Author Archives: Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D
Finding The Enemy: The Pentagon’s Biggest Problem Issue BriefHurricane Katrina seems to have turned all the dire predictions of a fiscal “perfect storm” into literal truth. The added spending required for Gulf Coast cleanup has led some cynics to conclude that the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review [Read More...]
Future Challenges Facing U.S. Air Power American Enterprise Institute speechMy mission today is to describe the challenges facing American air power in the years ahead.
I plan to do that by briefly assessing the major threats to global stability and then focusing on a range [Read More...]
Can the Space Sector Meet Military Goals for Space? Research StudyMilitary transformation as currently interpreted relies heavily on next-generation satellites to provide U.S. forces with advanced reconnaissance, communications, and navigation. However, the performance of the technology and manufacturing bases supporting production of nationalsecurity satellites declined in the years [Read More...]
Spy Satellites: What’s Up with FIA? Issue BriefReporters chasing the story of how a program to build next-generation photo-reconnaissance satellites might be restructured encountered something unexpected last week — a National Reconnaissance Office that was willing to give details. Not a lot of details and [Read More...]
Pentagon Declares War — On The Defense Industry Issue BriefReporters chasing the story of how a program to build next-generation photo-reconnaissance satellites might be restructured encountered something unexpected last week — a National Reconnaissance Office that was willing to give details. Not a lot of details and [Read More...]
Technology Lessons from Katrina Issue BriefMost of the lessons the nation’s pundits seem to be taking away from Hurricane Katrina concern politics, which is what you’d expect from a collection of liberal-arts majors. But engineers looking for less perishable insights are likely to [Read More...]
Fighter Plan Is Latest Evidence Of Military Decay Issue BriefHere’s some good news. The July 8 issue of Physical Review Letters, the journal of the American Physical Society, reports that it may be feasible to build a working time machine. Einstein’s special theory of relativity raised the [Read More...]
Without DDX, The Future Of Warships Is Very Unclear Issue BriefMany of the military’s severest critics don’t actually know much about the military. Like Islamic fundamentalists complaining about America, they prefer to assimilate only those “facts” that fit their biases. Not surprisingly, the facts they do know add [Read More...]
Non-Nuclear Missile Answers New Targeting Needs Issue BriefEarly in his tenure as defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld embraced a handful of new weapon initiatives intended to fill gaps in near-term military capabilities. Possibly the smartest was conversion of four Trident ballistic-missile submarines into carriers of non-nuclear [Read More...]
Is The Terrorist Threat Over-Rated? There’s a concept in psychoanalysis called “parataxic distortion” that describes how traumatic experiences can distort perceptions of subsequent events. The victim is so upset by the trauma that later events are interpreted as a further manifestation of the initial shock, [Read More...]