Legacy liabilities: an electronics manufacturer gets the jolt of a lifetime when it finds the competitor it has bought comes with some expensive underground environmental liabilities.
When AG Electronics in 2002 purchased El Camino Systems, a much larger and older competitor, it was justifiably proud of the progress it had made in less than ten years of operation. (The names of the companies have been changed.) As a young electrical equipment manufacturer, AG...

EEOC letter cites civil rights violations, blames Lockheed Martin in shootings: manufacturer denies wrongdoing. Dispute could wind up in court.
On July 8, 2003, at a Meridian, Miss. aircraft parts plant owned by Bethesda, Md.-based defense contracting giant Lockheed Martin Corp., worker Doug Williams, who was white, shot 14 fellow employees--12 of them black, before taking his own life. Six of his victims, including four black employees, died. ...

Unquiet American: tough, idealistic, motivated by profit, Dale Stoffel had all the attributes the Bush administration thought would set Iraq right. The mysterious murder of this whistle-blowing contractor exemplifies all that went wrong.
The sun sets early in Iraq in December. So, it would have been approaching dusk--calm and eerie--when Dale Stoffel climbed into the passenger seat of his black BMW station wagon at Taji military base outside of Baghdad. He would have held his dull, black Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine...

The Defense Revolution: Strategy for the Brave New World.
The Defense Revolution: Strategy for the Brave New World Kenneth L. Adelman, Norman R. Augustine, ICS Press, $19.95. Whole herds of hobby horses are ridden to exhaustion in the six chapters of this book expounding on geostrategy and military policy, six "myths" about the defense acquisition system, five...

Sack Weinberger, bankrupt General Dynamics, and other procurement reforms.
SACK WEINBERGER, BANKRUPT GENERAL DYNAMICS, AND OTHER PROCUREMENT REFORMS Was that really former DefenseUndersecretary David Packard standing in the Rose Garden last July, handing Ronald Reagan a blue-ribbon report blasting the way the Pentagon procures weapons? Was that really Reagan grinning away as he accepted? It...

Evolution of national defense awareness*.
One essential component of military training provided for young people in the 1961-1991 period was preparation of military specialists through the system of the Voluntary Society for the Promotion of the Army, Aviation, and Navy (DOSAAF), professional-technical education, and military-patriotic clubs and associations. The leading role here by right...

The State Armaments Program: development methodology.
Today the scientific and administrative work on drawing up the State Armaments Program for the 2006-2015 (SAP-2015) has entered a critical phase: the preparation of organizational, practical, and methodological solutions called upon to finalize the program's drafting by the end of 2004. The SAP-2015 will be Russia's...

Modern theory and practice of arms development planning: main conclusions and lines of improvement.
Dear reader, under this new heading we are planning to publish material on the problems of weapons theory development, upgrading of the defense-industry complex, development of military-technical cooperation, etc. We hope this material will be of help both to military theorists and practitioners so that in this age of...

Building an acquisition workforce to meet mission objectives: as the baby boomers retire and acquisition spending rises, cultural changes and innovative recruiting will be needed to attract talent and maintain competence.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Congress and the executive branch, including the Government Accountability Office (GAO), as well as academia, are greatly interested in the state of the federal acquisition workforce. This interest, spread by the media, has grown largely due to the convergence of two trends: the tremendous growth...

Company Watch - Northrop Grumman.
Apr 7, 2008 Boeing and Northrop Grumman remain at odds over the Air Force's decision to award a contract for refueling planes to Northrop. Boeing has protested the award, and the Government Accountability Office has until June 23 to decide whether the decision was fair. Apr 2,...