 Hello, I'm Jimmy Lease and welcome to Skywatch, a new TV program about grounding the F-35 here in Burlington, Vermont and grounding the F-35 everywhere. I'm co-hosting Skywatch with Danika Katowicz, who's based in Chicago. The first of twenty F-35 jets arrived here in one of Vermont's most densely populated cities four years ago. But I've been working to stop the F-35 since 2010 when the possibility of basing them here was first announced. Skywatch calls for grounding the F-35 because of its 115 decibel noise, its climate-killing greenhouse gas emissions, and its sole purpose, war. 1,300 Vermont children live near the runway or in the flight path and are repeatedly exposed to the extreme F-35 noise that damages hearing and impairs their cognitive development. F-35 training in a city is government-sponsored child abuse. What's more, the airport purchased and demolished 200 homes because of the extreme military jet noise. The 44 acres on which those homes stood can only be restored to desperately needed housing once the F-35 is grounded. The F-35 is a climate killer. Each F-35 burns 22 gallons of jet fuel every minute and they fly for hundreds of hours each month. To save the planet, the F-35 must be grounded now. The purpose of the F-35 is war. Like the Iraq war, the war in Afghanistan, and the Vietnam war. All of them based on lies. There is no just war. But there is a lot more to learn about the F-35 and the military-industrial complex from our distinguished guest today. And Skywatch co-host, Donika Katowicz, will introduce him now. Hi everyone and thanks, Jimmy. I am the national co-director at CodePink who convenes the International Ground, the F-35 coalition. F-35 jets are one of the many weapons produced by Lockheed Martin Corporation. And today we'll talk with Bill Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Bill is the author of the book, Prophets of War, which is about Lockheed Martin and the military-industrial complex. Bill, you say in your book, Prophets of War, that the F-35 was supposed to be a Chevrolet, not a Porsche. I think that was actually the Pentagon's terminology that used for it, meaning that the F-35 was supposed to be cheaper than its predecessor, the F-22. Can you tell us how that's been going for the folks over at the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin? Sure. Well, not well. You know, the program as a whole is going to cost $1.7 trillion, which is the most expensive weapons program in the history of the Pentagon. And $400 billion of that is just to buy them. The rest is to operate them. And it's had severe cost overruns, scheduled delays. It was actually first put forward as an idea in the 1990s called the Joint Strike Fighter. So it's also got at least 800 unresolved defects, according to the Pentagon Inspector General. It spends most of its time in the hangar. It's too complex to maintain. It's not good at any of the things it's supposed to do, support troops on the ground, you have fighter planes, drop bombs. Now, you know, given that we may not want these things to be happening, perhaps that's not a, you know, the decisive question on the table. But the project in Governer-Overset has made it clear it may never be ready for combat. And it was supposed to be cheaper because it was going to do many things at once. It was going to be a fighter for the Air Force. It was going to work off aircraft carriers for the Navy. It was going to be a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft for the Marines. And so that's part of the problem that's developed is there's these diverse things it's supposed to do, and it does none of them well. So this idea of the Chevrolet was it was going to be simple. It was going to be sort of easy to build parts for the different services, therefore making it cheaper and so forth. But more recently, the chief of staff of the Air Force is, well, really it's more like a Ferrari. I mean, you know, you take it out on Sundays, but you don't use it during the week. So it was supposed to be kind of the backbone of the U.S. Air Force. Now it's almost like a luxury good, and it doesn't even perform, you know, as advertised. Thank you. And in your book, Prophets of War, you I think start the book out talking about the F-22 sort of in relation to the F-35 fighter jet program. I know they were, you know, intended for mostly different things, but both fighter jets made by Lockheed Martin. Can you tell us a little bit about how the F-22 program came to an end? What were the issues with it? Yeah, it was an interesting fight. The Air Force and the Pentagon actually wanted to get rid of it. It was too expensive. They wanted to move on to the next generation, which was the F-35. They were going to build 750 of them. They built 189. For about the same cost that they said they could get 754. So there was huge cost overruns. And the Lockheed Martin and the members with pieces of the plane in their districts fought back. So 200 members of the House of Representatives wrote a letter to the president saying you can't stop this program. 12 governors. They claimed there were, you know, hundreds of thousands of jobs at stake. They took ads out in papers around the country showing workers building different parts of the plane. So they put on a big push, but there was a bipartisan pushback, not just from the administration, but from Senator McCain, who said this was the military-industrial complex at work. So they were managed to stop it, but the clinching argument by then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was, well, we've got the F-35. They don't give money to the industry. They don't give jobs to people. It's a substitute. It's not the end of building combat aircraft or spending money in this area. It's just a shift in what kind of plane we purchase. So in essence, on the one level, it was a victory for those who were trying to stop the building of an unnecessary weapon and overcome the lobbying of Lockheed Martin. On the other hand, the consolation prize for Lockheed Martin was as expensive as the plane that was being replaced. So it was kind of an exception to prove the rules. Rarely do you stop a weapons program, but they had a substitute sitting in the wings in the F-35. Did the U.S. military use the F-22 often in combat? No. No, there might be a handful of examples, but they mostly used the older planes, the F-18, F-16, you know, former generation bombers and so forth. So it was really in the nature of a luxury good from a military point of view. So that's one of the reasons I think they wanted to curtail it early. Do you see any major similarities between the F-22 and the F-35, you know, sort of with their issues and problems and how they're specifically being discussed by policymakers? Well, I mean, the cost overruns are in common. The notion that, you know, high-tech weapons are going to solve complicated problems that shouldn't probably be dealt with by military force at all. In terms of the more technical aspects, the F-22 is supposed to be what they call air superiority fighter that could overcome other aircraft. The F-35 was supposed to do multiple things, you know, fly off carriers, do vertical takeoff and landing from the Marines, be a fighter, give close air support to troops, be a bomber. So they had slightly different missions. But I think this faith in high-tech, this notion that we have to have a large air force that can bomb countries anywhere in the world, you know, the missions were similar and things that we need to push back against. It seems like a theme with, I guess, Lockheed Martin products specifically. Throughout your book, you know, you discuss a number of weapons that they were trying to create. Sometimes they, you know, only had a prototype out or they never even got a prototype out. A helicopter that could fly like a small plane or, you know, the bigger cargo planes for the Vietnam War, just really high aspirations with sort of no plan on getting there. So I bet Jimmy has some questions about that, so I'll leave it at him. But do you see the F-35 program coming to an end under similar circumstances to the F-22 at any point? I know Code Pink has been in conversation with members of Congress who, even though they might not be a fan of the plane, can't really see funding for it coming to an end at any point. Yeah, well, part of the problem with Congress is the, you know, the alleged economic benefits, and they overstate those. You know, I looked at their estimates of how many jobs were created. It was about half what they claim. And they claimed it's in 46 states, but the bulk of the work is done in Georgia, Texas, and California. Most other states get very little. But Congress sort of bought that argument that it's a job creator. And many years they actually add F-35s to the budget beyond what the Pentagon asked for. And there's an F-35 caucus in the House, 39 members who have pieces of it built in their districts. So there's this lobby entrenched in the Congress. On the other hand, because of the costs, and because there's a next generation fighter already being developed, and because there's an argument whether they should use more unpiloted vehicles versus piloted aircraft. I don't know if they'll build the 2,500 that they set out to do. So in that sense, it may be similar to the F-22. But it'll be, you know, it'll be a budgetary argument. They're not really going to admit that they made major mistakes or question the mission and the kind of like militarized foreign policy that it supports. So how much of the boondoggle would you say like the responsibility for it falls on Congress versus like the people at Lockheed Martin? I think there's equal blame. I mean, Lockheed Martin and all these companies always promise the sky, you know, it's going to be cheaper. It's going to be more effective. It's going to be easier to maintain. And they never deliver, but they understand that they don't really need to because there's only five big contractors left after the merger boom of the 1990s. So often the Pentagon has nowhere to turn. You know, if Lockheed Martin is messing up the program, they can't just shift to another contractor. So in that sense, Lockheed Martin bears a lot of responsibility. But then Congress, which in theory is supposed to do oversight of this stuff, has been asleep at the wheel. There's members like Adam Smith, who ran the Armed Services Committee on the Democrats controlled the House, who said he's tired of throwing money down the F-35 rat hole, but kind of said, you know, we're stuck with this thing. You know, it's too late to replace it. We're just going to live with it. So I would put kind of equal blame and of course there's collaboration because the company gives large amounts of campaign cash to these members of Congress. And also they hire people from the Pentagon as lobbyists, as board members to help them fend off any possible government efforts to reduce spending on the plane. So it's, you know, there's this kind of collaboration that people call the military industrial congressional complex or the iron triangle. And so it's kind of a joint responsibility. Thank you. I'm going to pass it over to my host for his questions if any came up for Jimmy, but I do really recommend everyone read Prophets of War. It took me a while to get through. It's very annotated, but I did learn so much about it. And if you're a listener and not a reader per se, the Busted Business Bureau podcast did an episode on Lockheed Martin that uses this book as like a primary source for everything that they talked about on the podcast. So I do really recommend delving into it. There's a lot of crazy and funny stories to be honest in this book. So Jimmy, I'll pass it over to you. Okay, I love the book too. I've, I've been reading it and I've actually I finished reading and I really admire this book. This is a really great handbook on how bad the military industrial complex is in this country. And I just like to get your view on why that is. They've had practice building aircraft since 1905 when the two men, the Wright brothers put together the first aircraft. Why aren't they getting cheaper every generation? And why are there so many deficiencies? You said there are 800 unresolved problems with the F-35. What is wrong with Lockheed Martin that they can't get it right? Well, I think part of it is there's no financial incentive. You know, whether they get it right or not, they get paid. Congressmen still get their campaign contributions. They still get to point to jobs in their district. The Pentagon keeps adding bells and whistles, things they would like to have, many of which are not achievable. So that adds costs. You know, there's been a few plans that have worked better like the A-10, the F-16, where people in the Pentagon pushed hard to not add all these bells and whistles and to hold the companies to some standard. More often than not, the F-35 is the kind of thing that gets generated by this system. So it's a corrupt system that basically provides benefits to the contractors, to the members of Congress, to the Pentagon, whether or not the planes work. So it's really kind of an outrage given that they're kind of selling it on the idea that it's for defense, but really it's to provide money to these players in the system. So there was an example that the book talks about, this cargo plane called the C-5A, and it had all kinds of problems, and it's just like reminiscent reading about it was like the F-35 itself. But one thing struck me was that there was a Pentagon official named Ernie Fitzgerald, who really did some remarkable things. Can you talk about what he did? Yeah. Well, Fitzgerald was sort of a cost estimator in the Air Force, and he got internal documents that showed that it was going to cost a lot more than they claimed. You know, billions of dollars more. And he also pointed out some of the performance problems, like wings that cracked and things like that. It was supposed to be this like massive transport plane to do things like get weapons to Vietnam more quickly. But it had so many issues. It wasn't really used substantially in the war. And Fitzgerald had the advantage of working with Senator William Proxmire from Wisconsin, who was kind of a gadfly who went after the Pentagon on various issues. He also passed the Foreign Crop Practices Act that made it harder for these companies to bribe overseas officials to sell their plane. So Proxmire was on the case, and he actually even hired Fitzgerald as a consultant after he was fired by the Pentagon for raising these issues. But, you know, his contribution was very valuable because he had the goods on them. You know, he had the internal documents. He had the analysis. He had somebody like Proxmire to give voice to his criticisms. It was a time where a senator could get a lot more media attention. The meeting environment wasn't as crowded. There were things like televised hearings. So it was a different moment. You know, I think now you've got some members who go after this kind of thing like Senator Warren and others. But she had a hearing on price gouging just a little while ago, and it didn't get the kind of media attention it deserved by any standard. So part of it is just how to penetrate the media and political environment to get people to know what's going on, in which case I think they would push back. But it's just lost in the noise. One of the things that your book takes up is the jobs issue. And that was something we heard a lot of before the F-35 arrived from Senator Leahy and from Bernie Sanders, who were both supporting bringing the F-35 to Vermont. But the Air Force said there would be no more jobs in Vermont compared to what we had before the F-35 with the F-16. What's your take on the jobs issue? And the book mentions this study that was done by the University of Massachusetts. Can you talk about that study and how jobs really are or are not created by these military contracts? Yeah, well that study has been updated by the cost of war project of Brown just recently came out. They estimated spending on things like infrastructure, green energy, education, healthcare would create anywhere from 9 or 10% more jobs to 250% more jobs than spending on the military. So throwing money at the F-35 actually cost jobs for the national economy. The problem is the localities feel like well, you know, if I don't have this base, if I don't have this manufacturing plant, I'm going to lose even if the country as a whole gains. And so there probably needs to be some sort of industrial policy conversion policy, which my colleague Miriam Pemberton has looked at in detail in a recent book. She found that some companies actually were making some progress on moving away from aircraft, helping build energy efficient buses and things like that. But neither the companies nor the government invested in that capability to the degree that would have helped shift the industry away from so much dependence on Pentagon spending. But in general, it's a bit of a con game. I mean, Lockheed Martin claimed 250,000 jobs nationwide from the F-35. But a lot of it was by saying, well, you know, it's not just the factories, it's the waitress at the bar across the street from the factory. It's the company that makes this widget that goes on the control panel. And they exaggerate the extent to which that really was true. So they probably, you know, doubled the number of jobs actually associated. And then they said, oh, every state is benefiting. But then you looked at their own figures, you know, they counted Nebraska as one of the states that benefited. And by their own estimate, it would create four jobs in Nebraska. And all of the jobs were in a few states, as I said, Texas, Georgia, California. So they kind of lie about the extent of their impact nationwide. They oppose efforts that would make it possible to invest in other jobs. So it's a manageable problem, but it's politics. And of course, in the current Congress to get to invest in things like green energy is very difficult. Biden had a plan that was scaled back dramatically, but he put in investments of about $37 billion a year in green energy. But that's, you know, less than 120th of what we spent on the Pentagon. So it's still highly skewed. But there's a better future that's possible. And not only would it be better for the economy, it would be better for humanity, because it would be fewer wars. There'd be less kind of capability to go to war on short notice, therefore making it, you know, giving a little time and space for the public to say no, as opposed to starting the wars on such short notice and therefore outmaneuvering, you know, public sentiment against war. Right. Now, you did mention the war, the use of this for war. At the same time, we have the climate crisis. And you mentioned that so many more jobs would be created if the money was used for green energy. And in view of that, what is the motivation, what is motivating Congress, what's motivating our state legislature in Vermont, our governor, even our local governments, our obsequious supporters of the military at a time when it's destroying the climate with this 22 gallons a minute burning vehicle. Hundreds of hours a month. We have a climate crisis. How can you justify this? What is wrong with Congress and all of our public officials? And then the wars themselves vastly accelerate the amount of greenhouse gases emitted. Yeah. Well, a lot of it is a narrow focus on the short term economic impacts of these things. You'll even see it in congressional hearings. You know, members will praise weapons built in their state, rather than asking hard questions about do these things work? What's the mission that they're supposed to carry out? Why do we have a strategy that involves being able to intervene militarily anywhere in the world? Given the disastrous results in Iraq and Afghanistan, why is that still kind of the central tenet of our policy? I mean, if you look at policy towards China, it's all about having the capacity to win a hypothetical war with China, not to have diplomacy come to common understanding about things like Taiwan, work together on the climate crisis, because if the two biggest emitting countries don't work together, we're never going to solve that problem. So, you know, longer term concerns, and some of them aren't so long term. I mean, the planet's on fire now. Climate's an issue now. But it's just a very narrow view instead of looking at what a better future for the country would be. And I think that only really can be resolved by public pressure, by people with a broader vision running for office. And that's happening in many regards, but it just hasn't reached the tipping point where we have majorities in Congress that are willing to change course and fight the entrenched interests that want to keep things the way they are. Well, that brings up something that you talked about in the book, which was the nuclear freeze movement. The F-35 is, of course, a nuclear bomb delivery vehicle. But at that time, in the early 1980s, the issue was the anti-ballistic missile. And there was a tremendous campaign around the country. I believe it started in Massachusetts, at town meetings in Massachusetts, and then moved to town meetings in Vermont a couple of years later. That put a lot of pressure on Congress. Can you talk about the nuclear freeze movement? Yeah. Well, the concept was developed largely by Randall Forsberg, who was an analyst of military issues based in Massachusetts. But it was picked up by activists like Randy Keeler, who had been a long-time anti-war activist by groups like American Friends Service Committee and a lot of other groups that were anti-war, anti-nuke. And it got a big boost because of the fear Reagan induced by some of his more rash statements about the Soviet Union being an evil empire. He was doing a radio address, and he didn't realize the mic was on. It was, you know, pre-going on the air. And he joked that the bombing started in five minutes. He had an official who told a journalist, I think it's Robert Shearer. It was in a book he did called With Enough Shovels. He said, oh, we could survive a nuclear attack if we had enough shovels. You know, just dig little holes to hide in. So that was a huge impetus. And then the European nuclear disarmament movement was quite strong at that point. So that was a model. And they were concerned about putting short-range missiles, nuclear arm missiles in Europe that would make the decision time for the Soviet Union and whether to retaliate at about five minutes. So the trigger on nuclear confrontation would be quite fast and be quite dangerous situation. And then I think because they built locally to nationally, they managed to get quite a big following, and they had things you could decide on. Resolutions of town meetings, a resolution of Congress that Senator Ed Markey spearheaded. And I think it made sense to people. It was freeze and reduce. Let's stop the buildup of the new generation of nuclear weapons. And that's worked to getting rid of them. It was sort of a bumper sticker that people could understand. You know, they weren't talking about, you know, technical issues like the circular error probable of accuracy of a missile or something. So I think that helped. And then, you know, it built to the point where you had a million people in Central Park marching for disarmament. Reagan himself went from, you know, talking about the evil empire to saying nuclear war can never be won and should never be fought. He negotiated with Gorbachev about even the possibility of getting rid of nuclear weapons. So he, you know, that whole movement turned Reagan around from where he started. And, you know, nuclear weapons are many fewer globally than they were in the 60s. You know, it was 70,000. Now there's 13,000. The problem is even one is one too many. But there's global movements like, you know, campaign to abolish nuclear weapons. There's a nuclear weapons ban treaty passed by the UN. So on a global level, there's a lot of changed opinion, you know, a lot of the country's US points to, oh, we're doing this to defend them are saying no, you know, we don't want these things. So I think there's movement. And I think the problem now is just this rightward turn in our national politics. It has to be overcome to, you know, make progress on things like alternative economic strategies that so we don't need these weapons and reducing the nuclear arsenal. But there's a lot of good creative people working on this. We don't get a lot of attention. So and often changes like this start with a lot of organizing that's not recognized. It's kind of ignored by the mainstream. And then it reaches critical mass and actually starts changing our policies in our national dialogue. So I think we'll get to that point. But people need to keep keep after it and not be discouraged by the current moment. I think we're running out of time. But I just wanted to end on on this note about the nuclear freeze and you really hit upon it that it became a it started locally. It built into a national movement and it had tremendous tremendous effect. As you said, it turned Reagan himself around and led to a disarm a treaty to eliminate a class of nuclear weapons and reduced the nuclear stockpile. This is what Skywatch is about. We're going to continue to work on that kind of campaigning. Thank you very much on behalf of Skywatch on behalf of Danica and myself. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.