As F-35 problems piled up, Lockheed Martin sent top exec on course to ‘deconstruct’ his ‘white male privilege’

Glenn David Woods is vice president of production at Lockheed Martin for the Air Force’s $1.7 trillion F-35 fighter jet program. Last year he was one of 13 senior Lockheed employees sent to a three-day virtual bootcamp to learn how to “deconstruct” his “white male privilege,” according to documents obtained by Christopher Rufo, one of the best-known US campaigners against the teaching of Critical Race Theory.

Woods was joined by other executive-level employees at Lockheed, including Aaron Huckaby, director of global supply chain operations; retired Air Force lieutenant colonel David Starr, director of the Hercules C-130 military transport program; and retired Air Force lieutenant general Bruce Litchfield, vice president of sustainment operations.

The retreat was run by ‘White Men as Full Diversity Partners,’ an organization of white men dedicated to improving “the brand, image, [and] reputation of white men,” according to course documents. The group’s clients include mega-corporations like Intel and Coca-Cola, arms manufacturers like Lockheed, Boeing, and BAE Systems, and Colonial Pipeline, whose fuel lines ran dry due to a hack earlier this month.

The group also held training sessions last year for staff at Sandia National Laboratories, which designs US nuclear weapons.

According to Rufo’s documents, participants in the course were first asked to free-associate connotations that come to mind when they hear the term “white men.” The trainers started them off with a handy list, including: “old,” “racist,” “privileged,” “anti-women,” “angry,” “Aryan Nation,” “KKK,” “Founding fathers,” “guns,” “guilty,” and “can’t jump.”

The trainers, who ask their clients to “work hard to understand” their “white privilege,” “male privilege,” and “heterosexual privilege,” then got to work “deconstructing” that supposed privilege. The Lockheed employees were asked to repeat a series of statements belittling their own race, including: “My culture teaches me to minimize the perspectives and powers of people of other races” and “I can commit acts of terrorism, violence or crime and not have it attributed to my race.”

Similar apologetic mantras on gender and sexuality were then repeated, before participants were asked to read a series of “I am tired” statements from the point of view of women and minorities, like “I’m tired of reverse discrimination claims” and “I’m tired of…the concept that we should be ‘colorblind.’”

Though Lockheed evidently deemed it important that its top-level employees atone for their racial sins, all was not well at the time with the corporation’s primary mission: building fighter jets.

A Pentagon review at the beginning of 2020 found more than 800 software flaws with the F-35, and defects that rendered its gun unusable. Though “most” of these issues were said to have been fixed by last summer, a number of issues that could “injure or kill pilots or otherwise jeopardize the plane’s security” remained. At a current lifetime cost of around $1.7 trillion, it is the most expensive military project ever undertaken, and even with the jet entering service, it already requires costly modernization upgrades.

When the existence of the Critical Race Theory sessions at Sandia National Laboratories leaked last year, Rufo revealed scores of similar training sessions in schools, corporations and government agencies, including the FBI. His work directly led then-President Donald Trump to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the federal government However, President Joe Biden rescinded Trump’s ban on his first day in office in January.

“Today, it’s back to business as usual,” Rufo wrote on Wednesday. “Consultants such as White Men As Full Diversity Partners peddle fashionable racial theories and attach themselves to bloated government contractors such as Lockheed Martin. Presidents change, but for now the woke-industrial complex has no term limit.”

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