To determine whether content analysis could be used to successfully identify major combat motivational factors for individuals, this research focused on soldiers who fought in World War II. Combat narratives written by men who fought in World War II were examined. Ten German and ten American works were examined. Of these, five of each were the works of flyers and the other five were the works of ground troops. The following factors were examined: "primary group" influence, ideology, attitudes toward the enemy, group leadership, national leadership, personal gratification, propaganda,...

Present study examined the perceived benefits of mentoring, in direct opposition to not mentoring, for four USAF career-success influencing variables. Data derived from the November 2008 Status of Forces Survey of Active Duty Members from U.S. Air Force members (n = 2487) analyzed via independent sample t-test comparing mentored (n = 1745) and non-mentored (n = 742) Airmen. This research effort tested whether Airmen's' perceptions differed concerning overall stress, retention, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Results indicate mentor-protege relationships did not appear to...

Every year, the DoD upgrades its information technology systems, allows new applications to connect to the network, and reconfigures the Enterprise to gain efficiencies. While these actions are to better support the warfighter and satisfy national security interests, they introduce new system vulnerabilities waiting to be exploited. Often, these vulnerabilities are discovered after the system has already deployed and where costs to fix are much larger. This paper recommends the DoD adopt an Information Assurance tactic to limit these costs, called the vulnerability market. Through use of the...

The purpose of this book is to evaluate the current primary aircraft utilized for oceanic palletized cargo movement for the United States Air Force. The United States Air Force is the primary cargo hauler for the entire United States Department of Defense. This paper will first evaluate the current aircraft used for palletized cargo movement, the Boeing C-17A Globemaster III. Next, the researcher will compare and contrast the C-17 with the Boeing 777 Freighter. These aircraft will be evaluated critically with regards to both their efficiency and their effectiveness. Methodologies employed...

Given a known aircraft location, a set of camera calibration parameters can be used to correlate features in an image with ground locations. Previously, these calibration parameters were obtained during preflight with a lengthy calibration process. A method to automate this calibration using images taken with an aircraft mounted camera and position and attitude data is developed. This thesis seeks to determine a partial set of circumstances that affect the accuracy of the calibration results through simulation and experimental flight test. A software simulator is developed in which to test an...

The last several decades have resulted in an unfortunate byproduct of space exploration and development: orbital debris. Satellites in Low Earth Orbit have been required to make an ever increasing number of course corrections in order to avoid collisions. Despite efforts to the contrary, collisions continue to occur, each time creating additional debris and increasing the requirement for the remaining satellites to maneuver. Every required maneuver decreases a satellite's service life. The purpose of this study is to develop a minimum thrust profile to maneuver an orbiting satellite out of...

From the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s thru 2007, the focus and attention given to the Air Force's nuclear mission noticeably declined. The organizational changes, downsizing, and increased focus on conventional missions made the concerns of the nuclear forces less pressing as senior leaders became less involved in the Nuclear Enterprise. The nuclear readiness of organizations, personnel, policies, procedures and processes all gradually declined culminating in two high profile incidents which revealed the drastic state of degradation. These incidents led to numerous high level...

The purpose of this research was to improve performance in speech recognition. Specifically, a new approach was investigating by applying an integral transform known as the Mellin transform (MT) on the output of an auditory model to improve the recognition rate of phonemes through the scale-invariance property of the Mellin transform. Scale-invariance means that as a time-domain signal is subjected to dilations, the distribution of the signal in the MT domain remains unaffected. An auditory model was used to transform speech waveforms into images representing how the brain "sees" a sound. The...