[Infowarrior] - Road From D.C. To Cape Cod Reveals Reach Of Defense Industry

[Richard Forno]

(c/o DS)

Road From D.C. To Cape Cod Reveals Reach Of Defense Industry

http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2012/08/15/road-from-d-c-to-cape-cod-reveals-reach-of-defense-industry/print/

Every summer I drive the wife and kids from our home in Virginia to a house in Plymouth, Massachusetts that has been owned by my family since the 1920s.  I’ve made the trip many times, but it wasn’t until this year that it dawned on me the road from D.C. to Cape Cod passes through the heart of the U.S. defense industry.  You can learn a lot about that industry’s role in the U.S. economy and political culture by just looking out your car window — if you know what to look for.  So here’s a travel guide.

If you’re leaving from Capitol Hill, you’ll probably want to drive up the Baltimore-Washington Parkway to get onto I-95 North in Baltimore.  Before you reach the city, though, you’ll pass the first big defense-industrial site on our itinerary, the headquarters of Northrop Grumman‘s electronics unit near the Baltimore airport.  It’ll be on your right about a hundred yards off the parkway just after you pass the main airport exit, and it’s huge: with two million feet of enclosed space and over 6,000 workers it is probably the premier military-radar assembly site in the world.  It used to be even bigger — there were 17,000 workers at the end of the Cold War — but Northrop automated many processes and demand has slackened since the old days, when 180 F-16 fighters needing onboard radars were being produced every year.

The factory was built on the site of a former fruit orchard in 1951 by Westinghouse, which had been the biggest rival of General Electric ever since it bought Nikola Tesla’s patent for alternating current to compete with Edison‘s direct current.  Westinghouse moved its radio operations from Massachusetts to Maryland in 1938, and shortly thereafter developed the Army’s first air-defense radar.  The radar detected the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, although the military failed to react.  A series of other breakthroughs followed including the pulse-doppler technology that made airborne radars possible, but by the end of the Cold War Westinghouse was ready to join the migration out of manufacturing.  Northrop Grumman bought its military-electronics unit in 1996 for $3.6 billion, which today looks like a smarter investment than the broadcasting properties Westinghouse chose to purchase with the proceeds.

Once you get onto I-95 North, you’ll probably want to follow it to the New Jersey Turnpike.  That’s kind of a shame, because if you’d stayed on I-95 you would have gone right by the Boeing plant south of Philadelphia where the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor and CH-47 Chinook helicopter are built.  That complex too employs 6,000 workers and like Northrop’s Maryland plant it has a long history.  The Chinook is assembled in the old Baldwin Locomotive factory that the world’s biggest maker of steam locomotives built in 1929 before it faltered in its efforts to convert to diesel engines.  Boeing bought the building in 1965 when Chinook production began, and currently is in the midst of a costly effort to make the plant more efficient.  Nobody remembers now, but during World War One Baldwin suffered a horrible explosion at a nearby munitions plant it was operating, killing 133 workers (mostly women and girls).  There’s a monument to their loss in the local cemetery.

We’ll have to leave those details for another time, though, because you took the shorter route to Cape Cod through Jersey.  When you get about 15 miles due east of Philly, you’ll see an odd sight on the north side of the turnpike — the superstructure of a warship sitting in a field.  That is the site in Moorestown, New Jersey where the Navy tests the radars for its Aegis combat system, the most capable air- and missile-defense system in the world.  The radars and a host of other electronics gear are assembled at an adjacent complex owned by Lockheed Martin, which until recently was also the headquarters of its sprawling military-electronics business unit.  The 400-acre main campus hosts 4,000 workers, making it the biggest employer in Burlington County.

The Moorestown factory was built in 1953 on what had been an asparagus farm by the old Radio Corporation of America (RCA).  RCA was a pillar of the New Jersey economy in the early postwar years when the state was still a hub of electronics innovation thanks to the early work of Thomas Edison at Menlo Park.  The company started out manufacturing consumer electronics and pioneered the development of color television in the 1950s, but over time gravitated towards military work as Japan began making inroads into the U.S. consumer market.  General Electric bought RCA in 1986 in a belated effort to benefit from the Reagan military buildup, but sold the military part of the business to Lockheed Martin during the defense-sector consolidation that followed the end of the Cold War.  That proved to be a wise move for Lockheed, which became the leading supplier of radars, computers and other items to the Navy thanks largely to the Moorestown facility.

You’ll see another vestige of New Jersey’s former dominance in the global electronics business if you decide to take the Garden State Parkway around Manhattan to avoid the inevitable backup at the George Washington Bridge.  The parkway snakes past sites once made famous by Edison, but when you get to the Clifton area you’ll notice that military contractor Exelis (formerly ITT Defense) still maintains a major presence in the area.  The company has 1,500 employees in and around Clifton working on electronic jammers, information systems and tactical communications for all of the military services.  You’d never guess looking at the nondescript Exelis building only a few yards off the west side of the parkway that it belongs to one the world’s leading repositories of military-electronics expertise.

Having driven north around New York City, you’ll have two options for continuing your Cape Cod trek into Connecticut.  Rather than rejoining I-95 at the state line, let’s travel the more scenic Merritt Parkway, the nation’s first divided highway.  That will take you right past the headquarters of Sikorsky helicopters in Stratford, a unit of locally-based United Technologies.  United Technologies has a huge manufacturing presence in Connecticut, and its Stratford plant where the Army’s UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter and the Marine Corps’ CH-53 Super Stallion heavy lifter are assembled is one of the biggest rotorcraft complexes in the world.  Sikorsky employs 9,000 workers in the Nutmeg State, most of them at Stratford.  Unlike some other local manufacturers, it is going gangbusters: sales of military, civil and commercial helicopters have increased about 40 percent over the past five years.

Right after passing Sikorsky headquarters on the north side of the Merritt Parkway, you’ll be taking a connector south to the Connecticut Turnpike along the shore, which is also I-95.  If you feel like taking a brief detour from your route, you can exit at the outlet malls in Clinton and drive 20 miles north to a similarly imposing United Technologies plant in Middletown where its Pratt & Whitney unit assembles all the engines for the F-22 and F-35 fighters.  No other company in the world is currently capable of producing jet engines with such demanding performance specifications.  Pratt & Whitney employs about 11,000 workers in Connecticut, and recently handed the state’s economy a pleasant surprise when it announced it would be building engines for a popular new Airbus commercial transport at the same plant where the fighter engines are assembled.

Not long after returning to the turnpike, you’ll be passing through historic Groton.  When you get to the crest of the bridge over the Thames River, you can see the center of global innovation in undersea warfare a mile down-river to your right, the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics.  You can also see the Navy’s big submarine base off in the distance to your left, still the locus of U.S. undersea operations in the North Atlantic.  Electric Boat delivered the Navy’s first submarine in 1900, the USS Holland, and later went on to construct the first nuclear-powered submarine (USS Nautilus) and the first ballistic-missile submarine (USS George Washington).  General Dynamics currently has 5,000 engineers and draftsmen at work in and around Groton designing the next generation of ballistic-missile subs, and an additional 2,000 tradesmen assembling Virginia-class attack subs, so the town is on firm ground in calling itself the submarine capital of the world.

The economic impact of Electric Boat spills over into neighboring Rhode Island, where General Dynamics has established a major industrial facility at Quonset Point to construct hull cylinders for its submarines.  The digital machining and outfitting capabilities at Quonset Point make it one of the most advanced naval construction sites  in the world, not to mention the biggest industrial employer in Rhode Island.  But that is not the only impact the defense industry has on the Ocean State.  Raytheon has a sprawling campus near Newport that develops electronic systems for U.S. warships, and as you travel I-95 through the state capital of Providence you will see the high-rise headquarters of military supplier Textron looming above Westminster Street near the highway.  Textron assembles the parts of the V-22 tiltrotor not built at Boeing’s Philadelphia facility, and a variety of other helicopters used by the Army and Marine Corps (most of that work is done in Texas).

Textron’s name tells you something about how manufacturing has changed in this part of the Northeast over the last century.  The conglomerate originated in textile mills that once dotted the shoreline in places like Providence, Fall River and New Bedford, and managed to stay healthy by diversifying into aerospace operations such as Cessna business jets.  Its Bell Helicopter unit is a major rival of Sikorsky in the civil and commercial rotorcraft market, and alternately teams with or competes with Boeing’s military rotorcraft unit.  The continuing success of companies like Textron, United Technologies and General Electric in a region where thousands of factories have shut down over the years is a testament to the adaptability of well-run enterprises.

I usually get off the interstate in Providence and take an old highway designated Route 44 to my house in Plymouth.  If you’re going on to the Cape Cod proper, you’ll probably turn onto I-195 at Providence and cross the Cape Cod Canal at Bourne or Sagamore.  The bridge at the latter crossing will allow you an unobstructed view of a big radar site on the Cape maintained by Massachusetts-based Raytheon, the nation’s fourth-largest military contractor.  The radar is designed to detect ballistic-missile attacks on the U.S., and is only one of hundreds of military systems the company makes in Massachusetts, Arizona and elsewhere.

The last military-industrial stop on my personal itinerary is off Route 44 in Taunton, Massachusetts where I pass near four buildings owned by General Dynamics in the Myles Standish Industrial Park.  The thousand workers there are developing a new battlefield communications network for the Army called WIN-T, and they recently escaped major job losses when the Army reversed plans to cut funding for the program under pressure from Senator Scott Brown.  Taunton is one of those tired milltowns that desperately needs good jobs, so the continued presence of the General Dynamics operation is crucial to its economic health.  General Dynamics acquired the operation when it purchased the defense operations of General Telephone and Electronics after the Cold War ended; GTE’s former corporate headquarters is right next to the Connecticut Turnpike in Stamford.

There’s a lesson embedded in this trip through the heartland of the U.S. defense industry.  Military production has become the cornerstone of manufacturing in America’s Northeast.  From the Northrop Grumman plant in Baltimore to the Lockheed Martin complex in New Jersey to the General Dynamic’s shipyard in Connecticut, Pentagon demand is an engine of prosperity.  I haven’t even mentioned sites that were far afield of my Cape Cod route, like the GE aircraft-engine plant in Lynn, Massachusetts and the General Dynamics shipyard in Bath, Maine.  There are hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs associated with such sites in the Northeast.  If you think that losing those jobs wouldn’t be devastating for the region, then you don’t understand the U.S. economy.

 
This article is available online at: 
http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2012/08/15/road-from-d-c-to-cape-cod-reveals-reach-of-defense-industry/
 

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