Topic: Loren B. Thompson

U.S. Defense Department officials didn't make any contingency plans in case the threat of $500 billion in automatic cuts came to pass, analysts said.

If you think having three surface warfare officers in a row at the helm of the U.S. Navy has created a bias in favor of surface combatants, then you must not be paying attention to news about naval shipbuilding.

It is now three months since the U.S. Air Force shocked the world by awarding the contract for its next-generation aerial-refueling tanker to Northrop Grumman and to the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co., the European parent of Airbus.

Imagine that in 1902, Secretary of War Elihu Root had told U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt the difficulty of suppressing the Philippine Insurrection proved future weapons would need to be useful in conducting irregular warfare. I know, you aren't so clear on what the Philippine Insurrection was. But it was a big deal at the time: 130,000 U.S. troops were deployed in a multiyear counterinsurgency campaign, and more than 4,000 of them died. U.S. forces tortured prisoners. Insurgents committed atrocities. Very messy.

The conventional wisdom about American politics is that the nation has become deeply polarized since the Vietnam War, with voters increasingly crowding to opposite extremes of the political spectrum.

There is no overwhelming threat around which to organize our defense preparations, despite U.S. attempts to make the global war on terrorism that crusade.

If you want to understand how former allies end up going to war -- or former lovers end up getting divorced -- take a look at how Boeing and the U.S. Air Force are treating each other in their angry confrontation over the award of a next-generation tanker program to Northrop Grumman.

Remember the Reagan Revolution? It's over. For 30 years the political system has been dismantling the burden of taxes and regulations imposed on the economy by the New Deal.

On July 9, 1861, as the Union mobilized to fight the Confederacy, The New York Times editorialized that the U.S. War Department was too corrupt to equip soldiers successfully: "It would seem as if some potent Spirit of Evil has cast its incurable curse upon the War Department of this country. ... In it financial frauds, wrongs, and robberies have been concocted on a scale so gigantic that all the frauds and defalcations of the past have been forgotten."

What's wrong with this picture? The U.S. Air Force plans to spend more than $100 billion to buy 2,000 new fighters, but it can't find the money to upgrade a handful of radar planes with better technology for tracking insurgents -- even though it has already spent $1 billion to develop the new technology it now says it can't afford to install.