The past several weeks have seen a considerable amount of attention to the question of whether or not the University should divest from three weapons contractors. Yet outside of the raging debate, most of the campus might know very little about the companies beyond their role in weapons production. Raytheon, the largest of the companies in question and the fifth-largest weapons contractor worldwide, has a prolific history of technological innovation, from inventing the microwave to popularizing the transistor radio.
In recent years, Raytheon, or “light of the gods,” has shifted almost entirely away from practical domestic tools and toward more high-powered military technology. Over the course of the transition, the company, which makes 90 percent of its profits from defense contracts, has run into legal trouble, including accusations and charges of spying, theft of government documents, and fraud.
According to Raytheon.com, the company was founded in Cambridge, Mass. in 1922 by Vannevar Bush who, according to ibiblio.org, was one of the founders of the modern military-industrial complex. Bush is unrelated to the family of President George W. Bush. With the support of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he created the National Defense Research Committee during World War II and thought up a primitive conception of the internet called the “memex,” a storage and retrieval device that mimicked the human mind, had a viewing screen, keyboard, and stored microfilm that could be linked together by association.
In the early years, the official Raytheon website reads, the company built its success on vacuum tubes—radio-receiver power supplies that replaced large batteries. A modified version of the vacuum tube was used for radar systems and later on, the microwave, which Raytheon employee Percy Spencer invented in 1945. In 1948, with the Cold War in its incipience, the company started producing guided missiles.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Raytheon began to purchase various aircraft and defense companies. Today, the company has six separate sectors: Defense Systems, Intelligence Systems, Missile Systems, Network Centric Systems, Technical Services, and Space Systems. The current mission statement reflects the company’s transition to military technology.
“Raytheon is a technology leader specializing in defense, homeland security and other government markets throughout the world,” the statement reads.
One of the company’s primary focuses is missile technology—it has provided the U.S. with many of its 460 AGM-129s, laser-guided nuclear warheads with a range of 3,000 miles. On the official website, the company advertises the AIM-9X, one of its many missile products.
“[The AIM-9X] has extremely high off-boresight capability which gives a pilot first-shot, first-kill dominance,” the site reads. “It provides greatly enhanced acquisition ranges in blue sky and clutter and IR countermeasures deliver the capacity to resist ever-changing threats. The AIM-9X has a highly agile airframe and its fifth-generation seeker and thrust vectoring control provide unprecedented performance.”
Beyond missiles, Raytheon has also focused much of its recent energy on space arms technology, military communications, and semiconductors.
During the shift into its modern role, however, the company has run into a string of legal predicaments. In March 1990, U.S. District Judge Albert Bryan Jr. fined the company for stealing confidential government documents.
“Raytheon pleaded guilty in a U.S. District Court in Virginia to one felony count of illegally obtaining secret Air Force budget and planning documents,” reported the International Monitor, an institute that identifies human rights violations and war crimes. “U.S. Attorney Henry Hudson said Raytheon also illegally obtained a wide range of secret Pentagon documents from 1978 to 1985.”
During the Gulf War, the company also ran into trouble with Congress for flaws in the highly touted Patriot Missile System. According to the Space Policy Project run by the Federation of American Scientists (fas.org), Patriot Missiles were reported to have shot down 80 percent of Scud missiles entering Saudi Arabia and 50 percent entering Israel during the war. However, these claims, which had been endorsed by President George H.W. Bush, were found to be vastly overblown.
“A 10 month investigation by the House Government Operations [S]ubcommittee on Legislation and National Security concluded that there was little evidence to prove that the Patriot hit more than a few Scuds,” reads the government document. “On April 7, 1992, reports written by [P]rofessor Postol raised serious doubts about the Patriot’s performance.”
Ultimately, a House subcommittee found that the George H.W. Bush administration and Raytheon had given false information about the effectiveness of the Patriot missiles.
“The public and the Congress were misled by definitive statements of success issued by administration and Raytheon representatives during and after the war,” the subcommittee reported.
In March 1999, according to the Boston Globe, Raytheon settled out of court with the AGES Group, a significantly smaller company that was vying for the same $450 million military aircraft contract as Raytheon. Apparently, Raytheon had been spying on the small company.
“On March 30, days before a lawsuit was to go to trial, Raytheon agreed to pay $16 million to AGES Group, of Boca Raton, Fla., to settle allegations that it had engaged in at least three days of industrial spying that included video and audio surveillance and thefts of documents,” reported Gregg Krupa of the Boston Globe. “Raytheon also agreed to make an undisclosed amount of future purchases from AGES, which sells aircraft engines and parts and services them.”
In March 2006, according to The New York Times, former Raytheon CEO Daniel Burnham paid fines to settle a dispute with the SEC over bad accounting practices.
“The alleged accounting irregularities took place in Raytheon’s commercial aircraft division from 1997 to 2001 and concerned the timing of losses recorded by the company,” reported the Times’ Leslie Wayne. “The SEC said that the company had overstated its 2001 losses and that its aircraft subsidiary should have charged as much as $240 million of a $693 million loss in 2000 instead.”
In May of 2006, according to the Times’ Wayne, William Swanson, Raytheon’s current CEO, was docked $1 million pay for plagiarizing UCLA professor W.J. King’s book, “The Unwritten Laws of Engineering.” Swanson’s new book, critically acclaimed by philanthropist Warren J. Buffett, was called “Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management.” Also, many of the rules in Swanson’s book had been taken from former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld 2001 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Rumsfeld’s Rules.”
In the 2006 elections, according to opensecrets.org, Raytheon donated $1.1 million—57 percent to Republicans and 43 percent to Democrats.