Author Archives: Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D

May 1, 2006Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D

Army Equipment After Iraq Research Study Operations in Iraq have placed the heaviest burden on the active and reserve components of the U.S. Army. While most attention has rightly focused on the war’s impact on our men and women in uniform, this report examines [Read More...]

April 28, 2006Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D

Modernization Priorities for the Army and Air Force Remarks to the Heritage Foundation My task in the next ten minutes is to describe the most pressing modernization needs of the Army and the Air Force. Since Baker Spring is discussing strategic forces, I will confine my comments to [Read More...]

April 21, 2006Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D

Army Force Protection: Helicopters Can’t Wait Issue Brief Next week the Lexington Institute and the Center for American Progress will release a study of Army equipment needs after Iraq. The study describes how warfighting systems have been worn out by three years of operations, and offers [Read More...]

April 13, 2006Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D

LIFT Issue Brief The U.S. military needs a lift. Airlift that is, and lots of it. The world has changed in ways that make the force more dependent on airlift than it ever was during the Cold War. First, global tensions [Read More...]

March 30, 2006Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D

Lucent’s Last Act Reflects Tech-Security Dilemma Issue Brief When Lucent Technologies is absorbed into France’s Alcatel later this year, the curtain will fall on the greatest technology enterprise in American history. Lucent is the successor to the old Western Electric Company that supplied equipment to the [Read More...]

March 23, 2006Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D

Military Acquisition: The Process is the Problem Issue Brief It seems defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld got a chance to do some reading over the holidays, because on his first day back at work he sent military leaders one of his signature “snowflake” memo’s alerting them to an [Read More...]

March 16, 2006Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D

The Impact of Iraq on Army Equipment Remarks at the Center for American Progress I’d like to speak for a few minutes today about the impact that the war in Iraq is having on the Army’s arsenal of weapons and other warfighting equipment. The reason I am [Read More...]

March 14, 2006Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D

Technology Lessons from Iraq Issue Brief Is it possible that military transformation made defeat more likely in Iraq? That’s a heretical idea in the doctrinal madrassa that is Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, where every operational innovation is reflexively credited to the farsightedness of transformationists. However, [Read More...]

March 7, 2006Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D

Pentagon Incompetence Hastens U.S. Industrial Decline Issue Brief If you think the controversy over who should run America’s ports is just about terrorism, then you haven’t seen U.S. trade statistics recently. The “arsenal of democracy” — that vast manufacturing complex that made America unstoppable in World [Read More...]

March 2, 2006Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D

Navy Relevance Hinges on Networks Issue Brief With a small band of insurgents threatening to bog down U.S. forces in Iraq indefinitely, some people are beginning to wonder what the point of military transformation was supposed to be. It’s a reasonable question, because countries that [Read More...]