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During Meeting for Worship on October 19th, Science Department Chair Dr. Mosher announced to the community that Lockheed Martin, which operates a plant about a mile and a half from campus, would be invited to speak to the Engineering and Women in STEM clubs the following week. This announcement was shocking for a variety of reasons. Although Lockheed Martin is one of the foremost companies in the aerospace industry and thus provides a unique opportunity for our students, it is also the world’s largest “defense contractor,” supplying weapons to more than 50 countries across the globe.

As a Quaker school, the SPICES are an integral part of our community. One of the most important testimonies is Peace, which has called for opposition to war and violence wherever possible since the earliest days of Quakerism. According to Quaker.org, a website dedicated to educating about the Quaker faith, “All Quakers recognize peace as a worthy ideal, and do our best, guided by our consciences day by day, to make that dream a reality.” Given Quakerism’s historical commitment to Peace and our own school conventions, it’s alarming that we would invite a corporation whose main business is so diametrically opposed to this testimony to speak to our students. Per the revised 2022-23 Student & Family Handbook, “Military attire is not permitted, including clothing and accessories that display military logos or patches from military installations and the camouflage pattern using any color palette.” Given this prohibition, the decision to invite the largest weapons manufacturer in the world to speak to our students is rather ironic. If we are not even allowed to wear camouflage to school because of its association with the military, why is a corporation that makes billions of dollars selling weapons to governments around the world any less problematic?

All of this could be justification enough to cancel the visit, but the reality of the situation is far worse. Lockheed Martin states on its website that it “has been a committed partner to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia since 1965.” Quoting directly from a report filed by Investors for Social Justice to the Securities and Exchange Commission:

Lockheed Martin has held longstanding relationships with Saudi Arabia, and is currently supporting more than $28 billion in integrated air and missile defense, combat ships, tactical aircraft, and other programs. In June 2016, civil society groups filed a complaint with the U.S. National Contact Point for Responsible Business Conduct against Lockheed Martin for failing to carry out human rights due diligence in relation to supplying military equipment to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen, in violation of the OECD Guidelines. Gross human rights violations, including war crimes, have been committed throughout the conflict, and Lockheed Martin has been named as an integral company in supplying arms and services to the Saudi Arabia/UAE-led coalition. Lockheed Martin weaponry was notably linked to a widely condemned school bus attack in 2018 that resulted in the deaths of dozens of children.

Similarly, Lockheed Martin has provided weaponry such as F-16 fighter jets, Longbow Hellfire missiles, and AH-64 Apache Longbow helicopter parts to the Israeli military, whose occupation of Palestine has displaced over 1 million people and is recognized by the UN as an apartheid. This occupation and apartheid has been connected to “inhumane acts, arbitrary and extra-judicial killings, torture, the denial of fundamental rights, an abysmal child mortality rate, collective punishment, an abusive military court system, and home demolitions,” and is being investigated for crimes against humanity. Lockheed Martin weapons have been used repeatedly by the Israeli military on densely populated civilian areas, resulting in thousands of civilian casualties, large groups of them children, potentially amounting to war crimes. Lockheed Martin played a critical role in the May 2021 attacks on Gaza, where apparent war crimes were committed, including the deaths of at least 129 civilians, of whom 66 were children.

Lockheed Martin is also a participant in around $40 billion worth of nuclear weapons contracts, something that threatens the future of life on Earth as a whole. Even if the Peace testimony was not strong enough grounds to prevent this visit from happening, basic human decency should, at least in theory, have us take a pause and consider the ramifications of inviting a company responsible for that much death and destruction to speak in our school. This is a small sample of the harm Lockheed Martin has caused throughout the world, and it’s enough to make the stomach turn with anger.

The goal of promoting the STEM field is admirable, especially for people who have historically been excluded from it. However, this goal should neither require us to sacrifice the tenets that are core to our identity as a Quaker school nor our basic morality. No number of people who take up careers in STEM will ever be worth the countless innocent lives, including children, that have been ended by weapons developed and manufactured by Lockheed Martin. There are many organizations that can provide similarly engaging conversations and opportunities to our students without the ethical baggage that Lockheed Martin carries.

Even though the visit still continued as scheduled, it nevertheless provides an opportunity for our community to decide what values are truly important to us. If we’re going to profess and promote our school’s Quaker beliefs, we should at least attempt to follow one that has been core to Quaker identity for its entire history.

Featured image by Markus Winkler on Unsplash