The Labyrinth of Defense
Funded by You and Me
The nation spends a gargantuan amount of money on defense programs but tracking where the money goes and who gets it is nothing less than jumping down the rabbit hole and never getting back.
A glimpse of the labyrinth of connecting businesses that get billions of dollars in federal contracts was provided through the arrest by the FBI last week of nuclear engineer Jonathan Toebbe and his wife, Diana, who were charged with trying to share some of the nation’s most closely held secrets on submarine technology with another, unnamed country. Jonathan Toebbe was accused of trying to sell information on the nuclear propulsion system of Virginia-class attack submarines — the technology at the heart of a recent deal that the United States and Britain struck with Australia, according to the N.Y. Times.
Jonathan Toebbe worked at the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, and that is where we start after climbing down the rabbit hole so join me at your own peril.
The Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory is a sprawling, 207 acre government research facility in the Pittsburgh suburb of West Mifflin, Pa. The lab works exclusively on the design and development of nuclear power for the Navy and was in the forefront of the development of the nuclear navy. The laboratory is situated on the site of the former Bettis Field, named after Cyrus Bettis, an army aviator who set the then airspeed record in 1925 before he died in an aircraft crash less than a year later.
The lab built the nuclear propulsion plants for the first U.S. nuclear submarines and surface ships. The laboratory had two supercomputers listed in 2005 on the 26th TOP500 List, a ranking of the best supercomputers in the world.
The Bechtel Corp. and its subsidiaries have run the lab since 2008. Bechtel is the largest construction company in the United States. Founder Warren Bechtel’s started as a cattle farmer in Peabody, Kan., in 1898, but he gave up his cattle farm and moved to the Oklahoma Territory to construct railroads. Since then, Bechtel has built roads, bridges and highways, joined with other companies to build the Hoover Dam, extinguished burning oil well fires in Kuwait in 1991, a result of the first Gulf War, built air ports in Hong Kong, a petrochemical complex in China and much, much more. The company’s revenues as of 2020 were $17.6 billion.
In 2018, Bechtel began building the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee. The $6.5 billion project is part of the National Nuclear Security Administration program to replace aging, Cold War-era facilities that service, refresh, and replace the uranium stages of nuclear warheads.
The Y-12 National Security Complex is named after the World War II code name for the electromagnetic isotope separation plant producing enriched uranium at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tenn., as part of the Manhattan Project. In the years after World War II, Y-12 has been operated as a manufacturing facility for nuclear weapons components and related defense purposes.
Y-12, which employs around 4,700 people, is managed and operated under contract by a conglomerate that includes Bechtel National, Inc., Leidos, Inc., Orbital ATK, Inc, and SOC LLC, with Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc. as a teaming subcontractor.
Leidos Holdings, Inc., formed in 1969, had revenues of $18.569 billion in 2020. Leidos merged with Lockheed Martin’s IT sector in August 2016 to create the defense industry’s largest IT services provider. Leidos works extensively with the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Intelligence Community, including the NSA. In January 2020, Leidos purchased defense contractor Dynetics for around $1.65 billion.
SAIC, the forerunner of Leidos Holdings Inc., did more than $2.6 billion in business with the Department of Defense in 2013, making it the ninth-largest defense contractor in the United States. Members of the SAIC management and board of directors included many former notable government personnel, including Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defense in the Nixon administration; William Perry, Secretary of Defense for Bill Clinton; John M. Deutch, Director of Central Intelligence under President Clinton; Admiral Bobby Ray Inman who served in various capacities in the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations; and David Kay who led the search for weapons of mass destruction after the 1991 Gulf War and served under the Bush administration after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Orbital ATK’s Space Systems Group provides satellites for commercial, scientific and security purposes. The group produces the Cygnus spacecraft, which delivers cargo to the International Space Station. Last year, the group became part of Northrop Grumman Space Systems.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg but it offers an indication of the scope and power of the defense industry in the U.S.