Author Archives: Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D
End Of Empire (IV) From Barry Eichengreen’s essay on the declining appeal of the dollar as a global reserve currency in the September issue of Foreign Affairs:
It would be no surprise if the dysfunctionality of U.S. financial markets diminished the appetite of central [Read More...]
Missile Defense: No Third Site, So What Now? Sometime this autumn the Obama Administration will announce it is abandoning plans to build a missile-defense complex in Eastern Europe. Since the administration has repeatedly warned of the danger posed by Iran’s development of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, the [Read More...]
Gene Industry Debate Raises Big Security Concerns In 1918, a huge catastrophe culminated in the loss of 50 million lives. No, I’m not referring to World War One, I’m talking about the Spanish influenza pandemic, which claimed more lives in one year than the war did in [Read More...]
Gates Signals F-35 Fighter Will Be Administration Priority Issue Brief
Defense secretary Robert Gates has finally found a weapons system he likes. After canceling or cutting back over a dozen major programs in April — and setting the stage for additional cuts in the fiscal 2011 budget submission [Read More...]
Gates Got It Right: F-35 Extra Engine Unneeded Despite criticism from President Obama and defense secretary Robert Gates, congressional backers of an extra engine for the F-35 joint strike fighter are preparing to force the program on the Pentagon. The F-35 is a single-engine jet aircraft that will [Read More...]
Army Truck Award Looks Very Suspicious In late August, with little fanfare, an obscure Army buying command awarded a five-year contract to Oshkosh Corp. to build up to 23,000 trucks under a program called the Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles (FMTV). It was a very big [Read More...]
Black Friday: Airbus Gets The Bad News About Subsidies Today the World Trade Organization will tell Airbus what everybody already knew: launch subsidies from friendly governments give it an unfair advantage in competing with its American counterpart, Boeing. Airbus will respond with three arguments: (1) Boeing gets subsidies too, [Read More...]
Gates Not Happy About Bloomberg Budget Story Pentagon sources say that defense secretary Robert Gates was quite unhappy about Tony Capaccio’s budget story carried by Bloomberg Business News on Wednesday of this week. The story revealed details of the Air Force’s proposed 2011-2015 budget request, including proposed [Read More...]
Failure To Use Radar Planes Against Taliban Is Foolish Issue Brief
U.S. commanders in Afghanistan are reporting worrisome advances in the battlefield performance of Taliban insurgents. Enemy discipline and morale seem to be improving, encouraged no doubt by the inability of the relatively small NATO force to be everywhere [Read More...]
Joint Radio Kill: “Game Over” For Net-Centric Warfare Bloomberg Business News reported yesterday that the Air Force and Navy want to kill their respective versions of the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS, or “Jitters”). Reporter Tony Capaccio is the gold standard for accuracy on such stories, so if [Read More...]