Author Archives: Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D
White House Seems Blind To How It Can Use The Defense Industry To Advance Its Agenda For all its supposed influence in Washington, the defense industry has a remarkably hard time finding friends. When Dick Cheney was defense secretary, he killed a hundred major weapons programs in a mere four years. Bill Perry told defense executives [Read More...]
Army Is Doing A Great Job On Reset, But Budget Outlook Requires Careful Planning To Preserve Skills The most relentless enemy of U.S. Army combat equipment in the new millennium hasn’t been the Mahdi Army or the Taliban, it has been dust. Insurgent violence waxes and wanes, but the dust is constant. It clogs radiators, contaminates fuel, [Read More...]
The Pentagon’s Tanker Plan Seems Disconnected From The Obama Economic Agenda The United States has lost an average of over a thousand manufacturing jobs every day since the new millennium began. Most of those losses resulted not from productivity gains or other positive trends, but rather from America’s decline as a [Read More...]
Why Defense Demand Will Weaken — And How Military Contractors Can Cope Remarks to the Price Waterhouse Coopers Executive Roundtable
Price Waterhouse Coopers has asked me to speak for the next hour about the defense outlook, which I have interpreted to mean the business outlook for U.S. military contractors over the next [Read More...]
New Security Strategy Means Little Without A Plan To Reverse America’s Economic Decline The Obama Administration has completed its first national security strategy. As in similar documents prepared by previous administrations, the strategy calls for continued efforts to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction, defeat terrorism and promote freedom around the [Read More...]
Boeing Fears Pentagon Is Shaping Tanker Contest To Favor France, Threatens To Pull Out Remember two months ago when Northrop Grumman announced it was pulling out of a partnership with Franco-German aerospace giant EADS to supply the Air Force’s next aerial-refueling tanker? The reason Northrop executives gave for withdrawing was that the government’s request [Read More...]
How Well Will Major Military Contractors Weather The Coming Downturn? You don’t need a defense expert to tell you that domestic demand for military goods and services is likely to weaken in the years ahead. The war in Iraq is ending, the federal government is running a daily budget deficit [Read More...]
Gates Is Right: The Air Force Has Enough C-17s, Other Needs Are More Urgent Over the past few years, Congress has continued to fund production of the C-17 airlifter despite the insistence of Air Force leaders that they had bought all the strategic lift they were likely to need. I supported continued funding for [Read More...]
Shale Gas Brightens Energy Outlook, But Not For Renewables On May 10, the Wall Street Journal published a seminal essay by Rice University scholar Amy Myers Jaffe that explored the huge impact recent breakthroughs in natural-gas development are likely to have on global energy markets. The essay described how [Read More...]
Washington Congressman Norm Dicks Isn’t “Mr. Boeing,” He’s Mr. America Last Sunday, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote an entertaining but one-sided commentary about Representative Norm Dicks (D-WA) that complained Dicks is too close to Boeing. Dicks is so close to Boeing, the writer said, that making him chairman of [Read More...]