A new U.S. Army Field Manual (large pdf) introduces the science and technology of aeronautics to non-specialist readers in a rigorous but readable format.
From Bernoulli’s principle to the challenges of night flight, the 392 page manual starts with the rudiments and builds from there.
“Because the U.S. Army prepares its Soldiers to operate anywhere in the world, this publication describes the unique requirements and flying techniques crewmembers will use to successfully operate in extreme environments, not always encountered in home station training.”
See “Fundamentals of Flight,” Field Manual FM 3-04.203, May 2007 (18 MB PDF file).
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.