We look at the intertwined relationship between private industry, the US Armed Forces and federal policy makers. We look at the domestic and foreign impacts of this dangerous complex.
DRS Technologies is not well known outside military circles, but the company has grown from a niche supplier of sonar signal processing technology to the U.S. Navy into a $3 billion provider of a wide range of high-tech defense electronic products, systems and military support services.
ManTech International, a leading beneficiary of U.S. government spending for the “war on terrorism,” started out as a specialized military contractor that devised war-game models and later began offering a wide range of professional services to various federal agencies. Since the 9/11 attacks, ManTech has grown nearly fourfold mostly by providing information technology and systems engineering services to intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, which together account for more than 90 percent of its revenue.
DynCorp does not like to be compared to controversial contractors such as Blackwater and KBR, but the company does exactly what they do. It performs a wide range of functions for U.S. government agencies, including security and support services in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. While DynCorp is not quite as well known as those other private military companies, it has had its share of scandals.
URS Corporation has used a series of acquisitions—most recently Washington Group International—to propel itself to the top tier of international engineering firms, joining the likes of Bechtel and Fluor. The company is also a major contractor to the U.S. federal government (the source of 41% of revenues in 2007) in the areas of systems engineering, technical assistance, operations and maintenance. Much of the federal work flows through URS’s EG&G Division.
Stanley Inc. (also known by the name of its subsidiary Stanley Associates) is a rising star among providers of information technology and business process outsourcing services to the U.S. federal government, particularly the Department of Defense, from which it gets about two-thirds of its revenues. The rest comes from civilian agencies ranging from the Department of Justice to the Library of Congress. At the end of its last fiscal year, the company had a contract backlog worth about $975 million.
AMEC plc is a British company formed from the amalgamation of the Fairclough Group and the William Press Group. AMEC operates as a high value consultancy company providing services in engineering and project management for the oil, gas, petrochemical, power generation, nuclear, pharmaceutical, defense, chemical, mining and water industries. AMEC is a member of the FTSE 100 Index after a promotion on Dec. 20th, 2007 when ICI went private.
CACI, founded in the early 1960s as California Analysis Center Inc., is almost entirely a Beltway Bandit—some 94 percent of its revenue is derived from contracts with the U.S. government. About two-thirds of that revenue comes from the Pentagon, but CACI also enjoys the patronage of the Departments of Homeland Security, State, Commerce, Justice and Transportation. At the end of its last fiscal year, CACI had a contract backlog worth some $6.4 billion.
The Honeywell name is most often associated with thermostats, but the company known today as Honeywell International is the result of the takeover of Honeywell Inc. by the conglomerate AlliedSignal in 1999. The old Honeywell was a frequent target of antiwar protests during and after the Vietnam War because of its role in making deadly munitions such as fragmentation bombs. Responding to those pressures as well as financial problems within its defense segment, Honeywell announced in 1990 that it was spinning off most of its military operations into a new company called Alliant TechSystems.
Textron is a multi-industry company that operates in 33 countries, and is headquartered in Providence, RI, USA. The company manufactures a variety of weapons, and is infamous for making land mines and cluster bombs which remain un-detonated for years, routinely killing civilians.
KBR specializes in engineering and construction, and is a major contractor for the US Military. It is a former subsidiary of Halliburton, and is the largest non-union construction company in the United States. KBR is the largest US private employer in Iraq with roughly 20,000 employees and 40,000 subcontractors.
