Author Archives: Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D
Multiyear Procurements Have Made Military Acquisition More Efficient The Pentagon’s baroque process for buying weapons needs to be streamlined. Vast amounts of money are wasted on overhead functions that add nothing to the value of the combat systems being acquired. On the other hand, the Department of Defense [Read More...]
McBee Influence Empire Expands Reach With New Digital Platform Washington’s fastest-growing purveyor of corporate advisory services launched a new front in the struggle for political influence last week. At a party for several hundred of its closest friends on the top floor of a gleaming office tower, McBee Strategic [Read More...]
Why A Boeing-Lockheed Martin Bomber Team Will Be Hard To Beat (From Forbes) Last week, Boeing and Lockheed Martin announced they would team to compete for the Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B), the first new heavy bomber the Air Force has developed in 30 years. The announcement sets up a David versus Goliath [Read More...]
Ex-Im Bank Produces Billion-Dollar Profit, Making Critics Look Foolish This week the federal government’s Export-Import Bank once again discredited the complaints of its most strident critics by sending a billion dollars it didn’t need to the U.S. Treasury. The money was left over from fees it charges users of [Read More...]
The Takeaway From AUSA The annual exposition hosted at Washington’s convention center by the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) is widely considered to be the best run conference of any military service or defense association. It’s not just that AUSA does such [Read More...]
Pentagon Needs To Avoid Delays In Delivering Revolutionary Manpack Radios To Soldiers The Obama Administration has successfully transitioned a vital tactical-communications effort it inherited from centralized management to service-led development and fielding. Originally called the Joint Tactical Radio System, the program was conceived to deliver the benefits of internet-protocol communications and software-defined [Read More...]
The Army’s Vision Of A Networked Force Is Rapidly Becoming Reality (From Forbes) After more than a decade of development, the U.S. Army has begun fielding a robust wireless network that will connect soldiers from the top of the command structure to the squad level. The two key transport programs in this revolutionary [Read More...]
Keeping The Virginia-Class Attack Sub On Track Should Be A Top Congressional Priority When trouble breaks out in places like the Middle East, the media rush to describe what U.S. forces are available nearby to respond. However, one type of combat system is often left out of the coverage: the nuclear-powered attack subs [Read More...]
The Army Can’t Decide What It Wants From Its Armored-Vehicle Industrial Base If you’re figuring out where to place your bets in the defense market over the next few years, you might want to skip reading the ground maneuver section of the 2014 Army Equipment Modernization Plan. It says that brigade combat [Read More...]
With The Government Out Of Money, Who Won’t Be Paid? Contrary to popular belief, October 17 is not the day that the federal government exhausts its authority to borrow. That happened in May. What happens on October 17 is that the Treasury runs out of options (“extraordinary measures”) for avoiding [Read More...]