Lockheed Martin: Information Systems And Global Services

ORGANIZATION. Lockheed Martin employs more than 140,000 people and is divided into three operating units: aeronautics, including tactical aircraft and R&D; space systems, including commercial and military satellites; and systems and IT, which includes C4I – the military acronym for intelligence and reconnaissance, and IT. Intelligence is a key part of all three divisions, but most of the company’s contracts are held by the IT division, Information Systems & Global Services, or IS&GS. "Some of our work, you will never hear about," the company website says. "Our classified work has supported the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) as they dealt with the most high-visibility situations in recent US history and many others you never saw on the news."

NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY. Lockheed Martin has extremely close and long-standing ties with the NSA. In the mid-1950s it built the U-2 spy plane that played a key role in the Cold War and conducted some of the NSA’s initial research in signals collection. “The U-2 has been the backbone of our nation’s airborne intelligence collection operations for several decades and continues to provide unmatched operational capabilities in support of Operation Enduring Freedom,” Lockheed Martin states in its 2008 annual report. The U-2 “is expected to continue to provide leading-edge intelligence collection capabilities for years to come.”

The company’s extensive contracts with the NSA first became public in 1997. That year, Margaret Newsham, a contract engineer working for Lockheed Space and Missile Corporation at an NSA listening post in the United Kingdom, disclosed to Congress the existence of Echelon. This global surveillance network is run by the NSA and its counterparts in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. She made the disclosure after hearing NSA intercepts of international calls placed by Sen. Strom Thurmond, the conservative South Carolina Republican. Her revelations sparked a spate of Congressional inquiries into whether the NSA was illegally listening in on domestic conversations. The discussions, led by a Republican civil libertarian, Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, presaged the intense debate that would follow the 2005 revelations about President Bush’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program.” In July 1998 a report commissioned by the European Parliament confirmed that, through Echelon, the United States, and its closest allies had the capability to intercept most European phone calls, emails, and data communications, as well as the technology to decode almost any encrypted communication. This revelation sparked deep suspicion in European capitals that NSA was using Echelon to capture European business intelligence and trade secrets and pass them to U.S. companies.

Under a contract signed in 2005, Lockheed Martin provides an integrated electronic security system to protect NSA facilities in the Washington area. A similar system is in place at the Pentagon and dozens of U.S. military facilities abroad.

KEY AGENCIES. Lockheed Martin is an important contractor for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). In one major project for the NGA, Lockheed Martin is developing a “ground-based infrastructure” designed to help users of the agency’s satellite and imagery data better distribute, share, and exploit the information. The contract, “Geo-Scout,” was awarded in 2003 for an unspecified amount, and is proceeding in four “blocks” that could take up to 10 years to complete. The ultimate goal, NGA officials say, is to create a system that seamlessly blends data from unclassified commercial and classified military satellites. The project, now in Block Two, is managed by Michael Thomas, a Lockheed Martin vice president in its Integrated Systems & Solutions unit. Its future, however, is uncertain: Geo-Scout is frequently cited by intelligence analysts, along with the NSA’s Trailblazer, as an overly expensive project in which government managers ceded too much power to the contractor.

At the Pentagon, Lockheed Martin was one of the contractors that provided counterintelligence analysis for the Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office (CIFA). Its jobs included tracking “logical combinations of keywords and personalities,” estimating current or future threats, creating and delivering reports, and monitoring current intelligence of specified contracts. In 2006, the company was hiring personnel for a “performance planner” who would “develop and analyze missions, program goals, [and] objectives and systems” for CIFA. At the Defense Intelligence Agency, which now manages CIFA, Lockheed Martin runs a bidding consortium that claims to have the largest cleared workforce in the nation and, according to the Lockheed Martin website, provides “exceptional depth to respond to both surge requirements and planned customers tasks.” The consortium’s forte seems to be providing large, agency-wide IT systems for the DIA and other agencies. The team includes three of the top U.S. IT firms, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems, as well as the consulting firm BearingPoint, which helped plan the 2003 U.S. occupation of Iraq for the Department of Defense. Another member of the team is The Analysis Corporation, the intelligence contractor run by CIA veteran John Brennan.

NETWORK-CENTRIC WARFARE. As one of the prime suppliers of reconnaissance and surveillance technology, Lockheed Martin is deeply involved in the Pentagon’s Distributed Common Ground System, or DCGS. On its website, Lockheed Martin describes DCGS as “a global, internet-like network where both military and national agencies have access to time-sensitive intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance data.”