Lockheed exec Larry Lawson speaks at a 2011 rollout ceremony for an F-35 in Florida. Photo: Lockheed Martin

Sometime in the spring of 2012 Al Bunting received a message imploring him to publicly endorse America’s warplane of the future.

Bunting, a retired senior Air Force officer and administrator for the tiny New Jersey coastal town of Sea Girt, was not alone. Across the Garden State in 2011 and 2012, government officials, political organizers and even religious leaders received similar messages, all asking for the recipient to speak out on behalf of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, meant to replace thousands of existing U.S. warplanes at an immediate cost of more than $400 billion. The plane had run into serious technical problems that heaped cost and delays onto the program, and needed a public boost.

The messages were just one facet of a high-stakes public relations campaign, paid for by Lockheed Martin and overseen by an interlocking network of powerful PR firms. The paid, pro-F-35 advocacy also involved, to some extent, a mysterious blog with access to suspiciously high levels of F-35 testing data.

Read the rest at Offiziere.ch.

The cruiser USS Mobile Bay takes on supplies. Photo: Navy

Automatic federal budget cuts set in motion last year by the U.S. Congress could have a “debilitating” effect on the Navy’s readiness for the next two years. In fact, the impact is already being felt — and the automatic “sequestration” is still two weeks away.

The Navy stands to lose 13 percent of its funding starting March 1, unless the Congress and Pres. Barack Obama can agree on a plan to reduce the federal budget deficit, which after the 2008 economic crisis rose to a staggering $1 trillion or more annually — though it has shrunk by hundreds of billions of dollars in 2012 as the economy recovered.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives, the Democratic Senate and the president, also a Democrat, designed sequestration in 2011 as a means of prodding themselves into crafting a plan for reducing the deficit.

Read the rest at Offiziere.ch.

From Booklist, a belated review of THE ACCIDENTAL CANDIDATE. Forgive the wonky scan.

Via Booklist

Blue Delliquanti art.

Grant Jackson at SCETV Radio interviews Corey Hutchins and me about our graphic novel THE ACCIDENTAL CANDIDATE.

In related news, my next graphic novel, ARMY OF GOD: JOSEPH KONY’S WAR IN CENTRAL AFRICA, has a release date: April 2013!

In mid-October I and my co-writer Corey Hutchins spoke at the University of South Carolina about our new graphic novel THE ACCIDENTAL CANDIDATE: THE RISE AND FALL OF ALVIN GREENE.

The entire presentation can be viewed above.

John F. Lehman, a former Navy Secretary and current advisor to Mitt Romney’s campaign, testifies before Congress in 2004. Photo: AP/Lawrence Jackson

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has vowed to boost the size of the Navy by roughly 15 percent as part of a broader defense buildup. “Our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917,” he complained in Monday night’s debate. “That’s unacceptable to me.”

But for one of Romney’s most important advisers on Navy issues, a man who oversaw a massive naval expansion for Pres. Ronald Reagan, there’s more at stake than U.S. national security. John Lehman, an investment banker and former secretary of the Navy, has strong and complex personal financial ties to the naval shipbuilding industry. He has profited hugely from the Navy’s slow growth in recent years — raising the prospect that he could make even more if Romney takes his advice on expanding the fleet.

That doesn’t mean that a bigger or better Navy is necessarily a bad idea. But it does complicate Romney’s claim that a larger Navy would merely be “matched to the interests we need to protect.” A bigger maritime force has the possibility of personally enriching one of the candidate’s top advisers. In fact, it already has.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

AP photo.

President Barack Obama signed an executive order last week creating new protections for national security and intelligence community whistleblowers, effectively sidestepping a congressional impasse provoked by the reservations of congressional Republicans.

The order — formally known as “Presidential Policy Directive 19″ and signed by Obama out of public view on Oct. 10 and without a White House announcement — directs intelligence agencies to establish procedures for the protection of employees reporting waste, fraud and abuse.

The order is meant to address longstanding concerns that whistleblowers in the intelligence agencies lacked legal protections like those available to employees of the Department of Defense and other federal agencies.

Read the rest at Up in Arms.

Dre Lopez art.

With my co-author Corey Hutchins I spoke at the University of South Carolina about my graphic novel THE ACCIDENTAL CANDIDATE: THE RISE AND FALL OF ALVIN GREENE, now out from McFarland. It was a better speech than mine from last year at the same school. The Gamecock newspaper has this to say:

The novel chronicles Greene’s out-of-nowhere 2010 run for a spot in South Carolina’s U.S. Senate delegation. He’d defeated Vic Rawl, the favorite, in the Democratic primary and unsuccessfully challenged high-profile Republican incumbent Jim DeMint in the general election.

Hutchins was the first reporter to take notice of Greene, who campaigned just a little — if at all — before the national media swept up the story.

Audience members spoke up to raise the issue of factuality and fact-checking, which, when it came to writing the book, was essential but limited, at times, to condense or re-enact scenarios, the authors said.

Hutchins described the process of assembling scenes in the book to explain Greene’s discharge from the Army prior to his candidacy.

Since he wasn’t able to find one specific moment that led to Greene’s dismissal, Hutchins said he based the sequence on a number of reports and conversations he thought captured the basic elements and tone of the scenes.

F-22 production. Photo: Lockheed Martin

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney promised that if elected, he would restart production of Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor stealth fighter. “I would add more F-22s,” the former Massachusetts governor said in Virginia on Saturday. Don’t buy it.

The plan, if you can call it that, is totally possible. But just because a Raptor resurrection is possible doesn’t mean it’s realistic — let alone a good idea.

It’s actually easier to return the F-22 to production than it is to restart most discontinued warplanes. Lockheed and the Air Force carefully preserved all the tooling and blueprints to make the radar-evading jet. Usually, warplane manufacturers usually dismantle the bulky factory tooling once production wraps on a particular model. Still, reviving the F-22 would cost billions before a single new jet even entered production. It would also upend the Air Force’s carefully-laid plans for producing new drones, tankers, bombers and — oh yeah — the cheaper and arguably more capable F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

It’s not clear how serious Romney is about his proposed Raptor re-start. According to Time, Romney mentioned the idea at a rally in the “rather modest” Military Aviation Museum outside Virginia Beach. “Perhaps he was just channeling the good vibes he was getting from all the museum pieces,” Time quipped.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

Photo: Flickr user carneasadaburrito

It’s finally happened. I got flamed by Code Pink, the fringe anti-war group famous for … well, wearing pink and being annoying. Toby Blome from Code Pink’s San Francisco operations wrote to scold me for my recent Wired article “Hidden History: America’s Secret Drone War in Africa,” in which I detailed drone operations over Somalia since 2007.

I concluded the article by noting the lack of popular backlash in Somalia against the robot strikes. Blome found that reported fact unacceptable. He wrote:

Is this the sign of a tired reporter, who worked so hard on this story, and failed to think about the deeper meaning of the words you decided to close with?  With drone war so secretive as it is, and few Americans having any idea of the violence that we propagate with these deadly weapons, and the enemies that are created, ten-fold, by their use, I would have hoped that you could have said something more thought provoking and conscientious. … One day this country will reap the whirlwind of the terror that we propagate with drone weapons. I’m hoping that in the future you think more deeply and write more responsibly, so America is awakened before it is too late.

As a reporter on the military beat, you can’t please everyone — not that pleasing anyone is the point. The liberals think you’re a fascist. The conservatives think you’re a hippy. War advocates think you’re a pacifist. Anti-war types like Code Pink think you’re a warmonger.

I’d welcome Blome to take up reporting himself, if he thinks he can do a better job.

Dre Lopez art.

Ace political reporter Dave Weigel at Slate interviews Corey Hutchins and I about our graphic novel THE ACCIDENTAL CANDIDATE, which Weigel says

turned into a funny, sad, and compact story of American democracy and media at their worst. Blue Delliquanti’s art is uncluttered and evocative, giving Greene little tics and emotional cues that the camera never captured. The Axe-Hutchins script gives us an accurate micro-history of the Tea Party, plus colorful details from the events Hutchins covered, all wrapped in an oddly optimistic personal story. Greene evolves from a sad man with delusions of grandeur to a happy, delusional guy who thinks he’s achieved grandeur — as he waits for a hearing on his felony charge, he tells Hutchins he’s the “greatest individual” alive.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow says our “cool” Alvin Greene comic THE ACCIDENTAL CANDIDATE is “sitting on my night table.”

Watch Maddow praise the comic in this clip.