There Is Plenty To Cut At the Pentagon

Hugh Pickens writes "William D. Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, writes that although we have been bombarded with tales of woe about the potentially devastating impacts of cutting the Pentagon budget 8% under the sequester, examples of egregious waste and misplaced spending priorities at the Pentagon abound. One need look no further than the department's largest weapons program, the F-35 combat aircraft, which has just been grounded again after a routine inspection revealed a crack on a turbine blade in the jet engine of an F-35 test aircraft in California. Even before it has moved into full-scale production, the plane has already increased in price by 75%, and it has so far failed to meet basic performance standards. By the Pentagon's own admission, building and operating three versions of the F-35 — one for the Air Force, one for the Navy and one for the Marines — will cost more than $1.4 trillion over its lifetime, making it the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken. And in an era in which aerial combat is of diminishing importance and upgraded versions of current generation U.S. aircraft can more than do the job, it is not at all clear that we need to purchase more than 2,400 of these planes. Cutting the two most expensive versions of the F-35 will save over $60 billion in the next decade."

Comments

Re:No bias at all...

[postbigbang]

The Pentagon puts all of its eggs in one basket. It better be a spectacular basket. One of the best reasons for operating systems diversity is that you can likely only kill off one branch with an attack. Imagine being able to find a way into a US$1.4trillion fleet, and whack all of them.

I'm not off-put by one turbine fan in one aircraft having problems; this has happened before in this fleet. Could have happened for many reasons. But I the US Military and its defense contractor network are vastly too cozy for my tastes. Add that to congresspeople trying to continue programs so that their districts have US military spending, and the whole process seems mightily corrupt.

Plenty to cut

[gmuslera]

And always at the neck. Putting the blame in the dot that is at the very tip of the iceberg makes simple people forget the 10% of it that is over the water, and normal people forget the 90% is below. If just gets considered the cost of starting wars (cyber and real world ones, even if they are disguised as humanitarian, or supporting rebels, or whatever), preserving the (corporate) order, or plainly stripping privacy/spying to all the world, including US citizens, would be evident where the real waste is.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[nbauman]

The major entitlement spending is for Medicare and Social Security. People are entitled to Medicare and Social Security because they paid for them all their lives.

Do you propose that the government not pay people the benefits they paid for as part of a contract?

That would be like buying health insurance from a private company, and having them decide not to pay you when you get sick and need it, because that would be a good way for them to save money.

Re:Stay the hell away from the F35

[TheSunborn]

I think that using "tens of thousands of our nation's best and brightest engineers" to build something more useful instead would be a good choice.

Re:No bias at all...

[arse maker]

The F-18 per unit cost is $29-57 million in 2006 dollars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F/A-18_Hornet)

Which is a small fraction of the F-35 cost. So I dont see how they can be saving money.

I dont really follow your logic. Replacing a plane is a total loss on the old plane. So you can't possibly save money.

Re:Look at the Pentagon suppliers

[O('_')O_Bush]

Yep, cost (materials and labor)+10%(the profit) is totally sucking our country dry... Nothing to do with the Pentagon driving costs through the roof by forcing bidding on one set of requirements, then changing them hundreds of times before the program is finished.

No, it is killer 10% markup that is the problem.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[Nidi62]

the simple fact of the matter is that entitlement spending dwarfs defense spending.

The problem is that defense spending has BECOME entitlement spending. It is welfare for the defense contractors, who have no incentive to remain within budget or timelines. We can cut defense spending without having to cut a single program in production or development: all we have to do is make sure that companies are held to the promises they make when the bid for a contract. And, if they intentionally underbid or underestimated the program well, then they need to eat the cost of that overrun, just like a company would in any other industry. This isn't cutting spending, it is simply cutting costs. We still get everything we need, we just don't pay out the ass for it.

Enough with the damn spending cuts

[rsilvergun]

We're not broke people. Really. We're not. This is what people in politics call a "Narrative". It's a story to get you to vote a certain way. Specifically to vote for massive tax cuts for the rich so they can pocket all the gains in productivity from the last 50 years.

Cut all the "Waste" you want. It'll never come close or be a drop in the bucket against what the ultra wealthy are taking from you on a daily basis. I tell ya man, dog eat dog capitalism for the poor, socialism for the wealthy...

Re:I say cut the F-35

[O('_')O_Bush]

I agree that Medicare should remain, but I disagree with the role of Social Security. SS is designed as a safety net, but in popular use, has been pushed into the role of a retirement income supplement.

I would prefer it stay as a safety net (kick in when little money or value is left because you lived longer than you expected to, say, 10 years after retirement). Some system to reduce its cost. Though, even SS isn't so bad, since, in theory, it is already paid for.

If we had bumped taxes and cut spending when the economy was good (pre2008, in which Bush did the opposite to boost his popularity) and then cut taxes and boosted spending when the collapse happened, we wouldn't be having these discussions.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[jamstar7]

The company with the deepest pockets to litigate its opponents into bankruptcy and bribe legislatures into passing laws only in its favor is the company that gets its products to market. Or, at least, that's the way it's been going for the last what, 50 years or so?

Real world numbers

[Grayhand]

So over it's service life it would cost roughly the same amount as putting solar panels on 40 million homes. One unneeded airplane that has yet to see a day of service. There's plenty of money to solve our problems it's all being wasted!

Re:I say cut the F-35

[vurian]

Post-Soviet was pretty much free-market. Where individual waiters would lease individual tables in a restaurant to serve, or the output of particular cooks. Sit down at the wrong table in Odessa and you could only order dessert. Free market at its best, no regulations at all, just individuals trying to make the most money. Fell flat on its face, breaking its teeth, with the result that there are a bunch of super-rich oligarchs. There is no such thing as a successful free market economy. Heck, just like there has never been a real communist state following Marx precepts, there has never been a real free market economy following Ayn Rand's delusions. A free market is a delusion, and saying that it would be a solution to anything marks you as deluded.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[Electricity Likes Me]

Except for NASA, infrastructure spending is almost always positive returns. It generally creates local jobs - and can usually provide long term stability depending on the size of the project - and the flow on effects of road, rail and internet access can be directly correlated to economic activity. I really struggle to see how "functional road and rail" is a pet project. It's a staple of civilization. Places without functional road and rail are 3rd world countries.

Speaking of NASA: it's not like fundamental R&D is a bad idea either. Again, it creates jobs and attracts talent - it means your universities and high-tech industries are engaged in cutting-edge work and develop and retain institutional knowledge and make other projects cheaper. The US is going to really suffer over the next two decades because it's allowed pretty much all it's major physics projects to be superceded by Europe. There's no replacement for the Tevatron at Fermilab and the consequence of that is that the US may lose the ability to even build particle accelerators in the next few years as all the people who know how you do that move on to other things or to facilities which do. The US is also cutting fusion funding with the exception of ITER - and may cut that - which is a huge strategic mistake for fairly obvious reasons.

This isn't stuff you can just write down and forget about - if you want to be at the forefront (which, when you do depend on a technologically advanced military, is kind of important) - then you need to have people active and working on those types of advanced projects - you need students in the same laboratories as the professors.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[geoskd]

Social Security isn't bankrupt.

To quote Paul Krugman:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/opinion/16krugman.html

But neither of these potential problems is a clear and present danger. Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund. The program won’t have to turn to Congress for help or cut benefits until or unless the trust fund is exhausted, which the program’s actuaries don’t expect to happen until 2037 — and there’s a significant chance, according to their estimates, that that day will never come. ...

What’s really going on here?

Whats really going on here is that trust fund you mentioned has no cash in it. It is entirely funded by "special" government bonds to social security. The result is that the cash is gone, and the government owes itself the money back. The crisis isn't that social security will go bankrupt, the crisis is that social security loaned the money to the US government as a whole, and it looks like the US government might not be willing to pay back those bonds. The US government wants to pretend those bonds wont really need to be repaid so that they can renege on the payment of the bonds. The thinking is this, if Social security is changed so that it does not pay out as much benefit to each individual, then there truly has been a surplus over the last half century. That being the case, then congress would not have to repay those bonds (because social security wouldn't need all of the money to pay its obligations). By not having to repay all of those bonds, congress could wipe that expense off the budget and as such would have more money to waste on craptastic jet fighters and tax breaks for people and companies making more money than Cuba. Its a giant game of smoke and mirrors, and its complicated enough that very few people have yet realized that the money is already gone. The rich stole it from us in the form of tax breaks for the very wealthy.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[D'Sphitz]

...the simple fact of the matter is that entitlement spending dwarfs defense spending.

The term "entitlement spending" is bullshit, intended to insinuate that it's referring to welfare and food stamps to get the foxnews dimwits all worked up into a froth when they hear how more money goes to dangerous minority drug addicts in the ghetto than we spend on defense. Of course, over half of that is social security, a tax that was forcibly taken from people's paychecks their whole lives, and now if they live to 100 they may get half of it back. That is not an entitlement, it's a really shitty savings plan that the people have already paid for, yet they go on and on about how social security is costing us too much and it's unsustainable. It's not costing anything because the people have already paid for it. That our inept government pissed it all away on wars and prisons doesn't change the fact that it's been paid for.

Almost all the rest of the "entitlements" go to Medicare and Medicaid, because it's not very civilized to let our elderly and disabled citizens die in the streets. These entitlements allow people who have worked and paid taxes their whole lives to get healthcare and obtain their obscenely expensive medication that would otherwise bankrupt most people in months, because our marvelous health care system, the best in the world they say, would have them all die in the streets before dipping into obscene profits to care for aging and ailing seniors end of life care. Those must be the "death panels" I've heard about.

The real "entitlements" as most people think of them, welfare, foodstamps, and throw in unemployment if you want, are a fraction of "entitlement spending", my brief research (a visit to google) says 8%, it took awhile to even find a chart that even specifically listed them rather than simply "other spending".

Re:I say cut the F-35

[geoskd]

We are running a $1.6Trillion deficit per year right now and have been during the current administration. If you cut defense out completely we would have a $900 billion deficit PER YEAR!

Ummm, no, We are currently running about $1.0 Trillion, and that number will drop a bit as the economy recovers and tax revenue increases. Take 400 Billion out of the defense budget, and fix the tax loopholes that allow companies like Google and Microsoft to pay less than 5% taxes, and you will have closed almost the entire deficit. Moreover, as the economy recovers more, the remaining deficit will turn into a surplus that we can use to pay down some of the massive debt we racked up in the last decade. If you really want to go for the perfect game, jump the taxes on anyone making over $5 Mil back to 75%, and we won't have any more budget problems.

-=Geoskd

Re:I say cut the F-35

[goldstein]

Pension plans offered by employers are disappearing or being scaled back. At the same time, the primary response of the financial industry is to devise ever more complex financial products that are designed to sound better than they are. We are not far from a situation where a prerequisite for retirement will be to win a lottery or be a financial planner - it is really naive to think that the average man in the street is able to adequately plan for his retirement without being backstopped by social security or something similar.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[KiloByte]

Yes, bribing legislatures this way is a textbook definition of corruption.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[meta-monkey]

But there is no trust fund, and the lockbox is full of IOUs. And it shouldn't be "I" Owe Yous, it's "You" Owe Yous.

We hear this crap about "America's promise to its seniors!" but I don't seem to recall making any promises. I'm in my early 30s, and I was in grade school, unable to vote when the boomers were spending all the money.

It's like they said, "Hmm, we've got this $200 here. Let's put that in the bank to save for later!" "Good idea, that's great. So, yup, got that saved. But ya know...I sure would like some of these social programs enacted. Let's write a check for $200 for that." "Great idea, great idea! And ya know, we sure could use some military spending. Gotta beat the Russians and all. Let's take out a loan against that $200 we saved." "Oh yes, of course! Capital idea there." An then now they're shocked, shocked I tell you, to come back to the bank to withdraw their $200, and it's not there! "But, but, but...we deposited $200! We want it back!" Well, yes, you did deposit $200. And then you spent it. And then you borrowed against it and spent that, too, and now there's nothing left.

The baby boomers have looted the empire.

Their parents built the greatest economic powerhouse the world has ever seen. They great up in the depression, then went off to fight a terrible war against tyranny and oppression. When they came home they fought to free their countrymen via the civil rights upheavals of the 1950s (that wasn't the boomers in their early teens marching in the streets). All the while they built the industrial base that dominated the global economy.

But if their parents were the Greatest Generation, the boomers were the Worst Generation. They were the ones voting, they were the ones in control of the government in the 80s and 90s. They made all the promises, spent all the money, racked up all the debt. Their parents built an industrial base, and when the boomers took over management, they shipped all the jobs to China. Now their kids (us) are left with coffee shop jobs to show for our four-year degrees.

They looted the empire their parents built and left a desiccated husk for their kids. Now they sit with their hands out, demanding their reward for a job well done.