Ceremonial unveiling of new homeland security drone at General Atomics.
Published in Counterpunch,
May 1, 2013
The Pentagon, military, intelligence agencies and military
contractors are longtime proponents of UAVs for intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance (ISR) missions. Following President Bush’s declaration of a
“global war on terrorism,” the White House became directly involved in
expanding drone deployment in foreign wars – especially in directing drone
strikes.
The most unabashed advocates of drone proliferation, however, are
in Congress. They claim drones can solve many of America’s most pressing
problems – from eliminating terrorists to keeping the homeland safe from
unwanted immigrants. However, there has been little congressional oversight of
drone deployments, both at home and abroad.
Since the post-9/11 congressional interest in drone issues –
budgets, role in national airspace, overseas sales, border deployment and UAVs
by law enforcement agencies – drone boosterism in Congress has prevailed of any
incipient oversight or governance role. Drones made an appearance in the Senate
in the first foray to implement immigration reform, when on January 28, 2013 a
bipartisan group of senators argued their proposal legislation would “increase
the number of unmanned aerial vehicles and surveillance equipment….”
Drone promotion by U.S. representatives and senators in Congress
pops up in what at first may seem the unlikeliest of places. Annually, House
members join with UAS manufacturers to fill the foyer and front rooms of the
Rayburn House Office Building with displays of the latest drones – an industry
show introduced in glowing speeches by highly influential House leaders,
notably Buck McKeon, the Southern California Republican who chairs the House
Armed Service Committee and co-chairs the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus
(CUSC).
Advances in communications, aviation and surveillance technology
have all accelerated the coming of UAVs to the home front. Yet drones
aren’t solely about technological advances. Money flows and political influence
also factor in.
Congressional
Caucus on Unmanned Systems
At the forefront of the money/politics nexus is the Congressional
Caucus on Unmanned Systems (CCUS). Four years ago, the CCUS (then known as the
House Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Caucus) was formed by a small group of
congressional representatives – mainly Republicans and mostly hailing from
districts with drone industries or bases.
By late 2012, the House caucus had 60 members and had changed its
name to encompass all unmanned systems – whether aerial, marine or
ground-based. This bipartisan caucus, together with its allies in the drone
industry, has been promoting UAV use at home and abroad through drone fairs on
Capitol Hill, new legislation and drone-favored budgets.
CCUS aims to “educate members of Congress and the public on the
strategic, tactical, and scientific value of unmanned systems; actively support
further development and acquisition of more systems, and to more effectively
engage the civilian aviation community on unmanned system use and safety.”
In late 2012, the caucus comprised a collection of border hawks,
immigration hardliners and leading congressional voices for the military
contracting industry. The two caucus co-chairs, Howard “Buck” McKeon,
R-California, and Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, are well positioned to accelerate
drone proliferation. McKeon, whose southern California district includes major
drone production facilities, notably General Atomics, is the caucus founder and
chair of the House Armed Services Committee. Cuellar, who represents the Texas
border district of Laredo, is the ranking member (and former chairman) of the
House Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security.
Other
caucus members include Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.), who heads the House
Immigration Reform Caucus; Candice Miller (R-Minn.), who heads the Homeland
Security subcommittee that reviews the air and marine operations of DHS; Joe
Wilson (R-SC); Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.); Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.); Loretta
Sanchez (D-Calif.); and Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.). Eight caucus members
were also members of the powerful House Appropriations Committee in the 112th Congress.
The caucus and its leading members (along with drone proponents in
the Senate) have played key roles in drone proliferation at home and abroad
through channeling earmarks to Predator manufacturer General Atomics, prodding
the Department of Homeland Security to establish a major drone program, adding
amendments to authorization bills for the Federal Aviation Administration and
Department of Defense to ensure the more rapid integration of UAVs into the
national airspace, and increasing annual DOD and DHS budgets for drone R&D
and procurements. To accelerate drone acquisitions and deployment at
home, Congress has an illustrative track record of legislative measures (see
accompanying box).
Congressional
support for the development and procurement of Predators dates back to 1996,
and is reflected in the defense and intelligence authorization acts. An Air
Force-sponsored study of the Predator’s rise charted the increases mandated by
the House Armed Service and the House Intelligence committees over the Predator
budget requests made by the Air Force in its budgets requests. Between 1996 and
2006 (ending date of study), “Congress has recommended an increase, over and
above USAF requests, in the Predator budget for nearly 10 years in a row.
This has resulted in a sum total increase of over a half a billion dollars over
the years.”
Association
of Unmanned Vehicle Systems
CCUS cosponsors the annual drone fete with the Association of
Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), an industry group that brings
together the leading drone manufacturers and universities with UAV research
projects. AUVSI represents the interests in the expansion of unmanned systems
expressed by many of the estimated 100 U.S. companies and academic institutions
involved in developing and deploying the some 300 of the currently existing UAV
models.
The drone association has a $7.5-million annual operating budget,
including $2 million a year for conferences and trade shows to encourage
government agencies and companies to use unmanned aircraft.
AUVSI also has its own congressional advocacy committee that
is closely linked to the caucus. The keynote speaker at the drone association’s
annual conference in early 2012 was Representative McKeon. The congressman was
also the featured speaker at AUVSI’s AIR Day 2011, in recognition, says AUVSI’s
president, that Congressman McKeon “has been one of the biggest supporters of
the unmanned systems community.”
The
close relationship between the congressional drone caucus and AUVSI was
reflected in a similar relationship between CBP/OAM and AUVSI. Tom Faller, the
CBP official who directed the UAV program at OAM, joined the AUVSI 23-member
board-of-directors in August 2011, a month before the association hosted a
technology fair in foyer of the Rayburn House Office Building. OAM
participated in the fair. Faller resigned from the unpaid position on
Nov. 23, 2011 after the Los Angeles Times queried DHS about
Faller’s unpaid position in the industry association. Faller is currently
subject of a DHS internal ethics-violation investigation.
Contracts,
contributions, earmarks and favors
Once a relatively insignificant part of the military-industrial
complex, the UAV development and manufacturing sector is currently expanding
faster than any other component of military contracting. Drone orders from
various federal departments and agencies are rolling in to AUVSI corporate
members, including such leading military contractors as General Atomics,
Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. (Unlike most major military contractors,
General Atomics is not a corporation but a privately held firm, whose two major
figures are Linden and Neal Blue, both of whom have high security clearances)
U.S. government drone purchases – not counting contracts for an
array of related UAV services and “payloads” – rose from $588 million to
$1.3 billion over the past five years. The FY2013 DOD budget includes $5.8
billion for UAVs, which does not include drone spending by the intelligence
community, DHS or other federal entities. The Pentagon says that its
“high-priority” commitment to expenditures for drone defense and warfare has
resulted in “strong funding for unmanned aerial vehicles that enhance
intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities.”
While the relationship between increasing drone contracts and the
increasing campaign contributions received by drone caucus members can only be
speculated, caucus members are favored recipients of contributions by AUVSI
members. In the 2010 and 2012 election cycles, political action committees associated
with companies that produce drones donated more than $2.4 million to
members of the congressional drone caucus.
The leading recipient was McKeon, with Representative Silvestre
Reyes, the influential Democrat from El Paso (who lost his seat in the 2012
election), coming in a close second. General Atomics counted among
McKeon’s top five contributors in the last election. (See Figure 1) Frank W.
Pace, the director of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, contributed to two
candidates – Buck McKeon and Jerry Lewis – during the 2012 electoral campaign.
(See Figure 2)
Who were the top recipients of the General Atomics campaign
contributions in the 2012 cycle? Four of the top five recipients were not
surprising – Buck McKeon, Jerry Lewis, Duncan Hunter and Brian Bilbray – given
their record of support for UAVs and all manner of military contracts and their
position among the most influential drone caucus members. (See Figure 3)
The relationship that has been consolidating between General
Atomics and the U.S. Air Force since the early 1990s has been mediated and
facilitated in Congress by influential congressional representatives, led by
southern Californian Republican Rep. Jerry Lewis, a member of the House
Appropriations Defense Committee and vice-chairman of the House Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence.
Lewis, a favored recipient of General Atomics campaign
contributions, used his appropriations influence to ensure that the Air Force
gained full control of the UAV program by 1998. Lewis, a prominent member of
the “Drone Caucus,” has received at least $10,000 every two years in campaign
contributions from General Atomics’ political action committee – $80,000 since
1998, according to OpenSecrets.org. During the 2012 campaign cycle, General
Atomics was the congressman’s top campaign donor.
The top ranking recipient of General Atomics campaign
contributions isn’t a CUSC member. Senator Diane Feinstein’s (D-Calif.)
contributions from General Atomics easily placed her at the top of the list.
Feinstein, who chairs the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee, was also
favored in the campaign contributions by Linden Blue, the president of General
Atomics. (See Figure 4)
Senator Feinstein has been a highly consistent supporter of the
intelligence community and military budgets. Her failure to oppose the
clandestine drone strikes ordered by the White House and CIA have sparked
widespread criticism by those who argue the strikes are unconstitutional,
illegal under international law and counterproductive as a counterterrorism
tactic.
In 2012, General Atomics was Feinstein’s third largest campaign
contributor, while other leading contributors were the military contractors
General Dynamics (from which General Atomics emerged), BAE Systems and Northrup
Grumman. Feinstein’s connections to General Atomics extend beyond being top
recipient of their campaign contributions. Rachel Miller, a former (2003-2007)
legislative assistant for Feinstein, has served as a paid lobbyist for General
Atomics, both working directly for the firm (in 2011) and as a General Atomics
lobbyist employed by Capitol Solutions (2009 – present), one of the leading
lobbying firms contracted by General Atomics.
And did
you know that Linden Blue plans to marry Retired Rear Adm. Ronne Froman?
Few others knew about the engagement of this high-society San Diego couple
until Senator Feinstein announced the planned marriage at a mid-November 2012
meeting of the downtown San Diego business community – news that quickly
appeared the Society pages of the San Diego Union-Tribune. There
has been no explanation offered why Feinstein broke this high-society news, but
the announcement certainly did point to the senator’s likely personal
connections to Blue and Froman (who was hired by General Atomics as senior
vice-president in December 2007 and has since left the firm).
Campaign contributions and personal connections create goodwill
and facilitate contracts. General Atomics also counts on the results produced
by a steady stream of lobbying dollars – which have risen dramatically since
2003, and been averaging $2.5 million annually since 2005. In 2012, General
Atomics spent $2,470,000 lobbying Congress.
Congressional
earmarks were critical to the rise of the Predator, both its earlier unarmed
version as well as the later “Hunter-Killer.” The late senator Daniel K.
Inouye, the Hawaii Democrat who chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee,
told the New York Times that if the House ban on commercial
earmarks that was introduced in 2010 had been in effect earlier, ”we would not
have the Predator today.”
Tens of
millions of dollars in congressional earmarks in the 1990s went to General
Atomics and other military contractors for the early development of what became
the Predator program, reported the New York Times. Inouye was a source
of a number of these multimillion earmarks for General Atomics, whose large
campaign contributions to the influential Hawaii senator from 1998 to 2012
($5000 in this last campaign) could be regarded as thank-you notes since Inouye
faced insignificant political opposition.
Figure
1
Buck
McKeon, Campaign Contributions (2012 cycle)
Top Contributors
Lockheed Martin $65,750
General Dynamics
$60,000
Northrup Grumman
$50,500
General Atomics
$38,800
Boeing
$31,750
___________________________________________
Source: OpenSecrets.org (includes corporate PACs and company officers,
employees, and family members)
Figure
2
Frank
W. Pace, President of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems
Campaign Contributions (2012 cycle),
Top Individual Recipients
Buck McKeon (R) $4,000
Jerry Lewis (R) $1,000
________________________________________
Source: OpenSecrets.org
Figure
3
General
Atomics, Campaign Contributions (2012 cycle)
Top Individual Recipients
Diane Feinstein (D) $54,750
Buck McKeon (R)
$38,800
Jerry Lewis (R)
$22,400
Duncan Hunter (R) $16,450
Brian Bilbray (R) $13,250
________________________________
Source: OpenSecrets.org
Figure
4
Linden
Blue, President of General Atomics
Campaign Contributions (2012 cycle)
Top Individual Recipients
Buck, McKeon $7,100
Duncan Hunter $3,950
Diane Feinstein $3,500
Mitt Romney $2,450
Jerry Lewis $1,000
_______________________________________
Source: OpenSecrets.org
Besides
campaign contributions, General Atomics routinely hands out favors to
congressional representatives thought likely to support drone proliferation. A
2006 report by the Center for Public Integrity identified Jerry Lewis as one of
two congressional members and more than five dozen congressional staffers who
traveled overseas courtesy of General Atomics. The center’s report, The ‘Top
Gun’ of Travel, observed this “little-known California defense contractor
[has] far outspent its industry competitors on travel for more than five years
— and in 2005 landed promises of billions of dollars in federal business.” Most
of this business was in the form of drone development and procurement by the
Pentagon and DHS.
Questioned
about this pattern of corporate-sponsored trips, Thomas Cassidy, founder of
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, said, “[It's] useful and very helpful, in
fact, when you go down and talk to the government officials to have
congressional people go along and discuss the capabilities of [the plane] with
them,” A follow-up investigation by the San Diego Union-Tribune reported,
“Most of that was spent on overseas travel related to the unmanned Predator spy
plane made by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, an affiliated company.”
Looking
Desperately for Oversight
In practice, there’s more boosterism than effective oversight in
the House Homeland Security Committee and its Subcommittee on Border and
Maritime Security, which oversees DHS’s rush to deploy drones to keep the homeland
secure. The same holds true for most of the more than one hundred other
congressional committees that purportedly oversee the DHS and its budget.
Since DHS’ creation, Congress has routinely approved annual and supplementary
budgets for border security that have been higher than those requested by the
president and DHS.
CCUS member and chair of the House Border and Maritime Security
subcommittee, Representative Candice Miller, R-Michigan, is effusive and
unconditional in her support of drones. Miller described her personal
conviction that drones are the answer to border insecurity at the July 15, 2010
subcommittee hearing on UAVs.
“You know, my husband was a fighter pilot in Vietnam theater,
so—from another generation, but I told him, I said, ‘Dear, the glory days of
the fighter jocks are over.’”
“The UAVs, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are coming,” continued
Miller, “and now you see our military siting in a cubicle sometimes in
Nevada, drinking a Starbucks, running these things in theater and being incredibly,
incredibly successful.”
The
uncritical drone boosterism in Congress was underscored in aWashington Post article
on the use of drones for border security. In his trips to testify on
Capitol Hill, Kostelnik said he had never been challenged in Congress about the
appropriate use of homeland security drones. “Instead, the question is: ‘Why
can’t we have more of them in my district?’” remarked the OAM chief.
Since 2004, the DHS’ UAV program has drawn mounting concern and
criticism from the government’s own oversight and research agencies, including
the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office and
the DHS’s own Office of Inspector General.
These government entities have repeatedly raised questions about
the cost-efficiency, strategic focus and performance of the homeland security
drones. Yet, rather than subjecting DHS officials to sharp questioning, the
congressional committees overseeing homeland security and border security
operations have, for the most part, readily and often enthusiastically accepted
the validity of undocumented assertions by testifying CBP officials. The House
Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security has been especially notorious for
its lack of critical oversight.
As part of the budgetary and oversight process, the House and
Senate committees that oversee DHS have not insisted that CBP undertake
cost-benefit evaluations, institute performance measures, implement comparative
evaluations of its high-tech border security initiatives, or document how its UAV
program responds to realistic threat assessments. Instead of providing
proper oversight and ensuring that CBP/OAM’s drone program is accountable and
transparent, congressional members from both parties seem more intent on
boosting drone purchases and drone deployment.
As CBP was about to begin its first drone deployments in 2005 as
part of the Operation Safeguard pilot project, the Congressional Research
Service observed: “Congress will likely conduct oversight of Operation
Safeguard before considering wider implementation of this technology.”
Unfortunately, Congress never reviewed the results of Operation Safeguard pilot
project, and CBP declined requests by this writer to release the report of this
UAV pilot project.
Congress has been delinquent in its oversight duties. In addition
to the governmental research and monitoring institutions, it has been mainly
the nongovernmental sector – including the American Civil Liberties Union,
Electronic Frontier Foundation, Center for Constitutional Rights, and the
Center for International Policy – that has alerted the public about the lack of
transparency and accountability in the DHS drone program and the absence of
responsible governance over the domestic and international proliferation of
UAVs.
In September 2012, the Senate formed its own bipartisan drone
caucus, the Senate Unmanned Aerial Systems Caucus, co-chaired by Jim Inhofe
(R-Okla.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). “This caucus will help develop and direct
responsible policy to best serve the interests of U.S. national defense and
emergency response, and work to address any concerns from senators, staff and
their constituents,” said Inhofe.
It is still too early to ascertain if the Senate’s drone caucus
will follow its counterpart in the House in almost exclusively focusing on
promoting drone proliferation at home and abroad. It is expected, however, that
caucus members will experience increased flows of campaign contributions from
the UAS industry. While Senator Manchin just won his first full-term in the
2012 election, Senator Inhofe has been favored by campaign contributions from
military contractors, including General Atomics ($14,000 in 2012), since he
took office in 2007. His top campaign contributor was Koch Industries.
For its part, AUVSI, the drone industry association, gushed in its
quickly offered commendation. “I would like to commend Senators Inhofe and
Manchin for their leadership and commitment in establishing the caucus, which
will enable AUVSI to work with the Senate and stakeholders on the
important issues that face the unmanned systems community as the expanded use
of the technology transitions to the civil and commercial markets,”
said AUVSI President and CEO Michael Toscano. “It is our hope to establish the
same open dialogue with the Senate caucus as we have for the past three years
with the House Unmanned Systems Caucus,” the AUVSI executive added.
There is rising citizen concern about drones and privacy and civil
rights violations. The prospective opening of national airspace to UAVs has
sparked a surge of concern among many communities and states – eleven of which
are considering legislation in 2013 that would restrict how police and other
agencies would deploy drones. But paralleling new concern about the threats
posed by drone proliferation is local and state interest in attracting new UAV
testing facilities and airbases for the FAA and other federal entities.
FAA and industry projections about the number of UAVs (15,000 by
2020, 30,000 by 2030) that may be using national airspace – the same space used
by all commercial and private aircraft – have sparked a surge of new
congressional activism, with several new bills introduced by non-drone caucus
members in the new Congress that respond to the new fears about drone
proliferation. Yet there is no one committee in the House or the Senate that
has assumed the responsibility for UAV oversight to lead the way toward
creating a foundation of laws and regulations establishing a political
framework for UAV use going forward.
At this point, there is no federal agency or congressional
committee that is providing oversight over drone proliferation – whether in
regard to U.S. drone exports, the expanding drone program of DHS, drone-related
privacy concerns, or UAV use by private or public firms and agencies. Gerald
Dillingham, top official of the Government Accountability Office, testified in
Congress about this oversight conundrum. When asked which part of the federal
government was responsible for regulating drone proliferation in the interest
of public safety and civil rights, the GAO director said, “At best, we can say
it’s unknown at this point.”
Tom
Barry directs the
TransBorder Project at the Center for International Policy and is the author
of Border Wars from
MIT Press and numerous books on U.S.-Latin American relations. He is also
the author of a new policy report Drones
Over the Homeland.
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