pro-business, helped facilitate the deal.)
BAE buys US tank maker Mark Tran and agencies, Monday March 7, 2005
The British defence giant BAE Systems today significantly stepped up its US presence by acquiring United Defense Industries for $3.9bn (£2bn).
United Defense, the maker of the Bradley armoured vehicle, employs around 8,000 staff at 25 sites in the US and Sweden. The company, which also designs artillery systems, missile launchers and naval guns, generated annual sales of $2.2bn last year.
"The combined business creates a leading international position in the fast growing land systems sector," BAE said in a statement. "As a result of the global war on terror and ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US department of defence has significantly shifted its priorities and budget towards land systems."
BAE, seeking to capitalise on heavy US defence spending, has been looking for an American acquisition for some time. The new business will be integrated with BAE's existing operations in North America, which currently employs more than 27,000 people in the US and generates more than $5bn in sales annually.
BAE said the US would now account for a third of its profits - compared to a quarter before - and the Pentagon would become its biggest customer to replace the Ministry of Defence in the UK.
Mike Turner, the chief executive, said: "We are accessing one of the fastest-growing areas of the US defence budget where the priority is being given to the army."
Among opportunities for the development of the United Defense business is the repair and upgrade of 7,000 Bradleys...
Investing in War: The Carlyle Empire by Eric Leser
May 15/16, 2004The biggest private investor in the world, deeply entrenched in the weapons' sector, is a discreet group that cultivates dealings with influential men, including Bush father and son.
One year ago, May 1, 2003, George Bush, strapped up in a fighter pilot's suit, landed on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham-Lincoln along the coast of California. The image became famous. Under a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished", the president prematurely announced the end of military operations in Iraq and his victory. Back on dry land the next day, he made another martial speech, not far from San Diego, in a
United Defense Industries' weapons factory.
This company is one of the Pentagon's main suppliers. It manufactures, among other things, missiles, transport vehicles, and the light Bradley armored vehicle.
Its main shareholder is the biggest private investor in the world, a discreet group, called Carlyle.
It's not listed on the stock market and doesn't have to show its accounts to any but its 550 investors- billionaires or pension funds. Carlyle manages eighteen billion dollars today, invested in defense and high tech (notably biotech), space, security-linked information technology, nanotechnologies, and telecommunications. The companies it controls share the characteristic that their main customers are governments and administrations. As the company wrote in its brochure:
"We invest in the opportunities created in industries strongly affected by changes in government policy."Carlyle is a unique model, assembled at the planetary level on the capitalism of relationships or "capitalism of access" to use the 1993 expression of the American magazine New Republic. Today, in spite of its denials,
the group incarnates the "military-industrial complex" against which Republican President Dwight Eisenhower warned the American people when he left office in 1961....
And who provokes those "changes in government policy"? Neo-cons? Defrauders of American democratic elections? Policy change through "fixing" intelligence and lying about WMDs? Traitors to America...and the world? Mass-murdering, war criminals?
(C'monnnn Fitzgerald!)
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