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Flying Blind “B-21 is being acquired through nontraditional means, using the Air Force’s Rapid Capability Office instead of a standard dedicated program office, as is more typical. Although this approach may improve the speed and ease of the acquisition, Congress has relatively little experience overseeing rapid acquisitions processes. At $3 billion a year, this […] “No One Noticed—Paraders Out of the Past” in The Nation, April 6, 1992 from ”The Passion of the Rumsfeld” in Harper’s Magazine, May 2004
Leif Parsons This essay originally appeared in HuffPost on August 6, 2013. I bring it back today to mark the 75th anniversary. What is left to say about Hiroshima on this anniversary? Much, of course. So far we have mostly covered the window dressing that came with victory and has lasted for three generations after […]
Dora-Mittelbau, April 1945
in memory of Yves Béon, 1925-2011, and Guido Zembsch-Schreve, 1916-2003 Spring semester’s end marks my retirement from teaching after 20 years at Johns Hopkins. Now the old unsolved mystery: Where does the time go? I will miss the students, some more than others. (The faculty are already remembered like odd ducks from childhood. It is highly possible that I have become one, too.) They brought […] A report that Google is hedging on its pledge to stop participating in Project Maven, the military program to adopt artificial intelligence for drone targeting, brings to mind Hans Bethe’s 1995 plea to scientists and engineers developing new nuclear weapons: “cease and desist.” For the old lion of Los Alamos, there was only one way […] After three generations of futile efforts to develop reliable defenses against ICBM’s, tracing back to the Nike, Patriot, and Sprint programs of the 1950’s and 60’s and warped by Ronald Reagan’s science fictional “Star Wars” scheme, the Trump administration will today pick up the eternal torch. The chimera of anti-missile weaponry remains the most […] |