February 2007 Archives

The US military needs oil -- about 300,000 barrels a day, in fact -- to fight.

Lots of oil comes from the same places where the military actually is fighting today, or may be fighting sometime in the not so distant future (Iran, are you listening?)

Oh, the irony!

It should come as no surprise then that the Department of Defense is giving very serious thought to oil independence. The notion is that the nation -- and particularly the military -- must have assured access to energy, and oil isn't such a safe bet any more.

Champions of this concept are known to include John Young, DOD's director for defense research and enginneering; Ron Sega, under secretary of the air force and -- on Capitol Hill -- New York Republican Representative Steve Israel and Maryland Republican Representative Roscoe Bartlett.

There's been some press about a highly-touted air force experiment using a sythentic base fuel (derived from natural gas pumped in from Oklahoma) to power one of the B-52's eight engines.

But that's just kid-stuff, really.

It's very clear that a much broader vision exists within DOD to really go ... all .. the ... way, and fast.

The vision can be found in this master's thesis by air force Lt Col Michael J. Hornitschek, who originally published the document for the Air University's Center for Strategy and Technology. It has since been republished in the air force Journal of Logistics. It's a thesis, but it often reads like a very good Popular Science article.

Here's a quick excerpt that explains the vision:

"A directed-energy based, highly-automated force, capable of generating a majority of its own power in a distributed fashion from local and environmental sources, could theoretically provide that future. The potential efficiency, environmental ubiquity, universality and convertibility from one form to another of this configuration, make strong arguments that the force of 2050 can be powered almost exclusively by electricity and hydrogen.   

Setting aside conventional paradigms allows one to imagine a conceptual 2050 force. All navy ships might employ nuclear-powered direct-electric drives, lightweight nanoengineered hulls, and directed energy armament. All army and marine corps future combat system land vehicles (many of which are unmanned) are designed for modular upgrades with plug-in electric hybrid or fuel-cell power, lightweight carbon nanotube-based armor and directed energy weaponry. Today's vulnerable tanker fuel trucks are replaced with smaller hybrid or fuel-cell powered trucks carrying stable, solid hydrate-based hydrogen batteries or combat safety-engineered liquid hydrogen containers. Individual soldiers are outfitted with pocket hydrogen fuel cells to power 10-15 onboard electric systems. Virtually all combat fighter aircraft are small, unmanned or single-seat, and powered by liquid or even nano-engineered solid hydrogen-based fuels. Ultra-efficient aircraft designs eliminate the need for tanker aircraft. All imagery (sic), surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms are either space-based or unmanned vehicles, orbiting for weeks at a time exclusively on solar-generated power while peering through weather from above."

It's the US Air Force to the rescue again.

A couple years ago, the army cancelled a program to replace the .9mm berretta with a larger-calibre handgun. Special operations attempted to revive the Joint Combat Pistol program a year later, but that, too, was cancelled.

Now the air force is taking the lead, according to this story from Air Force Times. Yes, the air force. Leave it to the service that historically fires the smallest amount of bullets from small arms to solve one of the army's and marine corps' biggest problems: the too-weak M9 berretta.

As I explained on this blog just last week, the air force once rescued the M16 from certain doom in the hands of the army's small arms acquisition department. History is repeating itself.

For this blog's take on the latest US Air Force acquisition screw-up, please listen to my commentary this morning on Federal News Radio with Mike Causey and Jane Norris.

Download 02272006.wma

After DefenseTech.org picked up my post about Active Combustion Controls for aircraft engines, a reader named Neil asked this question:

I wonder, why has it taken this long to be able to try enabling this advance? I would think, real fuel injection for jets and not just the same afterburner stuff we've had for decades, would be already in the bag.

Good question!

First, inventing an afterburner is a cinch compared to a fuel injector, especially one with "active" controls that precisely sense the measure of fuel needed at any given moment.

But the biggest reason for the delay is because the military customer has never asked for it -- until now, that is.

Engine companies still like to make money, and that means they do what the customer tells them to do. Until very recently, that meant finding ever-increasing ways to make military jet engines more powerful. The embodiment of that trend is the Pratt & Whitney F135, the 40,000lb-thrust monster powering the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Efficiency hasn't been completely ignored in the process, but nor has it been embraced.

Back in the late-1980s, the air force started up a program called Integrated High Performance Turbine Engine Technology (IHPTET), with a major goal to improve fuel efficiency by a wide margin. Many study and design contracts followed, but when the JSF program decided to go primarily with the F135, which is just an improved version of the F-22's F119, the IHPTET community was forced to wait a few more years.

Then comes along the next-generation long range strike concept, and, voila, the military suddenly needs both a super-powerful and a super-efficient kind of engine. Although the IHPTET program no longer exists, it has provided the baseline for continued research on improving engine efficiency. IHPTET's successor is another program with an equally awkward name: Versatile Affordable Advanced Turbine Engines (VAATE). Under this new funding account, a new program exists called Project Advent (an acronym for Advanced Versatile Engine Technology), and this is the likely demonstration vehicle for the active combustion control concept.

Hope that answers your question, Neil.

The short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing (STOVL) F-35B is either what makes the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program the stuff of genius -- or a sure bet for failure.

Think about it.

With the F-35B, the JSF program lays claim to an unprecedented aerodynamic hat trick: one common fighter design/three very, very different ways to take off and land. On the other hand, the F-35B is the biggest headache to develop and is already the leading cause for a two-year-delay and $5 billion cost overrun. And the aircraft still has yet to fly.

The F-35B also happens to be the diplomatic glue that attracts an international partnership to chip in one-tenth of the JSF's development cost. Only two of the eight JSF partners want the STOVL aircraft, but one of those is the UK. And if the JSF program loses the UK, you may say goodbye to the rest of the international partners and hello to Eurofighter Typhoon Tranche 3. (Without international cover, the JSF also may look a lot more inviting to the increasingly rapacious budget-cutters in the Pentagon.)

So let's hope the F-35B's largest customer -- the US Marine Corps -- knows what it's doing.

It is in this context that I was so interested to read the new book "Harrier II: Validating V/STOL", by Lon O. Nordeen. Perhaps, by understanding why the USMC believes the Harrier -- and the F-35B -- are so necessary, we may understand the disporportionate influence it wields over the JSF program.

First, it has to be understood that, historically-speaking, V/STOL is an aerodynamic fetish. To understand this point, please check out the aptly-titled V/STOL Wheel of Misfortune. Of the 45 V/STOL projects attempted in history, only four -- the Harrier, the V-22, the CL-84 and F-35B --ventured much beyond the prototype stage. Three of them involve the marines.

In his book, Nordeen unfortunately chooses not to analyze or comment but to straightforwardly present the USMC's obsession with the Harrier as a product of Vietnam. Close air support seemed to be quite a topic of discussion (imagine that?) at the time. To deal with the issue, the air force wanted to buy the A-10, the army favored the Lockheed AH-56A Cheyenne and the USMC focused on the AV-8A Harrier. Asked by Congress to pick the best option, DOD (surprise!) backed all three. (The Cheyenne was later cancelled.)

It's clear from Nordeen's writing that the USMC likes V/STOL because of the obvious: its fighters don't need a long runway or an aircraft carrier to take off. In the Falklands War, Royal Air Force GR Mk. 3 Harriers arrived -- and operated -- in the South Atlantic war zone on board the container ship Atlantic Conveyor (until the ship was struck by an Argentine exocet missile). Such basing flexibility briefly appealed to the US Air Force, which in 2004 and 2005 flirted with the idea of buying a bunch of F-35Bs.

Whether that flexibility is really worth the price in reduced aerodynamic performance and increased maintenance burden is unfortunately not within the scope of Nordeen's book. Even within his chosen limits, however, it is a historic crime for him to omit any reference to the Harrier's tragically horrendous safety record. 

While the V/STOL Harrier fleet were a potent force in the Falklands conflict, the advantage of basing flexibility alone hasn't proved pivotal in any modern engagement since. It is impressive to think of the devotion the marines lavish on this one aerodynamic quality, perhaps to the detriment of all else.

There's something wrong when the Defense Department's top science guy says the scientific method is invalid.

Noah Shachtman (ex-guru of DefenseTech.org/current guru of Wired magazine's Danger Room blog) has kindly posted the entire transcript of a recent interview with Tony Tether, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Noah: I'm sure you'd agree that the best science is done out in the open, right?

Tony: Not always.

Noah: Not always?

Tony: No. I mean, I think that's the legend. But I have not found that to necessarily be the case. The best science is done when you get the best people together. That doesn't have to be in the open. What you do have to do is gather a large enough population of people with different disciplines in order to make progress. And whether you do that open source or by having a very tightly knit project, I've not seen -- I can give you a fairly near-term example, and that is stealth. Stealth was very closed, a very secure program. Great advances were made. Lots of science. Materials science actually made great leaps and bounds. And it was a very, very closed discipline for a long time. Actually, it still is closed.

Oh really?

In the above paragraph, Dr. Tether not only dispenses with nearly five centures of collective wisdom on the scientific process; he butchers the history of stealth's evolution.

It began in the 19th century with the work of Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who developed a set of equations that explained electromagnetic behavior. Later, methods of solving Maxwell's equations were invented by other scientists, including Arnold Sommerfeld. In 1966, a Soviet physicist named Pyotr Ufimtsev applied that wisdom to create a formula to solve the radar signature of any two-dimensional surface. Ufimtsev's open-source paper was translated into English by a special US Air Force office. His research caught the eye of a brilliant Skunk Works engineer named Denys Overholser.

According to the book "Skunk Works," a memoir by former Skunk Works director Ben R. Rich, this is what happened next:

"Ufimtsev has shown us how to create computer software to accurately calculate the radar cross-section of a given configuration, as long as it's in two dimensions ... We can break down an airplane into thousands of flat trangular shapes, add up their individual radar signatures, and get a precise total of the radar cross section."

This is no attempt to minimize Lockheed Martin's distinct contributions to stealth technology. However, Tether should know better than to use stealth technology as the example for the merits of a closed-door approach to science. As in any scientific discovery, stealth is the product of years -- even centuries -- of inter-connected theories, discoveries and mistakes.

Conducting science under a veil of secrecy may sometimes be necessary, but -- as Tether must acknowledge -- that approach comes with a price. It is an aberration of the scientific process -- not an ideal.

BBC radio this morning asked this blog's author to talk about how the Pentagon views the recent bluster from Russia. The question: is this the beginning of a new arms race and a Second Cold War?

The answer, of course, is absolutely not!

The arms race is over. The US won. The Pentagon is aiming to spend about $600 billion this year. The Ministry of Defense in Moscow may get lucky and spend about $20 billion.

To be sure, Russia still retains the world's largest stockpile of strategic arms (aka nukes), so they will always get a seat at the adults' table in international gatherings. But, as a good friend of mine has told me, there is a huge gap between what Russia blusters about and what they can actually do.

There is indeed more antagonism these days between the US and Russia, but it is thin shadow of the competition for world domination that was the Cold War. The bickering now is mainly confined to the spreading of US influence in Russia's own backyard -- ie, the old Soviet states, the East Bloc and Central Asia. Russia wants to dominate East Europe and the Caucusus, not convert the world to Communism by force and coercion. Its tools have also spready beyond mere military muscle to include that old capitalistic stand-by: economic linkages.

Russia's recent military build-up will not provoke a response from the Pentagon. Rather, the build-up in Moscow is itself a response to the 10-year-old arms build-up now in progress in Washington DC. Whatever the Russian military becomes over the next 10 years, it will not be in position to compete as a conventional force on a global scale against the US military. It will instead become a much more potent tool to influence Russia's less-defended neighbors.

Listen to the BBC report and the interview here.

The good folks at IAG blog may have discerned the meaning behind some suprising comments on 21 February by the US Air Force's chief of staff -- General Michael Moseley. The general told reporters that the air force might but two types of new tankers instead of one.

Here is IAG's take:

USAF might buy "mixed" tanker fleet

In what may be a solution worthy of King Solomon, the USAF likely would seek to buy planes from both Boeing and Northrop Grumman, the top Air Force general said Wednesday.

As you read the linked story note the word use - some utility in a mixed fleet; a continual set of opportunities. To us this means Boeing likely gets the nod this time around and maybe net time the KC-30 team.

But his last statement "Lifecycle cost has to be as low as we can get it with the most capable airplane we can get" is really interesting. This one seems to favor the KC-30.

The truth may be that the USAF has to buy some KC-30s, sooner rather than later. That way the USAF keeps Boeing's prices very sharp. It also ensures the USAF has a choice of vendors. Isn't it amazing that this puts the USAF in the same place as many airlines? They all need Airbus to remain an effective airframe maker. Without it, Boeing becomes a monopoly which nobody wants. Airbus, despite its current woes, will get through its problems because those who fly planes need them.

What is going on with the annual Showcase for Commerce in Johnstown, Pennsylvania?

More specifically, why does this seemingly random event in scenic Cambria County attract major exhibitor-badge-wearing delegations every year from the world's largest defense contractors?

The confirmed sponsors for the 2007 Showcase for Commerce extravaganza scheduled on 31 May to 1 June are a who's-who of Big Defense -- BAE Systems, Boeing, DRS Technologies, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and -- representing Johnstown -- Concurrent Technologies Corporation. (Two questions: 1) Where is L-3 Communications -- lost in Pittsburgh? 2) What is a "concurrent" technology anyway -- a more polite word for "redundant" perhaps?)

The DEW Line tries hard not to be cynical, but it can't help but recall that Cambria County is in the heart of the Congressional district for Representative John Murtha.

Perhaps the booth-agent legions of the defense industry are flowing into Johnstown for this event like a gushing river -- oops, bad metaphor! -- because they like the late-spring weather near Dutch Country.

Another possible explanation could be the proximity to Murtha, who is famous for many things but certainly well-known as the King of Earmarks. That word -- earmarks -- is the polite term for lawmakers using their anonymous discretion to fatten an already bloated federal budget with their favorite spending projects. Murtha's prime seat on the defense appropriations committee makes him a key benefactor, and he is known to love this part of the job.

Our spies in industry report that many attendees have another name for this annual weekend affair: Murtha-fest.

Download 2_alexey_isaikin.ppt

We don't post two-year-old power-point presentations just willy-nilly, but this one that we just got our hands on is really interesting.

Boeing's concept for a commerical version of the C-17 -- the BC-17X -- has always struck us as a somewhat flighty (er, so to speak) venture.

What does it mean then, we wonder, that an executive at Russia's Volga-Dnepr (of all places) has come up with a surprisingly optimistic market forecast for something called the BC-17X?! Volga-Dnepr leases the Antonov AN-124 transport for commercial and military use, including with the US Air Force, in fact. This makes them something of a competitor to the BC-17X concept.

Hmmm....

The US Air Force has just issued a rather innocuous-looking notice for a new technology called "active combustion control". But this is quite a momentous development, and here's why.

Today, the air force has two kinds of warplanes that can survive in modern and future combat, in which fighters and bombers have to compete with integrated air defenses as well as increasingly sophisticated enemy fighters.

One kind is the Northrop Grumman B-2A bomber. It's relatively slow, but super-stealthy. It can fly for a long time and drop a lot of weapons.

The other kind is like the Lockheed Martin F-22A. It's extremely fast and also super-stealthy. But it doesn't fly for very long without refuelling and can carry only a couple of strike weapons (okay, eight if you're talking about the Small Diameter Bomb).

The missing link is a single aircraft as nimble as the F-22, as long-range as the B-2 and as at least as stealthy as both. In short, it's the dream warplane for every gadget-hearting air force general.

And it is the basic concept for what the air force now calls the Next Generation Long Range Strike aircraft. It's supposed to be ready to enter service by 2018 to 2020.

The trick to meeting this schedule is for some company to come up with the next breakthrough in aircraft engine technology. The breakthrough is called active combustion control, which is just a fancy name for integrating a fuel injector into an aircraft's propulsion system.

Aircraft engines using active combustion controls should be able to fly longer distances at a lower rate of fuel consumption.

With today's engine technology, the flow of gas into the combustion chamber is fairly unrestricted, which is not very efficient. Many years ago, the automotive industry fixed this problem with fuel injectors, and now the aerospace industry wants to make a similar leap -- although at a far greater level of sophistication.

It's a new spin on old concept. In the past, aircraft designers used variable-geometry wings (think: F-111, F-14 and B-1) to be more efficient in high-speed and cruise-speed. With active combustion controls, the goal is to reconfigure the engine instead of the airframe to be optimal in both states.

Somebody please help the infantry.

Since the 1960s, think of how many new generations of fighters, naval combatants and fighting vehicles have been deployed?

Contrast that record to the individual firearm -- the rifle, carbine or handgun carried and used by almost any one wearing a uniform. The same basic M16 rifle and M4 carbine first used in Vietnam -- with the same basic flaws still uncorrected -- remain the primary infantry weapons for the US military today.

Why?

Surely, a nation that can muster $250-$300 billion to develop and deliver the Joint Strike Fighter, $160 billion to build a new family of combat vehicles and $8 billion to develop and build a next-generation aircraft carrier can come up with some spare change to upgrade the infantry's arsenal of automatic weapons.

All the services are fond of promoting the concept of dominating any potential threat through superior technology. Yet the M16 and M4 remain matched -- if not inferior -- to the firepower provided by the weapon of choice for insurgents/terrorists/pirates worldwide: the even older AK-47 design and its antecedents. 

A new generation of superior guns are available for purchase today, offering improved firepower and less of the reliability problems of the older generation. Examples include the Heckler & Koch 416 enhanced carbine and the FN Herstal Special Operations Combat Assault Rifle (SCAR).

Giving the army more cash may not be the answer. Part of the problem is the way the army manages small arms. Back in the 1950s, the army was so loathe to develop an automatic rifle to compete with the AK-47 that some think it sabotaged tests on the M16. It fell upon Air Force General Curtis LeMay to rescue the M16 program and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to compel the army to buy it. Even then, the army sabotaged the M16 by initially filling the cartridge with the wrong gunpowder. (Read more here.)

More recently, the army aborted its plan to replace the M16 with the XM29, which was cancelled in 2005 after a $100 million investment.

The good news is that the commercial marketplace has already solved the army's problem. The question is whether the army is willing to bring itself to make the change.

SOCOM needed only one page. The navy and the army each required three. The air force -- God bless 'em -- burned up 426 pages.  Go figure.

• US Navy: Download USN_FY08_UPL.pdf
• US Special Operations Command: Download SOCOM_FY08_UPL.pdf
• US Army: Download USA_FY08_UPL.pdf
• US Air Force: Download af_unfunded_priorities_list_2007.pdf

The Pentagon's strategy for network-centric warfare used to be pretty simple. In the short-term, everybody is supposed to live with a bunch of narrowband data links. Later on, big-ticket programs like Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS), Warfighter Information Networking Technology (WIN-T) and Transformational Satellite Communciations (TSAT) are supposed make on-the-move wideband networking a reality.

That strategy is suddenly starting to unravel. There are three problems.

The first starts with the fact that JTRS, WIN-T and TSAT won't be fully operational until well into the NEXT decade. The second problem is that they aren't really needed -- the same basic technology is widely available on the commercial market today. And the third problem is that the "warfighters" want this stuff today -- not in 2017.

Thus, it's no surprise when Harris and BAE Systems announce today that they've stripped the Highband Networking Radio (HNR) off of WIN-T, and have commenced marketing it as a stand-alone upgrade for a supposed gapfiller called the Joint Network Node. Once more people realize that on-the-move wideband can be purchased today, The DEW Line predicts the big-ticket programs are going to be in more trouble than most are already in.

In the inaugural installment of The DEW Line's "Revolving Door" series, we give you retired General John A. Gordon. From October 1997 until June 2000, this former US Air Force four-star general served as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. He had previously been Associate Director of Central Intelligence for Military Support.

Mr. Gordon, welcome to the Board of Directors at EDO Corp.

Known mostly as a defense electronics house, EDO has been attacking the intelligence market lately, acquiring three companies to form a new business sector within the company called Intelligence and Information Warfare business sector.

Donald Rumsfeld is the ultimate punching bag.

Not only did he screw up the Iraq War, he also left the Bush Administration. That makes him the perfect target both within Republican circles and without. So forget about the careerist generals who let themselves get rolled by the Donalator, nevermind the Congressional overseers who looked the other way and -- oh yes -- forget about that other guy who is supposed to have a sign on his desk saying: "The buck stops here."

It is all Rumsfeld's fault.

That certainly seems the thrust of the first book we've seen that solely examines the total legacy of this man. The book, by "national security insider" Andrew Cockburn is called "Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy".

And Cockburn really means it when he says "catastrophic".

Fun fact: Rumsfeld didn't just foul things up in the Middle East. Cockburn also blames Rusmfeld for unleashing aspartame on an unsuspecting public and playing a major role in the electoral downfall of Gerald R. Ford in 1976. (Aspartame? Yes.)

Cockburn does better when he sticks to his knitting with the national security gossip circuit. His accounts of Rumsfeld's impact on weapons technology bear the mark of an amateur. For example, Texas and South Dakota will be surprised to learn that the entire B-1 fleet is based in Kansas. And The DEW Line was bemused to read that the military has nothing to replace the Milstar satellite constellation if Rumsfeld's beloved Transformational Satellite Communications (TSAT) system isn't ready before 2014 (er, what about Wideband Gapfiller? What about the Advanced Extremely High Frequency constellation? For that matter, what about cheap commercial transponders?).

Someday, history will give us a fair account of the Rumsfeld legacy, which to be sure will make for some gruesome reading. Until then, we'll have to make do with hatchet jobs like this.

Mercenaries, beware: Dov Zakheim (remember him?) doesn't like you.

Zakheim is a bona fide fat cat of the defense industry, a privileged member of the ultimate Old Boys Club. He used to sign checks for the DOD; now he collects them as a vice president for a big defense consulting firm.

(Ah, the cycle of life.)

This means a lot of things about Zakheim, but mainly it means that The DEW Line listens when Mr. Zakheim decides to make a point.

And he has decided to make a point about private military contractors, which in a former age were simply called either mercenaries or camp followers.

In a published review of three recent books on the topic, Zakheim makes it clear that he thinks the Blackwaters and DynCorps of the world are doing more harm than good. Put another way, he's saying DOD and other national security agencies are wasting their money. We recommend you read the full article (warning: registration required, but it's free). Here's an excerpt with his conclusions:

No matter how capable military contractors might be when deployed in combat-related areas, they will not achieve the aims of the governments that hired them. To be sure, they will remain an important supplement to military forces, providing critical noncombat service support that would otherwise have to be performed by highly trained servicemen and servicewomen who are best employed in combat roles. But military contractors cannot act effectively as soldiers in the long run. Worse still, they may well undermine their clients' military aims, because they will add to the resentments of those already embittered populations that view the United States as an alien occupier.

Despite the glory that Colonel Schumacher ascribes to such contractors, and the wealth that Professor Kinsey and Mr. Pelton claim they have earned, undermining military aims is exactly what they appear to be doing in Iraq, and perhaps in Afghanistan. When all is said and done, the political and strategic consequences of their activities in both countries are still unknown -- and as has often been the case with mercenaries in the past, we will not be in a position to judge the results until it is too late to do anything about them.

Accusing countries of harboring secret weapons programs is SOOOO 2003, but, as tweed is to fashion, some global security fads never truly go out of style.

The hardest working man in political-military affairs, Anthony Cordesman has a new report out that helps us understand the Bush Administration's current obsession with Iran's nuclear ambitions.

He concludes that, yes, Iran very, very likely has a nuclear weapons program. For him, the "smoking gun" ("smoking mushroom cloud" anyone? -- or did Bush ruin that metaphor?) are Iran's on-going medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic missile programs. Since Iran doesn't have the guidance technology to make such weapons useful in a conventional strike, the existence of these programs only makes sense if they are the REAL THING.

It's a dead-heat between the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and the Mikoyan MiG-35. France's Dassault Rafale and Sweeden's Saab/BAE Systems Gripen are not serious players. The competition may actually be just a proxy fight for deciding who can help India's civil nuclear infrastructure the most.

We are referring to the competition in India for a USD6 billion contract to replace a Soviet-era Mig fleet with 126 new multi-role jets. (Great Indian air force site here.)

The analysis above comes not from us, but from a far more knowledgeable (and surprisingly helpful) source: the Russian ambassador to New Dehli.

This new academic paper claims Boeing, Airbus and Bombardier are well-along on a path to "strategic destruction".

To sum up, outsourcing to Asian companies is bad because one day they will become stronger than the Western companies that now employ them and we will all become their slaves.

Or something like that.

The DEW Line detects a slight bent towards industrial xenophobia in this paper, but perhaps it's just being frighteningly rational. Your thoughts?

Stephen Trimble is just a dumb journalist with an unhealthy interest in the frequently bizarre world of buying, selling and developing military and commercial aviation technology.

He has been writing about the topic for most of the past 10 years in Washington DC, and he is currently America Managing Editor for the Flight Group.