When I was asked to write on weapons companies in Australian schools the challenge of AUKUS was prominent. Now the horror of the Israel–Palestine war is upon us, and it is difficult to focus on anything but the urgent need for the violence to end. But the context and conduct of any war will be determined by the power of the US war machine—and the ultra-profitable weapons companies, which are, after all, the biggest winners. And their power is increasing, not lessening, as the nuclear weapons states set about renewing their nuclear armoury, weapons industries branch into new technological possibilities and militarism continues its march through our entertainment, social media and education.
After the debacle of the AUKUS agreement and the nuclear submarines proposal, and even as so much uncertainty remains about where, when and indeed whether these subs will be built in Australia, the Department of Defence lost no time in enlisting the weapons industry to promote careers in weapon building. TheSubs in Schools Technology Challenge was first cab off the rank, a collaboration between the very military-focused REA (Re-engineering Australia Foundation), the Department of Defence and industry stakeholders including the Australian Submarine Corporation and Saab Australia. It was promoted as ‘Designed to attract both boys and girls’, containing ‘“cool” elements that attract student interest’, developing ‘skills directly transferable to industry roles’ and increasing ‘the number of students taking up STEM based careers in support of satisfying the skills requirement of large-scale Engineering programs’.
With the Subs in Schools program completed and the winners of the challenge taken on trips to experience (non-nuclear) submarines in Perth, BAE systems—already anointed by the Australian government to build any nuclear subs in Australia—produced the Beacon Program for Primary School Students. Working with Lumination, a high-tech curriculum resource company, they have commenced the program in three low socioeconomic area schools in South Australia, targeting the state that has always been promised future jobs in submarine construction. To deliver this program, branded materials aimed at very young children have been produced, appropriating fairy tales such as Hansel and Gretel to generate activities. Launching the Beacon Program, BAE Systems Australia CEO Ben Hudson said that Beacon’s goal was to ‘keep students engaged in their education and raise awareness of future career pathways’.
Of course, this is not new: weapons companies have been invading Australian classrooms for many years, at university, secondary and primary levels. In 2017, for example, the University of Melbourne announced a partnership with Lockheed Martin, the biggest weapons company in the world, to establish STELaRLab. Members of the Medical Association for Prevention of War (MAPW), alumni and academics became concerned and sought meetings with various departmental heads and the Vice-Chancellor. While the wording used in the initial press release was modified in response, the partnership went ahead, and the university has resisted severing its relationship with Lockheed Martin despite that fact that the World Health Organization declined to partner with it on cancer research because of this link with weapons manufacture.
When MAPW investigated during 2020–21, it found around thirty-five cases of weapons companies bankrolling and sometimes being actively involved in various programs aimed at secondary and even primary school students. Some of these are linked with Defence Department activities in schools, with most carried out in partnership with education programs or NGOs and charities. These are documented in the MAPW report Minors and Missiles—Weapons Companies in Schools.
One such partnership is the National Youth Science Forum, a very popular program run over summer for Year 12 students to encourage the further study of science, technology, engineering and maths: STEM. It was established in the 1990s, with Rotary as the founding partner. Rotary offers sponsorships for student participants, with a place at the summer school costing almost $3000. Rotary has a proud history of promoting peace activities and sponsors university activities to develop peace-building skills around the world, yet in the Youth Forum it has partnered with the largest producer of weapons—including nuclear weapons—on the planet, Lockheed Martin. It is difficult to establish the extent of funding, but Lockheed Martin is the majority sponsor and their scientists are directly involved.
MAPW members met with the CEO and chair of the National Youth Science Forum to ask about the link. They were met with resistance and learnt that there are several ex-Department of Defence people on the board. While there are glowing testimonials about the experience on the website, some students have expressed concern about the influence of a weapons-making industry in a government-sanctioned education program. The program’s promotional material is all about encouraging students, especially girls, into exciting STEM careers, with ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’ the keywords. Lockheed Martin is, according to the Forum’s website, ’a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 125,000 people worldwide … principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture and integration of advanced technology systems, products and services’. We are told that it ‘has also expanded in civil business areas, such as information technology, transport and logistics, and energy’. But this language disguises the real purpose of its work, the bulk of which is developing weapons systems for killing. Lockheed Martin makes almost US $50 trillion in net sales to the US Defence Department alone each year.
Further examples of questionable partnerships are Maths Alive and the Australian Youth Aerospace Leader scholarships for students currently studying at an Australian high school in Years 10 to 12. Both are sponsored by Raytheon, the second biggest weapons company in the world. Raytheon calls itself ‘a capability partner for the Australian Defence Force across the joint domain, delivering sovereign, whole-of-life capability solutions’. Managing director Michael Ward gives the company’s rationale for involvement in education as:
By inspiring the next generation of STEM professionals, Raytheon Australia is supporting the development of skills for the future and developing leaders of tomorrow. We’re excited to provide this pathway for students to engage directly with the Australian aerospace industry … partnering with the Australian Youth Aerospace Association, we are helping create a pipeline of future talent from a diverse range of backgrounds for the defence industry and the Australian Defence Force.
Then there is FIRST LEGO League, run in Australia in partnership with Macquarie University by Boeing and BAE Systems. Boeing is the third largest arms company in the world, making more than US $33 billion from weapons in 2021. It makes bombs, munitions, attack aircraft, bombers, drone subs, autonomous systems and surveillance technology. FIRST LEGO League targets children from four to sixteen. The program offers a ‘playful introduction’ to STEM through LEGO products, progressively providing more complex engineering and coding competitions. During 2021–22, Boeing had naming rights over the competition theme, known as Rapid React presented by The Boeing Company.
These companies make no bones about looking in the nation’s classrooms for their future workforce. They do it by exposing children to weapons brands in a highly positive context, and use messages of achievement, self-fulfilment, creativity, inspiration, innovation and connection. These positive messages and experiences are branded: advertising and recruitment for STEM programs may feature weapons companies’ logos, and participants may receive certificates or trophies branded by weapons companies. It is all part of Australia’s own military-industrial-educational complex. Through it we are connected globally into weapons manufacture and war worldwide. These companies are multinationals, headquartered in the United States, France or Britain, where school and university links to weapons companies are even more extensive than they are in Australia.
There is a general question about the appropriateness of corporate sponsorship of educational activities, but here it is a particular one about weapons companies sponsoring such activities. These ‘merchants of death’—a useful descriptor first coined in the 1930s—use all sorts of cagey, and sometimes illegal, methods to influence decision-makers, and they are involved in morally unsupportable wars and the suppression of domestic unrest by authoritarian governments.
Lockheed Martin, for instance, has been involved in numerous cases of corporate misconduct in the United States in recent decades, many more than any other weapons manufacturer. These cases include corrupt influence-peddling and anti-competitive and fraudulent activity. The use of their weapons systems is especially egregious in wars in Yemen and Israel–Palestine.
In August 2018, dozens of Yemeni children were killed and many more injured when a school bus was hit by a Lockheed Martin missile. In Israel, Lockheed Martin weapons have long been used by the IDF in densely populated Palestinian areas, resulting in thousands of civilian casualties including many children. They are currently being deployed in Gaza, thus potentially involving Lockheed Martin in war crimes. A 2019 Amnesty International report found that Lockheed Martin lacks human-rights due diligence procedures to effectively identify, assess, prevent, mitigate or remediate its human rights impacts, in contravention of its obligations under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights..
Raytheon is involved in the production of illegal nuclear weapons, and makes missiles and precision-guided munitions, hypersonic and laser weapons, surveillance drones, armoured vehicles and the Active Denial System, known as the ‘pain ray’. Raytheon missiles have been linked to over a dozen attacks on Yemeni civilians, including the 2016 bombing of a Sana’a funeral hall, and a 2022 attack described by the United Nations as the worst civilian casualty incident in recent times prior to the current crisis in Israel–Palestine. Thirty-five different Raytheon products have been used against Palestinians, and are also deployed by US border police to surveil and repel people seeking asylum in the United States.
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There are many important challenges facing humanity in the present period—the climate crisis, the collapse of biodiversity, pandemics, potential nuclear winter and modern slavery, to name a few—and these are all more difficult to solve in the face of increasing global inequity and the oppression of peoples on the basis of gender, race and religion. None of this can be addressed without unprecedented global cooperation and investment in solutions, and the fostering of peaceful communities. What we require are more engineers and designers for sustainable systems into the future—for housing, food production and renewable energy. We need our planetary living systems to be understood and protected by people studying ecology, biology, botany, earth sciences agriculture and health sciences.
Primary and secondary school education in Australia is delivered and regulated by the states and territories, and their departments have policies to prevent partnerships with harmful industries. These policies acknowledge children’s vulnerability to corporate influence, but only Victoria, the ACT and more recently Queensland have explicitly identified weapons and armaments manufacturers as inappropriate partners for schools. The federal and some state branches of the Australian Education Union are also proposing specific resolutions condemning the Subs in Schools program and weapons company sponsorship.
A report by STEM educators with the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering urges a government-wide systemic expansion and diversification of STEM education at every level, citing agriculture, climate change mitigation and adaption as key areas of need. But where are the programs to encourage students to go into these areas of STEM? Where they exist, their funding is far outpaced by military-orientated STEM programs.
Which brings us back to AUKUS. The federal government recently announced a $128.5 million plan to provide 400 additional places in STEM courses to serve the requirements of the AUKUS security arrangement. The agreement, made in secret, unscrutinised by parliament and of no demonstrable benefit to the Australian people, is now diverting money away from education that serves critical human needs.
But there are some rays of hope.
In the United Kingdom, where BAE Systems, Raytheon, Leonardo, Rolls-Royce and others run secondary school programs and where students as young as sixteen are directly recruited into the armed forces, the Quakers have produced a guide called ‘Responding to Military Engagement in Schools’. Along with groups like Demilitarise Education, ForcesWatch and Campaign Against the Arms Trade, they provide support for schools to resist militarism and the glorification of war, and to become Schools for Peace.
Here, MAPW’s report has helped spawn the group Teachers for Peace, who are working with educators to resist the domination of weapons companies in STEM and build programs for peaceful and positive STEM activities. Wage Peace—Disrupt War also campaigns to ‘demilitarise education’ and ‘get weapons companies out of schools’. In October 2023, a year-long campaign against RMIT University’s research partnership with Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems, finally achieved its goal. Working with the BDS movement and Free Palestine, two activists worked hard to enlighten students and staff about the war crimes carried out with Elbit systems in Palestine, as well as on the US–Mexican border. RMIT announced it would no longer partner with Elbit.
Let’s hope such examples provide inspiration to others to also break the chain of weapons-company influence on government and education in STEM programs. Let STEM become a much broader tool for positive peace—the design and engineering of sustainable solutions for our multiply stressed and ever more dangerous world.