Loren B. Thompson is Chief Operating Officer of the non-profit Lexington Institute and Chief Executive Officer of Source Associates, a for-profit consultancy. Prior to holding his present positions, he was Deputy Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and taught graduate-level courses in strategy, technology and media affairs at Georgetown. He has also taught at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
Thompson holds doctoral and masters degrees in government from Georgetown University and a bachelor of science degree in political science from Northeastern University. He was born in 1951 and currently resides in McLean, Virginia and Plymouth, Massachusetts with his wife Carla and two children -- Matthew and Ariel, twins born in 1997.
Over the last several years I have become convinced that one of the biggest threats to our national security is the decline of an industrial base once dubbed "the arsenal of democracy." It is a source of constant amazement to me that huge trade deficits, the near-collapse of the auto industry, and other obvious signs of industrial decay elicit so little concern from the policy community. I have recently released a report on the same subject -- "Reversing Industrial Decline" -- which is available at the Lexington Institute website. Anyway, my interest in the slackening sinews of America's industrial muscle strongly influences what I… Read more
Greetings again from New England, where I am visiting to celebrate my mother's 91st birthday. This presents a better venue than you might think from which to comment on national security strategy, given the manner in which my mother's life has unfolded. She was born in 1918, during a great war against imperialism. Twenty years later, she joined the Army Air Corps to fight another big war, that one against fascism. Ten years after that she met my father in Korea --while fighting a third war, against communism. So she has been present for all the major military threats of the last hundred… Read more
Secretary Gates did well last week in advancing his priorities. While termination of the F-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter alternate engine are largely symbolic moves, the Senate actions show that Gates really is making progress in winning the political system over to his priorities. Those priorities involve putting more emphasis on so-called asymmetric threats -- terrorists and insurgents at the low end, attacks on joint-force enablers like networks and satellites at the high end. Gates says he is seeking a defense establishment in which 50% of forces are postured for conventional warfare, 10% are postured for irregular warfare, and… Read more
Greetings from historic Plymouth, Massachusetts -- where I am composing this week's comments on a computer that feels like it arrived with the Pilgrims. Of course the Iraq War is not over. It will never be over as long as borders drawn by outsiders force three antagonistic ethnic groups to co-exist within the same country. When the British dismembered the Ottoman Empire after World War One, they kluged together three provinces centered on Baghdad, Basra and Mosul into a fictional polity called Iraq-Jazeera that had no organic identity. Ever since that political "innovation" was devised, the story of Iraq has been one of… Read more
I used to teach nuclear strategy at Georgetown University, so I have studied deterrence fairly extensively. The most important thing to understand about deterrence is that it is a psychological process -- it unfolds within the minds of adversaries in response to cues from their environment. Since we cannot read the minds of our enemies, we can never know for certain whether the messages we send are being interpreted as intended. This problem presumably grows when the object of a deterrent threat does not share the same frame of reference as the country posing the threat. What looks like a stable relationship may… Read more
Larry Korb's hysterical assessment of the Iraq campaign ("the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history") typifies the lack of historical perspective on recent conflicts that I described in my posting below. After six years of fighting, we have lost fewer soldiers than in the Battle of Gettysburg; we have spent less money than will be expended by the Obama Administration's wasteful stimulus package; and a brutal dicatator named Saddam no longer controls one of the world's largest oil reserves (or threatens the reserves of his neighbors). Was the Iraq war an intelligence failure? Yes. Was it a strategic mistake? Possibly. But failing to stop… Read more
There's a saying in psychotherapy that when all other treatments fail, the mere passage of time can work wonders. So it is with the way we treat our national experience. After a few generations, even the worst wars and leaders take on a patina of respectability. So by the time my 12-year-old kids reach the age I am today (57), they'll probably be talking about the presidency of George W. Bush the same way that we talk about Truman today. The point being that most of the wars (and leaders) we really hate are the ones we can actually remember. The wars that are… Read more
I recently wrote a brief study of cyber-threats -- it's on the Lexington web-site -- and in the process came to some personal conclusions about how to deal with the danger. First of all, there is no way a lumbering, balkanized bureaucracy like the federal government will ever be able to keep up with cyber-threats. There's so much malware on the net now that new versions may actually exceed the number of legitimate software releases. Second, of all the federal departments charged with addressing the threat, Homeland Security is the least likely to succeed. It's just not up to the challenge. Third, our… Read more
This is a tough question, because it's obvious an such inquiry could degenerate into a witchhunt or political circus. One the other hand, it is clear that human rights were violated and powers were abused in the hysteria that followed 9-11. So I guess the issue comes down to this -- are we capable of conducting an open and rigorous inquiry that takes into account the concerns motivating policymakers and field operatives at the time any transgressions were perpetrated? I think we are. We cannot allow gross abuses to go unpunished because we fear that enforcing reasonable standards of conduct will damage our political fabric or operational… Read more
If you want to grasp why Robert Gates will not succeed in changing the acquisition system, you need look no further than his Monday program decisions. Air power got clobbered, while land and sea power were merely trimmed. The Air Force lost its top-of-the-line fighter, its next-generation bomber, its next-generation search-and-rescue helicopter, and the only jet airlifter currently in production. A military requirement for each program was clearly present. What was missing was an effective advocate for air power -- Gates purged all of those last year, at least partly because they didn't share his program priorities. In the program-cutting process, his key military advisors -- the chairman… Read more
Al Qaeda has been crushed by continuous military pressure from the United States. Much of this effort is invisible to outsiders, such as the continuous overhead monitoring of likely terrorist sanctuaries along the Afghan-Pakistani border and the cooperative efforts with Arab governments to cut off money from fundamentalist sympathizers. George Bush and Dick Cheney may never get the credit they deserve for destroying a terrorist threat that was allowed to fester before they took office, but the simple truth is that Al Qaeda has failed to mount a major attack in years, and has never succeeded in repeating its "success" of 9-11. It is important for the… Read more
Fifty years ago the American Sociological Review published a seminal essay explaining the social consequences of economic frustration in developing countries. The essay advanced a thesis that came to be known as the "Gap Hypothesis." It argued that people living in abject poverty seldom revolt because they can't imagine things getting better. Once economic progress occurs, though, expectations for the future improve -- sometimes so fast that the economy can't keep up. When the gap between rising expectations and economic reality grows too great, violence is likely. That dynamic is probably at work today in places like China and Indonesia, where recent… Read more
What can you say about an enterprise that spends a billion dollars per week, but after eight years still can't find the tallest guy in Afghanistan? Probably that more money isn't going to fix the problem. Speaking as one of the rare contributors who manage to get by without a security clearance, I believe that the biggest single challenge to productivity in the intelligence community is secrecy. The system is too balkanized by security concerns to support effective use of all-source intelligence. The next time you go to a craft fair at the Dulles Expo Center, take a look at… Read more
I don't pay much attention to the continuous friction between Israel and the Palestinians, because it reminds me too much of that movie "Ground Hog Day" -- the same patterns keep repeating over and over again, without much change. Israel is a valuable ally of America, but its geographic, demographic and economic circumstances are not promising over the long run. Permit me a flight of fancy. I have fantasized for years that American would one day give the Jews North Dakota as their homeland. North Dakota would become the richest zip code in the Americas within two generations, the Palestinians could have a real homeland of… Read more
There is a paradox embedded in the Bush-era experience with terrorism. On the one hand, the failure of Islamic terrorists to mount a successful reprise of the 9-11 atrocities indicates that they were not as capable as we initially feared. On the other hand, the methods they and others have employed to launch later acts of violence reveals that new technology has empowered extremists of every stripe. The latter trend portends increasing danger for civilization during the Obama years, because disaffected, even suicidal elements in our society now have access to tools that can cause suffering on a vast scale. Not… Read more
The question of what changes Mr. Gates should pursue presupposes that he will be sticking around long enough to make changes. I'm not so sure he will be. After all, President-elect Obama won the Democratic Party's nomination by running against the Gates Pentagon, so if Iraq weren't so peaceful right now keeping him on would have been a political non-starter. If there's another blowup in Iraq, Gates is the most expendable person in the cabinet. But let's say for the sake of argument that there in no blowup, and Gates stays on. In that case, there are at least three… Read more
America's close relationship with Israel is driven more by domestic politics in the U.S. than strategic considerations. However, the relationship has provided numerous strategic benefits to the United States. First, Israel is a reliable base of operations and listening post in the wortld's biggest oil-producing region. Second, Israel often acts as a proxy for U.S. military interests in the region, for example by destroying the Osirak reactor. Third, there is little doubt about Israel's commitment to supporting U.S. goals in the region. Fourth, it is the most technologically advanced country in the eastern Mediterranean. And fifth, it shares our values concerning freedom… Read more
Over the last several years I have become increasingly interested in the nexus between economic growth, technological innovation and national security. I read about those topics constantly, but in my leisure time I try to find books that will add something unique to my understanding of how America rose to economic greatness, and how it will one day decline. For example, last summer, I read a book called "Old Times in Oildom" by George W. Brown that was published at Oil City, Pennsylvania in 1911 recounting the development of America's first oil field 50 years earlier. I found it while… Read more
Related Link: http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org
