Sperry UNIVAC
His Majesty Trump continues to rebuild his palace, and the scandal surrounding the complete demolition of the White House East Wing and the construction of a ballroom in its place—with dimensions befitting a tsar’s ego—continues to flare up. The issue is not only that an architectural monument in a protected zone of Washington has been destroyed and some monstrosity will be built in its place, but also that the budget, initially planned at $200 million, has grown threefold to nearly $600 million, as happens with any good developer (and Trump is certainly a good one). For many people, these sound like insane figures, but I was unexpectedly drawn to another piece of news. The unlucky Boeing company (where engineers who talk about the mess in aircraft assembly have a habit of mysteriously dying, and the aircraft themselves have a habit of falling apart) has suddenly made the breakthrough of the century and rolled out an unparalleled refueling drone (yes, really!) the MQ-25A. It is small and carries about 7 tons over 900 km.
What is the point of it, since there are the ancient, monstrous tankers like the Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker (from as far back as 1957) and the McDonnell Douglas KC-10 Extender (1981)? The point is that they cannot operate from aircraft carriers—they are too huge—and deck aviation sometimes needs to refuel. As a result, for many years, the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet—a quite versatile machine—has been used for this purpose. Specifically, it can carry external tanks and a refueling system instead of weapons, and refuel F/A-18s in strike configurations during flight. In short, the new drone is intended to relieve the unfortunate fighters of this grunt work, and so the delighted USMC and US Navy bought 76 units immediately, without bargaining or even looking! So, what is the connection to the previous news? The fact that the cost of one such refueler is… roughly 3-4 times more expensive than an F/A-18 (depending on the version and configuration) and amounts to $200 million.
With the cost of this contract, one could not only rebuild the East Wing, but tear down half of Washington and rebuild it as Trump Towers. Meanwhile, the reconstruction of the White House has already entered the annals of corruption scandals, and there are attempts to stop it partly because of reasonable suspicions of embezzlement and kickbacks. In other words, either the tsar-developer was too modest and took too small a kickback, or Boeing has completely lost its bearings and charged some unreal prices. Think about it: a flying jerrycan for 7 tons costs more than the legendary F-22—the first and only true 5th-generation aircraft in the world, whose overpricing sparked many debates in its time—as much as the long-suffering F-35, the most embezzled project in the history of weaponry, and for the price of five such drones, one could buy a B-2 stealth bomber.
To understand what is happening here, we need to look back at history. American megacorporations see ancap in their nightmares because their best and only friend throughout time has been the state. No American technological (as opposed to resource-based, like Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, or the Chicago meat kings like Armour) corporation could have been born, become a monopolist, or earned billions if not for the state. IBM was founded as TMC to sell tabulators for analyzing the government census; AT&T grew because Theodore Vail went straight to the government and offered the deal of the century: you give us a complete monopoly on telephones across the country, and we provide the telephone infrastructure—and no other way. William Seward Burroughs (grandfather of the beloved beatnik drug-addict William Seward Burroughs III) invented a perfect button calculator and founded AAC, which later became the Burroughs computer corporation, but he only began making millions when the 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913, giving states the right to collect income taxes. Taxes were calculated by hand, and errors were severely punished, so Burroughs’ calculators began selling like hotcakes. Later, Burroughs would become one of the three (along with Sperry Corporation and IBM) main US military contractors; their computers were installed in nuclear missiles and submarines, and their mainframes were purchased by the Federal Reserve.
The flowering of Detroit automotive baroque coincided strikingly with the start of the construction of the US federal interstate highway system; without the first SAGE air defense system, there would be no modern air traffic control or even online ticket booking; ARPANET was created in the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency at the taxpayers’ expense and developed for a long time on Uncle Sam’s money; in fact, even the transistor and the entire Silicon Valley are products of state (and exclusively military) investments. Only when HP, Xerox, Motorola, Fairchild Semiconductor (which, by the way, was part of a huge holding including, for example, Fairchild Aircraft, which produced missiles and fighters for the state) and others had been sufficiently fed by the state, did the time come for all the various AMDs, Apples, and other Intels (who were also knee-deep in military projects). Even the food megacorporation General Mills earned most of its money not from children’s cereal, but from smokeless powder components, army rations, and even nuclear bombs and guidance systems.
The father of supercomputers, Seymour Cray, worked for the state his entire life. All his companies—CDC, Cray Research, and CCC—produced exclusively military equipment: machines for the CIA, NSA, and federal nuclear laboratories (and also for the state weather service). There is nothing to say about corporations like Lockheed, Northrop Corporation, and Boeing—they were, are, and will be primarily military state companies, earning most of their money from defense contracts. It is not for nothing that when the Cold War ended, American industrialists nearly committed suicide in despair, as the Niagara Falls of megabucks from the Pentagon literally dried up to a thin stream in a couple of years. At that moment, almost all companies of the golden age went bankrupt: everyone from Cray to McDonnell was forced to merge, consolidate, and absorb one another just to survive. Of the entire US aviation industry, only two companies survived: Lockheed and Boeing (and Northrop turned into a single-purpose state company: for 30 years they have built, maintained, and modernized a single aircraft—the B-2 bomber, and recently created its new version, the B-21, which is what they live on). In general, even Google and Elon Musk are knee-deep in military contracts (Tesla itself was deeply unprofitable even with incredible state subsidies).
This is precisely what explains the monstrously inflated, unreal budgets (which, in today’s money, are more expensive than the Manhattan Project and the flight to the Moon) that Lockheed and Boeing spent on developing their most scandalous projects. The life cycle of the F-35 until the end of its operation (i.e., the 2050s) is estimated at a couple of trillion—a fine way for a corporation to live off the backs of taxpayers. At the same time, Lockheed is involved in another no less scandalous embezzlement—the “naval F-35” project—the so-called Littoral Combat Ships, Freedom-class LCS (yes, they build ships too), which turned out to be almost even more expensive. Ironically, since the end of the Cold War, Pentagon budgets have been attempted to be cut at every Congressional session, yet for some reason, during the relatively meager 1990s–2000s for megacorporations, they still managed to suck about 5–6 trillion bucks in total from the state. Who else can pay so much, without bargaining, for such useless nonsense?
So, as we see, Boeing is moving well within the tradition: now the Pentagon will have a flying jerrycan that costs more than the most advanced fighter on the planet. It would seem that beating the embezzlement record set by Lockheed was impossible, but the old school has once again shown a masterclass. Once, a philosopher expressed a paradoxical thought: Marxism is the philosophy of the privileged classes; to the workers and peasants, it is abhorrent. Similarly, one could propose a no less paradoxical postulate: libertarianism is the philosophy of the poor and underprivileged; to the capitalists, it is abhorrent.
