Defense contractors and the SysAdmin

POST: Why Does Lockheed Spend Money on Think Tanks?, By Nathan Hodge, Danger Room, December 4, 2009

Old theme of mine: defense contractors will do fine with the shift to SysAdmin ops/small wars/COIN. Going back to PNM, I argued that the dual-use here is almost universal, meaning anything you create for this market in the military realm will have great public and private-sector use outside of the military realm.

So yes, the Lockheeds will do very well with this shift.

But no, that doesn't make bloggers who argue for this nefarious.

I will tell you flat out: I have made a lot of money giving my brief and this argument to defense contractors. I consider it God's work, and yeah, I don't mind getting paid for being good at what I do.

Comments

[William R. Cumming]

Tom! I would argue that "dual-use" is in fact no longer quite the issue. It is one world economy. We (US) could not fight or be armed successfully without offsets and international contributions. Do you think that the Chinese believe there are two separate economies--a civil and a military one? I think they actually may well be ahead of US in not having a military sector so totally dependent on federal contracts like in US. Also what do we know about Chinese thinktanks?