Defense

Boom and Bust in the Supply of U.S. Air Force Pilots

May 7, 2018 Aviation

This past fall in San Antonio, I was part of a small group of former Air Force pilots briefed on the current pilot shortage.. Now the issue is written up in Foreign Policy:  USAF pilot shortage: What’s Driving the U.S. Air Force Pilot Shortage? Folks in the System Dynamics (SD) community are quite familiar with this […]

Read the full article →

Courage, Semantics, Personal Knowledge, and “He Knew What He Signed Up For”

October 20, 2017 Military

This comment is well outside the scope of what I usually write about here. But the recent controversy about President Trump’s call to the family of a serviceman killed in Niger began while I was with a group of friends with whom I served in the Air Force. I’m limiting my comments here to the […]

Read the full article →

The Requirements of Intelligence (Both Military & Organizational)

January 5, 2017 Defense

From The Secret War: Spies, Cyphers, and Guerrillas, 1939-1945, by Max Hastings:   “The first requirement for successful use of secret data is that commanders should be willing to analyze it honestly. Herbert Meyers, a veteran of Washington’s National Intelligence Council, defined his business as the presentation of ‘organized information’; He argued that ideally intelligence […]

Read the full article →

The Militarization of the US Police – The Data

September 18, 2014 Defense

I had downloaded the data on distribution of surplus military equipment to local law enforcement agencies and started to work with it, but Greorge Gorczynskid did a very nice job in beating me to it. Here is his data visualization of The Militarization of US Police. Take a look at it. Gorczynskid’s work was done using Tableau […]

Read the full article →