For years, Sen. John McCain has been ripping the Pentagon over its sweetheart deals with Boeing. Now, the Senator is going after the biggest deal of all — the $127 billion Future Combat Systems initiative. Future Combat Systems, or FCS, is the most complex, most expensive upgrade the American military as ever tried. It calls […]
From the monthly archives:
January 2005
As most regular readers know, I’ve been extremely skeptical about American involvement in Iraq. The White House’s justification for going to war always seemed shaky to me; its execution, nearly as wobbly. But the sight of so many Iraqis risking their lives to vote yesterday, that was beyond inspirational. And I have to give the […]
We’ve known for a while now that the “two computer disks that supposedly disappeared last summer, prompting a virtual shutdown of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in fact never existed.” But what’s interesting in this AP rpeort is that the Department of Energy has gone ahead and decided to slash the lab’s management anyway. In […]
There were a couple of anti-IED technologies I didn’t get to mention in my recent Wired News piece. One of ‘em comes from Navy-funded engineers at Advanced Ceramics Research in Tuscon, Arizona. They’re outfitting their Silver Fox unmanned plane with a radio frequency emitter. The signal returns when the wave encounters a detonation wire. And […]
Chief Warrant Officer Gordon Cimoli served 10 months in Iraq flying a Black Hawk helicopter. And, as you can imagine, he has stack of stories that illustrate the incredible strain that these pilots undergo. Here are a couple of excerpts from his diaries… We were descended for landing and we found that we couldn’t see […]
