The Revealing Tidbits Buried in Defense Contractors' Local Records

Hi,

This is sort of an “apropos of nothing” post since I don’t have a particular news peg, other than the fact I think every day is a day to report on and read about the people and places tied up in the $1 trillion Pentagon budget.

As part of that beat, I dig into public records from state and local governments about their interactions with the likes of Northrop Grumman, the world’s largest nuclear weapons manufacturer, or Anduril, the venture capital-backed weapons firm which is planning a mega-factory for autonomous weapons in rural Ohio. I sometimes have to submit formal records requests or fight the companies in court. Sometimes records, like those documenting Lockheed Martin’s registered lobbyists here in Georgia, are sitting around for anyone to look at, if you know the obscure place to go find them.

I wanted to share a few gems that I found in public records over the past year that didn’t quite make it into my reported stories. My intent in doing so is to show that there’s a lot to be done on this beat. We’re a nonprofit outlet with a mission to do public interest journalism about all the ways — big and small — that endless conflict impacts everyone. That means that, rather than be competitive and territorial about scoops, we are eager for collaborators and new folks to join us.

And we’ve got some exciting news. This year we’re partnering with the Sunlight Research Desk to deepen our local investigative work and do more of this kind of unique-value reporting. Reply to this email to send us tips about what you want to see us digging into, or you can message me on Signal at tkbarnes.10

Here’s some of what I’ve found.

“Multi-billion dollar company, and they have the oldest fire equipment I’ve ever seen in my life.”

That was the reaction of an officer from the Box Elder County Sheriff’s Office when he saw what Northrop Grumman had available to put out a massive explosion at its Promontory missile and rocket plant in Utah’s West Desert in April. We covered the explosion the day it occurred (“Building Explodes at Northrop Grumman’s Utah Plant for New Nuclear Missile”). The explosion leveled an entire building, and miles away residents felt their homes shake.

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I requested a variety of records on the explosion, including police bodycam and dashcam recordings of first responders. Why does it matter that the rural Utah sheriff’s office found Northrop Grumman’s fire equipment alarmingly out of date? For one, the site has a long history of fires and worker deaths. According to a Northrop Grumman internal training slide sent by an employee to Inkstick, some 104 fatal injuries have occurred at Northrop Grumman’s propulsion systems properties since 1960.

In addition to the controversial new intercontinental ballistic missile that the company is producing in Utah, it’s now angling to become a lead contractor on the Golden Dome missile shield. What qualifications does it have to do so? According to its CEO Kathy Warden, speaking in December in a panel discussion alongside the Space Force chief General Michael Guetlien, its near-monopoly on the production of solid rocket motors (ie, what makes missiles and rockets lift off) does.

“We’ve doubled capacity already in our factories for production of solid rocket motors, and we’re building out more capacity to further increase so that we can support the growing demand, not just for Golden Dome for America, but more broadly,” she said.

And that’s where those Utah facilities come in — the ones that have “the oldest fire equipment I’ve ever seen in my life” and where, as we reported exclusively, Ken Tran and Jonathan Steinke died due to asphyxiation by argon gas in 2023.

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Raytheon’s Ethics

Another gem I found this year was buried in hundreds of pages of records about state subsidies to RTX (formerly known as Raytheon) in North Carolina, where the company is setting up a Pratt & Whitney factory to make aircraft engines, including for the F-35. As part of the application for state support, called Job Development Investment Grants (JDIG), the company is asked about its business ethics.

That admission made me smile. That “yes” is a resounding “yes.” The year before it applied for its latest round of JDIG grants, RTX agreed to pay more than $1 billion in fines for several corrupt acts, including price gouging on defense contracts, bribing a Qatari official, and sharing unauthorized defense articles with China.

Since the JDIG application was, at least nominally, supposed to consider a company’s commitment to ethics before handing over North Carolinians’ public funds to it, I asked the state’s Commerce Department if they evaluated the company’s adherence to its state ethics policies — including whether the company had followed its own stated human rights policy and “take[n] actions designed to mitigate any adverse impacts” stemming from the use of its F-35 engine by the Israeli military over Gaza? No response from the Commerce Department. I also asked RTX that question — no answer. But a spokesperson did tell me that the company is “committed to creating good, high-paying jobs in the Asheville community.”

Why does this matter? This means that when local communities hand over millions of dollars to companies like RTX in exchange for the company setting up shop in town and creating local jobs, there is, at least on paper, some mechanism to ensure that the recipients of those grants and tax breaks are ethical ones.

Anduril vs. the National Bird

This one was a recent find among a batch of records from Ohio’s Environmental Protection Agency, and it’s part of an ongoing local battle.

Venture capital-backed autonomous weapons manufacturer Anduril, founded by a Trump ally and fundraiser named Palmer Luckey, announced plans in early 2025 to build a new mega-plant in rural Ohio that it says will start shipping its first weapons out by mid-2026.

There are some significant glitches, like the fact that large swaths of the plant were only recently even rezoned from rural to industrial — and doing so faces significant opposition from locals, including farmers and archeologists who say the factory risks bulldozing over Indigenous heritage sites. It also is being probed by the Army Corps of Engineers over the construction site’s potential to contaminate local wetlands and streams.

Anduril says in its manifest that its mission is to “rebuild the arsenal of democracy” for “great power conflict” with China. What may stand in the way of its factory to produce the weapons for such an America-first mission?

A bald eagle’s nest!