Biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower

Recommendable!

President Dwight Eisenhower: A General Keeps the Peace with John Yoo

Very recommendable!

Eisenhower's "Military-Industrial Complex" Speech Origins and Significance

Recommendable!

Eisenhower's Farewell Address & Warnings

Posted: 6/22/2019

Many are probably very familiar with President Eisenhower’s stark warning 

of the industrial military complex. Here is the prescient quote: 

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” (emphasis added)

I bet very few are familiar with his other, even more prescient warning just a few paragraphs below the above one:
“Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; ... A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government. ...

In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. ...

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.” (emphasis added) 

I find the second warning in Eisenhower’s Farewell Address much better fleshed out and it is so true in our time! Thanks President Eisenhower!

Sources (S):

Transcript of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address (1961)

The Age Of Private Commercial Space Exploration Has Finally Arrived

Update As Of 5/20/2014

Now that private enterprises really get involved in developing space opportunities, we read almost daily about amazing new advances. See e.g. here an article in the MIT Technology Review.

To The Moon And Beyond

Today (7/20/2013), I read here that Moon Express Inc. is carrying out a major new mission to the moon. I remember other news in recent years about significant progress was being made by commercial spaceflight etc.

Finally and long overdue, private initiative and enterprise is taking over from inflexible, risk averse government bureaucracies to advance human understanding of space and to commercialize space.

Big Government Retarded Civilian Space Research & Exploration

President Eisenhower’s NASA of 1958 was a big mistake copying the Soviet Union in light of the Sputnik shock. The Europeans copied this mistake in 1975 with ESA (European Space Agency). I would argue that this route taken by the USA has unnecessarily slowed down progress in this area perhaps by decades. This was an unjustified government takeover.

Well, NASA had a predecessor called NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) established in 1915 as an emergency measure during World War I. The Wikipedia entry mentions: “On the other hand, NACA's 1941 refusal to increase airspeed in their wind tunnels set Lockheed back a year in their quest to solve the problem of compressibility in the P-38.” I would bet that this earlier federal agency had more bad influences on the development of civilian aircraft and spacecraft. This could be a research topic for the future.

More About NACA

NASA has a webpage on the history of its predecessor here. Why this page is formatted as if written with an old typewriter on wrinkled paper is a mystery to me, it reduces legibility.

Excerpts and [comments]:

1.       “Throughout the next three decades [1930s-1950s], NACA continued to expand its influence in the field of aviation by recruiting top notch engineers and scientists to work in ever larger and more [government run] advanced technological facilities.”

[Here we have a government agency competing with private enterprises for top notch engineers by offering state of the art, tax payer financed research facilities approved by government officials.]

2.       “After World War II, NACA began to work on the goal of supersonic flight.”

[Is it possible that because of NACA and the New Deal such research was delayed by years?]

3.       “NACAs efforts were in a large part responsible for turning the American airplane from slow cloth-and-wood biplanes of the World War I era into the jets of today.”

[This self congratulation of a government agency is how big government would like to be perceived. Had the private sector played a larger role progress would have been faster and better.]

Still Waiting On Supersonic Transportation

In my view it is also quite possible that too much government intervention killed commercial adoption of supersonic transportation or even hypersonic transportation. How I wish I could fly in a few hours from my home in Phoenix, AZ to my hometown Frankfurt am Main, Germany at an affordable price.

I would argue that human ingenuity would by now have overcome most technical problems and it would have developed solutions to the noise pollution.

The Story of Qian Xuesen – A Serious Blunder Of The US Government?

Trigger

Today, I came across an article in Le Monde Diplomatique titled “A second cold war, this time in space/China goes ballistic” (subscription only) published in the May 2013 edition. The opening paragraph mentions “Just after the second world war, a young engineer from Hangzhou, Qian Xuesen, was working for the Pentagon at Caltech’s jet propulsion”.

This engineer died in 2009. The Ney York Times wrote an obituary about him, but left the circumstances of his return to Communist China in 1955 sketchy. To quote from this article (Emphasis added): “But by 1950 his American career was over. Shortly after applying for permission to visit his parents in the newly Communist China, he was stripped of his security clearance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and accused of secretly being a Communist. The charge was based on a 1938 document of the Communist Party of the United States that showed he had attended a social gathering that the F.B.I. suspected was a meeting of the Pasadena Communist Party [Mr. Xuesen was a founder of the Pasadena Jet Propulsion Laboratory]. … Mr. Qian first sought to return to China but was placed under virtual house arrest by the government; later, he sought to stay and fight the accusations, but the government sought to deport him.

In 1955, Mr. Qian was sent back to China, where he was proclaimed a hero and immediately put to work developing Chinese rocketry. By many accounts, he later became a committed Communist and served on the party’s ruling body, the Central Committee.” For the LA Times obituary see here.

Released in 1955, in exchange for the repatriation of 11 US airmen captured by China/North Korea
during the Korean War

The Wikipedia article on Mr. Xuesen does not go into any details regarding his repatriation. Are the records still classified?

Is it indeed true that the US government released one of the top rocket scientists of the 20^th century to Communist China in an exchange for a few prisoners of war?

Why did nobody sufficiently question the FBI allegations against this brilliant scientist?

Was this an attempt by the Eisenhower administration to create a counterweight in China to the Soviet Union?

The Stupidest Thing

The NYT article continues: “The loyalty allegations have never been fully resolved. Aviation Week, which named Mr. Qian its man of the year in 2007, quoted Dan Kimball, a former undersecretary of the Navy, as calling Mr. Qian’s deportation “the stupidest thing this country ever did.” A 1999 United States Congress report on Chinese espionage called Mr. Qian a spy, but critics say the report provides no basis other than a claim that he passed to China the secrets of the American Titan missile program, which began years after he had been deported.”