-industrial complex.

-Lobbying has played a huge role in Lockheed's might. "It is the work of Norman Augustine and his successors in the lobbying area that has made it so difficult to reduce the military budget to reasonable levels, even in times of reduced threats like the immediate post-Cold War years of the 1990s." - Page 170

-Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta in 1995 to become Lockheed Martin. "While executives made out like bandits, the more than nineteen thousand workers who were laid off as aresult of the Lockheed-Martin Marietta deal received little assistance." - Page 174

-A single F-22 plane cost $339 million to produce by Lockheed!

-Robert Gates said, "AT present America faces no global rival. America's grand strategy should aim to extend the advantageous position into the future as far as possible" PNAC said, in order to do so, "requires aglobally predominant military capacity now and in the future." There was no suggestion that U.S. security might be better served by diplomacy, arms control, economic integration, or other potential tools of conflict resolution." - Page 209

-As President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "the only way to ensure against abuses by the military-industrial complex is to have "an alert and engaged citizenry." This is even truer now that the military-industrial complex has made the leap into the information age-to the point where the defense industry may eventually make as much from surveillance and services as it does from weapons of war. As one veteran journalist put it, "If I had to choose a candidate for Big Brother, I would choose Lockheed Martin." - Page 249

[Peter Rooijmans]

A history of the dealings between the Lockheed company and its Government customers, mainly the US Government, from the start of the company to today. As the company has grown over the years in size and influence, it has become a powerful presence at the Government level, certainly when taking into consideration the spread of the company's activities over almost all of the states and the influence it can thereby bring to bear on members of Congress. The question is, whether this influence is for the better of the country or for the better of the company.

[gargamelscat · Rating 3 out of 5]

The bulk of the book - a history of Lockheed's chequered past as a major player in the military-industrial-congressional complex - isn't anything new.

But well written with an alarming chapter on post-911 activities. If private corporations contracted to carry out government activities - detention and interrogation of terror suspects - doesn't worry you then you haven't read enough dystopian fiction. The future is now and it ain't looking good.

[Nigel Pinkus · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was a critical look at Lockheed Martin's corporate history that started from its' unimpressive military aircraft manufacturing in WWI to a major supplier of fighters and bombers in WWII. Gradually over time and with a bit of (political) luck along the way (from Pres. Reagan), it became an absolute corporate behemoth firmly established with the US government in American foreign policy. The reader will learn about how the company has got away with suspicious foreign deals in areas and countries such as Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Japan, the Middle East and Turkey just to name a few; Continuous and intentional massive cost overruns ~ designed to fill their own pockets; There was price irregularities (the coffee maker scandal, the claw hammer scandal et. al.); There was under bidding in order to boosts profits, conspiracy, bribery (Japan), and, of course, shoddy workmanship. All in the name of making exorbitant profits from government contracts.

Indeed, everyone should read about the embarrassing and disastrous Lockheed C-5 scandal; The scandalous Cheyenne helicopter that became so expensive and cost ridden (between 1-3 million each) that the US army eventually cancelled the contract; Then, there was the F-104 that crashed and killed so many pilots that it became known as the 'Widow Maker'. If that wasn’t enough, then there was also the 'Lockheed bribery scandal' where Lockheed secretly bribed members of the Japanese government to sell them the L-1011 at $1.7 million each.

But, it was how Lockheed and Martin and other military contractors (such as Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman) have become so engrained and complicit with the US government and the Pentagon that it is simply called the military-industrial-complex or, since the 21st century, it should be now called the military-industrial-intelligence complex. Yet, our military serves only a tiny number of politicians and war-mongers who should be held accountable for their lying, stealing, cheating, mass murdering (twenty years of war in the Middle East including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria et. al) and, of course, the profiteering from war.

But, it is America's sons and daughters who are sacrificed to these despicable creatures - sent thousands of miles away to kill, steal and destroy in order to protect America’s so called 'freedom', 'democracy' and 'winning hearts and minds'. Indeed, on November seventh, 2021 the lower house in the US congress has just approved to raise spending on a Defense budget to $740 billion (up $25 billion) just a few months after America finally pulled out of Afghanistan. When, it is time, this person thinks, to stop spending so much money on war, what does America do? It does the opposite and spends even more! There seems no end to the cost and carnage of war ~ no end. How many more young men and women must die, before people stand up and say enough is enough. No more war.

"Imperialism is a system of exploitation that occurs not only in the brutal form of those who come with guns to conquer territory. Imperialism often occurs in more subtle forms, a loan, food aid, blackmail. We are fighting this system that allows a handful of men on Earth to rule all of humanity." Thomas Sankara.

[R. · Rating 1 out of 5]

TLDR: companies try to sell the products they make and companies that sell products to the government lobby the government to buy their products.
Full disclosure - I'm a former Lockheed Martin employee.
Very disappointing book. I was hoping for a real description of how our modern military-industrial complex came to be, but this book didn't provide it.
As presented by Hartung, Lockheed (and later Lockheed Martin) is the only entity in the world with any agency. Everyone else - US and foreign governments, legislators, other companies - acts according to Lockheed's wishes; ergo, everything bad in the arms industry is the fault of Lockheed.
That's obviously ludicrous, but that's the thesis.
Lockheed - along with other military contractors - is a big part of the US Military-Industrial Complex, but Hartung does absolutely nothing to demonstrate that Lockheed's role is materially different from Boeing, Northrop, Raytheon and others, or that Lockheed had a special or unique role in formation of the MIC. He simply focuses on news stories about Lockheed, emphasizes the dollars involved and ignores similar content about the rest of the industry. Maybe Lockheed is different, but Hartung didn't do anything to make that case.
In doing so, he casts Lockheed as the 800 lb. gorilla that can effectively control the US Government and Congress. Lockheed (like other contractors) isn't that fortunate - it has to respond to the requests that the government issues and it has to deal with contracting officers who wield significant authority that can affect the company's bottom line. For someone who has been following the MIC for so many years, Hartung is poorly informed about the actual workings of US government contracts.
And he ignores the "military" side of the complex almost entirely. How much of the current MIC is a result of US government actions/desires/interests, independent of any prompting by a contractor? Hartung isn't interested and doesn't explore it, perhaps figuring (correctly!) that it's easier to turn a folder of Lockheed news clippings into a book than it is to do real research about the MIC.
Read it if you want a partisan diatribe that mistakenly focuses on a single player in a cast of dozens; if you want to learn how we got the MIC that we have today you'll have to find another book.

[Annie Windholz · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Prophets of War, Hartung writes about Lockheed Martin-  the US' largest military weapons contractor. According to the Project on Governmental Oversight (POGO), Lockheed Martin has 85 instances of criminal, civil or administrative misconduct since 1995 and has accrued $762.9 million in penalties in the past 20 years. This has not stopped them from making a 'killing off of killing', though pulling in  $43,399.4 million dollars from government contract awards in 2016 alone. 

In the 70s, the company had to ask the government to a bailout comparable to the ones recently given to keep Wall Street afloat in recent years, they also faced charges of bribery and were seeing a decline in military spending post Vietnam. Reagan came to the rescue by engaging in the arms race with Russia. 

Throughout its history the company has also helped create arms export subsidies to inspire other countries to buy weapons and go to war. Sometimes costs to the US go beyond merely granting loans to other countries, but promising "offsets,"- 'different ways of steering the money back to the country buying the weapons products. For instance, Lockheed Martin might offer to set up a plant in the purchasing government's country- to provide their citizens with work in building these weapons. 

While Lockheed Martin has generally always made a lot of money from weapons sales- in the 1990's they merged with other companies and suddenly had a wider reach. This reach included "everything from involvement in interrogation [such as in GTMO] and the police training to profiting from the new post-9/11 wave of domestic surveillance activities."

[Javier HG · Rating 3 out of 5]

En su discurso de despedida en 1961, el presidente estadounidense Eisenhower advirtió del "complejo militar industrial" y de su influencia en la política. Desde entonces, su poder e influencia no ha hecho sino crecer, con compañías cada vez más y más grandes.

"Prophets of War" es la biografía de una de estas compañías: Lockheed Martin, una empresa que se funda con el nacimiento de la aviación y que a día de hoy está involucrada en numerosos aspectos de la política de la defensa de los EE.UU: cohetes espaciales, misiles, submarinos nucleares, aviones de combate, de transporte, helicópteros, mantenimiento de bases militares...
El libro detalla la relación simbiótica (algunos observadores podrían calificarla de corrupta) entre el poder ejecutivo, el legislativo, y las empresas de defensa: el lobby que ejerce Lockheed Martin en el Congreso y el Senado, la defensa que el propio Pentágono hace de proyectos fallidos y con sobrecostes...

El libro se lee rápido teniendo en cuenta que habla de una compañía de semejante tamaño e historia, y lo hace de una manera bastante crítica. Es bastante difícil que la persona que lo lea termine con una opinión favorable de Lockheed Martin e incluso del sector. Recomendable para quell@s que quieran entender mejor la política de defensa estadounidense.

[James]

Enthralling and explosive, Prophets of War is an exposé of America’s largest military contractor, Lockheed Martin. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his famous warning about the dangers of the military industrial complex, he never would have dreamed that a company could accumulate the kind of power and influence now wielded by this behemoth company.As a full-service weapons maker, Lockheed Martin receives over $25 billion per year in Pentagon contracts. From aircraft and munitions, to the abysmal Star Wars missile defense program, to the spy satellites that the NSA has used to monitor Americans’ phone calls without their knowledge, Lockheed Martin’s reaches into all areas of US defense and American life. William Hartung’s meticulously researched history follows the company’s meteoric growth and explains how this arms industry giant has shaped US foreign policy for decades.

[Pat · Rating 3 out of 5]

it was alright; extremely over the top view no pun intended. but for someone who has no idea what is goin on in the industry it should spark some interest to dig further. truth be told it introduced me to two stocks spun off from lockheed martin that i still hold today; and that alone was well worth the read.

[Mark Friedel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book on a Boeing 747 flying a across the Atlantic making it a 4D experience.

Anyone reading this books knows the military industrial complex is insane but this book was the first to help me truly grasp the scale and normality of pork barrel politics and how intrenched war spending is American politics.

[Stevie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Information like this makes me feel helpless and wonder about the point of participating in the U.S. form of "democracy".

[Constance McCutcheon]

Engaging read. Great insight.

[Danaka K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

anyone who pays taxes in the US should read this and talk to other taxpayers about it

[FiletMinion · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not interested in politics..

[Stephen Heiner · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very informative read on one of the pillars of the military industrial complex and just how incompetent they can be: Lockheed Martin is really a disaster.

[Camille · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very documented book. Close to a scolar book (don't expect suspense and thrill)
Lot of info to understand loockheed and how they operate.

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

In “Prophets of War” author Hartung presents an unabashedly biased critic of the Lockheed Martin, the United States largest defense contractor. The author centers on Lockheed Martin’s actions, from it’s post World War establishment to the current day, that prioritize ever increasing prophets through everything from manipulation (i.e. aggressive lobbying), to ever expanding company growth, and even overpromising on the capabilities of its products while intentionally low balling prices to win contracts. In doing so, Hartung identifies numerous legitimate serious concerns within the modern military-congress-industrial complex. However, it is a one sided assessment. While defense contractor’s like Lockheed Martin act with self-interest, and at times cross the line of what is morally and ethically in the best interest of the Nation, the author ignores the the incredible work and contributions that companies like Lockheed Martin contribute to U.S. national security.
Why read this book. All government acquisition professionals need to read this book, but with the acknowledgement that it is a one sided narrative. The author brings up numerous issues and concerns that government accusations professionals need to be aware of and address at their level before the issues become national level scandals, or work to undermine the government and industry partnership that is essential to maintaining our warfighting capabilities.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well researched account of how a couple of brothers started a company which grew into an organ of the US Empire. This is a document to the political power wielded by the Industrial side of the MIC triumvirate.

[Jeffrey Cavanaugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lockheed Martin is the world's largest defense contractor and is a corporate behemoth so intertwined with the U.S. government that it is often hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. Defense. Aerospace. Intelligence. Non-defense government work with the Post Office and even the Census Bureau.... the list goes on and on and raises serious questions about the nature of corporate power in 21st-century America.

Not least of which is the litany of projects the company has screwed up and overcharged us for - literally fleecing us on any number of billion-dollar contracts that consistently don't deliver what is promised. The fact is Lockheed Martin is so big and powerful that it can lose or otherwise screw up several such contracts and STILL be the best-positioned company to win future work from the government.

[Elena · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was comprehensive and comprehensively depressing, but it was also paced weirdly - tons and tons of details about early Lockheed Martin, but the conclusion implies that the biggest threat from the company is diversification and involvement with tons of government agencies. That part is relatively glossed over at the very end of the book. I understand laying historical groundwork, but I would have preferred way more information about LM's involvement in Iraq/Afghanistan and social services post-2005 or so. Also, the author couldn't seem to decide if he was telling a story or making a report. Sometimes there was narrative tension; sometimes there wasn't. I'm okay with a dry read, but I do prefer some consistency.

[Azriel]

The first 150 pages told me a story I already well knew: That large defense contractors were rent seeking and engaging in cronyism for decades, leading to over-expensive systems that underperformed and often weren't needed.

The remainder was partisan hackwork which often mentioned as fact radical claims and contested incidents, usually with the oft repeated "according to one source . . . "

A much better book on this subject would be Ralph Peters' novel "Traitor", which despite being fiction feels more accurate than a screed by someone who believes every rocket is a cluster bomb.

[Cherie · Rating 3 out of 5]

B Interesting book; pretty intense; skimmed mostly, but read some entire sections. A focus on how closely LM is to the U.S.'s army and the military industrial complex. LM is a company that often fails to meet their goals, overcharges, bribes, is rife w scanals, creates flawed products...and also is the creator of the horrifying "cluster bombs" which can cover an area the size of 3 football fields and aims to kill civilians (aka women and children). Very detailed, lots of background history.

[Alo Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am only on about page 8, but this is very interesting so far. I have a feeling I will be pretty pissed off after I finish this one.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's disturbing how much Lockheed Martin is involved in everything from the US Census to weapons.

[Tj · Rating 3 out of 5]

Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex. Very much suggest for anyone with an interest in what directed us to the point we're at.