MR. BAKER: First of all, some first impressions, you're just back. What's going on in the Paris Air Show, both on the surface and behind the scenes?

MR. TRENTO: Well, this year, largely bad weather, a lot of rainy days which canceled a lot of the flight demonstrations. And the other thing is the chaos that's still the aftermath of the Soviet Union collapsing where you have all these Russian and Ukrainian and other aircraft companies that were formerly Soviet monoliths coming in and competing with each other to sell stuff.

And one of the big breaking stories this year was there was a new MIG out and the Russians were hoping to demonstrate it and sell a lot of them. And unfortunately, their insurance wasn't paid up, so the Air Show officials, knowing the Russian track record of crashing airplanes at the Air Show, was not too thrilled about letting them fly it.

But behind the scenes, what was going on was a concerted effort by the American contractors to create an atmosphere of new threats coming to the world so they can justify spending billions and billions and billions of dollars on a new generation of fighters and tactical aircraft. That's one of the main things, the main themes of this Air Show.

Norman Augustine himself of Martin Lockheed, who is the -- I call him the ex officio Secretary of Defense because his advice seems to be more adhered to by President Clinton than Secretary Cohen -- was there, pontificating and saying why we needed all this new junk.

MR. BAKER: And what are the reasons we need this new junk, what was the line, how are they selling that?

MR. TRENTO: Well, the line is that it's a dangerous world --

MR. BAKER: Start again, I was overtalking.

MR. TRENTO: The line is it's a dangerous world and Lockheed Martin's going to protect it by taking your tax money and buying all this stuff, that's the line. There was no real justification.

The way they do this is by selling the older aircraft and getting the Department of Defense and the Administration to agree to sell it to countries like Chile and so forth. Then they prime the foreign market for a new generation of aircraft four and five years from now. And these folks think far ahead and the F-16s now is old stuff, it's old junk, and it's being sold cheap around the world. Taiwan's repairing them, South Korea has them, Jordan's getting some for $150,000.00 each I understand, a very good deal on a $20 million airplane. And what's happening is they're making the planes old hat and therefore, these folks, they're whetting their appetites for the next generation.

MR. BAKER: You're saying it's old junk. I was under --

MR. TRENTO: Lethal.

MR. BAKER: -- impression that these planes --

MR. TRENTO: Lethal.

MR. BAKER: -- were among the best --

MR. TRENTO: Lethal.

MR. BAKER: -- in the world.

MR. TRENTO: Of course, but we want to build new ones, we want to have jobs, and so consequently, that's happening. The other thing that was happening behind the scenes there that's a little scarier from the American perspective is the Chinese precision metal company which makes all their nastier devices, missiles and so forth, was operating undercover, dealing, taking meetings with numerous arms dealers, third-party arms dealers, offering large commissions on cheap devices, such as $40,000.00 missiles that can knock out billion dollar U.S. ships. They've got a new missile out with a 150-kilometer range that can take out any ship in the Persian Gulf and that's a very scary thing to the United States Navy. And that new missile can be mounted on a helicopter that they'll sell you for $800,000.00 or mounted on a truck that they'll sell you for less.

And so those are threats that guys like Augustine and his brethren among the defense contractors will point to in saying, "That's why you need our new hardware." And it becomes a dollars race. In other words, to defend against a $40,000.00 missile and the batteries that go with it, well, you need a hundred million dollar fighter aircraft. And the American taxpayer has fallen for this scam again and again and I see no reason to expect that they won't fall this time, especially with this Congress.

MR. BAKER: So what do American military aircraft makers get out of their participation in an air show such as Paris?

MR. TRENTO: They build good will with potential foreign customers. The customers who come to the Paris Air Show are Third World countries that either can't get approval to buy most of these weapons or can't afford them.

And let me give you an example of what's going on right now. There's a war going on in the Congo, the old Congo, and there's a big battle over the airport that's going on in the last few days. It began during the Paris Air Show and will go on and it will be ended and Africa will change again. But in that opportunity, that brief, little war going on during the Air Show, there were probably 15 countries trying to pour weapons into that little firefight, all from the Air Show.

So what happens is you go into this beautiful air show, Lavergé, where you see these missiles on display and these wonderful flying demonstrations and they're doing the Britling Cup (phonetic) and all this very sort of hifalutin country club style stuff.

In the meantime, these companies are feeding weapons to these grubby little wars for real dollars and that's really what it's about. It has very little to do with man reaching and soaring in flight. And while it's very thrilling to watch a MIG or an F-16 climb up to the clouds, the reality is these guys are being used to glamorize the profession of death, the profession of killing as a way of making money. And that's what the Paris Air Show.

Norman Augustine can dress it up all he wants as America's biggest defense contractor, but the reality is what he wants to do is he wants to get the American people to buy new, more bigger, more expensive, new weapons to keep his stockholders happy and his shareholders happy and sell the old ones to Third World countries. That's what the game is and that's what the game has always been.

MR. BAKER: The Paris Air Show is, it seems like, mostly a commercial marketplace, but we have air shows, like at Andrews Air Force Base and across the United States for the public. I mean how do air shows such as those generally function to make the public uncritically supportive of high tech. aircraft?

MR. TRENTO: Well, I mean anybody who sees a beautiful aircraft flying can't help but be smitten. I mean it's romantic and it's exciting and it's all that.

I mean the Andrews Air Force Base Air Show, which is one of the biggest in the country, has an interesting history. I mean a few years ago, a beer truck ran into a B1 bomber and did a huge amount of damage and people shoot themselves in the foot. And these air shows cost billions of dollars, I think the figure is in excess of 12 or 13 billion in the last 20 years.

They do it because they want to sell the idea of buying this junk to the American public. They want to make the public feel that their tax dollars, their tax dollars are going to something tangible, "Ooh, look at that. That will defend me."

Well, what they don't tell you when they show you a B2 bomber, for example, which is a very exotic looking weapon, unfortunately, the weapon can't carry much of a bomb load, it's really not stealthy, it's been downgraded to the point where most radars can see it. And further, it requires refurbishing every 200 hours at enormous expense. And what you've got is basically an airliner that can carry bombs that requires great care. And the military wants to spend billions and billions of dollars for additional ones.

The one at the Paris Air Show made its appearance and the public and the press wasn't allowed to go near it. Why? It's so fragile, you can't touch the thing.

MR. BAKER: Also, wasn't it designed for a mission that no longer exists, i.e., __________?

MR. TRENTO: Well, that's a minor problem. They've given it a new mission now; the new mission is to drain the Treasury as fast as possible and it seems to be very good at that mission. I mean the idea is that this will be used for long-range, conventional missions. I mean a Piper Cub would be more suited to that mission.

MR. BAKER: Let's talk about -- was there evidence of --

(Interview interruption.)

MR. BAKER: Do you see the revolving door spinning at the Paris Air Show?

MR. TRENTO: Oh, it's hilarious. I mean the funniest thing about the Paris Air Show is now you see it in all nationalities. I mean there are Argentinians there who look like --

MR. BAKER: Could you mention a revolving door? My question will be cut out.

MR. TRENTO: Okay. The funniest thing about the Paris Air Show is that there are all kinds of military people looking for jobs. And one of the reasons our military men and women like to go there and fly the airplanes and demonstrate the equipment is they get to rub elbows with the defense contractors, they get to know them. And if they do a good job, if they're good salesmen for the products, they might have a shot at getting a job when they leave the military and that's a big deal there.

So these guys are flying -- McDonnell Douglas, for example, for the first time is offering the C-17, this beautiful cargo plane which has performed well in Bosnia as a commercial plane. Now it's being sold as a commercial plane by McDonnell Douglas, but demonstrated by the U.S. Air Force at the Air Force's expense, with an Air Force crew.

And there was a very funny experience where the crew was trying to set a record on landing of 12 or 1,500 feet, this great big airplane stopping short. The captain was telling me with great pride about this and I said, "Aren't you a little afraid of breaking it? You know, what if you crash, what if something goes wrong, who pays for that?" And he says, "Well, the Air Force pays for that."

I mean the attitude here is that this is the best and the brightest of our military services, they get to show their stuff not to the American people, not to the people of France who only get to go to the Air Show for one day, last Sunday, but to the contractors who they hope to go to work for. And that is one of the basic faults with the whole system. And I mean there were literally hundreds of members of the U.S. military there, putting on their best performance, it was a tryout. And that creates a revolving door mentality.

The other problem is you have these military attachés working all around the world for the U.S. services who are nothing more than arms salesmen and they usually end up in the employ of the companies of the arms they sell.

So it's the oddest thing in the world. You know, when you and I go buy a car for the family, we do not have a friendly relationship with the car dealer, our interests are not the same. Only in the Pentagon are the interests the same where even if the aircraft's a piece of junk, the officer in charge of the program is going to have a big interest in making sure that the public buy it and Congress not be too critical of it. That's odd.

MR. BAKER: At a time of fiscal constraint and budget balancing rhetoric and in the absence of any conceivable military threats, how do the Pentagon defense contractors go about selling both the public and the Congress on the need for these enormously expensive weapons?

MR. TRENTO: Well, they sell the Congress by paying them off, I mean they make contributions to the various congressmen, they entertain the chairmen of the committees and the higher ranking members. And they let the districts know that if jobs are going to be lost in the various congressional districts, your man or woman is responsible. So it's a kind of form of blackmail and carrot and stick payoffs. That's Congress.

The Pentagon, these guys want jobs. You know, the Pentagon is a very interesting system. In civilian life, the way it works is you're responsible for a program, or a story if you're in the news business, or a case if you're a lawyer, for a long time. If things go wrong, you will be held accountable.

In the Pentagon, it doesn't work that way. You're assigned to a thing for two years, three years. If it gets screwed up, there's nobody to blame. I mean when these things happen, like with the C5A and the wings fall off and this kind of thing, nobody ever gets blamed by name. Unlike the shuttle Challenger, when it blew up, we knew who was responsible, we figured out who was responsible, but not at the Pentagon. And because of that, these guys get promoted or end up working for companies.

And therefore, the lack of accountability is the great benefit to the Pentagon in keeping things going. These guys are going to retire and they want a job to go to and the contractors provide it. So you have this kind of -- using the term -- well, this would be an unkind term to use, but I can't think of a worst conflict of interest than the one that goes on between defense contractors and the military, it's the worst. And having the Congress doing the oversight is like having a fox guard the chicken house. It's absurd, but that's the way it works.

And when they're overseas and they don't have accountability from the U.S. media, which has been just terrible at this, I mean the media doesn't even look at this stuff any more, it's bored by it, a real prescription for a disaster.

MR. BAKER: We see the major defense contractors in their advertising now commonly pointing to --

MR. TRENTO: Which, by the way, taxpayers are paying for all that advertising. When you see these B2 ads in the Washington Post or on television or Northrop Grumman looking out for America's interests overseas and the guardians of freedom and so forth, all this nonsense, all that comes out of U.S. tax dollars that are part of that contract. It's outrageous.

MR. BAKER: And one of the reasons, one of the threats they're conjuring these days is the notion of undemocratic countries out there armed with advanced fighter aircraft as a justification for us getting a new generation.

MR. TRENTO: Well, the only advanced fighter aircraft that are being sold are what we're putting out there or what the Russians are trying to sell. And the Russians, we've learned since access to the military equipment, that their advanced fighter aircraft are really not very advanced. The reality is there is no threat, it's a joke.

And the threat comes not from advanced equipment. The threat comes from U.S. technology that's been transferred in these arms sales largely illegally because the defense contractors are totally unscrupulous, U.S. defense contractors are totally unscrupulous about how this stuff is transferred.

In other words, we get a situation where, yes, we can sell to Italy or France and so one of the major contractors sells stuff to Italy and France. Then suddenly, it turns up in Libya or some Third World country. How does that happen? It happens because there is no real way to put export controls on this stuff and the technology disappears. And so what happens? Five years later, we're in a war in Iraq and the technology's being showered upon our fighting people.

MR. BAKER: And most people would be under the impression that perhaps the Commerce Department licensing procedures would preclude that.

MR. TRENTO: Nah, it's a joke, there's no protection. And China now is a great example. A year ago, they were testing missiles in the Straits of Taiwan that had everybody upset. We sent aircraft carriers and so forth. Those missiles are now for sale around the world and they're cheap. And the idea that a $40,000.00 missile can knock out a billion dollar aircraft carrier is something that we have to contemplate.

MR. BAKER: Despite all the chaff and the antimissile technology and all the advances in shooting down tactical missiles and all, you're saying these cheap Chinese missiles can get through.

MR. TRENTO: Mm-hmm, because they fly low. Apparently, the Chinese were able to access U.S. technology and determine that if they flew below four feet above the water line, you could evade the radar, you could evade the detection. And for $40,000.00, that's not a bad buy if you're a terrorist country or a rogue state. And it doesn't just make the United States a target; it's almost anybody else.

MR. BAKER: Is it in the interest -- the question answers itself. But how is it in the interest of American weapons makers to fuel arms races in other regions?

MR. TRENTO: Well, I mean, you know, it's like saying how is it in the interest of the obstetrician to hope for a lot of pregnancies. I mean the more -- they blame it on the folly of man. If you talk to people like Sam Cummings or Sartee Sauvignan (phonetic) or any of the big independent arms dealers, they'll talk about the folly of man.

But the reality is it's the big jobs program, that's how the politicians justify it. Bill Clinton. Here's a guy who says he's for peace and he seems like a nice enough guy and he seems like he is for peace. He has done more to increase the conventional arms race in the world than any president I can think of. I mean it's amazing.

And this business in Latin America where he's going to allow Chile to buy F-16s is phenomenal. Why would you infect a part of the world that is fairly peaceful? Why? Because the arms makers in the United States are pressuring the Administration saying, "Hey, that's a market we want to go for."

MR. BAKER: And that helps with jobs and that helps the --

MR. TRENTO: Well, supposedly that helps with jobs, but that's another big myth. Let me give you an example, F-16s. We're building them in Turkey; we don't build them in Fort Worth, Texas. So who gets the jobs? The Turks. It's an international economy now and the idea that these jobs come to America is nonsense. But the idea that U.S. technology of the highest order is now being transferred to Third World countries overseas so they can build them cheap is something that American workers seem to have accepted without any anger, without any remorse, without any retribution.

MR. BAKER: Well, it creates more jobs back here to build the next generation.

MR. TRENTO: Well, that's the idea, I mean that's supposedly the idea. But the fact is there are a lot of American high tech. workers who are now unemployed because of jobs that went to Turkey, for example, in the case of the F-16. Right now, the --

What's beautiful about it is, okay, we build F-16s in Turkey. Then the Turks use them to shoot at the Kurds which we are supposedly trying to help. I mean our foreign policy and the Pentagon seem not to have met. It's like, "Hello. Do you know each other, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, have you met each other?" Because they are two opposing forces doing exactly the opposite thing for the result that the policy's supposed to have. And Congress sits around, sucking its thumb, thinking it's all okay, just checking their campaign contributions.

MR. BAKER: As long as we're shooting broad -- whatever the analogy is -- across the bow of major institutions, let's talk about the mainstream media. We see ads for companies like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman --

MR. TRENTO: Well, "talk about the mainstream media," you mean the fact that two of the American -- let me start again. Talking about the mainstream media would be very interesting if you start off with a couple of propositions. Two of the major television networks are owned by defense contractors, NBC and CBS. Need we say more? And the third network, Fox, is owned by a guy who had a long history of cooperation with the CIA back in his days when he was in Australia destabilizing governments with his newspapers and CIA cooperation.

So the fact is we have essentially three media organizations controlled by companies that have a long history of doing business with the United States government.

MR. BAKER: And at the same times, we see ads for the major aviation contractors during such benign programs as the News Hour with Jim Lehrer --

MR. TRENTO: Right.

MR. BAKER: -- or the Sunday morning political talk shows. And simultaneously, we see rather uncritical, soft defense reporting from most of the mainstream outlets in this country, particularly on expensive, new weapons systems, I mean there just isn't a debate.

Is there a connection. Why is mainstream journalism so soft on these issues?

MR. TRENTO: Mainstream journalism is largely soft on everything. And at PBS, the tragedy is because they've been so criticized by the far right, what they've done is allowed a lot of the nuttier spokesmen for the far right on the air, they're putting them in place. And what's happened is we're supposed to be getting this sort of fair view of the way the world works. Well, the reality is it's not fair at all, it's not critical. If you look at institutions that are supposed to be doing their jobs, such as oversight and this sort of thing, and they don't do it.

I mean the answer is yes, reporters aren't doing their jobs. If I went to ABC or CBS or NBC or CNN and I said, "Here's a story about an airplane that doesn't work," it's a terribly hard sell. Now we do these stories at NSNS, I mean that's what we do. And you know something about this at the Center for Defense Information, you know what a hard sell it is to get the media to look at something critically.

MR. BAKER: It's not a conspiracy I take it, it's more subtle than that.

MR. TRENTO: It's boredom, people don't care. "Hey, the Pentagon builds weapons systems that don't do their job and are too expensive," that's not news. Only if the public understood that the jobs are being moved overseas and that it is taking away from health care, it is taking away from other areas, and that these are chunks of money that we will never see again, that we won't have access to, that our kids can't get educated by, that old people can't be given medical care with, only then do we seem to have any understanding of the meaning of what we do.

And then the defense contractors come in, "But the jobs we get," "The jobs we get." It's the biggest myth in the world, there are no jobs. This is corporate welfare at its worst and the problem is that what they make kills people, what they make ends lives, what they make maims people. And the American public is so preoccupied with so many other things that it can't deal with it.

(Interview interruption.)

MR. BAKER: That was my last question. What else, anything else you would like to add?

MR. TRENTO: Well, let's talk about these three new airplanes a little bit more --

MR. BAKER: Okay.

MR. TRENTO: -- because I think we need to focus in a bit on what the sales job's going to be.

MR. BAKER: Okay. The F-22 seems to be a done deal --

MR. TRENTO: Right, the F-22 is probably the most sophisticated of the aircraft. And the reason it's a done deal is because it pushes all the most expensive technologies a step further in terms of committing to the United States to having to buy this stuff in the future. Now all the other countries want stealth, they want these high speed, computer controlled aircraft which the pilots can't fly without the computers.

Now I want you to think of a wartime scenario and I want your viewers to think for a minute about we're in a dusty, dirty place and one of the computers breaks on the F-22. What do we do? It means we don't fly it and it means that a simpler airplane might be better in this case. And the reason I use this example is if you think back on the Gulf War, only about 20 percent of the smart bombs hit their targets because of computer failures, because of glitches and so forth.

The reality is we're buying very high tech., extremely expensive equipment that may not be necessary to the jobs at hand. And that's something the American public has got to ask, do you need a Ferrari to do what you can do in a Toyota? I don't think so. But we're unwilling to face that squarely and so we buy the Ferrari.

And the B2 is the greatest example. It's the only airplane I know that needs a $50 million docking station to park and can't be parked in the sun because its stealthiness will be lost. And as long as we keep buying this sophisticated stuff and the joint fighters -- we've done this before, it was called the TFX in the 1960s. It was one of the great weapons buying disasters in American history.

You can't build airplanes that all the services will use and save money. What will happen is instead of it being a third the cost, it will cost three times as much because it's an opportunity for cost overruns. These generals have a desire and admirals have a desire to put add-ons on weapons systems that are phenomenal. And therefore, you'll have systems that don't work very well, can't do any job very well, and cost a lot of money. Which is, by the way, the goal of the contractor. I don't want to sound like a complete cynic, but that is their track record and the B2 is a great example of that.

We have two bombers in our inventory. Thank God the cold war is over, because both of these bombers could not do the job of defending the United States in a strategic nuclear situation.

MR. BAKER: Which two are you talking about?

MR. TRENTO: The B1 and the B2.

MR. BAKER: The B52 is what they're still using.

MR. TRENTO: Yeah, it was built 50 years ago. They've got pilots whose grandfathers were alive at the time the B52 was built. The reality is that the new weapons systems aren't as good as the old weapons systems. They're designed not to last as long, they're designed to have a shorter usable life. And because of that, the taxpayers have to pay more. This is not all by accident, this is planned. The more you buy, the more profits there are.

MR. BAKER: I think it might be Norm Augustine who has the chart showing how, eventually, at current rates, the entire U.S. military budget will buy one fighter aircraft in 20 or 30 years hence.

MR. TRENTO: And that is I think the goal here. I think that at the Paris Air Show, they hope 50 years from now there will be one plane made by Martin Marietta and everybody will have to buy it. Of course, we'll all have to sign notes because there's no money to pay for it.

The reality is that the sickness is not just limited to the United States. The Europeans now want to smell those dollars and the Eurofighter which they're developing and the Eurocopter which they're developing and everybody saw in the last James Bond movie is their venture into taxpayer hell and they're going to be going into it as well.

The other issue is Japan, which has not been talked about much. We are now developing a joint fighter with Japan. The Japanese are now making noises about alliances with the Russians. And I predict it won't be very long before the Japanese decide to get into the defense contractor business. And I somehow think that maybe that's the real competition that people like Norman Augustine are worried about, where you get another serious capitalistic state involved in wars.

In the future, cold wars will be involving defense contractor states and what makes us a superpower is that we are a defense contractor state. And that's not a very good thing in terms of people who think about things like education and health care and the other issues that we all care about.

MR. BAKER: We see now a point where we're down to four, maybe three defense aviation companies between Lockheed Martin, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas linking up, and Northrop Grumman. Is there a point down the road where you see it being one and --

MR. TRENTO: Yeah, I think that can happen. I think that -- in fact, they'll use that. They'll argue that if you don't spend more on this stuff, there's only going to be one.

I still have serious questions as to why the U.S. government doesn't build its own. We used to do that. I don't think that's a bad thing. And I think when it comes to national security, if you're truly concerned, I think taking the profit motive out of national security is not a bad thing.

MR. BAKER: Anything else?

MR. TRENTO: No. Any other questions?

MR. BAKER: Mr. Trento, thank you very much.

MR. TRENTO: You're welcome.