CACI: CACI, founded in the early 1960s as California Analysis Center Inc., is almost entirely a Beltway Bandit—some 94 percent of its revenue is derived from contracts with the U.S. government. About two-thirds of that revenue comes from the Pentagon, but CACI also enjoys the patronage of the Departments of Homeland Security, State, Commerce, Justice and Transportation. At the end of its last fiscal year, CACI had a contract backlog worth some $6.4 billion... One of those acquisitions made CACI somewhat less cocky. When reports of inmate torture and abuse at the U.S-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq came to light in 2004, there were charges that civilian interrogators employed by a recently acquired CACI subsidiary were involved. CACI managed to avoid prosecution by the federal government, but it is facing civil litigation brought in U.S. courts on behalf of the Iraqi victims... CACI found itself being investigated by the General Services Administration and facing the possibility of being barred from doing business with the federal government. With the help of some high-powered Washington lobbyists, CACI warded off that threat. For good measure, the company announced that its own investigation of the matter found no “credible or tangible evidence” that its employees were involved in abuses at Abu Ghraib. A Pentagon report released in August 2004 concluded that six civilian employees of CACI and Titan (now part of L-3 Communications) had either participated in the abuse or failed to report it. Led by Maj. Gen. George Fay, the generals who wrote the report recommended that the six be prosecuted by the Justice Department, but no charges were ever filed.

IAP: IAP was founded by a former Army logistics officer and has filled its executive ranks with numerous high-ranking military officers passing through the revolving door into the private sector. It has also benefited from the political connections of its majority owner, the Cerberus hedge fund, which is now chaired by former U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow. Former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle sits on IAP’s board as a representative of Cerberus, where he heads the firm’s international business. IAP has been associated with scandals such as the mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina relief work and the deterioration of conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC.

United Technologies: Like other major U.S. military contractors, United Technologies has at times been accused of cheating the federal government. In 1992 the company pleaded guilty to four felony charges and agreed to pay $6 million in penalties in connection with an admitted conspiracy by Pratt & Whitney to defraud the Pentagon by using insider information when bidding on contracts. In 1994 UTC was forced to pay $150 million to settle claims that Sikorsky had submitted inflated bills in connection with its production of helicopters for the Pentagon. The amount was then the largest amount ever in a federal whistleblower suit. In 1997 Pratt & Whitney agreed to pay $14.8 million to settle charges that it took part in a scheme to divert $10 million in U.S. military aid to a slush fund under the control of an officer of the Israeli Air Force. In 2005 the Presbyterian Church USA called on UTC to stop providing military equipment and technology to Israel for use in the occupation of the Palestinian territories. For the past decade, other religious groups have been filing shareholder resolutions at each of the company’s annual meetings raising questions about UTC’s foreign military sales. In 2006 Norway’s government pension fund announced that UTC was one of the companies it was banning from its investment portfolio because of its assumed involvement in nuclear weapons.

L3: The company receives 74 percent of its revenues from Pentagon and another 6 percent from other parts of federal government, including intelligence agencies. The rest comes from foreign governments (7 percent) and commercial customers (13 percent)... In 2004, prior to L-3’s purchase of Titan, an Army investigation of the Abu Ghraib abuses—first reported by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker the year before—cited employees of Titan (as well as another contractor, CACI, which provided interrogators ) as being involved in the interrogations. The Justice Department did not prosecute the company or the employees, but civil lawsuits were brought against Titan and CACI. In November 2007, a federal judge dismissed the case against L-3 and Titan, but allowed it to proceed against CACI. In 2008 several new lawsuits were filed in U.S. federal courts against L-3 and CACI by Iraqi civilians with the assistance of the Center on Constitutional Rights.

General Dynamics: Given its overwhelming dependence on military contracts, the company was hard hit by the decline in U.S. military spending after the end of the Cold War. It sold off many of its operations and considered disposing of the rest and shutting itself down. But the comeback of military spending via the Gulf War encouraged General Dynamics to hang on. Before long, it was buying new assets, focusing its military operations on shipbuilding (in part through the purchase of the historic Bath Iron Works) and armored vehicles such as the Strykers widely used in the war in Iraq. It also increased its commercial work through the purchase of corporate jet maker Gulfstream Aerospace. At the end of 2007, General Dynamics had a total contract backlog worth $47 billion... In 1990 the U.S. Justice Department sued General Dynamics, charging that the company defrauded the Army on contracts for M-1 tanks. The company paid $8 million to settle the case... In April 2008 a Congressional committee blamed poor management by the Defense Department and General Dynamics for billions of dollars in cost overruns and delays in a Marine Corps tank program.

Raytheon: ...now focuses virtually all its attention on serving military customers. Thanks to a series of acquisitions in the 1990s and a steady stream of new contracts, it is now one of the largest Pentagon contractors. At the end of 2007 it had a $30 billion federal contract backlog... One of the biggest controversies concerning Raytheon has been its production of the Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW), which was used as a delivery vehicle for cluster bombs, the weapon widely condemned because of its devastating impact on civilians. In the late 1980s Raytheon was one of numerous military contractors targeted in the wide-ranging corruption probe by Henry Hudson, a U.S. Attorney in Virginia. In March 1990 the company pleaded guilty to trafficking in classified Pentagon budget documents and paid civil and criminal fines of $1 million. In 1994 Raytheon paid $4 million to settle charges that it overbilled the Pentagon for an early-warning radar system... In 1998 Raytheon paid $2.7 million settle allegations that it improperly charged the Defense Department for expenses incurred in marketing products to foreign governments. In 1999 Raytheon paid $400,000 to settle claims that it overcharged the Defense Department on an aircraft maintenance contract. In 2002 Raytheon was one of three companies that settled charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for violating a new rule prohibiting the release of financial information to large investors or security analysts without making the same information available to the public. In 2003 Raytheon agreed to pay $3.9 million to settle charges that its aircraft division overbilled the Defense Department when invoicing the cost of liability insurance. At the same time, the company disclosed that the SEC was investigating fraudulent accounting practices at the aircraft unit. More than three years later, the company finally settled the matter by agreeing to pay a penalty of $12 million. Also in 2003, Raytheon agreed to pay a $25 million civil penalty to resolve State Department charges that the company violated export controls by selling military communications equipment to Pakistan through its Canadian subsidiary. In a rare rebuke by a company to its chief executive, Raytheon announced in 2006 that it was denying William Swanson an annual raise and reducing his stock award. The move, which reportedly cost the CEO about $1 million, came after it was discovered that Swanson had apparently engaged in plagiarism in the preparation of his book Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management... In his book The Great American Jobs Scam, Greg LeRoy? describes how in the mid-1990s Raytheon threatened to move its extensive operations out of Massachusetts unless the state provided substantial tax breaks. The state caved in, and Raytheon ended up saving about $21 million a year. During this time, Raytheon did not neglect its military businesses, which consisted mainly of radar systems, communications equipment and missiles, including its Patriot missile, which would be celebrated during the Persian Gulf War of 1991, though later evaluations were a lot less positive. When the end of the Cold War put pressure on military contractors to consolidate, Raytheon took steps to ensure it would be a survivor. In 1995 it acquired the secretive company E-Systems, giving it an important foothold in military intelligence communications. The following year it purchased two defense businesses from Chrysler, and the year after that it bought the military operations of Texas Instruments. But its biggest move was the 1997 purchase of the military business of Hughes Electronics from General Motors for more than $9 billion. All this propelled Raytheon to the top tier of military electronics suppliers. It also brought some antitrust concern, but the Justice Department and the Pentagon supported the consolidation.

Northrop Grumman: Northrop Grumman, the third largest U.S. military contractor behind Lockheed Martin and Boeing, is best known as the producer of the hugely expensive B-2 Stealth bomber, fighter jets such as the F-14 Tomcat featured in the Tom Cruise movie Top Gun, and nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers. In 2008 it scored a coup when it was chosen—along with its European partner EADS—to supply the U.S. Air Force with aerial refueling tankers worth some $35 billion. Rival bidder Boeing successfully challenged the huge award, and the competition is being run all over again. Northrop was nearly gobbled up by Lockheed Martin during defense-sector consolidation in the 1990s, but antitrust issues undermined the deal. Northrop went on to carry out some major acquisitions itself, including the Litton and TRW conglomerates and Newport News Shipbuilding. Northrop has been involved in a series of false claims cases that the company has had to spend tens of millions of dollars to settle... The first major scandals in Northrop Grumman’s history came in the early 1970s, when the company, then known as Northrop Corp., was embroiled in controversies over illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign by company chairman Thomas Jones as well as some $30 million in bribes paid to foreign governments to win orders for fighter jets. A few years later, there were revelations that the company regularly entertained Pentagon officials and members of Congress at a hunting lodge on the eastern shore of Maryland. During the 1980s, Northrop was the subject of numerous investigations relating to alleged mismanagement during its work on the MX Missile and the B-2 Stealth bomber. In 1989, Northrop was indicted on criminal charges of falsifying test results on cruise missiles for the Air Force and Harrier jets for the Marine Corps. Just as the trial in the case was about to begin in 1990, the company agreed to plead guilty to 34 fraud charges and pay a fine of $17 million. Under the plea agreement, federal prosecutors agreed to end the investigations relating to the MX and the B-2. However, the company agreed in 1992 to pay $4.2 million to settle a whistleblower lawsuit—*brought without the involvement of the Justice Department*—alleging that the company padded its invoices on MX missile guidance system work. In 2000 Northrop Grumman paid $1.4 million to settle a whistleblower case alleging that the company overcharged the Air Force for B-2 bomber instruction and repair manuals. In a case inherited through the acquisition of TRW, Northrop Grumman agreed in 2003 to pay $111 million to settle claims that TRW overcharged the Pentagon for work on several space electronics programs in the early 1990s. Also in 2003, Northrop Grumman agreed to pay a total of $80 million to settle two False Claims Act cases, one involving work by Newport News Shipbuilding before Northrop acquired it in 2001 and the other involving the delivery of allegedly defective aerial target drones. In 2004, Northrop settled for $1.8 million the remaining individual whistleblower case from the late 1980s involving cruise missiles. The following year it paid $62 million to settle the remaining claims relating to overcharging on the B-2 bomber program. The false claims allegations continue. In March 2008 a whistleblower brought a lawsuit charging that Northrop Grumman’s Melbourne division with hundreds of millions of dollars of overcharges relating to the Joint STARS radar aircraft program. Not all of Northrop’s performance problems have been related to overcharging. Soon after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the company’s Vinnell Corp. subsidiary (acquired as part of the purchase of TRW in 2002) was awarded a $48 million contract “to train the nucleus of a new Iraqi army.” It botched the job so badly that the Jordanian Army had to be brought in to take over.

Blackwater: Blackwater USA is a private military company and security firm founded in 1997 by Erik Prince and Al Clark. It is based in the U.S. state of North Carolina, where it operates a tactical training facility that it claims is the world's largest. The company trains more than 40,000 people a year, from all the military services and a variety of other agencies. The company markets itself as being "The most comprehensive professional military, law enforcement, security, peacekeeping, and stability operations company in the world". At least 90% of its revenue comes from government contracts, two-thirds of which are no-bid contracts... Cofer Black, the company's current vice chairman, was the Bush administration's top counter terrorism official when 9/11 occurred... Blackwater has become home to a significant number of former senior CIA and Pentagon officials. Robert Richer became the firm's Vice President of Intelligence immediately after he resigned his position as Associate Deputy Director of Operations in fall 2005. He is formerly the head of the CIA's Near East Division... In 2003, Blackwater landed its first truly high-profile contract: guarding civilian Administrator L. Paul Bremer in Iraq, at the cost of $21 million for 11 months. Since June 2004, Blackwater has been paid more than $320 million out of a $1 billion, five-year State Department budget for the Worldwide Personal Protective Service, which protects U.S. officials and some foreign officials in conflict zones. In 2006, Blackwater won the remunerative contract to protect the U.S. embassy in Iraq, which is the largest American embassy in the world... On March 31, 2004, Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah attacked a convoy containing four American private military contractors from Blackwater USA who were conducting delivery for food caterers ESS. The four armed contractors Scott Helvenston, Jerko Zovko, Wesley Batalona and Michael Teague, were attacked and killed with grenades and small arms fire. Their bodies were hung over a bridge crossing the Euphrates. In the fall of 2007, a congressional report found that Blackwater intentionally "delayed and impeded" investigations into the contractors' deaths... According to the State Department, on December 24, 2006, a Blackwater employee shot and killed a security guard working for the Iraqi vice-president. In late May 2007, Blackwater contractors, "opened fire on the streets of Baghdad twice in two days... and one of the incidents provoked a standoff between the security contractors and Iraqi Interior Ministry commandos, U.S. and Iraqi officials said." And on May 30, 2007, Blackwater employees shot an Iraqi civilian deemed to have been "driving too close" to a State Department convoy being escorted by Blackwater contractors... After a group of Iraqi ministers backed the Iraqi Interior Ministry's decision to shut down Blackwater USA's operations in Iraq, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called on the U.S. government to end its contract with Blackwater USA as well... On September 24, the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior announced it would file criminal charges against the Blackwater staff involved in the shooting, although it is unclear how some of them will be brought to trial.