Author Archives: Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D
Combat Rescue Helicopter: Air Force Backing Away From Its Bravest Warfighters After a dozen years of continuous combat in Southwest Asia, the term “warfighter” is in danger of being devalued by our political culture. In our eagerness to honor all those who serve, we make it sound like everybody who dons [Read More...]
How To Cut Federal Spending By A Trillion Dollars — Without Sequestration Or Serious Hardship (From Forbes) Last week the Congressional Budget Office issued a 300-page compendium of options for cutting the budget deficit. Adopting a handful of these options would enable the government to forgo the destructive consequences of sequestration while permanently reducing federal outlays. Among [Read More...]
The Bad News From Dubai: Ex-Im Critics Undermine U.S. Jobs At Air Show Amidst the smashing success of Boeing’s products at the Dubai air show this week — orders for 255 of its planes were announced the first day — a sour note has emerged. The head of the U.S.-based Air Line Pilots [Read More...]
Boeing Launches Search For 777x Airliner’s New Home (From Forbes) When machinists in Seattle rejected a proposed contract extension and modification crucial to securing production of Boeing’s new 777X widebody airliner, the company didn’t lose any time starting the search for alternative sites. In fact, company executives were on the [Read More...]
Next-Gen Jammer: Watchdog Agency Sides With BAE Systems, Tells Navy To Take Another Look (From Forbes) The Government Accountability Office yesterday handed BAE Systems a partial victory in its protest of a Navy contract award to Raytheon for development of the Next Generation Jammer. BAE and Northrop Grumman headed the two industry teams that lost when [Read More...]
Obamacare: Contractors Didn’t Cause The Problems Politicians love to blame contractors when things go wrong. It’s so much easier than accepting responsibility for government mistakes. So we shouldn’t be surprised that companies involved in building the HealthCare.gov web-site supporting Obamacare have been raked over the coals [Read More...]
Lockheed Martin Emerging As Dominant Player In Federal Cybersecurity Market (From Forbes) Six years after George W. Bush signed presidential directives sparking a prolonged surge in federal spending on cybersecurity, a clear leader is emerging among the dozens of tech companies that poured into the field. Lockheed Martin, the government’s top military [Read More...]
The Opportunity Costs Of Pentagon Overhead And Inefficiency Are Huge Imagine that you discovered a federal agency was wasting enough money each year to send one million students to M.I.T. Not just the money needed to cover their tuition, but room and board too. Would you be outraged? Well there [Read More...]
Sequestration Is A Disaster; Here’s A Smarter Way To Save Money (From Forbes) The sequestration provisions of the 2011 Budget Control Act are having a disastrous impact on federal programs. Military readiness has plummeted, life-saving research has been canceled, and the FBI can’t find money to train its agents. But sequestration isn’t doing [Read More...]
Boeing Eyes Long Beach C-17 Plant For 777X Airliner Production (From Forbes) Only seven weeks after announcing that it will complete production of the C-17 airlifter at its Long Beach plant in 2015, the Boeing Company is contemplating a new role for the 5,000 workers at the site — assembling the company’s [Read More...]