Admiral Blair Joins Iridium Board of Directors
Iridium Satellite is pleased to announce that Admiral Dennis Blair, U.S. Navy (Retired) has joined its Board of Directors. Admiral Blair recently served as the president of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a federally funded research and development center providing scientific and technical research and analytical support to the Department of Defense (DoD) and other federal departments and agencies. Prior to that, he was the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Command from February 1999 to May 2002. As the senior U.S. military commander in the Pacific and Indian Ocean areas, he led the largest of the unified commands and directed Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force operations from India to the West Coast of the U.S.
Is DD21 Program In Peril?
Prospects for a proposed all-new $30 billion advanced Navy destroyer foundered on Tuesday, undercut by a study carried out for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The boom was lowered on the ship, known as DD 21, by an influential panel advising Rumsfeld on ways to "transform" the U.S. military into a more lethal, agile force. "We didn't see a substantial difference in operational capabilities in the DD 21 compared to the other (existing U.S. Navy) systems," panel chairman James McCarthy told a Pentagon news briefing. Competing to design the destroyer are teams led by General Dynamics Corp.'s Bath Iron Works with Lockheed Martin Corp. on the one hand, and Northrop Grumman Corp.'s Ingalls Shipyard with Raytheon Co. on the other.
