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Ethics, Quality & the Persian Gulf War (Ethikos Archives) Ethics, Quality & the Persian Gulf War (Ethikos Archives) May/June 1991 - By Andrew Singer. Ethics, ‘Quality’ and the Persian Gulf War “Nearly everything the U.S. and its allies used against Iraq—the air-land strategy, the high-tech weapons, the size and mix of the all volunteer forces—seemed spectacularly successful.... ‘It’s unbelievable,’ says John Keegan, a British military historian. ‘It’s a hell of a situation when everything works so well.”’—Wall Street Journal, March 6, 1991.In the recent conflict in the Persian Gulf, many professed astonishment at the performance of America’s high technology weapons. The eighties, a decade marred by sundry defense contracting scandals, hadn’t quite prepared the U.S. public for the “spectacularly successful” performance of military materiel in the first months of 1991. Amid the $600 coffee pots and $300 hammers, some people, somewhere, were apparently meeting high standards of quality control.Was there an ethical element in that manufacturing success as well? Is it possible to credit the high performance of U.S. weapons systems at least in part to the ethical climate within the companies that developed those weapons?“I think that’s true without question,” asserts Norman R. Augustine, Chairman and CEO of Martin Marietta Corporation, the $5 billion aerospace and electronics manufacturer based in Bethesda, Maryland.‘No one saw him drop it’Augustine and others are convinced that there is an inextricable connection between “quality” and “ethics.” When asked if a company that lacks reasonably high ethical standards can produce a “quality” product, Augustine, in an interview, replies, “If they did, I think it would be entirely by accident.”He tells this story. Full Article: http://www.singerpubs.com/ethikos/html/persiangulf.html |
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2006 Ethics-Governance.com |
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