Erik Schechter's blog

Do no harm. It’s a cardinal rule for doctors – and it should be the same for advertisers because a poorly executed ad can do as much damage as a surgeon with a shaky hand.

Recently, when flipping through a defense magazine, I came across one of these misguided ads and was shocked by how badly it served the company that had purchased it.

The one-pager was for comms equipment, and it depicted your typical soldier as an operator. But on his camo cap, there was the word “infidel” written in Arabic-style script, a tweak to Islamic extremists.

Boeing is swearing up and down that it has not abandoned Kansas. Sure, just a few weeks ago, it ordered the shuttering of its Wichita plant — a move that put 2,160 people out of work and raised hackles across the state.

It’s no secret that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is a troubled program. Over the past 10 years, the price of Lockheed Martin’s cutting-edge stealth aircraft has shot up 64 percent, while sales projections have continued to slide. Indeed, foreign countries that once fell over themselves to join the multinational F-35 program are now showing far less enthusiasm for the $120-150 million plane.

One doesn’t usually think of hackers as advertisers. Sure, they boast online about their assorted computer exploits. But they do not sell goods, respect copyright or organize themselves along some corporate hierarchy. The cute logos and viral videos not withstanding, they are anonymous — amorphous — doing what they do for the lulz, not money.

The AUSA conference is like a G.I. Joe cartoon bursting to life.

While down at the AUVSI expo in Washington, D.C., I had the opportunity to check out sleek unmanned systems and chat with smart industry representatives. And what I soon realized was, despite booming global sales in drones, tough days were in store for little guys making little bots.

It’s no secret that military robots are big business. The Teal Group predicts that global spending on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will increase by $9.2 billion over the next decade. And that’s just the flying bots.

It was another face-palm moment for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).  A few weeks ago, a TSA officer at Detroit Metro Airport actually patted down a 62-year-old cancer survivor with a urine-filled urostomy bag in full view of other travelers.