In this summer’s hit movie, Independence Day, the president oversees attacks against the aliens by watching fancy color monitors with live-action images of airplanes and spaceships. A Marine pilot brings down a trailing alien fighter by deliberately opening and releasing his F18’s tail parachute in flight so that it flops on the alien’s windshield and […]
Gregg Easterbrook
Gregg Easterbrook has published three novels with a fouth coming next year and nine nonfiction books, most recently, It’s Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear. He was an editor at the Washington Monthly from 1979 to 1981.
Posted inMagazine
Fear and Loathing in Silicon Valley
Put down that pocket calculator! Don’t go near the softwear! Oh, my God! The PC! It’s .. it’s … it’s got Melissa! Silicon chips, it turns out, aren’t our little electronic friends after all. They’re ominous. Behind them lurk greed, exploitation, water pollution, and middle-age stress syndrome. These chips are eeeevil. So say two related […]
Posted inMagazine
Why DIVAD Wouldn’t Die
I feel strongly that if a president were to challenge the Pentagon to be better instead of bigger, more effective instead of more expensive, he would find a receptive audience both with the public—which, I think, senses how far out of control the Pentagon is—and within the military itself.
Posted inUncategorized
What Caspar Weinberger Could Learn from the Falklands
If only Ethell and Price would turn their talents to the U.S. military, asking lower-level soldiers what is actually happening, as opposed to what Pentagon press kits say is happening; and if only someone on Capitol Hill, where committees fund now and ask questions later, would listen.
Posted inMagazine
The Army’s $800,000 Model Airplane
A future in which remotely piloted vehicles have come to replace manned aircraft for most combat
functions may be not only inevitable, but appealing. Why should the country have to build expensive airplanes? And why should brave pilots have to be killed in them?
Posted inMagazine
The Heart of a New Machine
Once owners can talk to their computers directly and receive an original response, the illusion of human interaction will be nearly complete.
Posted inUncategorized
The Sliver Strategy
It’s a plain, squat building on a billboarded Albuquerque boulevard, the office of an insurance agency called MLA—entirely unremarkable except perhaps to those who know it is owned by a U.S. congressman. Early in the 1970s federal funds started to disappear here. The money wasn’t being stolen. Nor was it being fumbled away through incompetence. […]
Posted inMagazine
The Meaning of Money Markets
How 8 million people learned to stop worrying and love high interest rates.
Posted inOctober 1981
From Sputnik to the Flying Submarine
MX was designed not so much as a response to world military conditions but as a response to Washington political conditions. Whatever President Reagan ultimately decides about the system, its history sheds light on how internal pressures, not defense requirements, often shape the most important and expensive national security projects.
