How does one spread a successful educational reform? The essays here recount the authors?' experiences with the scale-up process. Among their lessons are the importance of building the capacity to implement and sustain the reforms, adjusting for local culture and policy, ensuring quality control, providing the necessary infrastructure, and fostering a sense of ownership. The process is iterative and complex and requires cooperation among many actors who must ensure that the results align with goals.
Americans spend more than $100 billion a year to buy weapons, but no one likes the process that brings these weapons into existence. The problem, McNaugher shows, is that the technical needs of engineers and military planners clash sharply with the political demands of Congress. McNaugher examines weapons procurement since World War II and shows how repeated efforts to improve weapons acquisition have instead increased the harmful intrusion of political pressures into that technical development and procurement process. Today's weapons are more complicated than their predecessors. So are the nation's military forces. The design of new systems and their integration into the force structure demand more care, time, and flexibility. Yet time and flexibility are precisely what political pressures remove from the acquisitions process. In a series of case studies and conceptual discussions, McNaugher tackles concerns at the heart of the debate about acquisition—the slow and heavily bureaucratic approach to development, the preference for ultimate weapons over well-organized and trained forces, and the counterproductive incentives facing the nation's defense firms. He calls for changes that run against the current fashion—less centralization or procurement, less haste in developing new weapons, and greater use of competition as a means of removing the development process from political oversight. Above all, McNaugher shows how the United States tries to buy research and development on the cheap, and how costly this has been. The nation can improve its acquisition process, he concludes, only when it recognizes the need to pay for the full exploration of new technology.
The book shows how the wartime alliance of engineers, scientists, and the military exemplified by MIT's Radiation Lab helped to transform research and development practice in the United States through the end of the Cold War period. This book presents an organizational and social history of one of the foundational projects of the computer era: the development of the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) air defense system, from its first test at Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1951, to the installation of the first unit of the New York Air Defense Sector of the SAGE system, in 1958. The idea for SAGE grew out of Project Whirlwind, a wartime computer development effort, when the U.S. Department of Defense realized that the Whirlwind computer might anchor a continent-wide advance warning system. Developed by MIT engineers and scientists for the U.S. Air Force, SAGE monitored North American skies for possible attack by manned aircraft and missiles for twenty-five years. Aside from its strategic importance, SAGE set the foundation for mass data-processing systems and foreshadowed many computer developments of the 1960s. The heart of the system, the AN/FSQ-7, was the first computer to have an internal memory composed of "magnetic cores," thousands of tiny ferrite rings that served as reversible electromagnets. SAGE also introduced computer-driven displays, online terminals, time sharing, high-reliability computation, digital signal processing, digital transmission over telephone lines, digital track-while-scan, digital simulation, computer networking, and duplex computing. The book shows how the wartime alliance of engineers, scientists, and the military exemplified by MIT's Radiation Lab helped to transform research and development practice in the United States through the end of the Cold War period.
Over the past half-century, think tanks have become fixtures of American politics, supplying advice to presidents and policy makers, expert testimony on Capitol Hill, and convenient facts and figures to journalists and media specialists. But what are think tanks? Who funds them? What kind of “research” do they produce? Where does their authority come from? And how influential have they become? In Think Tanks in America, Thomas Medvetz argues that the unsettling ambiguity of the think tank is less an accidental feature of its existence than the very key to its impact. By combining elements of more established sources of public knowledge—universities, government agencies, businesses, and the media—think tanks exert a tremendous amount of influence on the way citizens and lawmakers perceive the world, unbound by the more clearly defined roles of those other institutions. In the process, they transform the government of this country, the press, and the political role of intellectuals. Timely, succinct, and instructive, this provocative book will force us to rethink our understanding of the drivers of political debate in the United States.
89 TABLE 5 USE OR PLANNED USE OF MAJOR ENGINES IN AIR FORCE AND NAVY AIRCRAFT a Engine Air Force Aircraft Navy Aircraft F-80, T-33, XF-92, YB-61, AJ2, F9F-7, TV-I, J-33 YB-62, F-94 (A, B), TM- T2-V, P4M-I 61 (tactical missile) X-3, XF-88 F3D, F2H, F6U, F7U J-34 F-84 (B, C, D, E, G, H) J-35 FJ-I B-45, XB-51, XF-9J, B-36, J-47 B-47, F-86 (D, F, K) J-48 F-94C F9F J-57 B-52, YB-60, F-lOO, A3D, F4D, F8U F-I02A, F-I0l (A, B), SNARK, F-105A, F-I07, KC-135A, B-57D, X-16 F-84F, B-57 FIIF, A4D, FJ-3, J-65 FJ-4, F9F YQ-l, YQ-2, T-37 J-69 SNARK, YF-89E, B-66 J-71 F-I01, F-I02B, F-I05, J-75 F-I07 F8U, XP6M B-58, F-I04, F-IOIA (see J-79 note c, Table 4) F5D, FIIF, A3J, F4H T-34 C-133A, YC-97J, YC-12IF R7V-2 XF-84H T-40 R3Y, XFY, A2D YC-130, YC-131C T-56 Note: a Aircraft in which engine was used or was planned to be used. For at least one (and generally more) of the aircraft in the list associated with a given engine, the decision to use the engine was made when the engine was in the final stages of develop ment. (In the case of the J -57, J-79, andJ-75 this is true of nearly all the aircraft listed.) No Jist extends beyond 1956. Summary For an engine developed independently of an airframe the de veloper may constrain the performance, weight, and size of an engine at the start.
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