01.30.14

Northrop Grumman and war on terror waste spending

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 7:51 pm by George Smith

This evening Northrop Grumman, the sixth largest arms manufacturer in the world, is in the news for a lawsuit made by an employee who worked on its never-fielded system to protect commercial air-liners from shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.

In 2006 this project was worth big money and the Department of Homeland Security issued a report on the subject, one that was posted on Steven Aftergood’s Secrecy blog. DHS complained the material was sensitive and Aftergood took down the paper.

I wrote about it here:

And upon perusal, it is possible to see why DHS might want to control its dissemination. The anti-MANPADS systems under consideration, manufactured by BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman for addition to commercial airliners, don’t work.

A few days after FAS’ posting of the report, Associated Press filed a story on it.

“It could be 20 years before every U.S. passenger airplane is outfitted with a system to protect it from small portable missiles, according to a government report obtained Monday by The Associated Press.Under a test program, BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman developed laser-based systems over the past two years that still don’t meet the reliability standards set by the Homeland Security Department . . . ” wrote the AP.

The upshot:

False alarms would cause the complete halt or disruption of commercial air traffic and the emptying of airports and surrounding areas in a search for terrorists. False alarms would cause notification of what is called the Domestic Event Network. The problems associated with false alarm of an anti-aircraft missile attack on a commercial jetliner could be said to be substantial, economically back-breaking, or worse than terrorists.

In any case, Reuters reports on Northrop Grumman’s anti-MANPADS project and the lawsuit over it:

A lawsuit by a former Northrop Grumman employee alleges that the defense contractor defrauded the U.S. government over a contract to provide commercial airliners with a missile defense system.

The suit, which was originally filed in 2009 by Leo Danilides, was unsealed in federal district court in Chicago on Thursday…

The suit was filed under the False Claims Act, which lets people collect rewards for blowing the whistle on fraud against the government …

Northrop received a contract in 2006 to provide improvements for work it had done in two earlier phases of the project “and “create a commercially feasible system,” according to the lawsuit. It said the plaintiff, Danilides, had worked on the program “for many years.”

The suit alleged that during the Phase III part of the project, for which it said the company was paid $62 million, “Northrop pretended to be exerting its best efforts when it was doing virtually nothing to improve the design and reliability of the Counter-MANPADS system.”

“Northrop failed to perform critical tasks, and then profited by keeping the money that was supposed to have been spent doing that work,” according to the allegations.

“Far from providing its ‘best efforts’ as required, Northrop was providing no efforts.”

By 2008 the contract had ended with no results and the government did not pursue more research.

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Another reason why you read this blog: the nightmare years of the past decade when the Department of Defense and national security spending slipped out of civilian democratic control and oversight. And very few people cared.

Now look where we are.

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