When superhero Tony Stark
isn't donning his Iron Man armor to personally rough up villains, he's pitching
the U.S. military on new gadgets to fight
the War on Terror.
"They say the best
weapon is one you never have to fire," Stark tells a group of military
officers in the "Iron Man"
film that opens today. "I prefer the weapon you only have to fire
once."
The Marvel comic book character's
suit embodies a futuristic technology that may enhance human capabilities in
war, but the current battlefield belongs to a growing swarm of unmanned
aerial vehicles (UAV) and robots that could someday give even Iron Man a
run for his money. UAVs clocked more than 500,000 hours in the air by the
beginning of 2008, performing many of the tasks normally done by piloted
aircraft.
"There's a scene of
Iron Man flying against [F-22] Raptors," said Pete Singer, Brookings
Institute defense expert and author of the forthcoming book "Wired for
War." "Those are among the last generation of manned fighter
jets."
Someone still needs to
develop and sell those manned or unmanned technologies, and that's where Stark
might be the new face of military contractors. Private individuals and
companies might not be as visible as UAVs soaring above the skies of Afghanistan and Iraq, yet their role has grown just as dramatically during the
recent conflicts.
Howard Hughes, the
original Halliburton
Tony Stark, played by Robert
Downey Jr., is based partly on real-life wealthy industrialist Howard
Hughes, who lent his eccentric genius and financial resources to oddball U.S. military efforts during World War II and the Cold
War.
Hughes built and piloted
many of his own aircraft, including the Hughes H-1 Racer that he flew to set a
transcontinental airspeed record in 1937.
"He was really doing this
sort of thing even before there was a military-industrial complex," said
Alex Roland, military historian at Duke
University. He compared Hughes to a
"one-man Halliburton empire," referring to one of the largest defense
contractors currently working in Iraq.
The military-industrial
complex really took off in the 1950s as the United States sought new weapons and technologies for its growing
military, which gave Hughes and other military contractors a market to sell
everything from helicopters to satellites.
Yet some Hughes projects
contracted by the military simply fizzled. The all-wood "Spruce
Goose" remains the largest plane ever built; it was meant to carry troops
safely across the Atlantic during World War II, but was
completed after the war and flew just once. Another effort that foundered
involved building a secret ship that could raise a sunken Soviet nuclear
submarine from the bottom of the Pacific.
Such doomed investments
were just one symptom of the troubles that plagued the early military-industrial
complex. A "revolving door" allowed military officers to join
companies that they had just awarded defense contracts to, while private
executives went to work for the Pentagon and funneled contracts back to their
companies, Roland said. He added that tightened regulations now prevent many of
those earlier abuses of the system.
Cycles of military
spending
Still, those powerful
interests combined with the cry of "how much is enough for defense?"
during the Cold War to make a seemingly irresistible call for bigger and
pricier weapons, according to Roland.
And the military-industrial
complex remains hungry today for increased funding. Private companies are eager
for contracts, the military looks for next-generation
weapons, and some in Congress jockey for new defense-related jobs for their
districts.
"That's how Dad did
it, that's how America does it and it's worked out pretty
well so far," Stark says in the movie.
Roland observed that U.S. military spending has gone up and down in cycles
largely unrelated to the constant pressure from the military-industrial
complex, with spikes in 1940, 1960, 1980 and again during the Bush
administration.
The trouble arises when the
sense of national urgency that accompanies those spikes can lead to relaxed
government oversight, just as millions of new defense dollars suddenly become
available and companies rush in. Such has been the case with the latest boost
in military spending, Roland said.
However, there's now the
additional twist of reduced competition among contractors.
"From 1986 to 2006,
the number of Pentagon prime contractors competing on major defense programs
went from twenty to six," said Singer, the Brookings Institute defense
expert. "There's often just two going at it, competing on both sides of
[contract] bundles, so that they win no matter what."
'Minimal competition'
That reduced competition
among major contractors may contribute to problems of inefficiency, Singer
said.
Budget overruns and delays
for weapon systems appear to be the rule. The Government Accountability Office
found that 95 major defense systems exceeded their budgets by $295 billion
collectively in a March 2008 report, including an upgraded version of the F-22
Raptors that duel with Stark in "Iron
Man."
But even noncompetitive,
no-bid contracts are "perfectly legitimate under certain
circumstances," said James Jay Carafano, senior fellow at the Heritage
Foundation and retired U.S. Army Lt. Colonel. The U.S. military awarded such contracts to get on a war
footing quickly and invade Iraq.
Now that U.S. efforts have switched to providing long-term security
and reconstruction, though, experts say contracts should be more competitive to
boost efficiency.
Corruption and waste among
contractors and local officials in Iraq
caused the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction to deem the
problem the "second insurgency" in 2007, according to the Associated
Press.
"There's minimal
competition with very few eyes and ears watching the contracting," Singer
noted. "Should you be surprised to be billed for one hundred guys working
on a site, if you never visited to see if there were even ten?"
Singer blamed the
government for acting like a "stupid client." Carafano agreed, adding
that the sudden flood of military spending resulted in poorly defined contracts
hastily given out.
"It's not about greedy
contractors, it's not about backdoor deals, and it's not about politicians
making sure certain companies get contracts," Carafano said. "It's
about the government not being a very good customer."
Who is on the front
lines?
Whatever happens, no one questions
that the United States could not fight a war now without
outsourcing to military contractors.
"Do you always get
value for your money? Not always, but generally, yes you do," Carafano
said. "These wars wouldn't be possible without private sector
support."
That means military
contractors have also expanded beyond just selling military
hardware. They now run supply lines, feed troops, build base camps, consult
on strategy and even fight as private security forces.
"Companies don't just
build the weapons of war, they provide the personnel to use it," Singer
said. "They provide the service side of war. That's a pretty historic
shift."
The change amounted to more
than 180,000 Americans, Iraqis and other nationals working as private
contractors in Iraq as of July 2007, exceeding the 163,000 U.S. troops there at
the time. Some of those contractors necessarily carry guns in their line of
work.
Movie audiences probably
won't be troubled by Iron Man dealing out
vigilante justice, but experts question how to hold military contractors
accountable for their actions if things go badly. Private individuals work in a
murky area where no law seems to apply, leading to incidents such as the shooting
of Iraqi civilians by guards working for the private military company Blackwater.
"Every human endeavor
has bad apples, and that's true whether you're talking about the real world or
a comic book world," Singer said. "But do you have a system in place to
ensure that the bad apples are punished?"
There's no need to worry
about Tony Stark, though. He is, by cinematic definition, one of the good guys.
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