But what happened next was an object lesson in the power of a defense contractor to trump the Pentagon's own attempts to set the nation's military spending priorities amid a tough fiscal climate. A team of Northrop lobbyists, packed with former congressional staff and bolstered by hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions, persuaded Congress to demand the drone's continued production and operation.

In so doing, the contractor -- which had revenue of $25.2 billion in 2012, more than 90 percent from the federal treasury -- defied not only the leadership of the Air Force, but also the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey. He told the House Armed Services Committee in February 2012 that the Global Hawk "has fundamentally priced itself out of our ability to afford it." The White House, in two messages to Congress last year, said it "strongly objects" to the lawmakers' demand for additional Global Hawks, but the protests were to no avail.

Northrop's strikingly successful campaign to thwart the government culminated in a letter this May from two influential House lawmakers to newly installed Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, reminding him of the requirement to buy three more of the drone aircraft. The Air Force, they complained to Hagel, had not heeded "clear congressional intent [and] explicit direction to complete the acquisition."

The letter, whose authors -- Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., and Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va. -- received a total of $135,100 from Northrop Grumman's political action committee and employees for their election campaigns and leadership PACs since the beginning of 2009, is emblematic of the political forces that helped stoke a 117 percent jump in the Defense Department's procurement budget from fiscal year 2001 through its peak in fiscal year 2010.

Those forces are now causing some lawmakers to resist the drawdown in military spending that President Obama and some military analysts say is needed to help shrink the federal deficit, projected to be $759 billion this year, and repair the nation's long-term economic health.

Northrop Grumman's political strategy "is entirely predictable -- hire the right people, target the right people, contribute to the right people, then link them together with subcontractors and go for the gold," said Gordon Adams, who served as the senior White House budget official for national security from 1993 to 1997 and has studied defense spending and procurement for more than 30 years.

"Killing a major program, in production, is rather like vampire-killing," Adams added. "You have to drive a silver stake through its heart to make sure it is dead."

The battle over the Global Hawk is one of many in which a major defense contractor and its influential friends in Congress have forced the military to spend money on hardware it doesn't want. An Army proposal in 2011 to stop refurbishing the M1 Abrams tank to save $3 billion was blocked by the same House and Senate defense panels in response to the lobbying muscle of the tank manufacturer, General Dynamics.