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Lockheed Martin began as an aircraft manufacturing company in 1916, started by two brothers in Burbank, California. The small family business grew as it began to manufacture commercial planes. But the industry was unpredictable and success was limited — until World War II. War contracts made the business very profitable, and when fighting overseas ended Lockheed Martin waged a battle at home to become indispensable to the US government and economy. In his new book, “Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military Industrial Complex,” William Hartung chronicles the history and ever-growing sphere of Lockheed Martin’s influence. The company currently holds billions of dollars in contracts to develop and manufacture nearly anything the military might need. It has acquired companies that are involved in foreign conflicts, including peacekeeping operations and military training in Liberia, and Sudan. Lockheed Martin is the largest intelligence contractor in the world. It receives 40 of the $50 billion dollars the US pays for non-government intelligence services. It owns Sytex, a private company that has provided interrogators and translators to the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq, including at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The company has contracts with the US Census Bureau, the US Postal Service, and the IRS. It is developing projects around biometrics and integrated information systems, including involvement in maintaining the FBI’s fingerprint data for 55 million people. In addition to unveiling Lockheed’s reach, Hartung reveals the dysfunctional relationship between members of Congress, the military, and Lockheed, which allows it to grow to the near omnipresent world player that it is today.

GUEST: William D. Hartung, Director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New American Foundation, he has written for the Nation, the New York and LA Times, the Washington Post, and he is the author “Weapons for All”, and “How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy?”.