“A detailed accounting of all of Lockheed Martin’s government contracts could fill several large volumes,” writes William Hartung, in his new book Prophets of War, a history of the nation’s largest defense contractor. “Suffice it to say that they are involved at one level or another in nearly everything the federal government does, from providing instruments of death and destruction to collecting taxes and recruiting spies.”

For those who have followed the defense industry for years, that statement is no revelation, but for the vast majority of the American public, the notion that the maker of the radar-evading F-22 Raptor aircraft has also been involved in sorting the mail is both surprising, and important.

An analysis of the recent U.S.-Saudi military deal, and what domestic forces are driving this strategic relationship.

There’s no doubting the conservative bona fides of Bruce Fein. A high-level Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration in the 1980s and previously a resident scholar with the Heritage Foundation, he is a long-time advocate for uncompromising right-wing political principles.

The American Small Business League (ASBL) has released the first analysis of the government’s fiscal year (FY) 2009 small business contracting data, and found 61 percent actually going to corporate giants.

Gates is taking on a lot of opponents. Legislators who never met a defense platform they wouldn’t throw money at. Pentagon bureaucrats and staff officers who never met a needless regulation they couldn’t cite to interfere with a low-level commander’s common-sense assessment of his/her needs or capabilities. A system that — I loved this line — comes up with something like this: “The one area of real decline in overhead was in the area where we actually needed it: full-time contracting professionals, whose numbers plunged from 26,000 to about 9,000. We ended up with contractors supervising other contractors – with predictable results.”