About: Michael Lowrey

Coming up with new ways of wasting money is a long-standing Pentagon tradition. Two cases getting national press attention: • The Littoral Combat Ships. Bloomberg describes problems with the Navy’s new types of ship that’s suppose to be able to do, well, everything, in coastal waters: U.S. Navy leaders were warned last year that aContinue Reading

Archaeological evidence suggests that the Vikings of old probably didn’t have horns attached to their helmets. So where does this notion come from? Blame the composer Richard Wagner. Or to be more exact, as The Economist explains, Wagner’s costume designer, Professor Carl Emil Doepler, who came up with the concept for the first Bayreuth productionContinue Reading

Tim Kane has an interesting piece in the Washington Post, arguing that the Pentagon in general and the Army in particular does a poor job of managing people: The Army has bled talent for decades, a consequence of a deeply dysfunctional organization that poorly matches jobs with talent and doesn’t trust its officers to makeContinue Reading

And that would be a problem. As Flightglobal reports: The Pentagon’s decision to reduce the performance specifications for the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will have a significant operational impact, a number of highly experienced fighter pilots consulted by Flightglobal concur. But the careful development of tactics and disciplined employment of the jet mayContinue Reading

The minesweeper USS Guardian went aground on Jan. 17 on Tubbataha Reef in the Sulu Sea while en route from Subic Bay in the Philippines to Indonesia. The damage is so severe that the vessel will have to be broken up reports Defense News. Now how does a warship run aground in the age ofContinue Reading

Julie, what went down last night in Charlotte is far worse than you ever imagined. Charlotte City Council voted in secret to give the Carolina Panthers $125 million towards stadium upgrades. To do this, they decided to double the city’s (county’s?) prepared food tax, again via a vote in closed session. So essentially Charlotte hasContinue Reading

Back apparently from the dead is the idea of Mars Sample Return. As The Space Review explains: You can be forgiven if you missed it, because NASA was careful not to use the words “Mars Sample Return” in their press release. Instead, they announced that they are going to build another rover, based on theContinue Reading

To Congress, including Republicans. Funding to help develop spacecraft in a public-private partnership with NASA to ferry crew to and from the International Space Station remains well below levels the Obama Administration has requested. Without these new spacecraft, the U.S. will have to continue paying the Russians to fly American astronauts to the space station.Continue Reading