Iron Man -The Real Life Origins of Iron Man’s Weapons Maker
The new movie Iron Man is now a bona fide hit. And the defense industry is now attempting to ride the publicity coattails of the movie’s success, despite the anti-military-industrial complex message of the film. Raytheon, for example, is promoting its work on the exoskeleton as the real life equivalent of the Iron Man suit. [At the Army’s behest, there’s another movie-driven exoskeleton media day planned for later in the week - ed.] The company has yet to promote another parallel: Stark Industries, the fictional defense company of Iron Man, is, like Raytheon, a missile maker.
In either case, while most comparisons have been about the Iron Man technology, Space.com explores the real life basis of the main character:
Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr., is based partly on real-life wealthy industrialist Howard Hughes, who lent his eccentric genius and financial resources to oddball U.S. military efforts during World War II and the Cold War.
Hughes built and piloted many of his own aircraft, including the Hughes H-1 Racer that he flew to set a transcontinental airspeed record in 1937.
“He was really doing this sort of thing even before there was a military-industrial complex,” said Alex Roland, military historian at Duke University. He compared Hughes to a “one-man Halliburton empire,” referring to one of the largest defense contractors currently working in Iraq.
The military-industrial complex really took off in the 1950s as the United States sought new weapons and technologies for its growing military, which gave Hughes and other military contractors a market to sell everything from helicopters to satellites.
Yet some Hughes projects contracted by the military simply fizzled. The all-wood “Spruce Goose” remains the largest plane ever built; it was meant to carry troops safely across the Atlantic during World War II, but was completed after the war and flew just once. Another effort that foundered involved building a secret ship that could raise a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine from the bottom of the Pacific.
Such doomed investments were just one symptom of the troubles that plagued the early military-industrial complex. A “revolving door” allowed military officers to join companies that they had just awarded defense contracts to, while private executives went to work for the Pentagon and funneled contracts back to their companies, Roland said. He added that tightened regulations now prevent many of those earlier abuses of the system.
