Local Press Support Their Contractors

(MoneyWatch)  This in the Montgomery Advertiser is a fairly typical article about the award of a defense contract. Northrop Grumman has won a contract to support an Army system, the Forward Area Air Defense Command & Control/Counter-Rocket and Mortar (FAAD C2 C-RAM). The contract is considered "Huntsville" property as the company's group that got the contract is located there, and the entity that awarded, US Army Aviation & Missile Command (AMCOM) is based at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. The only cost of the contract that will affect that city is the administrative support for the technicians in Iraq. Huntsville itself also did not win the contract per se. One of the issues with the defense budget over the last twenty years has been that it is considered, especially by Congressman, as a jobs program for their district. The press has supported this by analyzing the money flowing out of it as going to a city, or state. States and cities have invested in establishing organizations whose sole job is to get work from Congress on defense by lobbying and helping companies. See an old article I wrote at DefenseProcurementNews.com on the issues Michigan is having within their state entity, Michigan Defense Contract Coordination Center, and a local one set up to do the same thing. People complain about waste in the defense budget, and this is what they should be talking about.