It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a…
Massive runaway surveillance blimp?!
As the kids say, WTF?
You’ve probably heard by now, a giant blimp broke free of its tethers and floated from the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland all the way to Columbia County, Pennsylvania. The escaped blimp was dragging a 6,700 foot long cable behind it — destroying power lines, terrifying onlookers and even confusing Amish horses…
“Easy now, Jebediah… this too shall pass.”
*Image courtesy of Jimmy May, Press Enterprise Online
Now, in full disclosure, I HATE these blimps. Always have, always will.
You see, I live in an old farmhouse in Baltimore County about 25 miles from Aberdeen Proving Ground. Whenever I go outside to walk my dog, play baseball with my son, or even mow my lawn, I’m met with the foreboding sight of not one, but two of these ominous balloons staring down on me like alien invaders, ready to beam me up and perform untold acts of horror.
So when I heard the news that one of the blimps had broken free, I was ecstatic. “Good riddance!“, I muttered as I shook my fist at the sky. My only regret was that Blimpy didn’t take his friend with him on his fateful journey.
Call me a NIMBY, but what can I say? I don’t want two ancient dirigibles floating around while I’m trying to enjoy the sunset. Blimps, really? What is this, 1916? If you’re going to spy on people, I’m thinking we could be a bit more discreet…
Is our technology really that bad that we’re relying on huge balloons to do our military surveillance?
The short answer is yes. Yes it is.
The official name for these floating monstrosities is the JLENS – Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System. They are 242 feet long — twice the size of a blue whale — and designed to identify cruise missiles, enemy boats and suspicious aircraft. At an altitude of 10,000 feet, the JLENS onboard radar can spy approximately 350 miles in every direction — scanning the skies from Canada all the way down to North Carolina.
From a military standpoint, that sounds like a pretty effective idea.
Too bad these blimps have been proven to do very little to make us safer; not to mention the obscene costs involved…
Let’s start with their efficiency, or lack thereof…
From the LA Times:
Seventeen years after its birth, JLENS is a stark example of what defense specialists call a “zombie” program: costly, ineffectual and seemingly impossible to kill.
- In tests, JLENS has struggled to track flying objects and to distinguish friendly aircraft from threatening ones.
A 2012 report by the Pentagon’s Operational Test and Evaluation office faulted the system in four “critical performance areas” and rated its reliability as “poor.”
- The system is designed to provide continuous air-defense surveillance for 30 days at a time, but had not managed to do so as of last month
- Software glitches have hobbled its ability to communicate with the nation’s air-defense networks — a critical failing, given that JLENS’ main purpose is to alert U.S. forces to incoming threat
- The massive, milk-white blimps can be grounded by bad weather and, if deployed in combat zones, would be especially vulnerable to enemy attack.
- Even if all those problems could be overcome, it would be prohibitively expensive to deploy enough of the airships to protect the United States along its borders and coasts.
Raytheon (NYSE: RTN) created these inflatable monsters, and have raked in billions to develop them. The project itself is a crash course in the military industrial complex. The costs of this ineffective program have been incredible:
- The JLENS blimps are part of a almost two-decade, $2.7 billion-dollar program
- Each JLENS blimp costs about $182 million
- In November 2005, the Army added $1.3 billion to Raytheon’s JLENS contract, and the government committed to buy 28 of the blimps.
- Defense Industry Daily estimates the total cost to complete the program had reached $7.56 billion
The takeaway here is that, even if a big military project doesn’t even work, the defense contractors still get paid for a long, long time.
In part it’s because the lobbying arm of the military industrial complex is very, very good at what they do. That is, feeding tax-dollars into massive defense programs…
Raytheon in particular has benefited from these sweetheart government deals for years. The JLENS is a perfect example of a military spending sinkhole. Here’s a quick history…
In 1998, the Pentagon agreed to build 28 blimps for $1.4 billion. However, they blew through $1.9 billion by 2012 yet none of the JLENS were even ready to get to work. In order to get these beasts into the air by 2014, they would require another $6 billion.
The Army actually tried to kill the program in 2010, but were met with the lobbying arm of the defense industry. Here’s what happened next, again from the excellent LA Times exposé:
Raytheon mobilized its congressional lobbyists. Within the Pentagon, Marine Corps Gen. James E. “Hoss” Cartwright, then vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came to JLENS’ defense, arguing that it held promise for enhancing the nation’s air defenses.
At Cartwright’s urging, money was found in 2011 for a trial run of the technology — officially, an “operational exercise” — in the skies above Washington, D.C.
Cartwright retired the same year — and joined Raytheon’s board of directors five months later. As of the end of 2014, Raytheon had paid him more than $828,000 in cash and stock for serving as a director, Securities and Exchange Commission records show.
So here we are today, saddled with a massively expensive, yet ineffectual program. Taxpayers lose, Raytheon wins.
Just check out their stock chart since the September 11th attacks ushered in a new age of defense spending:
They’re up 377%. Not too shabby.
But, as I said, I hate Raytheon and their Orwellian blimps. Even taken with that grain of salt, I’m still more bullish on some of their competitors.
Next week I’ll bring you my top three defense stocks that should perform better than Raytheon, and aren’t littering our skies with untethered flying objects.
Until then…
