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Philip M. Condit |
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2002 CEO Salary: $4.1 million This company doesn't just make 747's, it makes JDAM "smart" bombs, F-15 fighter and Apache helicopters. Caught knowingly selling flawed parts for the Apache that led to thousands of unnecessary landings and at least one fatal crash, Boeing has paid tens of millions of dollars in fines. Also fined for trying to resell military technology from the United States to Singapore, Turkey and Malaysia in 2001. The JDAM (joint direct attack munitions) kit fits over a "dumb" missile and coverts it into a satellite-guided weapon using movable fins and a satellite positioning system. According to Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke, of the 12,000 bombs the U.S. has dropped on Afghanistan, 7,200 (about 60%) were precision-guided. Of these, 4,600 were Boeing's Joint Direct Attack Munitions. The rest were laser-guided bombs or satellite-guided Raytheon Co. Tomahawk cruise missiles. But there was a downside, the precision JDAMs have repeatedly missed their targets; crashing into a residential neighborhood near the Kabul airport on October 12th and killing at least 10 civilians, falling off target and killing three American soldiers on December 5th, and wounding five Special Forces soldiers a week earlier. The Pentagon maintains there is no problem with the weapon, and insists it will continue to use it. Since the United States began bombing Afghanistan, Boeing has received two separate orders for more than 1,074 JDAMs, to be delivered by December 2001 and March 2002. The C-17 Globemaster is Boeing's jumbo military transport plane, which performed high altitude food drops in Afghanistan. As recently as March 2001, Boeing tried unsuccessfully to make the plane available to commercial buyers. This time around it seems the company is capitalizing on widespread sympathy for its commercial losses, but the proposal is still a bad ideal. Selling the military planes as though they were commercial would allow the Air Force to bypass important pricing oversight. In addition, the $232 million per copy C-17s aren't all they promised to be. A General Accounting Office report found that Boeing's failure to rigorously test the C-17 before production resulted in increased costs of more than $2 billion to the program. The plan to lease 100 converted Boeing 767 air-refueling aircraft for a period of 10 years is a big rip-off for taxpayers too. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that the lease plan would cost $22 billion, while purchasing the aircraft outright would cost just over $15 billion-that is a difference of $7 billion that Boeing can pocket. The aircraft is even less of a bargain when the $600 million cost of modifying existing hangers to house the plane is taken into account. Some officials at the Congressional Budget Office and in the House and Senate budget committees oppose the leasing plan, contending it is a scam that adds to the long-term costs. "This would be a first," said G. William Hoagland, minority staff director on the Senate Budget Committee, of Boeing's plan. "We've got to maintain some discipline. This just isn't the time to be adding in this way." But, cool heads like Mr. Hoagland's might have a hard time prevailing, given Boeing's political weight. The 767 plan goes before a House-Senate conference committee next week and Boeing has a lot of well-connected and important people looking out for its interests. John M. Shalikashvili, retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is on the Boeing board. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Rudy de Leon heads Boeing's Washington office. After September 11th Boeing beefed up its political connections by hiring former Senator Bennett Johnson (D-LA) and former Rep. Bill Paxon (R-NY). Former Ambassador Thomas Pickering, Boeing's senior vice president for international relations since January, uses his forty years of experience to generate business for Boeing with foreign governments and corporations. Also on the Boeing agenda is more money for its portfolio of major contracts. Boeing is currently working on more than a dozen contracts-- including the expensive F/A-18 fighter jet, the crash prone V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, the AH-64 Apache Longbow helicopter and the Airborne Laser for the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization-- that account for well over $10 billion in the 2002 Pentagon budget alone. |
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