Author Archives: Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D
NCADE: Missile Defense Agency Neglects Its Most Affordable Option
The Missile Defense Agency faces some big challenges as it adjusts its investment agenda to the priorities of the Obama Administration. First, it has been directed to put more emphasis on interception of hostile missiles early in their trajectories, but [Read More...]
F-35 Alternate Engine Problems Delay Deliveries, Drive Up Costs
Andrea Shalal-Esa of Reuters reported this week that deliveries of the alternate engine being developed by General Electric and Rolls Royce for the F-35 joint strike fighter will be delayed by a year. Repeated testing failures are forcing the engine [Read More...]
Northrop Expert Rebuts Lexington Tanker Brief
Northrop Grumman sent us the following rebuttal to my tanker brief of November 9, in which I explained why Boeing believes the recent World Trade Organization finding on commercial-transport subsidies is relevant to the Air Force’s tanker competition. The rebuttal [Read More...]
Five Ways Pentagon Insourcing Will Backfire
On April 8, two days after defense secretary Robert Gates proposed huge cuts to military investment programs, the Pentagon’s comptroller signaled where all the money saved will end up going. It will go to paying for more bureaucrats — 33,000 [Read More...]
C-5 Galaxy Likely To Remain Useful In Airlift Role Beyond 2040
December 17 will mark the 40th anniversary of the day in 1969 when the first C-5 Galaxy cargo plane was delivered to the U.S. Air Force. In some quarters that milestone might be cause for celebration, but in the current [Read More...]
Tanker Wars: Why Boeing Thinks Subsidies Matter
Issue Brief
Air Force’s plan to conduct an expeditious re-competition of its future tanker program has run into trouble. An initial award was overturned when the Government Accountability Office found major irregularities in the way proposals by Boeing and Northrop [Read More...]
Conflict-Of-Interest Chaos Could Produce New Abuses
As I noted in a posting on October 30, the Obama Administration is enforcing tighter conflict-of-interest standards on who may provide technical assistance to the federal government. The new rules focus in particular on what role (if any) companies that [Read More...]
More Ashore: Navy’s Tenth Fleet Prepares To Patrol Cyber Space
If you think an Aegis radar in a cornfield is odd (see Rebecca Grant’s preceding post), how about a whole fleet with no ships? That’s what the Navy’s Tenth Fleet is — a virtual warfighting formation being stood up as [Read More...]
FMTV: How The Army Erred
InsideDefense.com reported on November 2 that the program executive officer for the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) program had cast doubt on part of an issue brief I wrote concerning a recent Army truck award. The offending passage was actually [Read More...]
Tanker Wars: Pentagon Must Have A Policy On Illegal Subsidies
The Pentagon’s revised strategy for selecting a next-generation tanker looks likely to become a price shootout. The performance features of the competing planes will be compared using a series of yes-no mandatory requirements in which thresholds are either met or [Read More...]