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

I say cut the F-35

[jonwil]

As an Aussie who saw the Howard government jump on board with Bush on this overpriced boondoggle (without even considering if other aircraft, American, European or otherwise were suitable for our needs at a cheaper price), cutting it completly and forcing Australia to evaluate ALL the options for aircraft suitable for our defense needs would be a good thing.

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: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.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[Anonymous Coward]

The challenge you face with the insurance company analogy is the insurance company can go bankrupt. The Federal government just prints more money. We have to face reality, a vast majority of people get considerably more out of Social Security and Medicare then they put in.

This is simply not sustainable. This includes my parents too.

At this moment the we are borrowing .46 cents of every dollar we are spending. That is simply not sustainable. Hard choices are in our future and I think we should face reality now while we still have some control over our destiny.

I do not want to wake up one morning and discover the world has decided that a US dollar is just a piece of paper with dead white guys face on it and nothing more.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[fafaforza]

"Entitlement" is almost a four letter word, but you know what? I'd rather have US citizens be able to feed themselves, than our money going to toys that never get used. We will have training exercises and missions costing millions per minute, in flight refelling for God knows what reason when the US has bases and aircraft carriers everywhere. And all this in an age when 19 guys with box cutters struck a direct blow to us and we're relying more on RC planes to dish out our justice. Who are we going to fight with these planes?

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?

Re:I say cut the F-35

[nbauman]

So after the government has taken all this money, you would change the law to say that the government won't give it back to me?

Re:I say cut the F-35

[fafaforza]

Yeah, state of the art military that doesn't do much of anything, and we're all driving on pot hole riddled roads, we have 40 kids to a classroom, our bridges are falling down, and there's never any money for anything in our budget. This is the thinking that keeps senators from cutting any spending. Because of the immediate negative effect on their constituents. That money could be used elsewhere, and people would retain employment.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[hrvatska]

Some insurance companies can go bankrupt. Others, like AIG, apparently cannot. And probably, if any of the other large insurance companies that provide millions of seniors with retirement income through annuities was about to go bankrupt, the federal government and the Fed would likely figure out a way to keep it afloat and continue paying on its obligations. If you think Social Security has problems, it is nothing compared to the coming problems faced by China's pension system. It has worse demographics and the retirement age is much lower (55 for women, 60 for men) than in the U.S. And, it's not just China and the US. Japan, Europe in general, Brazil, and Russia face the same dilemma. I don't think every major country's currency is going to become worthless and I don't think they are going throw all their elderly out on the street, either. There are fixes for both Social Security and Medicare, but political gridlock in Washington prevents any meaningful change.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[nbauman]

I've seen economists say that you can't buy an annuity on the free market that would give you as good a return as Social Security.

It's one of those things that the government can do more efficiently than private enterprise.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[nbauman]

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? Conservatives hate Social Security for ideological reasons: its success undermines their claim that government is always the problem, never the solution. But they receive crucial support from Washington insiders, for whom a declared willingness to cut Social Security has long served as a badge of fiscal seriousness, never mind the arithmetic.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[meta-monkey]

You seem to be under the misconception that when you paid SS taxes, those dollars were being set aside for you to be "returned" to you later. No, they were given to current retirees.

A more accurate statement would be, "so after old people have taken all this money from me, you would change the law to say that I can't take money from workers when I'm old?"

Re:I say cut the F-35

[hjf]

Defense spending is public spending in disguise.

The US has been eating their own dog food (anti-communism) for the last 50 years. They have been SO brainwashed against communism that even thinking of building a power plant or public road is now seen as the big red menace.

Spending in defense, on the other hand, is not only patriotic, it's also money that goes to private companies which is a very capitalistic way of spending your money. So technically they are being keynesian without being too communist.

The problem is, people are used to that reasoning. And they think the government shouldn't "spend" money. Everything private is better and more efficient. The government is slow and wasteful.

Yet, a private company doesn't have neither the interest or funds to take on a huge work like the US highway system. The US is what it is now because of the highways. A private company wouldn't have built a road to nowhere, but government does. Even if it seems like a bad idea, 20 years later it proved to be one of the best strategic moves ever. A private company would just build a straight line between NY and california because that would be the most profitable.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[Electricity Likes Me]

Also eliminating laws which require contracts to go to the lowest bidder. Removing discretion in procurement is as bad as having no oversight at all - it means the people making the decisions have no leeway when they see a bid they know can't quite work out, even if it would be very hard to prove why conclusively.

There was an example of this a while ago, where a bid to provide ammunition to the US army was made fraudulently, was incredibly low, and wound up killing a bunch of people when the guy who put it in's factory that was repackaging old Chinese bullets to the US army blew up in the middle of the town, killing 30 or so workers.

http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/firing-blanks-afghanistan

Re:I say cut the F-35

[mc6809e]

I've seen economists say that you can't buy an annuity on the free market that would give you as good a return as Social Security.

It's one of those things that the government can do more efficiently than private enterprise.

It has nothing to do with government efficiency, except in the sense that the government can more efficiently put young workers in jail if they don't give up enough money so the government can continue to make social security payments to retirees.

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

[nbauman]

Paul Krugman has explained this, which he calls one of the "cockroach ideas" that keeps coming back no matter how many times you flush them down the toilet:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/about-the-social-security-trust-fund/

Social Security is a government program supported by a dedicated tax, like highway maintenance. Now you can say that assigning a particular tax to a particular program is merely a fiction, but in fact such assignments have both legal and political force. If Ronald Reagan had said, back in the 1980s, “Let’s increase a regressive tax that falls mainly on the working class, while cutting taxes that fall mainly on much richer people,” he would have faced a political firestorm. But because the increase in the regressive payroll tax was recommended by the Greenspan Commission to support Social Security, it was politically in a different box – you might even call it a lockbox – from Reagan’s tax cuts.

The date at which the trust fund will run out, according to Social Security Administration projections, has receded steadily into the future: 10 years ago it was 2029, now it’s 2042.

But the privatizers won’t take yes for an answer when it comes to the sustainability of Social Security. Their answer to the pretty good numbers is to say that the trust fund is meaningless, because it’s invested in U.S. government bonds.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[geoskd]

SS has never been a 'paid for' plan. It was always predicated on more and more current workers paying for the retiree benefits. Sometimes a surplus to be sure, but never 'fully funded' for an individual by that individual's contributions.

For 50 years, far more has been collected than was needed to pay current obligations. This was done so that the coming of the baby boomers wouldn't cause a financial crisis. Since the 80's, That process has been undercut by congress "loaning" then money to itself in the form of special bonds, and then using the proceeds to offset spending (such as excessive defense spending, welfare, and reducing taxes on the wealthiest 1% of Americans). As a result, we have effectively given the money to the defense contractors, the extremely poor, and the 1% (same as the defense contractors). We borrowed against the future social security income to do it. The end result is that we have exactly the social security funding crisis that was envisioned, but the solution that was put in place has been systematically destroyed and we have the crisis anyway. The only good way to fix it now is to cut defense spending down to the core, put taxes on the 1% back to 75%+ where it belongs, or go and get our money back at the point of a gun. The choice is yours.

-=Geoskd

Re:I say cut the F-35

[nbauman]

Does anybody stop to ask why our per-capita spending on healthcare has skyrocketed and we spend more than other countries with better longevity?

Lots of people have asked that question. If you read Slashdot, you'll see that most people here know that almost every other developed country in the world has a government-financed system of health care, and they spend half or less of what we spend on health care with about the same outcomes. (Switzerland, the country that has the system most like ours with private insurance, is the country with the second highest health care costs after us.)

If you look around the developed world, to see what works and what doesn't work, you'll see that government-financed health care, including socialized medicine, works better than ours, and no country has come up with a free-market health care system that works.

Obama had the chance to implement a single-payer system, or a single-payer option, and after $8 million in campaign contributions from the health care industry, he chose Romneycare instead. We could have saved a lot of money.

Unfortunately I don't see any of the members of congress, the administration or any of the health insurance companies or the medical profession fixing this because they've been given a license to rape us all in terms of our costs and now with ACA they have a federally mandated right to steal from you.

Don't blame me. I voted for Jill Stein.

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

[nbauman]

The greatest falsehood of our political debate is that the government can't do things more efficiently than private enterprise.

I've compared industries where the government was working side by side with private enterprises, and it was straightforward to compare the results. For example, in the electric industry, there are private, federal, state and locally-owned power generation plants. Everybody in the industry agrees on the standards to judge them -- basically the percentage of downtime and cost per kilowatt-hour. The federally-run power plants, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, were consistently at the top of the list. Some of the private plants were at the top, some of them were at the bottom. The government did a good job.

If you don't believe the government can do anything efficiently, then go out and look at the data, and see if it supports your hypothesis. When I look at the data, it doesn't.

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

[Runaway1956]

"a vast majority of people get considerably more out of Social Security and Medicare then they put in."

Citations needed.

I remember a few things from the news, down through the years. I remember congress dipping into Social Security for money. And again. And again.

Social Security is something of a pyramid scheme, yes. It isn't truly sustainable. But, despite that, Social Security had surplus money, time and again. And, every time, Congress put their fingers into the surplus, and skimmed it off.

Is it REALLY true, that the vast majority of Americans take out more than they pay in? Or, is it more likely that the vast majority of Americans don't LIVE long enough to collect what they have paid in? Maybe, just maybe, Social Security is going broke only because Congress can't control themselves, and they have spent our Social Security already!

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

[Greyfox]

What are you worried about? You will never in your life make a million dollars a year. I can say that with complete certainty. I can also say with reasonable certainty that you'll never break 250K and I'd honestly be surprised if you ever break 100K. But do you listen to your mother? Nooooo.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[1369IC]

I work for a DoD R&D organization, and this is very true. We create a lot and we do it well and relatively cheaply.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[dj245]

If you think Social Security has problems, it is nothing compared to the coming problems faced by China's pension system. It has worse demographics and the retirement age is much lower (55 for women, 60 for men) than in the U.S.

China's economy might be built on a house of cards, mostly in the form of housing, buildings, and infrastructure. I am not worried about their retirement plan collapsing their economy though. The personal savings rate in China is above 50%. The US's is around 6.5%, which is higher than it has been in almost 20 years. And the US savings rate is defined as "% of disposable income"- not gross income or net income. I don't know how China's is defined exactly but it doesn't matter- People in China are generally preparing for retirement, problematic life events, etc.

Plus their basic pension plan pays about $108 dollars a year per person.

Even if there are 500 million people in China on the plan (a staggering number, but possibly possible), it costs "only" $54 billion a year. In contrast, the US spent $615 billion in 2008 on SS and has about 20% of the population receiving such benefits. Even when you consider GDP differences (which are narrowing fast), this isn't an unreasonable burden on China.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[Solandri]

For 50 years, far more has been collected than was needed to pay current obligations.

The catch is that "current obligations" is simply what's paid out today, not money needed to pay those who paid into it. The money you pay into Social Security isn't put into some savings account where it grows with interest waiting for you to retire. It's paid out almost immediately to current retirees (solvency varies from 1 year to about 15 years depending on program changes). That's why the baby boomers retiring is such a shock to the system - it drastically altered the ratio of SS payers to payees. If it had been structured like a real pension, the baby boomers would just be getting back money they paid in and there would be no shock to the system from the payer/payee ratio changing. But that's not how it works.

Medicare works the same way - current workers paying current retirees. This is why it's very dangerous to think of these programs as getting back money you paid in, or as "solvent and paid for" just because they've been running in the black on the accounting books thus far . They're not run like a regular retirement or pension fund. To compare their health like you would a pension fund, you have to project out about 30-40 years ahead to take into account the current batch of payers turning into payees. And the CBO has been warning for over a decade that these (primarily Medicare) are the biggest threats to the budget when you project out that far.

While I'm sure there's lots of waste in Defense spending which could be cut, it is not growing. It's more or less been holding steady. Even with the uptick from the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Defense spending is still below 1980s levels. The bottom line is that you cannot balance a budget by cutting things which aren't growing, and ignoring the things which are growing. Eventually you're going to run out of things to cut, while the things you're ignoring will continue to grow (which btw is projected to happen around 2070, when SS + Medicare/Medicaid spending are projected to exceed all tax receipts). You have to look at the costs that are growing and do something to get their growth under control. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to implement those cost controls.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[chill]

Saying govt contacts must go to the lowest bidder is a myth. Every one I have dealt with has been "best value" and we have a certain amount of discretion.

Evaluating bids is a two part process. The technical evaluation and the cost evaluation. The technical eval is more than just "does it meet the minimum specs". I've sat on Technical Evaluation Boards that awarded contracts to huge bidders because the quality was superior. The awards withstood protest.

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.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[khallow]

The greatest falsehood of our political debate is that the government can't do things more efficiently than private enterprise.

It'd help your argument, if the falsehood was actually false.

I've compared industries where the government was working side by side with private enterprises, and it was straightforward to compare the results. For example, in the electric industry, there are private, federal, state and locally-owned power generation plants. Everybody in the industry agrees on the standards to judge them -- basically the percentage of downtime and cost per kilowatt-hour. The federally-run power plants, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, were consistently at the top of the list. Some of the private plants were at the top, some of them were at the bottom. The government did a good job.

And if the TVA were playing on an even field, it'd be at the bottom of those lists. If I didn't have to follow a bunch of costly federal laws and had some large, cozy monopoly markets, I bet I'd be at the top of that list as well.

If you don't believe the government can do anything efficiently, then go out and look at the data, and see if it supports your hypothesis. When I look at the data, it doesn't.

One merely needs to look at your example to see that you aren't looking.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[elashish14]

Greed doesn't drive you to build better products - it drives you to make more money. And the two can often have minimal correlation. That's why you see companies form monopolies which make billions off crappy products because greed didn't drive them to make better products, it just drove them to dominate the marketplace and stamp out all competitors. I'm looking straight at you, Microsoft. Or alternatively, to make the barriers so high that no one has a shot in hell of making it into the ring.

The free market is a total failure. The common pathology is for wealth to accumulate into few parties, then for these few parties to collude and raise prices (oil industry, internet service providers), or better yet, merge together (think telecommunications). So in short, greed doesn't work.

No bias at all...

[dywolf]

I especially love this statement: " 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". The implication being even the military thinks it too much, which they don't. Such a statement implies something that doesnt exist, and conveniently ignores that the entire reason for developing a common platform for multiple roles is to save money. Yes, that one single platform is 1.4T. But the thinking was that 3 separate weapon systems to update all 3 branches at would cost even more. When properly executed this type of program does work; shared parts commonality is a real savings. When poorly executed you can end up with an unusable product (re: Naval version of the F-111 that was too heavy and unmaneuverable)

Point is, yes, the man from the CIP, a group dedicated to the eradication of the world's militaries, but particularly the US military, thinks we should cut the military.
Shocking. I love how people for various things never call their organization by their true intentions, but always give it something normal and official sounding, to create a built in bias towards thinking they are legit when they call for things.

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.

Re:No bias at all...

[Jawnn]

Point is, yes, the man from the CIP, a group dedicated to the eradication of the world's militaries, but particularly the US military, thinks we should cut the military. Shocking. I love how people for various things never call their organization by their true intentions, but always give it something normal and official sounding, to create a built in bias towards thinking they are legit when they call for things.

So..., you're saying that an organization that, "...promotes transparency and accountability in U.S. foreign policy, while advocating a foreign policy that promotes international cooperation, demilitarization and respect for human rights..." (taken directly from the CIP mission statement) should have no credibility? That it's not possible that one of the reasons that they support "demilitarization" is that they actually understand that the business of war is hugely profitable and the money that is spend on that might be better spent on better things? Riiiiiiight....

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:No bias at all...

[Nidi62]

The problem is the F-35 doesnt need to replace half of those planes. Instead of scrapping the F-15s or F-16s, we could have just upgraded and modified them: new electronics, upgrade the airframe (I think a lot of the 16s are starting to develop cracks in their wings). And the F-35 has nowhere near the survivability of an A-10. A-10s can fly and land with damage that would make any other plane fall out of the sky. Instead of spending a lot of money on the bastardized F-35 (remember, something that can do a little bit of everything can't do anything well), we should have bought a lot more of the F-22s and upgraded the rest of the fleet.

Re:No bias at all...

[sumdumass]

It is not replacing just one plane though. It is replacing 5 or 6 planes- each with different roles. Now think of this, suppose it only replaces 3 types of aircraft currently in use. No more training on 2 other aircraft to certify pilots, no more separate spare parts, storage and logistics programs for 2 other aircraft. No more cross training and specialty training of mechanics and support personnel (these aren't like cars where the concept of changing a starter is transferable to models you had no training on. mistakes can cost lives and parking a broken down jet at 35000 feet in the air will always result in an insurance claim where a car breaking down on the highway is more of a safety hazard and inconvenience.)

The cost of the plane alone is not the only savings.

Re:No bias at all...

[Solandri]

IMHO the F-35 will go down in history as an object lesson in specificity vs general purpose. They looked at all these different types of aircraft with different roles and different parts, and the huge expense that came with warehousing all those spare parts and training maintenance people who could fix one plane but not another. They thought they could cut costs by building one plane which could fill all those roles while using the same parts. In other words they went from a bunch of planes each build to a specific role, to one plane built to fill all those roles as a cost-cutting measure on the maintenance. But they're now discovering that when you try to assign so many different roles to the same airframe, it increases cost on the design side. And I predict it'll increase it more than they save on the maintenance side.

Re:No bias at all...

[ducomputergeek]

Bullshit. My father was a VP at McDonnell Douglas. I spent more than half my life around the defense industry and it's all a political game. Little of it has to do with actually what we need to defend the country. The F-22 and F-35 are not about defense, they are about keeping the engineers and union factory workers at locheed busy.

Read the after action reports of conflicts for the past 20 years. They all said pretty much the same thing: Need more A-10's and B-52's. Today the A-10's role is increasingly being done by Drones like the Reaper. The B-52s are still flying. While you typically need a few fighters for air superiority and defense, you need a few. Not a lot, a few. The last credible air threat was in 1991. And that threat lasted how many hours before any birds in the air were shot down and every airbase the enemy had destroyed?

It's true the Air-Force needs new airframes. The F-15's and F-16's are getting too many hours on them. The question is why spend these huge amounts of money on the F-22 and F-35 when the era of the manned fighter is coming to an end. Sure there will need to be some manned fighters, but not as many. If we had been serious we would have launched a modernization program for the F-15 and purchased replacement airframes for those aging out. Sad thing is, Boeing did this anyway for the export market with the F-15S. And those planes are still cheaper than the F-22's and without the billions in overhead that the R&D cost.

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:Plenty to cut

[AmiMoJo]

Even lower down it isn't clear that government agencies are particularly wasteful because there is nothing to compare them to. No private companies do anything like what the government does, and that is kind of the point of the government doing it. It's something not commercially viable, or that we can't trust to the free market to sort out.

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.

Fix acquisitions

[Nidi62]

There is no need to cut programs or funding. If the Pentagon wants to save billions per year, simply fix the acquisitions process. Pretty much every single defense program in development and production runs over in time and budget. If we simply hold the contractors to the terms of their contracts, we will save tons of money and have equipment that works. Contracts are always underestimated in terms of the time frame and the cost, and yet companies that constantly overrun these still get preferential treatment when it comes to the next contract. And heaven forbid there's a fair competition for a bid: if one of the main contractors doesn't win the bid, they push for and usually get a reevaluation from the military for the bid, and usually end up getting the contract. A simple fix off the top of my head would be that, should a contractor not be able to adhere to the terms of the contract, they should be unable to bid on another contract for a certain period of time. Any other business that was constantly late and over budget would stop getting work and go out of business; so why do we tolerate it with defense companies? We need a strong military, and we need new, modern equipment. What we don't need are programs that run 3-4x over their stated costs or take 15-20 years instead of 10.

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.

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:Stay the hell away from the F35

[sulimma]

It also employs tens of thousands of our nation's best and brightest engineers..

Who are unavailable for other tasks due to this programm.

and almost all of it goes to labor (and a big chunk returns in taxes, if not all in economic activity)

As would almost any other type of spending. The difference is, you get planes instead of schools, highways, vaccines or what else could be done with the money.

Also, the money for this programm is coming from taxes so not spending the money at all creates purchasing power all accross the population which might be the best thing for welfare and economy.

Re:Vague and Misleading

[Dr. Tom]

There is a case for keeping the F-35B. It is to replace the aging and very outdated Harrier.

not a compelling argument. tech has moved on, yes. so has the enemy. fight smarter, not more expensively

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!

Be careful when cutting!

[ctrl-alt-canc]

If you apply a 20% reduction to the number of pentagon sides, it shrinks to a square. You can go further, and apply a 40% reduction so that it becomes a triangle. But if you apply a 60% cut the pentagon shrinks to a segment. As a consequence workers will find quite difficult to move along the only remaining hallway. The consequences of a 80% cut are left as an exercise to the reader. It should also be obvious that applying cuts that are not multiple of 20% will change the pentagon into a fractal shape, with unpredictable consequences over the productivity of people working inside.

Pentagon Accounting Standards

[nickmalthus]

On September 10th, 2001 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced the pentagon could not track 2.3 trillion dollars. To this day, the Pentagon cannot be accurately audited For an institution with organization and discipline as its creed this is laughable. If Congress mandated that they would not receive one penny in funding until they got their house in order this problem would be solved overnight. Unfortunately the power of fear, obstinate Militarism, and the federal reserve corporations ability to manufacture unlimited debt provides no impetus for Congress to take the necessary corrective action.

Wishful thinking

[Python]

This statement is just wishful thinking "we have more troops than we need in a world in which we will no longer focus on fighting large, boots-on-the-ground conflicts like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." Yes, the same thing was said after every single war in the 20th century as well, and was the mantra of the 90s after the Soviet Union fell. No one thought we would be fighting the kinds of wars that happened in late 90s (Serbia, Bosnia, etc.), or the Watson the early 21st century and yet here we are. This is just wishful, hopeful thinking, sure a world without wars like Afghanistan seem possible but let's face facts we didnt suddenly inherit a world filled with peaceful stable nations. There are plenty of screwed situations in the world that will likely cause more wars.

The realy problem with the pentagon is the procurement system. Things costs too much because weapons platform developers can get modifications to their contracts, which means more money, if they don't deliver. They basically play games with the contract, unbidden with a partial solution that appears complete to dod, a well written contract, wich means they did what they said, yt need more money to deliver a complete product. It's all very legal, but its so prevalent that its a sick joke in dod.

Problem, congress will decide not pentagon

[Maxo-Texas]

Listen, if you told the pentagon- we are cutting 10%. You decide where.

A few bad programs might be retained (generals personal favorites) but a lot of bad programs would be cut.

But congress decides. The pentagon tried cutting the laser plane multiple times and congress insisted that it be continued because a powerful congressman had jobs depending on it.

So we need to cut 10% but probably a lot of bad programs will be retained and a few good ones will be cut.