"This is the story of how one person persevered through three decades of technology change, marketplace change, major historic change, and the rise and fall of his multiple careers"--Publisher's description

"In ancient times when people lived in caves and thatched huts, men looked to other men to fashion weapons they could use to hunt and to defend themselves and their families against hostile enemies. These stone club and flint arrow makers were the first defense contractors." -T. H. Henning, From Memoirs of a Defense Contractor, Chapter Fourteen, Epilogue Corporate divestitures, acquisitions, mergers and the feast and famine nature of defense contracts have taken their toll on thousands of people. Yet today, you will find defense contractors side by side with our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines providing technical services in the national interest. They can be found on submarines, surface ships, flying with aircrews, in desert tents with our soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq and at spaceports in the U.S. helping the nation's space program reach towards outer space. Defense contractors have diversified their products and services to serve federal, state, and local government clients in such diverse organizations as health, education, civil aviation, agriculture, homeland security, intelligence, and other areas. This is a story of how one person persevered through three decades of technology change, marketplace change, major historic change, and the rise and fall of his own multiple careers. Memoirs of a Defense Contractor captures the author's experience at International Business Machines Corporation, Loral Corporation, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Litton Industries/TASC, (now Northrop Grumman), and Veridian, (now General Dynamics).

Paul "Chuck Norris" Yurkin has never been one to give up. A product of the inner city projects, he pulled himself up by the bootstraps and enlisted in the Marine Corps-serving proudly in Desert Storm before beginning a fifteen-year career with the Myrtle Beach police force. But when he saw the efforts of his policing failing to create any positive change, it wasn't long before Yurkin became jaded by the system as a whole. Seeking a new life for himself and his daughters, he met up with a private contracting firm and began training for a trip to sunny Afghanistan, where he would work on training the fledgling Afghan National Police. In the midst of two weeks of training in Virginia, he earned the nickname that would stick with him for years to come-and met three best friends that remained by his side through dangerous missions, misadventures, and the frustrations of being stationed abroad. In Memoirs of a Security Contractor, Yurkin tells the true story of his time as a security contractor in Afghanistan in candid detail-in an eye-opening tale of determination, friendship, and never giving up.

A wry insider's view of the stagnant conditions plaguing governmental offices. The image of government workers as lazy, ineffective and corrupt is a common one in popular culture. Roberge, now retired after nearly three decades as a civil servant, makes it clear that the majority of her colleagues did not correspond to this stereotype. Nevertheless, for the sake of entertaining material, she focuses on those individuals who hardly worked instead of working hard--Kirkus.

When he discovers that his father worked on missiles for a defense contractor, Jeff Porter is inspired to revisit America’s atomic past and our fallen heroes, in particular J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. The result, Oppenheimer Is Watching Me, takes readers back to the cold war, when men in lab coats toyed with the properties of matter and fears of national security troubled our sleep. With an eye for strange symmetries, Porter traces how one panicky moment shaped the lives of a generation.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down. In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it. Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online—a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet’s conscience. Written with wit, grace, passion, and an unflinching candor, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital age and destined to be a classic.

This classic history of America's high-stakes quest to dominate the skies is "a gripping technothriller in which the technology is real" (New York Times Book Review). From the development of the U-2 to the Stealth fighter, Skunk Works is the true story of America's most secret and successful aerospace operation. As recounted by Ben Rich, the operation's brilliant boss for nearly two decades, the chronicle of Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works is a drama of Cold War confrontations and Gulf War air combat, of extraordinary feats of engineering and human achievement against fantastic odds. Here are up-close portraits of the maverick band of scientists and engineers who made the Skunk Works so renowned. Filled with telling personal anecdotes and high adventure, with narratives from the CIA and from Air Force pilots who flew the many classified, risky missions, this book is a riveting portrait of the most spectacular aviation triumphs of the twentieth century. "Thoroughly engrossing." --Los Angeles Times Book Review