John Pike Quotations

Possibly, in a post-Sept. 11 environment, we do need to think about restricting the availability of information that would be useful to terrorists. But if we're going to do it for online satellite imagery, there are a lot of other sources of similar information that we're going to have to try to restrict as well.

If we give the Air Force enough money and enough time, the Airborne Laser will probably achieve many of its goals.

It goes against everything they have believed for more than a century.

It has been a long time since I have not been able to get a look at the cockpit as I get on a plane.

I think we're going to see a package deal.

I think the United States needs to engage with India and Pakistan to help them deploy a limited number of nuclear weapons in the most stabilizing fashion possible.

I think there will be growing interest in using biometric scanning at international access points in order to catch known people coming in on false papers. The problem is, even if all these searches disclose the identity papers of some of the perpetrators, that will not tell you necessarily what their mother named them since none of these people travel under their own names,

Risk-averse American decision-makers would have to be focused on the possibility that the Chinese will beat us back to the moon. It would be a reasonable worry from the political perspective,

It depends on how many nodes you're talking about. A minimal survivable radio network for emergency crews, the improvement of state emergency-management operation centers ? these kind of steps are feasible. But when people start talking about a nationwide survivable network, I tell them, 'Welcome to what's called the real world.' No one is going to pay for such a thing.

The fact that the government authorized the release of this imagery I think indicates that the Defense Department decided that the release of this imagery was not going to jeopardize the troops.

There are a lot of politics. Some on the panel are past politicians who have been meeting with politicians.

We knew it would be easy money if we could find a place.

We're the sole remaining superpower, the only country that's sent people to the moon. If the Chinese sent people to the moon they'd take us down a notch.

To make sure there is some money left over at the end of the year, they're going to cut costs. A good place to cut costs is security.

We're supposed to be in winter, but it doesn't look like any winter weather is coming.

What are you training for? To kill insurgents.

The problem for the enemy is that computer security vulnerabilities will almost certainly prove fleeting and unpredictable,

There's some interest here in retrofitting barns. Most farms in Southern Illinois don't have a lot of on-farm storage. And the local elevators and terminal elevators are not set up to hold grain. They have to move it out.

Is the problem that they are only just now beginning to understand how serious the damage was? Did they not have a contingency for a disaster of this magnitude?

The whole story is hard to put together,

The strategy is to get China to waste money on things that we know are not feasible, while discouraging them from working on things that we believe to be quite promising, ... The U.S. continues to fund work in this field, despite the fact that it contravenes known laws of physics.

The story most people around the world have is that the Americans are up to their old tricks - committing atrocities and lying about it. And that's completely incorrect.

Some would say it's time to recognize that the world has changed - that the number of intelligence questions that can be answered with images from space is very limited.

Private companies are in business to make money,

The bottom line is that the U.S. government looked at this imagery and decided that it was OK for it to be publicly released,

They had all the radios in the world. They had complete interoperability. That was not a hardware problem. That was a people and procedure problem.

As with every other weapon, there is no reason to hope that it is going to work perfectly all of the time.

It's a zero sum competition among these politicians to bring home the bacon.

It's all political. You have politicians on the BRAC commission who were appointed by politicians and who were they talking to? Politicians,

It sounds like it's, unfortunately, about what you'd expect, because the things do crash.

It's somewhere between irrelevant and counterproductive. Since the Iraqi army disintegrated, the weapon of choice has become a sniper. That's the ultimate in precision firepower.

It's certainly not going to be able to intercept all of them all of the time. If we're talking about incoming nuclear missiles, that imperfect defense is going to simply be a false sense of security.

It's certainly not going to be able to intercept all of them all of the time,

It's discredited the American military without any basis in fact,

They couldn't just do closures to help Republicans, ... It would be transparently political.

They are one-company towns. That's going to drive the local political activism to keep the bases open.

They've hired a lot of new people. You know they are not all going to be adequately trained, that's a fact of life.

If you're not going to have a lunar landing until 2018, how are you going to keep people and Congress interested?

In order to save appearances, they didn't want it to be unanimous,

I just don't think we've got this thing figured out yet. And I can't detect that we've set in motion a process for figuring it out.

If you want to think about airplanes that have defined the air age, this would have to be on the short list.

If it is an international transaction, the National Security Agency is monitoring it. The target is wide open: Essentially, it consists of anything that would be of interest to the U.S. government -- and the rest of the English-speaking world.

I don't think they're going to move a base to Florida because the governor is the president's brother.

You could certainly question whether an amphibious vehicle is the most appropriate ... to be driving around in a desert.