By John LaForge
Giant military contractors might be just too big when their own weapons so overcrowd a war zone that their own missiles shoot down their own fighter jets.
This could be what happened in Ukraine in August, when a Lockheed Martin F-16 jet fighter, piloted by Ukrainian Lt. Col. Oleksiy Mes, was most likely shot down by a Patriot air-defense missile. Six of Lockheed Martin’s F-16s were delivered to Ukraine in August. An undisclosed number of Patriot missile systems arrived there earlier, from a General Dynamics program which was bought by Lockheed Martin in 1993.
The deputy head of the Ukrainian parliament’s defense committee, Mariana Bezuhla, made the allegation of so-called “friendly fire” and demanded consequences for parties responsible for the blunder. According to the Associated Press, Ukraine’s Air Force has not directly denied that the F-16 was hit by a Patriot missile. Four days after the crash President Zelenskyy fired the head of Ukraine’s Air Force, Lt. Gen. Mykola Oleshchuk, who had accused Bezuhla of illegally “discrediting U.S. arms manufacturers.” The gall!
Lockheed Martin is the $137-billion global weapons giant, with 115,000 employees, that sells — to willing buyers — anywhere all manner of war machines, from jet fighters to missiles, from helicopter gun systems, to rocket motors.
One Lockheed program making a real killing today is the F-35 jet fighter, now being sold all over the world.
Of course, Lockheed’s crash- and accident-prone F-35 is notoriously faulty. The jet’s 13 major crashes or disappearances over the last ten years hint at a shaky future performance in war. Lockheed Martin currently has around 100 F-35s in stock because they are not being delivered due to various technical problems and software modifications.
Lockheed boasts that by the 2030s, over 600 of its F-35s will be operating in ten European NATO states, the better to gear-up for permanent war with Russia.
Four NATO countries that now station U.S. hydrogen bombs at their air bases — Germany, Italy, Belgium, and Holland — are purchasing F-35s by the dozens.
The F-35s are being built to carry the Pentagon’s newest nuclear weapon, the B61-12 air-drop H-bomb. On March 8, 2024, the company declared the F-35A had officially been “certified” to carry the B61-12. These new thermonuclear weapons are set to be delivered to the allied NATO bases this year or in 2025, replacing the B61s already deployed there.
So, the Russians can sleep a little less easily as the newest U.S. fighter jets, carrying the newest U.S. air-drop nuclear bombs, will be ready and purposed for incinerating their cities on orders from the U.S. president. The F-35s are the first ever stealth (radar-evading) warplane certified to carry nuclear weapons.
Beyond the Pentagon’s “nuclear sharing” NATO partners, the F-35s are being peddled to other compliant militaries including those of Greece, Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Singapore, South Korea, Israel, Australia, United Arab Emirates, Canada, and Japan.
With the Pentagon itself buying 1,855 F-35s, and nineteen other air forces in line for their share, a rough calculation is that Lockheed will sell 3,615 of the $110-million jets, pocketing at least $433 billion.
Starting last year, the U.S. deployed several of the nuclear-capable F-35s to the eastern borders of NATO, operating from Estonia, Lithuania, and Romania. The Royal Netherlands Air Force has trained to carry the U.S. B61 nuclear bombs for decades. Since the start of the Ukraine war, the Dutch have twice deployed their newly purchased F-35s in shows of force against Moscow, first to Poland which borders Russia, and later to Bulgaria.
In 2024, Lockheed Martin spent $6,434,005 on lobbying Congressional offices in Washington. On September 19, Lockheed sponsored the “Future of Defense Summit,” on Capitol Hill “to discuss how to build a more advanced defense industry and enhance deterrence.”
This bribery and lying in support of gargantuan military spending only leads to crimes of war or self-inflicted fatalities like Lockheed’s likely shoot-down of its own jet. Although it sells in Congress, Lockheed’s nuclear weapons systems and the means of delivering them are not for defense. They only produce billions in profits at the expense of the world’s crying need for basic necessities.
With the colossal volume of U.S.-made jets, tanks, bombs, missiles, helicopters, artillery, and intelligence programs being sold, traded, or gifted all over the world, it was inevitable that the empire’s guns would eventually be fired against itself — intentionally or by accident. If the Ukrainian F-16 crash and the death of Col. Mes is not to be repeated endlessly, and if accidental nuclear detonations are to be avoided, the United States will have to be forced to end its weaponization of international conflict, and to replace its militarized foreign policy with a diplomatic one.
Leave a Reply