Word: less
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...National Security Adviser, John Poindexter. "Covert actions were pretty much left to Casey and ((CIA Deputy Director)) John McMahon, with little if any top-level discussion or review," says one former Administration policymaker. According to this official, even Reagan was cut out of the loop: "The President became less and less involved. Decision making was less systematically fashioned. There was no process to involve him. There was too much informality...
...United Nations, who attended the meeting at which that invasion was finally approved, says North was not present and his name never came up. Indeed, for all her deep involvement with Central American policy generally and the contras specifically, Kirkpatrick says she heard little about North and saw even less of him before leaving the Government...
...ticket items like robots. Beyond that, the technology was often overhyped. Robots also proved more expensive to operate than many manufacturers imagined. U.S. robotmakers depended heavily on the fortunes of a single industry: automaking. U.S. auto manufacturers have bought 50% of American robots in current use. By contrast, less than 10% of Japan's robots are operated by its auto firms...
...robotmakers wallowed in their early success, the Japanese, who imported their first hydraulic robot in 1967, were coming up with a new product. Fitted with high-speed computer chips and sophisticated circuitry, the new electric machines received instructions via computer-software programs. The machines tended to be smaller, less expensive ($5,000 to $40,000 each) and not as prone to breakdowns as their U.S. hydraulic counterparts. - Though electric robots were less powerful, and thus less capable of heavy industrial tasks, their greater accuracy in tasks such as delicate manipulation and precision welding made them more attractive for the automotive...
Some of those who rushed to buy an expensive robotic system got less than they bargained for. At a Ford Motor plant in St. Louis, snags in 200 production-line robots delayed the 1986 introduction of the Aerostar minivan. Then the discovery that the same robots had been skipping many key welds led to the recall three months later of some 30,000 of the vehicles. In another disastrous episode, a Campbell Soup plant in Napoleon, Ohio, was outfitted with a $215,000 system designed to lift 50-lb. cases of soup. But anytime it encountered defective cases, the machine...