NYT: Lockheed and the Future of Warfare (scary and very $$$)

Lockheed Martin, the ultimate welfare queen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/business/yourmoney/28lock.html

Lockheed and the Future of Warfare
By TIM WEINER

Published: November 28, 2004

LOCKHEED MARTIN doesn't run the United States. But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it.

Over the last decade, Lockheed, the nation's largest military contractor, has built a formidable information-technology empire that now stretches from the Pentagon to the post office. It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make all that happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft.

-snip-

"It used to be just an airplane company," said John Pike, a longtime military analyst and director of GlobalSecurity.org, a research organization in Alexandria, Va. "Now it's a warfare company. It's an integrated solution provider. It's a one-stop shop. Anything you need to kill the enemy, they will sell you."

As its influence grows, Lockheed is not just seeking to solve the problems of national security. It is framing the questions as well:

Are there too few soldiers to secure the farthest reaches of Iraq? Lockheed is creating robot soldiers and neural software - "intelligent agents" - to do their work. "We've now created policy options where you can elect to put a human in or you can elect to put an intelligent agent in place," Mr. Stevens said.

-snip-

more, lots more...

I don't like the sound of an "intelligent agent."
The whole thing sounds like a bad sci-fi flick;
trouble is, it is real.
bhn

Not that Bush and his supporters care.

Suppose a rich terrorist unleashed "intelligent agents" on the U.S. or U.K.? Robots will be cheap one day.

...vee dont need no steenking Geneva Convention.

Achtung !!!!

that our government will unleash them on us.
Crowd control and all for the impending civil disobedience
when Americans finally wake up and realize their
government doesn't care anymore about them
than the civilians they have been killing in other
countries for decades.
BHN

...That would be SPAWAR.

I have a friend who writes code for Raytheon. He helped devolope the system to track down college loans by the US.

Lockheed shut down a big plant in my town. We lost a lot of jobs and had to clean up toxic soil from the plant. Lockheed help with the cleanup, but they left an economic hole in the community.