BANGALORE, India, Feb. 6 — Encouraged by the passage late last year of the first agreement on nuclear cooperation between India and the United States, American military contractors and technology companies have descended on Bangalore, the country’s technology hub, this week in the hope of winning some of the biggest military contracts.
On the eve of India’s air show, which is held every two years, 52 American companies ranging from the largest contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and General Electric to smaller companies are showcasing their products and lobbying government officials.
The five-day air show opens Wednesday in the suburbs of Bangalore, just as India and the United States are gradually relaxing policies governing military collaboration between the countries.
“There is no opportunity or market outside of India that is bigger than India for both commercial aircraft and defense products,” said Mark Kronenberg, vice president of integrated defense systems for the Asia-Pacific region at Boeing.
Boeing said it projected a market of $15 billion for its own products in India over the next 10 to 15 years. Mr. Kronenberg said this estimate was “conservative.”
Boeing and its competitors are angling for potential orders that include 126 fighter aircraft by the Indian Air Force for an estimated $11 billion, heavy-lift helicopters, carrier jet trainers and antiship missiles.
One of the hotly contested contracts will be for a multirole combat aircraft that executives for the visiting companies say will entail the “fiercest competition in the last 15 years.” Boeing will go head-to-head with a rival American contractor, Lockheed Martin, along with French, Swedish and Russian competitors.
As part of its marketing effort, Boeing has brought in two multirole combat F/A-18 Super Hornet aircraft, a Chinook helicopter and the C-17 transport aircraft to show potential buyers.
Lockheed Martin, based in Bethesda, Md., brought one of its F-16 multirole combat aircraft and is also showing its P-3C surveillance aircraft and its strike missiles to the Indian military.
“We are tickled pink to be here,” said Dennis D. Cavin, the vice president for international air and missile defense strategic initiatives at Lockheed Martin.
Lockheed Martin will have the opportunity to showcase its F-16 combat jet on a flight later this week. The pilot will be one of India’s best known businessmen, Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group, an industrial conglomerate, who is also a trained pilot. Mr. Tata has frequently appeared in the news lately after his steel company, Tata Steel, moved ahead last week with its acquisition of the Corus Group, a much larger British-Dutch steel maker. “We look forward to putting him in the pilot’s seat,” said Robert H. Trice, senior vice president for business development at Lockheed Martin.
Lockheed said it was in the running to sell six C-130J Hercules transport planes to the Indian military, with the possibility of another six by the end of the year.
The American contingent at the Bangalore air show this year is its largest ever and “illustrates the dramatic ramp-up in their commitment to the Indian market,” said Ron Somers , president of the Washington-based United States-India Business Council of the United States Chamber of Commerce.
Over the years, India’s cool relations with the United States had resulted in a conspicuous absence of American military products in its armed forces. India’s previous alignment with the former Soviet Union created a military weaponry dominated by Russian MIG jets, as well as French and British products.
Other military contractors from Europe and South America have also appeared in significant numbers at the air show and are vying for contracts...
This has been coming awhile.
Finally India gets a piece of the action Pakistan's had for awhile. Or is it the other way around? The Lords of War eat Indian resources that could have gone to preserve Indian lives. Untold billions of dollars worth will be squandered so the Big Boys of India can have their big toys. Just like their partners in Pakistan. And the rest of the Middle East, including, you will note, Iran. And of course, Amerikastan.
Speaking of untold billions, does anyone have any idea about that missing trillion dollars the Pentagon couldn't account for? The first time Rumsfeld acknowledged it- everythingchanged the next day.
But there's no doubt about their accountability: the Patriot Phillip Perry is on the job.
Pierre Tristam notes:
President Bush's 2008 budget includes a $625 billion request for the military, up from $295 billion the year Bush was elected -- a 112 percent increase. Its about $100 billion more than all other military budgets in the world, combined. Plenty of attention is being paid the exhausted military fighting Bush's various wars. There's no denying it. It's overstretched and undermanned. It makes you think the Pentagon needs more money, not less.
But little attention is paid the flip-side of that story -- the squandering of money on defense contractors' swindles, whether it's the superfluous $66 billion F-22 fighter jet program -- one of three jet fighters in development -- or the $9 billion-a-year missile shield, which, one test aside, hasn't gotten much past its middle school science project concept since Ronald Reagan fancied it a quarter century and $160 billion ago.
The military is strapped by its own doing. Lawmakers are complicit. Job-producing military contracts are seeded throughout the land's congressional districts like above-board bribes.
But lawmakers couldn't get away with it if the military weren't the subject of a misplaced, ill-informed and dangerous public infatuation that's been changing American society for the worse since the early 1980s -- the period when Reagan built up the military into the creepy colossus it's been since. As Andrew Bacevich, author of "The New American Militarism," wrote, "The ensuing affair had and continues to have a heedless, Gatsby-like aspect, a passion pursued in utter disregard of any consequences that might ensue. Few in power have openly considered whether valuing military power for its own sake or cultivating permanent global military superiority might be at odds with American principles."
Misuse of the military abroad and its escalating burdens on taxpayers are well documented. The consequences of the infatuation on civilian society are documented less well, because the effects are more subtle than convoys of tanks down Main Street. The consequences are more diffuse, more pernicious. There is, for example, the increasing role the military is playing in domestic life, secretly and not-so secretly, crumbling almost a century and a half old prohibition against military meddling in civilian business.
Five years ago the Pentagon established a "Northern Command" over the United States, the first time such a command was based on the mainland, ostensibly to coordinate responses to terrorist attacks. The Pentagon is actively engaged in domestic intelligence gathering, something that would have been thought outright illegal a generation ago. In December, the president signed a law that gave him the authority to declare martial law virtually at will.
Militarization is happening in more direct ways. Last week, the Associated Press circulated a story about the Pentagon selling surplus hardware to police agencies. The story projected a happy, fortunate circumstance. The tone was approving. The suggestion rewarding.
A picture featured a young police officer called Shane Grammer holding up a massive M-16 rifle with at least two scopes and a muffler-size barrel, a Chevrolet Blazer behind him, also military surplus, cluttered up with soldiers' helmets, camouflage and gear. The officer was a member of the Litchfield, Pa., Police Department. Litchfield is a minuscule township of 500 families. Who does Officer Grammer intend to use his M-16 against?
The difference between police agencies and military units is becoming difficult to distinguish. They love their helicopters, they love their night raids, their SWAT teams, their chases, their drawn guns.
We often hear about how "attitude" is in itself a trigger of violence among gang members. What we don't often hear about, but endure, because the media are too busy writing cute features about military surplus property in the hands of local police agencies, is the same attitude from police -- the very same approach: Look at an officer the wrong way and you might be in jail before the rooster crows once. All of that military hardware brings with it an attitude all its own, a sense of power and presumption that has to be exercised. At this rate, a police state would be a blessing. What we're heading toward is a military state, perpetually at war abroad, but also perpetually mobilized at home down to the tiniest mom-and-pop police agency. Uniforms are the new cult, force the presumed solution to order's challengers. The law can wait.
When a society is no longer exclusively and vigilantly civil, its claim to be a civilized society, let alone a civilizing one, is in peril. Other countries have been discovering that about the United States. We're discovering it at home, too, every time a police shield is flashed with the presumptive power of an M-16 burst.
Some of us discovered that quite awhile back.
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