War Is Boring » Media Spin

Danger Room: Air Force Shoots Down Investigation Into Deadly Crash

David Axe — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:01:13 +0000

CV-22. Air Force photo.

by DAVID AXE

For the crew of U.S. Air Force CV-22 Osprey number 06-0031, a lot of things went wrong on the early morning of April 9, 2010, in southern Afghanistan. A series of alleged pilot errors and possible mechanical failures sent the speedy, hybrid aircraft — which takes off and lands like a helicopter but cruises like an airplane — crashing to the ground.

Four people died.

The loss of 06-0031 was a tragedy for the victims and their families. It was also problematic for proponents of the controversial Osprey. In recent years, elements within the U.S. military have worked hard to portray the V-22 as safe, reliable and combat-ready. The Afghanistan crash threatened to undermine that effort.

Which perhaps explains why the Air Force appeared to cover up the possible real cause of 06-0031’s deadly mishap. The lead investigator, Brig. Gen Donald Harvel, claimed that the V-22 suffered engine problems before its crash. Then Harvel’s superior officer overruled the initial decision, chalking up the accident mostly to pilot error. That took the heat off the Osprey itself.

“There was absolutely a lot of pressure to change my report,” he told Air Force Times, adding that the flying branch was focused on protecting the V-22’s reputation.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

Wary of Advertiser, Magazine Pulls Critic off F-35 Beat

David Axe — Tue, 11 May 2010 19:07:24 +0000

Bill Sweetman. Facebook photo.

by DAVID AXE

The conspiracy to foist an overweight, underpowered, overpriced fighter jet on the U.S. military has just gotten a little more Byzantine. Aviation Week, arguably the number-one defense trade publication in the U.S. — and my former employer — has removed its top aviation reporter from the F-35 beat. “The editorial team has decided that Bill Sweetman will not be covering the F-35 program for a period of time,” the Washington, D.C.-based magazine stated.

In one move, the media-military-industry establishment has silenced one of the most important voices in one of the most important procurement programs. It’s a move that brings America a big step closer toward the same tyranny you see every day in countries such as China.

The drama began with a Facebook update. In advance of a trip to Fort Worth, Texas, to visit Lockheed Martin’s F-35 factory, Sweetman posted this status update:

Gentlemen, your target for tonight is Fort Worth. Flacks are predicted to be numerous and persistent on the run-in and over the target, and bullshit is expected to be dense throughout the mission. Synchronize watches and good luck.

Sweetman, my former boss at AvWeek, was referring to Lockheed Martin’s and the government’s long history of lying about the F-35. Two years ago, an independent Pentagon auditing team found serious management and production problems inside the decade-old, $300-billion program to build some 3,000 F-35 fighters for the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps plus more than a dozen allied countries. The problems would result in a two-year service delay and potentially tens of billions of dollars in cost increases.

It took a year for most reporters to notice the audit. It became hot news in the summer of 2009, as the Pentagon announced it would truncate F-22 fighter production in favor of the F-35. Amid that debate, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell called me directly to deny the F-35 auditors’ findings. “Delays in testing does not mean getting delay on [Initial Operating Capability],” Morrell said. Lockheed, for its part, insisted the F-35 was “on track.”

Six months later, the problems had gotten so bad that a cover-up became impossible. The Pentagon admitted the auditors had been right. The Air Force bumped back IOC two years to 2016. Secretary of Defense Bob Gates fired the government program manager and withheld from Lockheed $600 million in fees.

Sweetman had predicted all of this, in a series of blog posts and articles that, for months prior to the 2009 audit controversy, had detailed the F-35 program’s unraveling. Sweetman emphasized a metric that many reporters ignored: actual test flights versus planned test flights. The test flight goal for the 2009 fiscal year was 317 sorties, Sweetman revealed. “The total so far … is more like 30 flights, with a little more than two months to go.”

“For every month’s litany of problems in the program, you’ll find a Lockheed Martin or government program boss assuring the customers, Congress and the taxpayers that everything is going fine,” Sweetman wrote.

Everything is not going fine. Today, most reporters recognize that fact. Sweetman was ahead of them by two years. And when Sweetman commented on his Facebook page that Lockheed’s “bullshit is expected to be dense,” he was writing with authority. AvWeek‘s reward to the man who granted the magazine greater legitimacy than any other aviation publication on the F-35 beat? Suspension.

Why did AvWeek punish its best reporter for writing the truth? Here’s why:

: Aviation Week.

Note the Lockheed ad at right. The number-one defense contractor is also one of AvWeek‘s biggest advertisers. A Lockheed spokesman told reporter Steve Trimble that the company “has not asked Aviation Week to take disciplinary action against Bill Sweetman.” But it didn’t have to. Lockheed only had to keep buying ads. AvWeek‘s cowardly editors handled the disciplinary action all on their own. That’s one way influence works in D.C.

There’s more at stake than one man’s career. The F-35 program has proved, time and again, that it cannot be trusted with the taxpayer’s dollars. Audits and good reporting are the only way to keep the F-35 developers honest. Without Sweetman, that kind of oversight gets a lot harder.

As a consequence, the United States could wind up like China. Beijing is scrambling to cover up serious, and sometimes fatal, design flaws in its new J-10B fighters, which were partially reverse-engineered from Israel’s Lavi fighter. “The pitfalls of reverse engineering without paying royalty and truly understanding the technology are high accident rates, a fact that China has hushed up with its lack of media freedom,” Manu Sood reports.

The big difference is that the F-35 has not gotten anyone killed. Yet.

Wendy Button: “We are … a Nation at War”

David Axe — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:39:19 +0000

Medevac. David Axe photo.

by DAVID AXE

“There is no other time than the night of The White House Correspondents Dinner when Washington is more out of touch with the country it guides and informs,” Wendy Button writes at The Huffington Post:

With the black ties and dresses, shiny hair and sparkling diamonds, bad jokes and back-slapping, it would be hard to tell that more than 37 million Americans live in poverty every day and millions more at the razor’s edge or that more than 508,000 Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans have sought care from a Veterans Affairs facility because some of the people at that dinner sent them off to war. …

We forget that we are — like it or not, for it or not — a nation at war and we rarely act like it. Most Americans don’t serve. Most Americans don’t know that 2 million men and women have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan; the suicide rate for active duty soldiers has more than doubled since these wars began; nearly 15 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are unemployed, and their families have to fight to get a wheel chair or surgery or help with a creeping traumatic brain injury.

At tomorrow night’s high profile dinner, our national press corps could begin to change all of this for our veterans.

They won’t.

Exclusive Video: MV Faina Released by Pirates

David Axe — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 06:18:15 +0000

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/fTrz6Xrm3Xc" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

The Ukrainian Merchant Vessel Faina was captured by Somali pirates in September 2008 while carrying 33 T-72 tanks and other arms through the Indian Ocean. Some sources said the tanks were bound for Sudanese rebels; the Kenyan government claimed the tanks had been ordered by its own army.

In February, Faina‘s owners paid a multi-million-dollar ransom and the vessel was released. She made port in Mombasa, Kenya, where Kenyan officials repeated their assertion that the tanks were bound for Kenya. The speakers are, in order: ship’s second mate Vladimir Nikolsky, Kenyan Assistant Defense Minister David Musila and government spokesman Dr. Alfred Mutua.

(Footage: Moses Baya)

Info War Strategy for Robots

David Axe — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:12:37 +0000

“Robots will figure prominently in the future of warfare, whether we like it or not,” Matt Armstrong writes in the latest issue of Serviam:

They will provide perimeter security, logistics, surveillance, explosive ordinance disposal, and more because they fit strategic, operational, and tactical requirements for both the irregular and “traditional” warfare of the future. While American policymakers have finally realized that the so-called “war on terror” is a war of ideas and a war of information, virtually all reports on unmanned systems ignore the substantial impact that “warbots” will have on strategic communications, from public diplomacy to psychological operations.

In other words, how will our friends and allies perceive U.S. war ‘bots? The potential for trouble is great:

Without capable information management from the strategic to the tactical level, accidents and failures of unmanned systems will receive harsh treatment in the global media, amplifying an endemic view in the Middle East and elsewhere that the United States commoditizes death. The United States cannot afford technological failures or induced failures (i.e., hacking) that kill civilians.

Problem is, much of the world already associates U.S. military robots with death, thanks to the use of Predator drones as aerial assassins in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — and the military has no plans to scale back these sneaky, lethal attacks.

(Photo: me)