In 1969 John Kenneth Galbraith penned a piece for the New York Times titled The Big Defense Firms Are Really Public Firms and Should be Nationalized arguing, among other things, that it was folly for defense contractors to claim that they were private corporations.
Do you think that the distinction between growth at the frontier and catch up growth is always so well defined? So if you think about China, they seem to have innovations: how quickly they can build things; they have an autocratic government, but they’ve managed to keep reasonable stability and the public on board. Isn’t that kind of innovation like a technological innovation and their growth in a way is at some other frontier rather than being just catch up?
Update on the readiness crisis. Electronic warfare. Jedi cloud computing contract. Aviation crisis. Revolving door stats.
Federal prosecutors say the three men — all executives connected to defense contractor Anham FZCO based in the United Arab Emirates — were awarded an $8 billion contract to provide supplies and food to American troops in Afghanistan in 2012.
Cost Operational Effectiveness Analyses (COEA). The COEA done for the major Army projects are of spotty quality and in some cases non-existent. What should be […]
The book How Google Works, by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, offers many insights in a post-industrial (or post-corporate) world. I’ll discuss the book’s ideas […]
It is interesting how fragile the DOD is with respect to small changes in the budget plans. We find strong push-back from defense insiders that modest cuts will lead to large risks. Either you scale back military operations or you cut investment in new systems …
One tip-off is the amount of Ocasio-Cortez’s “accounting errors” is far bigger than the actual Pentagon spending from 1998 to 2015, which was $8.5 trillion. In fact, it’s also far bigger than the amount the government has spent on national security since 1940 and, in all likelihood, in the nation’s history.
When the company officials had been asked to leave the room, the admiral in charge of shipbuilding told Warner the contractor’s demand for an extra $10‐million on the spot and $4‐million soon afterward was reasonable and ought to be paid. But then a ruddy, expensively but conservatively dressed civilian interrupted. “Admiral,” he said, “over my dead body will you reform that contract and give them $10‐million. This is the goddamnedest thing I ever heard of, a contractor coming in and throwing a piece of paper on the table and saying that to the Navy.”
Report confirms DOD will investigate SOCOM professionalism and ethics. Imagine This: F-35 Stealth Fighters Armed with Lasers. Yeah imagine that. “The first airborne tests are […]
Here’s my question to Arnold Kling: I was wondering if you could comment on the fact that you’ll never see papers or courses in defense […]
Think about that for a second. When there is a 90% that companies are bad, and a 90% accuracy rate being able to identify them, I still have a 50% hit rate of being right. So someone with 90% accuracy is no better than flipping a coin.
In my opinion the present situation in this regard is worse than I have ever seen it. Further, I predict that the way the present bureaucracy would implement your [Packard’s] proposed directive will make matters still worse.
Arms manufacturers are spending millions of pounds a year promoting their brands in Britain’s schools, the Observer has learned… BAE Systems visited 420 schools across the UK last year and prepared lesson plans for children as young as seven.
“It’s a typical mistake made by an empire,” Putin said. “An empire always thinks that it’s so powerful that it can afford some mistakes and extra costs. But mistakes and costs multiply, and a moment comes when they become overwhelming in both security and economic spheres.”
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