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Alliant Techsystems
CEO: Dan Murphy
Total 2006 Sales: $3.1 billion
Campaign Contributions 2002-2006: $175,360
Headquarters: Edina, MN
Website: http://www.atk.com/
Overview
BULLETS: A “CONSUMABLE”
PRODUCT
The “Long War” needs lots of bullets. With the
U.S. fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and training new
soldiers every day, Alliant’s bullets and munitions--
manufactured in Independence, Missouri and other sites throughout
the country—are literally flying off the shelves. The
company has more than quadrupled its capacity to manufacture
small arms ammunition since 2000, and is now planning to increase
capacity to be able to produce 1.5 billion bullets a year.
Industry watchers say that demand for ammunition is the highest
since the Vietnam War. As Dan Murphy, Alliant’s CEO
said recently, “the consumable nature of our core product
and our future oriented portfolios of advanced weapons and
space systems align ATK closely with future funding priorities.”
Plainly said, war and preparation for war are the foundation
of our profit and the future looks bright for the country’s
biggest bullet maker.
The company, based in Edina, Minnesota, is the U.S. military’s
largest supplier of munitions-- from bullets in guns to heavy
artillery and cluster munitions shot from tanks-- and works
on many Pentagon contracts, including composite materials
for space warfare systems and rocket motors for most missiles--
most notably the Trident
II missile and the Minuteman
III ICBM, both of which are nuclear delivery vehicles.
The company has also moved into the lucrative Homeland Security
arena, marketing detention systems for chemical agents and
radiation to police and military alike. Finally, Alliant’s
foot is in the proverbial “future war” door, creating
prototype weapons using “directed energy” (ie.
lasers and microwaves) for both “lethal and non lethal
purposes.”
This breadth- from simple bullets to space-age plastics- has
contributed to Alliant Techsystems catapulting from the bottom
of the Pentagon’s list of top 100 contractors to the
top third. The company, which only employs 15,000 people,
is ranked 29th for 2005. For fiscal years 2002 through 2005,
the most recent years for which full data is available, Alliant
Techsystems received a cumulative total of about $3.7 billion
in Pentagon contracts.
YEAR
DOD CONTRACTS
(millions)
2002
$674 million
2003
$813 million
2004
$1.02 billion
2005
$1.27 billion
The company has a checkered past that it would rather ignore.
Vietnam War era protests made its predecessor Honeywell
synonymous with landmines,
cluster
bombs and indiscriminate killing in Southeast Asia. Honeywell
unloaded its munitions operations in 1991 and renamed it Alliant.
But, as we will see later, the protests continue. Alliant’s
$3.1 billion a year business operates in 23 states and has
international sales office in 33 countries, including Israel,
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Malaysia, Chile, Pakistan, India, Greece
and Turkey. More than two-thirds of the company’s business
comes from the Defense Department and related military and
Homeland Security agencies, with $1.27 billion in Pentagon
contracts in 2005.
Alliant Techsystems is responsible for some of the deadliest
and most problematic weapons systems in the United States
(and global) arsenals.
Cluster Bombs
According to a 1997
Human Rights Watch report, Alliant Techsystems was the
primary contractor on two antipersonnel mine contracts—the
Volcano
and the Gator
mine systems. The “Vehicle Launched Scatterable Antitank
System (VLSAS)” or Volcano has launcher tubes that can
fire 800 antitank mines and 160 antipersonnel explosives in
just 43 seconds when mounted on a tank or truck. When mounted
in a Blackhawk helicopter, Volcano can do the job in 17 seconds.
Launched from either platform, the mines cover an area about
11 football fields long and about one field wide.
In response to letters from Human Rights Watch, then-CEO Richard
Schwartz said the company reconfigured the Volcano landmine
system to an antitank capacity, updating it from the mix of
antitank and antipersonnel mines, at the request of the Pentagon.
Alliant’s Volcano system is still being manufactured
and marketed, with emphasis on its “completely reliable
self-destructing antitank munitions.”
The Gator system is dispensed by jet aircraft. An F-16 fighter
plane or similar craft can spread 600 mines in seconds-- deploying
72 antitank mines and 22 antipersonnel weapons from each of
its cluster bomb-like containers. Production of the Gator
system was completed in late 1996.
Depleted Uranium Shells
Alliant manufactured over 16 million medium and large caliber
depleted
uranium munitions. The suburban Minneapolis site where
Alliant made DU munitions is now a “superfund site”
and the local community is fighting the company and the Pentagon
over clean-up responsibilities.
In Iraq, U.S. troops fire DU weaponry from the Abrams battle
tank, A-10 Warthog and other systems. A toxic and radioactive
substance, DU-- otherwise known as Uranium 238-- is a byproduct
of enriched uranium, the fissile material in nuclear weapons.
It is pyrophoric and burns spontaneously on impact. That,
along with its extreme density, makes DU munitions the Pentagon’s
ideal choice for penetrating enemy tank armor or reinforced
bunkers.
When a DU shell hits its target, it burns, losing anywhere
from 40 percent to 70 percent of its mass and dispersing a
fine toxic radioactive dust that can be carried long distances
by winds or absorbed into the soil and groundwater. According
to a military spokesman, in the first year of the war in Iraq,
the U.S. Army and Air Force fired 127 tons of DU munitions.
Soldiers and civilians in the war zones and those who live
near testing ranges like the one in Socorro, New Mexico where
open air testing of DU was conducted for more than 20 years,
have suffered the short and long term health effects of ingesting
radioactive dust, such as kidney problems, birth defects,
cancers and death.
Nuclear Weapons
In partnership with Lockheed Martin,
the company is developing a submarine-launched, intermediate-range
ballistic missile (SLIRBM)
— a “supersonic, GPS-guided, long-range strike
missile.”
Alliant Tech makes the propulsion system for the Trident II
(D5) submarine-launched ballistic missile, a multiple warhead,
nuclear armed missile. The D5 is one of the few major long-range
nuclear delivery vehicles still being produced for U.S. forces.
The missiles are designed to be launched from Trident ballistic
missile firing tubes aboard four U.S Navy Ohio-class submarines
that are being converted to guided-missile submarines.
As part of the START
II agreement, older C4 missiles are being dismantled and
replaced by fewer but faster D5 missiles. This represents
a huge windfall for Alliant Tech and lead contractor Lockheed
Martin, but is completely unnecessary. According to Rep.
Bill Luther (D-MN), the D5 is a “cold war weapon specifically
designed to destroy hardened missile silos and other military
targets found in the former Soviet Union.” The
Congressional Budget Office estimates that ending procurement
of the D5 missile would save taxpayers $262 million the first
year, and as much as $2.6 billion over the next seven years.
AlliantAction
Bullets for war, propulsion for nuclear weapons, depleted
uranium, cluster bombs… none of Alliant’s crimes
go unchallenged. For the last nine years, the Twin Cities
peace and justice communities have vigiled at Alliant Techsystems,
drawing attention to what happens behind corporate facades
and inside guarded complexes, and channeling outrage at the
war and war profiteering into resistance and campaigning.
According to a January article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune,
the company has arrested 176 people for trespassing at protests
in the last nine years. In jury trials in 2003 and 2004, activists
effectively put the war in Iraq, President Bush’s policies
and Alliant’s war profiteering on trial, winning acquittals.
According to Alliant campaigner Steve Clemens, currently serving
six months in jail for an action at the School of the Americas,
the company and Edina officials were embarrassed. “The
city, Alliant Techsystems, and the city attorneys got together
to devise a different strategy to prosecute nonviolent activist…
rewrite[ing] the local law to include a new trespass ordinance
which would deny protestors the right to put their case before
a jury of their peers… The City of Edina was
in such a hurry to protect this corporate malefactor (ATK)
that members of the City Council adopted the new ordinance
without even having the courtesy to allow for community input
by scheduling a second reading of the proposed ordinance.”
In October, hosted by AlliantAction,
groups and individuals from around the country will gather
in the Twin Cities to network, strategize and share stories
in the work against war profiteers.
This research and report
was compiled by Frida Berrigan of the Arms
Trade Resource Center of the World
Policy Institute in January 2007 for the War
Resisters League's WIN
Magazine.
Aerospace Contributions
This information is also available as
a printable, PDF
fact sheet.
Programs &
Products:
ATK’s background in both weapon systems and space systems
has made it a successful subcontractor in the missile defense
and space weapons industry. It helps that an ATK board member,
Admiral David E. Jeremiah, US Navy (ret.), was part of Rumsfeld’s
commission on national security uses of space. This commission
produced a document arguing
the US should avoid international agreements that limit the
deployment of weapons in space, and that the US needs to “develop
the capability for power projection in, from, and through space.”
ATK took advantage of this official position to propel itself
into the space weapons market. Its Scramjet propulsion technology,
already used by NASA, is now used in Department of Defense projects
such as the Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle.
This aircraft is a reusable unmanned vehicle that can travel
at hypersonic speeds. It is an integral part of the Force
Application and Launch from Continental United States (FALCON)
program’s goal
“to provide Prompt Global Strike capability to any location
in the world in under two hours.”
ATK also provides rocket motors for space launch vehicles, stategic
missiles, global strike missiles, satellites, and missile defense
interceptors. In 2006, ATK received
a $90 million contract to provide rocket motors to the Ground-based
Missile Defense program. ATK was also selected to
support a study of the Kinetic
Energy Interceptor project for the US Missile Defense Agency.
Kinetic Energy Interceptors are to be used in the US Ballistic
Missile Defense System to take out enemy missiles en route.
They also have potential
applications as anti-satellite weapons. The
US Navy gave Lockheed Martin and ATK $9.2
million to develop a rocket launcher suitable for the Submarine-Launched
Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile System. Lockheed Martin
and ATK demonstrated
their launcher for the US Navy in January 2007.
ATK’s website proclaims, “ATK’s rocket motors
represent a national asset, offering an affordable and sustainable
way to implement America’s new space exploration initiative.”
Affordable? The Department of Defense requested more
than a billion dollars from the US budget for fiscal year
2008 to fund space weapon and missile defense projects.
Not to mention the sad irony that ATK’s rocket motors
are used to launch missiles and other weapons that will inevitably
destroy space infrastructure and cluter space with debris, preventing
the exploration of space.
This research and report was
compiled by Ray Acheson of Reaching
Critical Will in February
2007 in coordination with the Secure
World Foundation.
See also:
Minnesota
Alliant Action
For More Profiles:
See Alliant Techsystem's
original
Dirty Dozen profile.
BAE Systems
Bechtel Corporation
Boeing
British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL)
General Dynamics
IBM
Lockheed Martin
Mitsubishi
Northrop Grumman
Raytheon
Siemens
University of California
Dirty Dozen Annex
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