Northrop Grumman’s “Secret Sauce” to Getting Missile Contracts, According to its Attorney

Updates from our public records case with Utah and the world’s largest nuclear weapons manufacturer. Plus: Sword of Laban at the Mormon investment fund, and the latest on that weapons plants map.

Hi,

I was recently back in Utah to report on the new intercontinental ballistic missile that Northrop Grumman, the world’s largest nuclear weapons manufacturer, is producing in the state. Here’s some updates from the field:

“Northrop Grumman feels incredibly strongly that this is … its secret sauce”

My public records battle with the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity — which manages subsidies to so-called “incented” firms — and Northrop Grumman has pronged into two related battles. We’re continuing to try to get a full, unredacted contract of Utah’s deal to subsidize the company’s intercontinental ballistic missile manufacturing in the state. The government and missile-maker are insisting on redacting a page that is the heart of the deal, one that spells out how many jobs and at what minimum salary the company needs to create in order to receive tax rebates. That page also includes some language the company’s attorneys referred to as “assumptions,” which, well, I don’t know what they are because the page is blacked out, but I imagine to be some sort of caveating language about Northrop Grumman’s job creation benchmarks. 

The good news is we had a small victory at our August hearing. The judge ruled that Utah and Northrop Grumman needed to hand over a more significantly unredacted copy of the record to my legal team, under a provision called “Attorneys’ Eyes Only,” in order for them to actually be able to argue whether the information under the black box is secret or not. 

The second and new prong of our public records battle is to get performance reports for the company under its first year receiving tax breaks — did it actually do what it said it would do in the original contract? Publicly, the government has claimed in marketing materials that the new ICBM will “create up to 2,250 jobs in the next 20 years” in Utah. So how’s that going? I don’t know, because the government has completely denied me those performance reports.

A handout photo shows Northrop Grumman celebrating breaking ground on a new facility in Utah in 2019 (Northrop Grumman)

Northrop Grumman claims those figures on job creation and salaries are trade secrets. The tl;dr on our position comes from Inkstick friend Pat Garofalo, an expert on state and local economic development subsidies at the American Economic Liberties Project. This is what he told me when I started digging for these records: “The literal amount of people who will be sitting in this facility doing jobs? That can't possibly be a trade secret. That's just nonsense.”

Well, here’s what Northrop Grumman’s attorney Mark Wagner said in our hearing about that “literal amount of people,” which is spelled out in the redacted Attachment B of the contract. 

“On this in general, I would like to note that Northrop Grumman in this particular area of its business, of the contracting of federal contracts and defense contract work — highly, very highly competitive — and Northrop Grumman has spent a lot of time, a lot of effort in developing over many years a particular process and procedure for making bids and being successful in those bids and then hopefully performing to it, to hopefully accomplish, to meet the assumptions in the forecast. Northrop Grumman feels incredibly strongly that this is, for use of maybe an overused term, but its secret sauce — and this goes to the very top of the organization — they feel incredibly strongly that this is information, from their experience over much time, [that] would give — if a competitor were to have the information — would give that competitor the ability to take out assumptions and to learn information about how Northrop Grumman is going to phase in the project, that they can reverse engineer a portion of that from knowing this kind of information.” 

There’s a few issues with this. One, bidding on the new intercontinental ballistic missile was the opposite of competitive — Northrop Grumman was the lone bidder, since its only would-be competitor, Boeing, dropped out of the race after complaining that Northrop Grumman’s acquisition of a key company with facilities in Utah that produces solid-fuel rocket engines made the process unfair. Two, if such information were indeed the “secret sauce” to winning a contract projected worth $130 billion, it would stand to reason that Boeing, Raytheon et al would be trying to get that Attachment B, not just a small nonprofit media outlet. Neither the government nor Northrop Grumman have claimed that any of those companies have attempted to get Attachment B. And last year in our hearing at the State Records Committee, an attorney representing the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity suggested that no company has ever really tried to get that document for any of their subsidized companies:

"That portion of the contract is not subject to public disclosure. Never has been. This is the first time the Governor's Office has been before this committee on this issue. Nobody's questioned it before,” Todd Jenson, an assistant attorney general, said. (Jenson also said that “competitors look at [this type of public record]. Not only business competitors but Russia and China are probably watching very closely what Northrop Grumman is doing. I guarantee they are.” But the Sino-Soviet bloc has yet to join our lawsuit.)

I’ll wrap up with a little bit of horseshoe theory. If you follow my reporting, you probably know that I actually sort of agree with Northrop Grumman’s attorney. I do believe that job creation claims are a major part of military contractors’ “secret sauce” to convincing Congress to buy their wares, claiming that they spread thousands of jobs across their districts. So that’s why I want the paper trail. If you claim you create thousands of good jobs, well, why hide the records that would show it?

“Sword of Laban”

While I was in Salt Lake City, I had the opportunity to join a few of the activists from the Utah Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (UCAN) for a vigil outside the offices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ investment manager, Ensign Peak. The vigil was part of a week’s worth of activities to mark the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The vigil location was chosen by UCAN after our cover story in the Salt Lake City Weekly exposed Ensign Peak’s hundreds of millions of dollars in investments in top nuclear weapons contractors, including Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin. Holding those stocks is at odds with other Christian churches, whose “sin screens” prohibit such investments, and also with the Mormon church’s own historic opposition to nuclear weapons. 

We were joined by an ex-Mormon named Eric who told me he’d paid plenty in tithes during his time as a church member. He had heard about the vigil on an evening radio show, grabbed a piece of cardboard, made a sign, and joined UCAN on a hot Friday morning. His sign read “Sword of Laban?” a reference to a story in Nephi 1, the first book of the Book of Mormon. In it, Nephi slays a powerful man named Laban in 600 B.C. Jerusalem by using the latter’s own sword. Nephi, according to the scripture, had been “constrained by the Spirit” to kill Laban, then brought his pure gold-hilted sword to the Western Hemisphere, where it was regarded as a sacred object among the Nephites. Eric told me the story is often an allegory used in LDS circles to justify the use of military force. 

On Hiroshima remembrance day, UCAN staged a similar vigil outside a Northrop Grumman office in Salt Lake City, joined by a local Hibakusha, Tosh Kano. Tosh survived the atomic bombing while in utero, and made his way to Utah in 1961, where, among other things, he managed a fleet of snowplows for the 2002 Winter Olympics. 

Both the UCAN activists and Tosh approached passersby, including pedestrians outside Ensign Peak and Northrop Grumman employees leaving their day shift. What struck me in their interactions was generally how friendly and engaged people were. (With some exceptions, like a Northrop employee who told Kano, “I have nothing to do with that. I’m just making a living.”) Even the security guard at Northrop Grumman had become amicable with the UCAN folks, telling them some tires were slashed after a Gaza war protest at the site earlier this year, though he seemed to indicate that he knew it wasn’t by UCAN. A father of two affiliated with UCAN gave out bumper stickers to exiting employees while advertising his special guest available to speak to them through their car windows: “Tosh lives in Salt Lake and survived the bombing 79 years ago!”

Impact!

Remember that map of US weapons plants compiled by an Air Force veteran that Google suppressed and we helped get restored? It’s now been utilized for an extraordinary project, Mapping Genocide, which allows people to scroll across America and find weapons plants supplying Israel. The creators dubbed the project, “Meet the genocidal neighbors.”

No impact?

Aug. 14 was the first 13F filing for the LDS Church’s investment manager since we published our story exposing stockholdings in nuclear weapons producers like Northrop Grumman. Was there any change to their “sin screen”? Nope! The stocks are all still there.

Extra

I joined KRCL radio in their Salt Lake City office for an interview about all things Northrop Grumman and ICBMs. Thanks for having me!

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