Pearls and Irritations

 Among a group of corporations which also includes Boeing and BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin is a particular target for this action. Though principled and consistent, it has proved to be a futile exercise in protest; worse, it is likely to remain so.
The reason for such a pessimistic judgment is straightforward. Between the activists and protesters on one side, and those who oppose them — the government, university management, and the national security establishment (the old military industrial complex, defence industry-funded think-tanks, peak university bodies, and friendly media) — there is a massive difference in power measured across several dimensions.

That said, it is conceded that, at the opening, or basic level of argument, both parties have strong positions. The government’s case, for example, holds that, for the nation to be secure, it must have weapons and, where possible, weapons produced by Australian industries.

Failing that, the need is for weapons produced collaboratively with allies or acquired completely from the same sources. This proposition is eminently reasonable and would attract close to unanimous support among the citizenry.

A serious problem arises, however, if this is deployed so as to exclude other arguments by privileging itself. And government does so when it demands input from certain specialists who are found in sufficient numbers only in the universities. Even though many might be willing to contribute their expertise, it is also undoubtedly the case that many others will find the arrangements to be professionally and ethically compromising.

The former see benefits: resources, relevance, enhanced career prospects, and perhaps a sense of national security purpose.

[Government, which increasingly regards the universities as either a prosthesis for capabilities which it should fund but doesn’t, or a hybrid policy-advice agency, finds this disposition predictable and much to its liking.]

The latter’s objections, also predictable, are heard, but not listened to. How could they be? They are couched in a language which, for them, is as indecipherable as Latin or Aramaic, and refers to historical concepts of the academy as a stable institution, which was oce able, because of its historical consciousness, “to preserve at least a pocket of memory, “and maintain, as Regis Debray recalls it, “a tribal reservation for the ethics of truth”.

Specifically, they reject the closing-off of the free flow of research information that the engagement with national security projects entails, effectively creating closed and open societies on the same campus. But above all, they regard as anathema the sheer hypocrisy of the proposition — indistinguishable from intellectual apartheid — that a classical university education is possible, or compatible in a setting in which it is humiliated by the privileges accorded research on weapons and their attendant systems choreographed by cephaloid corporations such as Lockheed Martin.

[Yes, cephaloid needs a little explanation. Think the big five of defence industrial corporation – Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon. In the commercial world, they are part of the defence industrial oligopoly. In the biological marine world, they would be exemplary cephalopods – highly intelligent creatures in which there is no distinction between the head and the tentacles, which facilitate mobility, the gathering of sensory information, and fastening upon and devouring its prey. The metaphor is not misplaced.]

Back in 1983, Franklin Spinney, a veteran analyst in the Pentagon’s Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, concluded that the US defence complex is not so much an organisation as a “living, insatiable, creature, dedicated only to its own defence and power”. He also described it as, “a living organic system” embedded in US society.

As to the 2023 report from the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies revealed recently, the average taxpayer spends $USD1,087 per year on weapons contractors.

Then consider the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a typical product that conforms to the general rule of being produced late, over budget and under-performing: the contracts and sub-contracts for it are spread across 307 congressional districts in 45 states — thus attracting the loyalty of 307 plus 90 senators — a considerable insurance policy in the light of the historical and currently troubled status of the F-35.

Overall, as reported in Andrew Cockburn’s The Spoils of War, defence spending accounts for 53 cents of every dollar appropriated by the US Congress. And the money flows regardless of corporate corruption, ridiculous mischarging ($USD435 for a hammer; $USD645 for an aircraft toilet seat, and $USD10,000 for a toilet seat cover, subsequently reduced to $USD300).

The greatest threat to all of this is a “threat blank” – the absence of the need to indulge the Pentagon’s technophilia and dreams of perpetual strategic dominance. Should it persist, the good life enjoyed by the national security establishment in the US would be under threat. Enemies — whether real, imagined, or in fevered dreams — are imperative.

As another insider, the director of the Strategic Forces Division in the Pentagon’s Office of Systems Analysis, noted of the world of strategic analysis required to sustain the national commitment this regime of indulgence, it too often reduced to “programming weapons that don’t work to meet threats that don’t exist”.

What the student, professional staff and faculty activists at UniMelb have discovered, therefore, is that they are working within (to use a military term) a “target rich environment”. There could be no bigger target for them than Lockheed Martin.

In 2020, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts, more than the entire budget of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined. In sum, it is accustomed to having its own way and getting what it wants.

A few statistics explain this success in the context of what Ben Freeman and William Hartung term the Arsenal of Influence. Consider the immense influence-buying effort funded by just the US arms industry which:

donated more than $83 million to political candidates in the past two election cycles (Lockheed Martin’s contribution was $USD9.1 million). The 58 members of the House Armed Services Committee reported receiving an average of $79,588 from the defence sector during the 2022 election cycle.

Across the broader spectrum of the 2024 version of the Military-Industrial Complex, lobbying expenditures supporting 820 lobbyists totalled more than $USD247 million in the last two election cycles.

For now, and the discernible long-term future, what Lockheed Martin, et al, want from UniMelb is little different from what they want from other universities and are getting: low-cost, highly qualified labour (which might, or might not retain an appropriate level of intellectual property rights) from mendicant organisations that will be excessively grateful. Lockheed Martin will determine the uses of the output. The Australian Government, throughout, will hail it all as a another bind in the alliance, and a savings benefit in the education budget.

This points to the tragedy of the severance and divestment campaign waged by the UniMelb activists. Their reasons are honourable and idealistic (and this in no way is a criticism of them). They have been articulated eloquently, courageously and logically. But eloquence, courage, and logic do not always carry the day, especially when countervailed by extraordinary corporate largesse.

Rather, they met dissembling and implacable opposition by university management: the Australian university system of which UniMelb is a major constituent has, for the foreseeable future, passed the point of no return in relations with the national security establishment.

It has been a relatively silent takeover, but it has been under way for some time and noted. Hence my suggestion is that this current piece is best supplemented by articles in P&I which have highlighted the consequences, especially their intensification under the universities’ wholesale embrace of AUKUS.

And to these should be added the government’s investment of $AUD128.5 million to support 4,001 university places for STEM students as just one part of the overall priority being accorded the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine enterprise. It is but another transformational initiative the consequences of which will be borne for generations.

At the heart of this tragedy are a series of irreconcilable demands: the government’s demands are political and economic, as are Lockheed Martin’s et al. The university’s management welcomes it all as a corporate success, ignoring all the while that it still, on occasions (graduation ceremonies!) declares itself to be adhering to the values and traditions of a bygone age it, to all intents and purposes, despises.

Is there a way through?

Yes!

The extended logic of the government’s claim that it must provide for the defence of Australia does not lead inexorably to facilitating the colonising / losing the universities. The required resources and expertise could be located elsewhere — should be located elsewhere — for the good of all, so that the role and functions of a traditional, albeit flawed university education might be undertaken.

A fantasy?

For now, yes.

And for now as well, we live in the trench of defeat. Like all great institutional excesses, the contemporary neo-liberal university has created its own demise, and finally, many epitaphs. Mine, this time, is taken from lines borrowed selectively from Nizar Qabbani’s 1967 banned poem, Footnotes to the Book of the Setback. I have quoted them before in other contexts, but they keep reappearing because they speak to decline and demise and the refusal to act instead of gawking:

Friends,
Our ancient word is dead.
The ancient books are dead.
Our speech with holes like worn-out shoes is dead.
Dead is the mind that led to defeat . . . . .
Our shouting is louder than actions,
Our swords are taller than us,
This is our tragedy.

 

*Used here in a secular sense to indicate that they are now, in the lands of the infidels – those unfaithful to the roles, functions, and values of the traditional university.

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