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UFPPC commentary
BEHIND FORT LEWIS 'CONCEPT VEHICLES,' ANOTHER CONCEPT IS HIDING
By Mark Jensen

*Rumsfeld is gone, but his legacy lives on *
United for Peace of Pierce County (WA)
March 29, 2007
www.ufppc.org/content/view/5993/

TACOMA, Washington -- Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has left the Pentagon, but his legacy lives on.

Rumsfeld was an invisible presence on Thursday in an Associated Press article featured in about a hundred organs of the mainstream media. The AP piece appeared on page B1 of the local paper here in Tacoma -- the News Tribune. [See #2 below.]

In the article, Melanthia Mitchell touts in ludic tones four "concept trucks" that defense contractors have "given to the soldiers" at Fort Lewis "to play with," in the words of "Tim Connor, a Defense Department contractor based at Fort Lewis and overseeing the project."

Melanthia Mitchell reported that the vehicles "are part of a $60 million Army program to modernize military tactical vehicles like the Humvee and the Hemmet -- the Army's large transport truck."

One week earlier, Bob Reinert of the Northwest Guardian, which bills itself as the "authorized newspaper of Fort Lewis, Washington," wrote an article about these vehicles (there were five then -- has one failed to survive being "played with" at Fort Lewis?).

Reinert's piece gave the name of the program involved -- "Future Tactical Systems." And Reinert did a much better job of explaining what's at stake in the program.

"'About every 25 years, the services have modernized their tactical vehicles,' [Col. John S. Myers, the Army's project manager for Future Tactical Systems] said," according to Reinert. "'Right now, the concentration is on replacing the Humvee,' said Myers, adding that the Humvee has lost much of its payload capacity and is now underpowered. 'We want to have a clean-sheet-of-paper approach, start all over again and have a family of joint light tactical vehicles.' Enter the JLTVs [Joint Light Tactical Vehicles] turned out by International [Military and Government] and Lockheed Martin in just nine months to address the needs of the Army and Marine Corps."

The News Tribune, it so happens, is the publisher of the Northwest Guardian. (www.nwguardian.com/) As the McClatchy Newspapers web site  (www.mcclatchy.com/146/story/444.html) points out, "Each week, the News Tribune publishes the Northwest Guardian, the official newspaper for Fort Lewis Army Base. It has recently received awards for overall Best in the Army as well as overall Best in the Department of Defense."

It does not seem to have occurred to the News Tribune that this arrangement constitutes a substantial conflict of interest.

How can the News Tribune possibly report objectively on what is going on at Fort Lewis when it publishes "the authorized newspaper of Fort Lewis"?

No wonder its reporting on the case of Iraq war resister Lt. Ehren Watada has been so lamentably bad.

Perhaps this ethical lapse doesn't occur to the editors of the News Tribune because such conflicts of interest are now part and parcel of American life.

If that's so, then it's symptomatic, not ironic, that the articles on the "concept vehicles" miss one of the most important concepts involved.

The trucks described by Melanthia Mitchell and Bob Reinert appear to be part of a significant but little-reported development in the military-industrial complex known as Cooperative Research and Development Agreements, or CRADAs.

Jon W. Glass described how CRADAs work on November 26, 2006, in an article (www.ufppc.org/content/view/5354/) in the Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA).

Under CRADAs, which were introduced by Rumsfeld in May 2005, "the government and the companies . . . share resources to improve the way U.S. military services fight wars and combat terrorist threats," Glass wrote.  "There is no competitive bidding involved."

"[T]he research agreements offer companies a competitive edge. They gain access to government labs and soldiers in the field, and they get a clearer understanding of what the military wants. This helps the companies target their research dollars."

A Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins University's Washington Center for the Study of American Government, warned that with CRADAs, "only contractors know what is going on. To gain access to needed information, as CRADA provides, one basically has to be part of the contracting system."

Seen from the vantage point of the evolution of U.S. political insitutitions, CRADAs are an anti-democratic development which represents a further co-optation or "intussusception" of the political realm by corporations -- precisely the sort of development against which President Dwight David Eisenhower warned in his 1961 Farewell Address on the military-industrial complex.

Subversive developments like these seem so natural to those in the corporate-owned media that they scarcely report on them. As we see with the Northwest Guardian, media companies are busy pursuing CRADA-like corporate arrangements of their own.

Donald Rumsfeld, in his retirement, must be smiling.

NOTE: One more thing. Armor Holdings is also the manufacturer of the "No. 9 CS -- Irritant Agent" fired on peaceful protesters at the Port of Tacoma earlier this month. As I noted in a Mar. 13 piece entitled "Hundreds at Port of Tacoma despite Police Intimidation," (www.ufppc.org/content/view/5916/) the company's web site states that "Armor Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: AH), listed #3 on FORTUNE Magazine's 2006 '100 Fastest-Growing Companies List' and a member of the S&P Smallcap 600 Index, is a diversified manufacturer of branded products for the military, law enforcement, and personnel safety markets."

--Mark Jensen is a member of United for Peace of Pierce County, and of the faculty of Pacific Lutheran University.

2.

FORT SOLDIERS PLAY WITH BIG TOYS
By Melanthia Mitchell
* 'Concept vehicles' designed to modernize military fleet get workout *
Associated Press/News Tribune (Tacoma, WA)
March 29, 2007
Page B1
http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/story/6437615p-5736337c.html

3.

MILITARY CONCEPT VEHICLES TO AID FUTURE DEVELOPMENT
By Bob Reinert
Northwest Guardian (Fort Lewis, WA)
March 22, 2007
http://www.nwguardian.com/news/story/6427386p-5728392c.html
or
http://www.army.mil/-news/2007/03/23/2385-military-concept-vehicles-to-aid-future-development/