6 Ways LA's Defense Industry Soared in the Years Since 9/11

Sarah Favot

Favot is an award-winning journalist and adjunct instructor at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She previously was an investigative and data reporter at national education news site The 74 and local news site LA School Report. She's also worked at the Los Angeles Daily News. She was a Livingston Award finalist in 2011 and holds a Master's degree in journalism from Boston University and BA from the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.

6 Ways LA's Defense Industry Soared in the Years Since 9/11

In the decade after the Twin Towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001 and the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, military spending skyrocketed, at one point eating up 20% of government spending.

Although it has since fallen, its legacy can still be felt in Southern California where the military drone was born.

Some of the nation's largest military contractors – Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon and Aerojet Rocketdyne – all have a large presence in Los Angeles County.


In fiscal year 2020, the United States spent $714 billion on national defense, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a figure that registered as over 10% of total federal spending, according to an analysis by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

Many of those dollars poured into Southern California where the defense and aerospace industry have a strong hold. The companies have secured hundreds of millions in military contracts to provide missiles, drones and other technologies to help the U.S. military fight terrorism.

L.A. County has more than 50,000 employed in the aerospace and defense industry, according to the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation.

Here are six ways companies in Southern California have benefited from the surge in defense spending:

1. Lockheed Martin acquired El Segundo-based Aerojet Rocketdyne

Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, which was headquartered in Burbank for decades before moving to Maryland, reached an acquisition deal worth $4.4 billion in December for El Segundo-based Aerojet Rocketdyne. The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice have yet to sign off on the deal.

Aerojet Rocketdyne, known for developing and manufacturing rocket motors for missiles like the Tomahawk, Javelin, Patriot and Stinger, generated $2.1 billion in sales in 2020.

2. Lockheed's Palmdale built NASA's supersonic X-plane

In 2018, Lockheed secured a $247.5 million contract to build NASA a supersonic X-plane, which is being built at Lockheed's Palmdale facility Skunk Works. In 2020, the Palmdale outpost was awarded a $50 million contract from the U.S. Air Force to upgrade the Dragon Lady, a single-jet engine, high altitude reconnaissance aircraft.

Lockheed, the world's largest defense contractor, had net sales in 2020 of $65.4 billion.

3. Part of Northrop Grumman remains in L.A. County

Northrop Grumman's worldwide headquarters were in Los Angeles until it moved in 2010 to Virginia to be closer to its military customers, but its Aeronautics Systems division is headquartered in Palmdale.

One of the world's largest weapons manufacturers and military technology providers, it brought in $36.8 billion in revenue in 2020 up from $30.1 billion two years before.

From 2000 to 2001, sales increased 78% to $13.6 billion in 2001 when it acquired three companies.

4. Raytheon expands its El Segundo campus

Aerospace giant Raytheon Technologies was formed in 2020 after a merger of United Technologies and Raytheon Co. In July, it secured a $320 million contract for Stinger missile production for the U.S. Army. In 2021, it expects between $63.4 billion to $65.4 billion in sales.

Raytheon's 16-building El Segundo campus, which employs about 6,000 people, develops products that include radar systems, sensors and electronic warfare technologies. Last summer it planned to hire more than 300 workers.

5. Military drones were born in Southern California post-9/11

Simi Valley-based AeroVironment was the beneficiary of contracts to supply the devices to the military and grew into a publicly traded defense contractor and is now one of the world's largest drone manufacturers.

In 2021, AeroVironment expects to generate between $390 million and $410 million in revenue.

The Defense Department will spend about $7.5 billion in 2021 for a variety of robotic platforms and related technologies, including drones.

6. Defense stocks have also surged since 2001

The Intercept found that if you purchased $10,000 of stock before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan divided among top defense contractors, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics, it would be worth $97,295, outperforming the stock market overall by 58%.

Northrop Grumman's stock alone jumped 1,196.14%.

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'Open Letter' Proposing 6-Month AI Moratorium Continues to Muddy the Waters Around the Technology

Lon Harris
Lon Harris is a contributor to dot.LA. His work has also appeared on ScreenJunkies, RottenTomatoes and Inside Streaming.
'Open Letter' Proposing 6-Month AI Moratorium Continues to Muddy the Waters Around the Technology
Evan Xie

AI continues to dominate the news – not just within the world of technology, but mainstream news sources at this point – and the stories have entered a by-now familiar cycle. A wave of exciting new developments, releases and viral apps is followed by a flood of alarm bells and concerned op-eds, wondering out loud whether or not things are moving too fast for humanity’s own good.

With OpenAI and Microsoft’s GPT-4 arriving a few weeks ago to massive enthusiasm, we were overdue for our next hit of jaded cynicism, warning about the potentially dire impact of intuitive chatbots and text-to-image generators.

Sure enough, this week, more than 1,000 signatories released an open letter calling for all AI labs to pause training any new systems more powerful than GPT-4 for six months.

What does the letter say?

The letter calls out a number of familiar concerns for anyone who has been reading up on AI development this past year. On the most immediate and practical level, it cautions that chatbots and automated text generators could potentially eliminate vast swathes of jobs previously filled by humans, while “flood[ing] our information channels with propaganda and untruth.” The letter then continues into full apocalypse mode, warning that “nonhuman minds” could eventually render us obsolete and dominate us, risking “loss of control of our civilization.”

The six-month break, the signatories argue, could be used to jointly develop shared safety protocols around AI design to ensure that they remain “safe beyond a reasonable doubt.” They also suggest that AI developers work in collaboration with policymakers and politicians to develop new laws and regulations around AI and AI research.

The letter was signed by several AI developers and experts, along with tech industry royalty like Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak. TechCrunch does point out that no one from inside OpenAI seems to have signed it, nor Anthropic, a group of former OpenAI developers who left to design their own “safer” chatbots. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman did speak to the Wall Street Journal this week in reference to the letter, noting that the company has not yet started work on GPT-5 and that time for safety tests has always been built into their development process. He referred to the letter’s overall message as “preaching to the choir.”

Critics of the letter

The call for an AI ban was not without critics, though. Journalist and investor Ben Parr noted that the vague language makes it functionally meaningless, without any kind of metrics to gauge how “powerful” an AI system has become or suggestions for how to enforce a global AI ban. He also notes that some signatories, including Musk, are OpenAI and ChatGPT competitors, potentially giving them a personal stake in this fight beyond just concern for the future of civilization. Others, like NBC News reporter Ben Collins, suggested that the dire AI warnings could be a form of dystopian marketing.

On Twitter, entrepreneur Chris Pirillo noted that “the genie is already out of the bottle” in terms of AI development, while physicist and author David Deutsch called out the letter for confusing today’s AI apps with the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) systems still only seen in sci-fi films and TV shows.

Legitimate red flags

Obviously, the letter speaks to relatively universal concerns. It’s easy to imagine why writers would be concerned by, say, BuzzFeed now using AI to write entire articles and not just quizzes. (The website isn’t even using professional writers to collaborate with and copy-edit the software anymore. The new humans helping out “Buzzy the Robot” to compose its articles are non-editorial employees from the client partnership, account management, and product management teams. Hey, it’s just an “experiment,” freelancers!)

But it does once more raise some red flags about the potentially misleading ways that some in the industry and the media are discussing AI, which continues to make these kinds of high-level discussions around the technology more cumbersome and challenging.

A recent viral Twitter thread credited ChatGPT-4 with saving a dog’s life, leading to a lot of breathlessly excited coverage about how computers were already smarter than your neighborhood veterinarian. The owner entered the dog’s symptoms into the chatbot, along with copies of its blood work, and ChatGPT responded with the most common potential ailments. As it turns out, a live human doctor tested the animal for one of the bot’s suggested illnesses and accurately guessed the diagnosis. So the computer is, in a very real sense, a hero.

Still, considering what might be wrong with dogs based on their symptoms isn’t what ChatGPT does best. It’s not a medical or veterinary diagnostic tool, and it doesn’t have a database of dog ailments and treatments at the ready. It’s designed for conversations, and it’s just guessing as to what might be wrong with the animal based on the texts on which it was trained, sentences and phrases that it has seen connected in human writing in the past. In this case, the app guessed correctly, and that’s certainly good news for one special pupper. But there’s no guarantee it would get the right answer every time, or even most of the time. We’ve seen a lot of evidence that ChatGPT is perfectly willing to lie, and can’t actually tell the difference between truth and a lie.

There’s also already a perfectly solid technology that this person could have used to enter a dog’s symptoms and research potential diagnoses and treatments: Google search. A search results page also isn’t guaranteed to come up with the correct answer, but it’s as if not more reliable in this particular use case than ChatGPT-4, at least for now. A quality post on a reliable veterinary website would hopefully contain similar information to the version ChatGPT pulled together, except it would have been vetted and verified by an actual human expert.

Have we seen too many sci-fi movies?

A response published in Time by computer scientist Eliezer Yudkowsky – long considered a thought leader in the development of artificial general intelligence – argues that the open letter doesn’t go far enough. Yudkowsky suggests that we’re currently on a path toward “building a superhumanly smart AI,” which will very likely result in the death of every human being on the planet.

No, really, that’s what he says! The editorial takes some very dramatic turns that feel pulled directly from the realms of science-fiction and fantasy. At one point, he warns: “A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.” This is the actual plot of the 1995 B-movie “Virtuosity,” in which an AI serial killer app (played by Russell Crowe!) designed to help train police officers grows his own biomechanical body and wreaks havoc on the physical world. Thank goodness Denzel Washington is around to stop him.

And, hey, just because AI-fueled nightmares have made their way into classic films, that doesn’t mean they can’t also happen in the real world. But it nonetheless feels like a bit of a leap to go from text-to-image generators and chatbots – no matter how impressive – to computer programs that can grow their own bodies in a lab, then use those bodies to take control of our military and government apparatus. Perhaps there’s a direct line between the experiments being done today and truly conscious, self-aware, thinking machines down the road. But, as Deutsch cautioned in his tweet, it’s important to remember that AI and AGI are not necessarily the exact same thing.

EVGo’s Stock Surges on Better-Than-Expected Q4 Earnings

David Shultz

David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.

EVGo’s Stock Surges on Better-Than-Expected Q4 Earnings
Image from EVGo

Shares of EVgo are up over 20% today after the company released Q4 earnings that outpaced predictions from Wall Street. Analysts had predicted the company would announce a loss per share in the neighborhood of $0.16-$0.18, but the Los Angeles-based electric vehicle charging company reported a much more meager loss, to the tune of just $0.06 per share.

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AgTech Startup Leaf is Helping Farmers Brace for Unexpected Rainfall After Record Year

Samson Amore

Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.

green leaf drawing and rolling farm lands
Evan Xie

At least 50,000 acres in the state of California are estimated to be underwater after a record-breaking year of rainfall. So far this year, California has received nearly 29 inches of rain, with the bulk being dumped on its central and southern coasts. Farmers are already warning that the price of dairy, tomatoes and other vegetables will rise as the weather prevents them from re-seeding their fields.

While no current technology can prevent weather disasters, Leaf Agriculture, a Los Angeles-based startup that launched in 2018, wants to help farmers better manage their properties by leveraging data.

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