Author Archives: Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D
Four Budget Practices That Are Destroying America’s Defenses (From Forbes) Congress has become so absorbed in internecine political struggles that it has lost sight of how distortions in the budget process are damaging the nation’s defense posture. Sequestration, congressionally-imposed inflexibility, continuing resolutions and the looming specter of debt default all [Read More...]
Raytheon Scores Another Breakthrough Victory In Radar Competition (From Forbes) Just about the toughest thing that a military contractor can do in a defense downturn is take market share from competitors, but that’s what Raytheon seems to be doing. In July, it beat incumbent Northrop Grumman in a competition to [Read More...]
Richly Valued CACI Acquisition Reflects Risks In Defense Deals (From Forbes) On Wednesday, federal IT provider CACI International disclosed it was paying $820 million to acquire a rollup of several companies involved in supplying support to the intelligence community. The company being acquired is called Six3 Systems, and it was founded [Read More...]
What Boeing Must Do To Maintain Its Lead In Defense (From Forbes) The Boeing Company generates over a third of its revenues and returns from defense operations. Combining commercial and defense aerospace operations in the same enterprise has proven beneficial to shareholders, because the two market segments follow different rhythms and that [Read More...]
Defense Companies Warn Thousands Of Layoffs Imminent Due To Shutdown (From Forbes) The partial shutdown of the U.S. government is beginning to generate economic fallout beyond the federal workforce. Defense companies are warning that they will have to begin furloughing thousands of employees next week because without government auditors and inspectors in [Read More...]
Why Fielding Fewer Than Twelve Ballistic Missile Subs Could Be Disastrous For America On October 1, the Capitol Hill weekly Roll Call ran a ridiculous commentary by an anti-nuclear activist arguing that the Navy was seeking a budgetary “bailout” at the expense of its sister services to buy more ballistic-missile submarines than it [Read More...]
Ex-Im Bank Critics Tap Credit While Trying To Deny It To Others Every industrialized country in the world helps offshore customers to obtain financing for exports they wish to purchase. The main agent of such transactions in the United States is the Export-Import Bank, often referred to as Ex-Im. Last year, Ex-Im [Read More...]
Tea Party Budget Tactics Are Hitting The Military Hard (From Forbes) Although Congress passed a last-minute law to assure warfighters would receive their next paychecks promptly on October 15, there are plenty of other ways in which the partial government shutdown will harm active-duty personnel, veterans and their dependents. If this [Read More...]
Secret Army Sensor Plane Is Crucial To Situational Awareness Of Future Force Chances are you’ve never heard of the Army’s EO-5C Airborne Reconnaissance Low planes. Chances are even slimmer you’ve actually seen one. You can find pictures of crew trainers on the internet, but the Army has decided that the sensors on [Read More...]
IR Sensor Makers Fear Export Rules Will Strangle Their Business (From Forbes) There was a time when America so thoroughly dominated the development of cutting-edge technologies that if other countries couldn’t get it here, they couldn’t get it at all. Those days are long gone, but you’d never know it from the [Read More...]