Buy These Planes, or Else! The Hard Sell of Military Advertising

Glenn Baker is an award-winning writer/producer for America’s Defence Monitor, a weekly documentary programme on public television that explores current security issues.

 

 

Sombre, emotional music plays as a majestic dawn sky flickers across the TV screen. A sleek fighter jet catapults off the deck of an aircraft carrier. A concerned female voice intones: “Someone’s father; someone’s daughter; someone’s son—who will bring them home? (Pause) McDonnell Douglas will.” This ad, plugging the $46 billion Super Hornet aircraft programme, aired relentlessly on Washington television stations as Congress was weighing future defence spending.

 

“The message here is the kidnapper’s message,” says Mark Crispin Miller, a media critic at New York University and author of Mad Scientists (W.W. Norton), a forthcoming book on propaganda. “‘If you don’t support us and our enterprise, we’ll kill your children, we’ll kill your loved ones.’ The survival of our fathers, sons and daughters now depends on the same forces that have an interest in promoting war around the world.”

 

As with any product, weapons manufacturers seek to promote sales and increase profits. Yet few viewers are in the market for an $85 million fighter plane. The Washington-area audience is the exception. With an estimated $350 billion in the balance for Pentagon contracts on new fighter planes alone, the American capital is ground zero for a media blitz aimed at the hearts, minds and ultimately the votes of the 535 members of Congress and the “inside the Beltway” bureaucrats with whom they lunch. 

Wooing Congress 

Since allegations of Chinese influence peddling emerged following the 1996 presidential election, there has been renewed concern about the impact of foreign campaign contributions on the American political process. But the influence of a powerful domestic special interest group—the defence industry—goes virtually unnoticed. Arms makers contribute millions of dollars to members of Congress who then vote on how much to spend on major weapons systems. The arms companies also lobby Congress to pass laws that will create lucrative overseas markets for these same weapons. In collaboration with the Pentagon, defence contractors’ public relations departments stage spectacular media events celebrating new weapons. To round out the package, they flood the Washington media market—print, radio and television—with slick Madison Avenue-crafted advertising. “I can’t think of a worse conflict of interest than the one that goes on between defence contractors and the military,” says Joe Trento, a former CNN reporter who now directs the National Security News Service, a nonprofit news organisation that investigates military issues. “And having the Congress doing the oversight is like having the fox guard the chicken house. It’s absurd, but that’s the way it works.”

 

In the 1998 election cycle, defence contractor contributions to federal candidates exceeded $6 million, two-thirds of which went to Republicans. Over $1 million came from aerospace giant Lockheed Martin alone. Much of that money went to incumbents who faced no serious threat from their opponents, but whose loyalty to the defence industry was rewarded.

 

Just as there is a “revolving door” between the military and weapons firms, many members of Congress work for defence contractors before or after their stints on the Hill. For example, Representative Tom Davis (R-Virginia), who sits on the House subcommittee overseeing space and aeronautics, used to be vice-president and general counsel to PRC Inc, a northern Virginia high-technology defence firm owned by Litton Industries. Former Congressman Don Fuqua (D-Florida) chaired the House Science and Technology Committee, which promoted the space programme. Now he is president of the Aerospace Industries Association, a powerful lobbying group representing major space and defence contractors. President Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell admonition, “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the military-industrial complex,” is still as true as it is unheeded.

 

The rationale for most product advertising is to boost sales and gain a market advantage over competitors. But defence contractors produce unique products for a single buyer, the Department of Defense (with foreign sales requiring US government approval). “The relationship between contractors and the Department of Defense is the world’s funniest form of capitalism,” Gordon Adams, then-director of the non-profit Defense Budget Project, once noted. “Anybody who calls it capitalism is fooling you. It’s a sort of government-subsidised socialism for wealthy contractors.”

 

A rapid series of mergers and acquisitions—supported and facilitated by the Pentagon—has left only three giant military aircraft manufacturers today. The Northrop Corporation merged with the Grumman Corporation to become Northrop Grumman. Martin Marietta merged with Lockheed to become Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin then sought to buy Northrop Grumman, but was turned back by anti-trust concerns within the Justice Department. Meanwhile, aviation colossus Boeing acquired McDonnell Douglas, resulting in a corporation with estimated annual revenues of $48 billion. If Boeing were a country, it would have an economy larger than two-thirds of the nations on earth.

 

“You can’t allow power to become too concentrated anywhere in a democracy,” says Miller, who has closely examined the impact of consolidation in the media industry on diversity of expression. “When you’ve got an over-concentrated defence business, you have companies that aren’t competing with one another, companies that can afford to keep us immersed in upbeat, slick, seductive propaganda about how exhilarating and delicious their weapons systems are.” 

A Docile Media 

Today, American television rarely carries stories critical of the defence industry. Even in the 1980s, when contractor procurement scandals made the news, the stories tended to focus on $600 toilet seats and $7,600 coffee makers, rather than on gold-plated weapons programmes as a whole. After all, the average person is much more likely to recognise an unreasonable price for a toilet seat than for a fighter jet. At that time, the Cold War provided an arguable motive for buying new weapons, a pretext conspicuously absent today.

 

Now, the airwaves are chock full of “wargasm” programmes such as Weapons at War, Firepower and Desert Storm Helicopters, which consist almost entirely of slick footage of sporty technology in action. Two of the major television networks are owned by companies with sizeable defence sectors: NBC by General Electric, and CBS by Westinghouse.

 

But even without any direct influence by the defence industry, it would be unusual to see serious criticism of arms makers from the major networks. The television industry is almost solely dependent on revenue from commercials. Under these circumstances, “it’s not very likely that you’re going to find a reporter suicidal enough to try to do a story that’s going to win him the disfavour of the higher-ups at the network in the advertising department or in the offices of the parent company, which may well be the parent company of the defence contractor,” Miller observes.

 

How much do defence contractors spend on weapons advertising? Lots, obviously, but getting any kind of hard figures proves difficult. “I can’t tell you. That’s proprietary information,” said Jim Fettig, director of national media relations for Lockheed Martin. He added that it is all paid for by the company. But according to Trento, the costs are ultimately recouped by the contractor: “When you see these B-2 ads in the Washington Post or Northrop Grumman on television as the guardians of freedom and so forth, all that comes out of US tax dollars that are part of the contract.”

 

The Pentagon is currently planning to buy three new tactical aircraft programmes, the Navy’s F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet, the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor and the multi-service Joint Strike Fighter. These aircraft, a staggering 3,700 in all, are slated to consume huge slices of a growing budget procurement pie. Taken together, these tactical aircraft modernisation programmes are projected to cost some $350 billion to complete.

 

Perhaps the most notorious of these new aircraft is the F-22 Raptor. The F-22 was originally proposed in the mid-1980s to counter a perceived “fifth generation” Soviet fighter, an aircraft that never got off the drawing board as the Soviet Union collapsed. Undeterred by such geopolitical inconveniences, the Air Force continued to push for the Raptor as a replacement for the F-15 Eagle, an aircraft which many in the intelligence community assert will more than match any other plane in the sky for years to come. Current plans call for 339 F-22s at a cost of approximately $187 million per unit and climbing. Because of the enormous stakes involved, prime contractor Lockheed Martin has pulled out all the stops with its advertising. 

Emotional Blackmail? 

“Some of the most egregious industrial advertising I’ve ever seen in my life has been on behalf of the F-22 fighter,” says retired senator Dale Bumpers.¹ Bumpers should know. A vocal critic of wasteful military spending during his twenty-four years on Capitol Hill, in 1997 he made headlines when in a Senate hearing he accused prime contractor Lockheed Martin of pandering to lawmakers’ emotions in one particular magazine ad for the F-22.

 

The ad takes the form of a postcard inserted into magazines, complete with cancelled stamps. It’s dated 2007 and features a woman in combat fatigues resting her chin on a machine gun atop an armoured vehicle in a Desert Storm-like setting. Scrawled across the picture are the words, “See if Jake recognises me under the camo” and “Further proof that I am one tough customer.” On the back, a handwritten note reads:

 

Dear Rick (and the Jakester!), 

Well we’re here and I’m okay … I think about you and Jake constantly. I can’t say much about what’s going on, except that you guys shouldn’t worry. I’m surrounded by great people. We’ve got great equipment. And we know what we’re doing. We also have those F-22s upstairs, totally ruling the sky, covering us like Jake’s big fuzzy blue blanket.

 

“It borders on being sick, in my opinion,” said a disgusted Bumpers at the hearing. “You can always tell when a weapons system is in some difficulty. When you have a $70 billion contract riding on it, I can understand why they would want to sell the American people on the F-22.”

 

Upon reading the faux postcard, media critic Miller broke into laughter. “It’s amazing, but for all its sentimentality, it’s a very serious kind of threat. It’s a little bit like a kidnapper sending your wife’s little finger to you in the mail and saying, ‘You’d better pay up; basically, you’re going to be in big trouble if you don’t support us.’”

 

Doug Oliver, Lockheed Martin’s director of F-22 advertising, claimed, “We wanted something, as they say in the advertising industry, that ‘breaks out of the clutter.’” He cited how most weapons ads tout technological capabilities, while this ad sought to bring in a human dimension.

 

That “human dimension”, namely, the idea that the safety of your loved ones depends on the procurement of a new weapon, is a theme that echoes throughout the promotional materials for these new planes, whether they’re authored by the contractor or the military. After the Navy published an 8-by-11-inch glossy booklet entitled Worldwide Threats to Naval Strike Warfare hyping the Super Hornet, the Air Force responded with F-22 Raptor: The Keystone of Air Dominance for the 21st Century. It opens with grim black-and-white photos of war dead from the past. “World War I: 320,710 US Casualties. World War II: 1,079,162 US Casualties,” it recounts ominously. The first of dozens of charts depicts “casualties per day” of major wars, showing a rapid decline from the Second World War to the Gulf War. “America Demands This Trend Continue.” Later, the booklet even calculates how many lives the F-22 will save, asserting there will be a 25 per cent reduction in casualties with the plane, which is still at least five years from operational service. In case you still haven’t got it, the publication closes with pictures of smiling soldiers hugging wives and babies, under the caption: “Bringing Our Warriors of Today and Tomorrow Home Quickly, Safely and Victoriously.”

 

Of course, no American wants US soldiers, sailors and airmen put at unnecessary risk. But defence contractors have increasingly tried to turn this natural concern for the troops into a means of justifying purchases of the most costly and militarily dubious weapons systems. Thanks in part to constant reinforcement from the manufacturers of stealthy aircraft and “smart bomb” technology, the notion that the American public has zero tolerance for US combat casualties has taken root in official Washington, especially in Congress. The decision to forego ground troops and bomb from high altitude in the Kosovo conflict, despite strategic and moral arguments, reflects the unquestioned nature of this belief.

 

Interestingly, most polls contradict the assumption, and indicate that the majority of Americans would respond to casualties by calling for an escalation of force if it were aimed at a swift and clear-cut victory. More importantly, as the General Accounting Office (Congress’s watchdog agency) has pointed out, despite their huge price tags, systems such as the F-22 or Super Hornet may offer only modest or unnecessary improvements over their predecessors. In other words, high-cost weaponry is in reality no guarantee of low casualties. Nevertheless, the “success” of the air campaign in Yugoslavia, despite the fact that it occurred only after a ground offensive by the Kosovo Liberation Army forced Serbian troops into the open, will undoubtedly be used by defence contractors as evidence of the need to buy more high-tech air power. 

‘The Anti-war Plane’ 

Indeed, within days of the Kosovo war’s end, ads began to run proclaiming the role high technology had played. A Northrop Grumman ad in the Washington Post read, “Performance. Precision. Peace.” Beneath a picture of the familiar batwing aircraft, it continued: “The B-2 Stealth Bomber, Joint STARS² … combined with many other advanced products and technologies, have helped confirm a new direction in war-fighting technology and military strategy.” The ad even gave weapons contractors a pat on the back for their role in securing the peace: “Air power, diplomacy and the efforts of the men and women of the armed forces and the defence industry brought an end to military conflict in Kosovo.”

 

Beyond promoting the F-22 for its ability to prevent casualties, other ads tout the plane for its ability to prevent conflict itself. “The first thing it will kill is the enemy’s appetite for war,” one ad claims, implying that its existence would have kept the Serbs from persecuting Albanians in Kosovo, or Hutus from slaughtering Tutsis in Rwanda. Thus, it is portrayed as a tool of preventive diplomacy, as if the aircraft were an alternative to sending Jimmy Carter.

 

Another ad shows the plane’s curvaceous body dramatically lit in a darkened hangar, simply labelled “the anti-war plane”. Says Miller: “Calling the F-22 ‘the anti-war plane’—it’s a startling kind of a misrepresentation. It’s not built to drop flowers on people, right? To call the F-22 ‘the anti-war plane’ is to obviate the need for any anti-war activists, you see. I mean, there’s really no need, now, for people to be against the war because the war machine itself does that job.”

 

Contractors have always banked on the sleek lines and inherent sexiness of modern fighter aircraft to create “gee-whiz” support for their wares. Going a step further, some ads try to nurture the perception of the aircraft as living things, steps forward in an evolutionary chain as natural as it is inevitable. “Darwin was right,” a recent Lockheed Martin magazine ad states while depicting a high-flying “genealogy” from the Second World War–era P-38 to the still-conceptual Joint Strike Fighter. “In any species, the fittest survive,” the small print asserts. “Individual talents become family traits. Each generation adapting to a changing world.” Even the term “generation” serves to anthropomorphise the aircraft and imply that some unstoppable biological clock is ticking toward a newer, better follow-on which will proudly fill its forefather’s shoes.

 

One of the most enduring legacies of the Cold War is the mentality that says we need to be continually buying sexier, more expensive, higher-tech weapons. For decades the reason given was to counter “the Soviet threat”. Each year the Pentagon produced a glossy report and video entitled Soviet Military Power hyping the USSR’s military machine as a justification for spending more on new weapons. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Pentagon and defence contractors were faced with a dilemma: “How do we justify spending billions on new weapons now?”

 

A promotional video for the F-22 fighter, sent to members of Congress by Lockheed Martin, gives an idea of how the arms firms met that difficulty. Images of chaotic ethnic conflict and Islamic terrorists flash across the screen. “The fact is, civilised society is under siege,” an ominous male voice begins. “The world is populated by renegade nations and extremist factions willing to use any method available to spread their beliefs. These potential enemies continue to modernise and upgrade their military capabilities.”

 

Most arguments for increasing US military spending have cited the threat of “rogue states”, terrorism and, when in doubt, the ever-popular “uncertainty”. But when more concrete evidence is required, weapons contractors often cite the upgraded capabilities of potential adversaries. McDonnell Douglas’s promotional material sent to Congress used a map to identify foreign countries with advanced fighter aircraft. But it’s American aircraft, such as the F-15, F-16 and F/A-18, that dominate the map. “It’s one of those things where we start competing with ourselves,” says Bumpers. “We wind up building new planes because we’ve sold our best planes and they use that as a justification. They say, ‘Well, look at all these planes out there.’ Well, look at them, they’re ours. We sold them abroad.”

 

Overseas sales are often used to help reduce per-unit costs, and are pushed relentlessly by the contractors. Although the F-22 has yet to enter the US arsenal, the Pentagon is seeking foreign buyers, although the price tag is likely to deter even the deepest pockets. It’s a bonus that foreign sales in turn help make the case for building the next round of aircraft. “That’s another reason we ought not to be selling these planes abroad,” says Bumpers. “It just gives the Air Force a justification for trying to build follow-on fighters.”

 

Another genre of ad emphasises economic themes, not surprising in an era of global free-market capitalism that values stability primarily because it is conducive to consumerism. A two-page Boeing ad for the Joint Strike Fighter shows the aircraft on the left, above the caption “the investment”. On the right the grinning pilot stands above the words “the return”.

 

“Here we have combined the promise that your loved one won’t be waxed thanks to our Joint Strike Fighter and at the same time, an economic pay-off is also possible,” observes Miller. “It’s a delightful fantasy.”

 

Remarkably, many of the ads stress how affordable these aircraft will be. “Guaranteed to lower the price of victory,” proclaims one Boeing ad for the Joint Strike Fighter, to which an ad for the Super Hornet rejoins, “We can START SAVING money on the future of naval aviation today.” Even the F-22, at more than triple the cost of any previous fighter plane, gets into the act: a twenty-four-page advertising supplement to Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine includes a chart entitled “F-22: The Cost-Effective Solution”. 

A Select Audience 

Publications such as Roll Call, The Hill Rag, CQ Weekly and National Journal may have little name recognition with the general public, but they are seen as “must reading” by the Capitol Hill crowd. These magazines are chock-full of slick colour ads for major weapons systems, particularly when Congress is divvying up the military budget.

 

“They’re not aiming for Joe six-pack with these ads,” says Bob Garfield of Advertising Age. “The publications they advertise in have a rarefied subscriber list.” National Journal has a circulation of just over six thousand, minuscule by most standards. But that list is made up primarily of members of Congress, administration officials, think tanks, industry and media figures that help shape the budget debate inside the Beltway. At $1,097 per year, The National Journal’s subscription fee would buy a lot of six packs.

 

In Washington, television commercials for major weapons contractors routinely air during political talk shows such as Meet the Press, Face the Nation and This Week, which are avidly watched by congressional staffers and other policy shapers. When asked whether these spots are also broadcast in other cities, Jim Fetig, Lockheed Martin’s media relations director, simply said, “Some are, some aren’t. This (Washington) is where our customers are.”

 

Advertising Age’s Garfield explained why the ads may run elsewhere as well: “When they advertise on the Sunday public affairs programmes or CNN, it may be to build grassroots support. People in Congress pay close attention to their mail, and if it’s a procurement decision between Long Island and southern California with jobs at stake, they will pay attention to the political ramifications of their vote.”

 

The defence industry has long portrayed weapons contracts as essentially a federal jobs programme. It has also used the threat of lost jobs to promote overseas sales with Congress. In 1992, when the sale of F-15s to Saudi Arabia was being weighed, McDonnell Douglas produced a video entitled US Jobs Now that was delivered to members: “With the perception of conflict diminished, tens of thousands of high-technology aerospace jobs are threatened, as are employers from coast to coast, spelling even more trouble for a fragile economy.” Fortunately, the deal went through, thereby saving the nation from certain ruin.

 

Subcontracts for nascent weapons systems are deliberately sprinkled in nearly every state and congressional district. The F-22 has subcontracts in forty-six states. Says Trento: “The contractors let the districts know that if jobs are going to be lost in the various congressional districts, your man or woman is responsible. So it’s a form of blackmail and carrot-and-stick payoffs.”

 

The Navy’s Los Angeles–class attack submarines roam the seas unchallenged, yet a successor, the Seawolf, is being built by General Dynamics at a cost of $4 billion each. But the Navy is planning a follow-on to that, too: the New Attack Submarine, to be known as the Virginia class (a nod to the Virginia-based Newport News Shipbuilding Company). Thirty Virginia-class subs are pencilled in at a total cost of $63 billion. The Navy circulated maps to members of Congress showing subcontracts in their states and districts, even those for as little as $1,000. “If there’s ten jobs in the state, some member of Congress is going to hear about this weapons system and how wonderful it is and how not to build it will spell the demise of the United States democracy as we know it,” says Bumpers. 

In Search of New Markets 

Weapons spectaculars such as the Paris Air Show help advertise the hardware abroad, giving potential foreign buyers a chance to inspect the merchandise first-hand as demonstrated by US service personnel. “One of the reasons our military men and women like to go to air shows and fly the airplanes and demonstrate the equipment is that they get to rub elbows with the defence contractors,” says Trento. “If they do a good job, if they’re good salesmen for the products, they might have a shot at getting a job with the contractor when they leave the military.”

 

Defence contractors put a great deal of pressure on the president and Congress to open up new overseas markets. Bowing to industry demands, President Clinton in 1997 lifted a long-standing ban on the sale of advanced weaponry to Latin America, a ban put in place by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 and upheld by both Presidents Reagan and Bush. In 1996, when such a move was under consideration, Carter told me about the effect of ending that restraint:

 

Chile doesn’t need F-16s, but if Chile does spend a large portion of its free budget funds on F-16s, it’s almost inevitable that Argentina would have to buy F-16s just for some future contingency when they didn’t get along with Chile. This would then spread to Brazil and the first thing you know, South America will be covered with F-16s and other advanced weaponry, and electronics to defend yourself against F-16s. So, here you have a new massive drain of precious and very scarce funds just to go into the pockets of American equipment manufacturers. And that’s where the initiative for this change in policy originates.

 

Since Carter’s comments, Asian economic woes and depressed oil prices have resulted in declining weapons sales to the Far and Middle East, and contractors were hoping that, in the wake of the ban’s being lifted, South America would step in to take up the slack. But falling copper prices have forced Chile to postpone its decision to buy F-16s, and the South American market is stagnant for now as well.

 

In the meantime, American defence contractors advertise heavily in glossy defence-trade publications aimed at an international audience. Magazines such as Jane’s Defence Weekly, NATO’s 16 Nations and Military Technology sport full-page and back-cover ads for products such as Boeing’s C-17 cargo plane and Harpoon missile navigation system, Raytheon’s Forward Area Air Defence radar, and Sikorsky’s Helibus.

 

In Europe, the expansion of the NATO military alliance to include former East Bloc countries has the arms manufacturers seeing dollars signs, with NATO membership requiring a certain degree of weapons inter-operability. New member countries will be required to maintain a military in accord with NATO levels, which means they will have to buy new weapons—largely from the United States.

 

Lobbying groups such as the US Committee to Expand NATO, based at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank, have sprung up around Washington. The Committee’s president, Bruce Jackson, also happens to be director of strategic planning for Lockheed Martin. To promote its cause, the Committee hosted a formal dinner in 1997 at the exclusive Metropolitan Club, two blocks from the White House, where a dozen Senators heard Secretary of State Madeleine Albright explain the benefits of adding Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to the NATO alliance. Those three countries were subsequently admitted at the April 1999 NATO fiftieth anniversary summit, where Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Tenneco and other contractors paid $50,000 or more to be benefactors of the “host committee”, an organisation that raised over $8 million in corporate donations to support the US government in organising the summit.

 

Hoping to be admitted in the next round of expansion, Romania has set up a lobbying group in Washington to promote its cause. Financial backing for the group comes from Lockheed Martin and Bell Helicopter Textron, which has already signed a $1 billion contract to produce attack helicopters in Romania.

 

Because of the shaky economies of some of its foreign buyers, the defence industry took another step to ensure it gets paid. In 1995, at the industry’s urging, Congress voted to establish an arms export loan programme, which meant that US taxpayers would be responsible for picking up the tab—up to $15 billion—if foreign arms buyers, such as Indonesia or Romania, default on their loans. Senator Bumpers led the fight against the bill:

 

The people who voted against my amendment to kill that programme had received twice as much in political donations from defence contractors as had the people who voted with me. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that’s the way the system works.

 

But nothing spells “bonanza” for weapons companies like W-A-R. During the Kosovo conflict, President Clinton went to Congress with an emergency funding bill of $6 billion to pay for the war effort. Republicans, who for the most part opposed the Kosovo campaign, decided to use it as an opportunity to fund their favourite pork barrel programmes in their home states. House majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) invited defence lobbyists to participate in shaping the pumped-up bill, issuing them a form entitled “Emergency Defense Supplemental Coalition Progress Report”, on which they detailed their efforts to add new defence projects. When they were done, the emergency bill had been merged with another and had ballooned to $15 billion. Thus Republicans were in the ironic position of simultaneously opposing the war and more than doubling the funding for it. “It’s enough to give hypocrisy a bad name,” commented Representative David Obey (D-Wisconsin), the ranking democrat on the Appropriations Committee. 

Glory Days 

The advertising push for the F-22, Super Hornet and Joint Strike Fighter may be all the more fervent because it is fuelled by nostalgia for the heyday of piloted aircraft dogfighting in the sun. The Air Force’s first love, manned tactical fighters, may already be approaching obsolescence with the convergence of two trends: the American public’s perceived intolerance for casualties, and new technologies that emphasise remote, information-heavy strategies. Uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) and stand-off weapons such as the Tomahawk cruise missile have demonstrated that much of today’s warfare can be conducted without putting a single pilot in harm’s way.

 

So when the fiftieth anniversary of the Air Force came along in 1997, it gave both the weapons contractors and the Pentagon an emotional theme around which to spin their mutually reinforcing advertising. One Boeing television spot opens with grainy historical footage of trusty airmen and women of yesteryear’s wars to create an atmosphere steeped in nostalgia. The narration portrays multi-million dollar aircraft as simple, fragile vessels dependent on the heroic efforts of human pilots: “They are only metal, and cloth, and wire, and rubber; not until courage and service and dedication are added do they become more than just machines.” A rapid montage of above-the-clouds beauty shots mixes vintage Second World War aircraft with the B-2 bomber, while an angelic gospel choir provides the soundtrack.

 

A television ad produced by the Air Force consists of a rapid-moving collage of noble-looking faces both young and old, people helping each other and children playing, intermingled with sleek aircraft (including the prototype F-22), sunsets and, of course, a lot of American flags. The narration, in a variety of men’s and women’s voices, takes the form of a prayer:

 

Older man: “Make me an effective instrument of Thy peace.” 

Man: “In the defence of the skies that canopy free nations.” 

Another man: “Instil within me an abiding awareness of my responsibility toward You, my country and my fellow man.” 

Woman: “So guide me daily in each thought, word and deed, that I may fulfil Your will.” 

 

“This commercial is an absolute powerhouse of propaganda,” Miller enthuses. “It’s a piece of manipulation so rich that you don’t even know where to begin talking about it. And in fact anything you say about it will sound feeble and crabby put up against this strikingly emotional manipulation. The images serve to make the commercial seem like a celebration of human diversity, the brotherhood of man. It’s a gauzy, super-patriotic, upbeat fantasy—and serves, of course, to suppress completely that the Air Force is about efficient killing and fraught with danger for the pilots themselves. The commercial doesn’t allow us to think that for a moment. It doesn’t want us to think at all.” 

Involving the Children 

Although still unproven in the air, the F-22 does publish a glossy newsletter, Mission Brief, to promote its cause. In it, Lockheed Martin takes a particular interest in promoting the plane to children, who will be of recruiting age when and if it enters service. One issue contains a story on Lockheed Elementary School in Marietta, Georgia, where a wall-sized mural of the F-22 greets arriving students.

 

Another edition of Mission Brief features drawings of the plane by third-graders at Jasper Elementary School. The students were lectured by their teacher on “what the F-22 means to the economy and for the protection of our country”. The children were asked to write what they thought it would be like to fly the plane. Most of their essays have a nightmarish quality to them. Eight-year-old Casey wrote:

 

the airplane went out of control. I got so scared. Then someone came and helped me out and took me back to land. I ran to my mom and hugged her. I said, “Let’s go home and watch TV and eat popcorn.”

 

Olivia, a classmate, wrote:

 

I took off and started to get nervous. It started to rise. My stomach felt funny. I wish I could go home. I said, “This is the first time I’ve been a test pilot. I see our enemies ahead of you so strap up. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

 

The bumpiest ride may be the one American taxpayers take when they find themselves committed to purchasing these astronomically expensive aircraft—with no enemy in sight. “People in this country thought we’d be dancing in the streets if we ever got rid of the Soviet Union,” says Bumpers. “We’re not dancing in the streets. We’re building the F-22 fighter plane.”³

 

In an era in which the United States has unchallenged military might, the defence-spending debate in Washington is not whether to raise it, but by how much. When the Democratic president calls for increasing the defence budget by $110 billion over six years, and the Republicans for another $26 billion on top of that, the defence industry need only sit back, smile and keep sending cheques to its friends on Madison Avenue.

 

 

Endnotes

 

 

1. Bumpers now directs the Center for Defense Information, a private, non-profit research organisation that also produces the America’s Defense Monitor television series shown on public television. His comments above were made while he was still in the Senate.

 

2. Joint “Surveillance Target Attack Radar System”—the military loves its acronyms.

 

3. In July 1999, the House defence appropriations subcommittee stunned the Air Force by voting to cut $1.8 billion from a requested $3 billion intended to produce the first six F-22s. While the future of the plane remains uncertain, apparently even members of Congress are starting to question the F-22’s cost and relevance.