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How the Pentagon Wasted $10 Billion On Military Projects
schwit1 writes: In the past decade, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency has wasted $10 billion on defense projects that were either impractical and impossible.
It's hard to choose a single quote showing the absurd stupidity of these projects — the article is filled with too many to choose from. Read it all and weep. However, here's one quote that typifies the attitude:
"Henry A. Obering III, a retired director of the Missile Defense Agency, said any unfulfilled expectations for SBX and the other projects were the fault of the Obama administration and Congress — for not doubling down with more spending. 'If we can stop one missile from destroying one American city,' said Obering, a former Air Force lieutenant general, 'we have justified the entire program many times over from its initiation in terms of cost.'"
We get the government we deserve. Until we stop electing candidates (from either party) who promise pork, we will continue to get pork, and waste, and a society that is steadily going bankrupt.
"Henry A. Obering III, a retired director of the Missile Defense Agency, said any unfulfilled expectations for SBX and the other projects were the fault of the Obama administration and Congress — for not doubling down with more spending. 'If we can stop one missile from destroying one American city,' said Obering, a former Air Force lieutenant general, 'we have justified the entire program many times over from its initiation in terms of cost.'"
We get the government we deserve. Until we stop electing candidates (from either party) who promise pork, we will continue to get pork, and waste, and a society that is steadily going bankrupt.
Anything to speed up the inevitable collapse of empire.
1) The US is hardly going bankrupt. 2) Do you think the private sector has not lost $10 billion on failed projects of one sort or another in the past few years?
"We get the government we deserve. Until we stop electing candidates (from either party) who promise pork, we will continue to get pork, and waste, and a society that is steadily going bankrupt."
There's no such thing. Like a woman with good looks who cooks and cleans.
But my conservative friend sent me an opinion article from two years ago about a woman on WIC driving a Mercedes Kompressor to pick up her groceries! Sometimes I think your political alignment just reveals where you ignore graft from: conservatives ignore overspending from the top; liberals ignore overspending from the bottom. And the argument between the two is just which is more burdensome.
Now cue the Libertarians that want to march us back to the feudal ages and isolation.
>
We get the government we deserve. Until we stop electing candidates (from either party) who promise pork, we will continue to get pork, and waste, and a society that is steadily going bankrupt.
Change "we will continue to get pork" to "we will continue to get porked", and that would be a more accurate assessment.
No one promises pork spending. They just do it and don't tell you. Things like this are never really election items and if they are, they are ignored post election.
We don't have the congress we deserve, we don't have a democracy in any useful sense, and we don't have freedom in any useful sense of the word.
But my conservative friend sent me an opinion article from two years ago about a woman on WIC driving a Mercedes Kompressor to pick up her groceries! Sometimes I think your political alignment just reveals where you ignore graft from: conservatives ignore overspending from the top; liberals ignore overspending from the bottom. And the argument between the two is just which is more burdensome.
Whatever your political alignment, I'd hope you base your opinions and (in the case of politicians) policy decisions on more than anecdotal articles. Articles like that appeal on an emotion level, but that's all. You need to look at aggregate data on the state/nation level to evaluate how a policy is working. You can't do it based on an article your mate sent you.
soylentnews.org
The CMCM campaigns (specifically 2) were classified, so you will not be able to Google the results.
The radar on SBX is quite awesome actually. It shares a common linage with a radar known as TPS-X (which IIRC was renamed to FBX-T) which functions very well as part of the THAAD system. These radars are precision weapons guidance radars. While they do have a search function they do indeed stink at that: they are rifle sights, not binoculars. Try to locate a flying bird with your rifle scope.
The discrimination capabilities of these radars are really a function of software as well as the radar characteristics, see my comment about the CMCM-2. However during a launch a target would typically drop bolt mounts, explosive bolts for the stages, the stages themselves, and other such debris (in addition to counter measures). Individual radars (there were about a dozen tracking just the target vehicle) were assigned to and could track the individual pieces in flight as they spun around and bounced off of each other. This was easier than discrimination as the flight characteristics and origin of the debris were known ahead of time, but this is a small unclassified example of the capabilities.
Now, it is debatable if this was all a waste of money, but to say none of the stuff worked is disingenuous as the success stories will not be found in unclassified sources.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Military spending is not pork.
The government is being demanded to give money on these stupid projects by the commercial private interests doing the work.
You can't blame government for doing what is being demanded of them on government, but completely ignore the petulance of those doing the whinging.
Well, you can, but the hypocrisy is obvious and completely negates any validity you have garnered.
Without those 'wastes' and 'failed weapon projects' you think the United States can become the strongest nation on earth?
Much like any scientific experiments - we all learn from prior mistakes and those 'failed weapon projects' are no exceptions
It's valuable lessons from the 'failed weapon projects' that American armed forces has learned that make them know the right way to build their new weapons
So please, stop complaining
Instead, you should thank the selfless Boys and Girls who are in the armed forces, who work so tirelessly to keep you guys safe
Whatever your political alignment, I'd hope you base your opinions and (in the case of politicians) policy decisions on more than anecdotal articles. Articles like that appeal on an emotion level, but that's all. You need to look at aggregate data on the state/nation level to evaluate how a policy is working. You can't do it based on an article your mate sent you.
And ... how exactly does this advice not apply to the article at hand?
The Airborne Laser, envisioned as a fleet of converted Boeing 747s that would fire laser beams to destroy enemy missiles soon after launch, before they could release decoys.
It turned out that the lasers could not be fired over sufficient distances, so the planes would have to fly within or near an enemy’s borders continuously. That would leave the 747s all but defenseless against antiaircraft missiles. The program was canceled in 2012, after a decade of testing.
The problem would have gone smoothly if they had used tried technology. For example, instead of 747s they should have gone with DC-10s, as they have successfully been converted in the past even for interstellar travel. And you could always go with sharks of course... No missile deployment stands any chance against a sharknado... with lasers...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Are you saying that the article about that woman driving her Benz to pick up her grocery is false, that there is no such woman on welfare driving a Benz?
NO MATTER how anecdotal the evidences are, they ARE still evidences, and they are as VALID as any other evidence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
$2.3 trillion unaccounted for.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Is that why we need to spend 48% of the world's defense spending, as in almost as much as the entire rest of the world combined? While we're 18 trillion dollars in debt?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
There's no such thing. Like a woman with good looks who cooks and cleans.
I'm extremely curious, how exactly are you managing to post on Slashdot from the year 1963?
Yes- he displays a shockingly anachronistic view of how the modern world works. Nowadays you can't even get the *less* good looking ones to cook and clean!
Well, hang on, let's have a sense of proportion here. Any of these projects would be amortized over a number of years, and it wasn't immediately clear to me how long any individual project was in development. Better to look at the agency's total budget. According to the article, the MDA has a budget of about $8B a year, or a bit over 1% of the total yearly defense budget these days. The majority of defense spending is in operations, maintenance, and personnel - if even one of these projects were to actually pan out and render some long-range bases or something obsolete, it could well be a bargain at many times the price.
All that aside though, the submitter is wrong to characterize this spending as "pork". Pork is a localized project meant to benefit a specific representative's district, while this is clearly an expression of American foreign policy generally. We believe we have to be able to instantly thwart any threat conceivable at any time forever, even though that's impossible. These projects were specifically designed to stop a missile attack on US soil by North Korea, which is absurd. They know which side their bread is buttered on, they're not as kaaa-raaaazy as we'd like to believe, and most importantly they know who begrudgingly sends them foreign aid every time they rattle their sabres a little. North Korea will bomb the US when their infantry can flank us by ice-skating through Hell, and not before. That doesn't matter, though; the threat can be imagined, and therefore according to our defense doctrine any amount of money is justifiable in defending against it.
From that perspective, having these projects be expensive failures is preferable to having them succeed, since success doesn't benefit us in any real way, and failure makes it marginally more likely that we'll have to radically adjust our defense thinking towards something resembling reality.
I'm shocked it was only 10 billion. Asshats.
But my conservative friend sent me an opinion article from two years ago about a woman on WIC driving a Mercedes Kompressor to pick up her groceries! Sometimes I think your political alignment just reveals where you ignore graft from: conservatives ignore overspending from the top; liberals ignore overspending from the bottom. And the argument between the two is just which is more burdensome.
Whatever your political alignment, I'd hope you base your opinions and (in the case of politicians) policy decisions on more than anecdotal articles. Articles like that [ "How the Pentagon Wasted $10 Billion On Military Projects" ] appeal on an emotion level, but that's all. You need to look at aggregate data on the state/nation level to evaluate how a policy is working. You can't do it based on an article your mate sent you.
I* agree...! (with both comments - i just made i small addition to yours)
* I am a Greek; our state's "bankruptcy" (and its reasons) is something we Greeks (and the rest of the world...) discuss all the time, so i think i know some things about it ("bankruptcy" in general and the special Greek case) - in our (Greek) case, while (necessary i think, because of a Muslim neighbour state well known for its genocides and other such actions against Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds, e.t.c.) defence spendings played a role, it was mostly because of "overspending from the bottom" (what socialists -a.k.a. liberals in USA, mistakenly in my opinion- don't want to admit): anecdotal, BUT TRUE, we had/have too many Greeks receiving social benefits collected by them "driving a Mercedes Kompressor"...
Have you seen the size of the national debt?
So, when are we going to see that paid off? Well, so long as the USA keeps paying the interest, then it won't get any bigger. Oh, wait. They're not, and so the debt grows ever faster. Wish I could do that with my mortgage, and still declare myself as solvent.
Reality is, not just the USA, but all countries are bankrupt, and the huge joke is the law, which prevents us from interacting with a bankrupt corporation. So that being the case, paying your taxes is illegal.
The answer? Don't declare bankruptcy. (Greece might look like it, but refuses to admit it)
Instead, repeal the Banking Charter, take back the power to create and destroy currency, and wipe out the national debt. So simple! So why won't they do it?
Because debt is the one thing uniting all countries! We'd all have to do it at the same time, but that could be decentralizing banking, and the notion of central banks, the world bank, the bank of international settlements, and the international monetary fund. ALL PRIVATE CORPORATIONS, getting rich off the poor, the suffering, and the only people who pay taxes (the working class).
If you want to remain the global power that you are, it's the only way to do it. It's the same as the 1800's British law stating that the Royal Navy had to have 10% more ships than the next two nations combined.
I say this as a Britain who isn't particularly fond of US foreign policy, but I think it could be a lot worse if there was a less reasonable country acting as the worlds policeman.
How are you isolated when you talk and trade with people? Isn't sanctions and war more isolating?
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Colour me entirely unsurprised. This investigative article has details of many more billions of the Pentagon's wasted taxpayer money - and the real number could be dramatically higher. We'll never know, because the Pentagon has failed to perform the required audits of its accounting ever, despite tens of billions still being sunk into modernising its infosystems.
A few random details of what we do know:
- $5.8B of inventory "lost" between 2003-2011.
- $9B of ledger adjustments simply made up to get the books to balance in 2012, up from $7.4B the previous year.
- "Probably half" of its $7B general inventory is in excess of needs, but they're still spending $700+M buying more of the same.
- Hundreds of thousands of contracts that have not been audited for completion. Solution: raise the threshold to contracts worth $250+M.
There's much worse, but you wouldn't believe it coming from a random Slashdot post. Read the article.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
What if I don't give a shit about being a world power? It doesn't do anything for me.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
US defence spending is 4.4% of GDP. You can blame the deficit on many things but not that.
Thanks,
Your Sanity Napkin
P.S. Crap internet companies bought for billions
And that worked so well that UK is still the world's superpower in naval might. Right?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Has this guy seen Detroit? You can't distinguish it from a missile strike.
Is there not a principle that offence always beats defense?
Many of these vast military overspends appear to be based on an assumption that the potential opponents will never adapt to the new technology. I'm no expert, but is part of the analysis of a new system or strategy not, "how would we adapt to this if the enemy had this system, and does it therefore make sense to do it?"
So here we have a system designed to tackle some number of incoming missiles. Even if it's perfect, the enemy adapts by using slightly more advanced decoys, more missiles, different trajectories ... and the new defensive technology is a military failure (granted the shareholders and C-levels have made enough money to buy their own remote island). I'm sure there are many more examples -- stealth aircraft that are visible to radar with a longer (less "modern"?) wavelength?
You also have to question the motivation of people who will spend billions to avoid a slight chance of a large number of war deaths, but are unwilling to spend money on a continual stream of preventable medical deaths.
So $757.8 billion is the low ball amount that even the Pentagon can't hide. It seems a lot more likely that the Brown figure of $1.1 trillion is a more realistic number. No one at Brown has a personal stake in fudging the figures, unlike those in the military-industrial complex who live and die by the defense budget.
And that $757.8 billion is just the down payment. You want to see the real big bucks, look at the long term costs.
Remember, the Iraq War was completely voluntary. It was a war of choice. The two justifications used to start it were both completely wrong. First, Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack. It was Al Qaeda, and had nothing to do with Sadam Hussein. Second, there were no weapons of mass destruction, except for the left-overs from the Iran-Iraq war. These were the chemical weapons that the US helped Iraq obtain when they were fighting a proxy war for the US against Iran.
So upwards of $2 trillion has been spent on a war that we started for the wrong reasons. That's real serious government waste.
And it's not just the money. If you want to get really upset, check out the Casualties of the Iraq War. It will make you sick to your stomach.
Why is Snark Required?
10% more? Pathetic. The USA will call you a commie pinko terrorist-sympathizer if you propose reducing the military to 200% more than the next two nations combined.
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Fraud and abuse in social programs.. a fairly low percentage of the total spent, millions of people get a little help or hand up, and we arent using the money to kill people.
Your Kompressor example is an anecdote. Waste in spending is the norm. I am not saying that either end of the spectrum could not be administered better - they certainly could - however, a few fraudsters (or a few thousand) getting an extra 200 a month is much less than one pork barrel project that costs .5B when it is known to be unlikely at best. And it is less still than the corporations who socialize losses by not offering fulltime or decent wage jobs, placing the profits in their pockets and the burden on the taxpayer.
Silence is a state of mime.
The anticipated, and constantly rising, cost of the F-35 aircraft is approximately $300 million each for the expected 32 aircraft of the _testing_ manufacturing run. The attempt to use the same airframe with different versions for all three military branches and their very different needs has made it so expensive that it's next to useless and many times the cost of a normal aircraft for _any_ of the planned roles. It has incredibly expensive "stealth" technology that does not work, it's incredibly fast but it cannot turn in air combat, and it's so overmuscled and heavy that the $1500/each tires keep failing when it lands.
You have to try to see it if works. If nobody try to build a chest that can stop bullets, you don't know if is possible.
So, preventing death using some sort of a missile defense is money well spent. Preventing death using health care is socialist bullshit. Fuck, yeah.
Sig ?
I saw on Fox News someone say there were millions of companies that could slap together healthcare.gov at a fraction of the cost, so what possible justification was there for CGI Federal? Well those "millions of companies" were not on the DHHS task order under which that contract was issued. Only about 40 some companies were, apparently. You're not a prime on the task order, then fuck you. You better cozy up to one of the primes on that task order so you can bid on it.
$10B on impractical stuff doesn't upset me. $10b is a drop in the bucket of the federal budget. The rules, by their very nature, probably waste 10x that by favoring incompetent incumbents especially in IT.
If by "isolation" you mean we quit trying to be the world police and let the rest of the world pay for their own defense, then yes. Otherwise, sounds like a straw man to me. The thought that we are suddenly going to become isolated now is pretty funny, almost.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Waste and corruption have become more apparent as budgets shrink and their is more checks and balances put into place as past issues demand it. But we always seem to find even more waste no matter what is done to stop it. Especially at the federal level projects get funded by Congress who typically pass budgets in a crisis management style at the last minute with no real understanding what the budget includes or how the money is being spent. They dole out millions without any ability to fully understand how its being spent. This is because, government is so big that nobody can possibly mange such a huge entity without understanding that significant amounts of that budget will be wasted. The problem is a lack of transparency and absolutely no real end to the funding. Even though Congress cries all the time that money is running out. It never really happens, they simply borrow more money and raise the national debt. We should all be fearful of a collapse of our economy and government because of this debt. But it seems nobody really does care. We never associate a absolute end to our borrowing, and our debt numbers seem just that, a number.
Spend a bunch of money, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but either way you learn a lot.
It's not a waste if you're in the business of government.
People are happy to have the NSA read their sexts if it stops a terrorist. The country has gotten what it deserves. I'm just glad I won't be around in 40-50 years when the chickens really come home to roost.
thats unpossible....seriously, why is the governments wasting money news? its not like it hasnt happened before or will never happen again.
Is it just me, but if they were going to base their entire defense on one single site, with one single radar. Is this just not one single point of failure? Destroy one single site and drop as much as you want after that?
Simple money in the back pocket of contractors, this was never a feasible defence system.
On September 10th, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld announced that the Pentagon was missing $2.3 Trillion dollars.
On 9/11, a "plane" hit the accounting offices of the Pentagon and the missing money was never discussed again.
Just a coincidence.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Can someone find which circus the submitter ran away from & send him back?
At the bottom of the
Right but you have to start somewhere. The 'technocrats' are always telling us the lie that government spending is somehow different. Over the short term maybe that is true, in that I can't print money but they can, over the long term however its wealth in vs wealth out. Military spending is almost uniquely consumptive. When you build a bomb once you use it you no longer have a bomb any more, unless it did something like end WII it probably ultimately means nothing. Sometimes you do get technological advances but only sometimes.
Tell me how OUR society continues to benefit form ordinance detonated over IRAQ 13 years ago..
Even if the government builds a road or a dam we get a road and a dam, by comparison and those things continue to pay dividends for a long time, they give us electricity, a reservoir of potable water to support a city or industry, cheaper and faster transportation of people and goods etc. Even if you spend money on something like education you get a better more productive workforce.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Actually this is a very good point. Decaying roads, impoverished cities and rural areas, huge student loan debts...It is like a missile hit, just slow and dispersed. Fear of missile attacks is the thing that destroys us. Fear of terrorists. Fear of airplane bombers. Fear of secret conversations. Fear of people hiding under cars in the mall parking lot. Fear of life without a gun.
...'If we can stop one missile from destroying one American city,'
Damn, is that all it takes to get a multi-billion dollar defense program justified?
The only thing stronger than the FUD being slung here is the stench of the bullshit coming from it.
No wonder I still have to take my damn shoes off at the airport. Stupid Americans will believe anything under the guise of national security.
Seems we have a lot of people online with mod points who seem to appreciate the "lol its funny because women belong in the kitchen, geddit? har har" style jokes. I wonder if they're the same people who concern-troll and shout down any articles about sexism in IT.
I now await someone who will accuse me of being a "social justice warrior" because pointing out blatantly sexist jokes is completely equivalent to also forcing all science fiction to be dystopic.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
"Billion? With a 'B'?"
"Yes, with a 'B'."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=5E8DQSHkhGE#t=115
This number sounds awfully low.
best case is, you get spam.
average case is just manure.
Actually, if it's the Kompressor article I'm thinking of: The situation was that the husband and wife both had had well-paying jobs, then they both lost their jobs via the downturn in the economy, and the CAR WAS PAID FOR and not worth much, so they kept it, rather than - what? Trading it in on a used beater or something? So, yes, she was driving the Mercedes to pick up welfare checks, but they were, for lack of a better term, newly poor. It was likely if something happened to the Mercedes that they wouldn't be buying another one while still on welfare. Holding it up as an example of poor people owning nice cars and the handouts being out of control is misleading.
But I think the projects did reach their intended goals: getting rid of the excess resources of our society so as to keep people hungry, sick and in fear.
What else could they have used those resources for? Healthcare? Education? Science?
... Only it worked. They were able to build a bomb that could flatten a city that was small enough to be dropped by a single plane.
We take that for granted, but that was a pie in the sky concept at the time... at least from perspective of the non-physicists.
So today they're building lasers, magnetically accelerated cannons, autonomous hunter killer robots, etc...
Can you blame the pentagon for not being able to tell what will work from what won't?
I hate waste as much as the next guy, but how the hell are they to know half the time. F'ing radar invisible airplanes? Jet fighters that take off vertically?
A lot of it sounded crazy until it had already happened and was proven to work.
Just have a little sympathy for them. They can't really know sometimes. Neither can you. Any number of the dumb ideas there could have worked or could still work in the future.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Oh, I can blame it on that. How many tank wars do you think we're going to have in the next 10 years? How many artillery pieces are going to be used for anything except training?
If we learned anything from Iraq and Afghanistan, it's that war doesn't look like that anymore. It's some asshole looking to bushwhack you with a roadside bomb, a sniper on top of some shithole building in a crowded civilian area. Not a column of tanks advancing through the countryside with an artillery barrage flying overhead.
I am a scientist in real life (yes, biomed PhD and everything) and I would like to offer a different opinion. We spent all this money on something that didn't work. Ok, that's less than desirable. However, I think it's inaccurate to call it a complete waste. For one, it employed people and secondly and maybe most importantly, it funded research, which is almost always a good thing. The only way this would be a complete waste, is if they did not use what they learned from these projects to take with them to the next. That's my real fear: we'll keep spending money in a very inefficient way. My only beef with the whole thing, is that they should have given that $10B to the NIH, NSF, NASA, universities, etc...
ITT: non-experts give biased explanations for the failure of r&d projects, then extropolate from this an indictment of an entire industry.
Hell of a lot of problems in our procurement system-- this article doesn't even come close to accurately identifying them.
How the Pentagon Wasted $10 Billion On Military Projects
That's more reassuring than if the Pentagon wasted that money on personal projects instead of military ones...
The parent comment is spam
The 'Welfare Queen' myth started under the Nixon Administration. It has never been proven out either when the facts are checked or in my personal experience. Oh, and it seems that the 'Welfare Queen' is almost always black even though more white people are on welfare of one form or another, Perhaps a bit of racism in the mix?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Here's an idea for how to spend the next 1 trillion in USA military better: just fucking educate your troops better, make the grunts have 3 year training.
I defy you to find a national army with meaningfully better training than the US military. Seriously. I have many criticisms of the US military but their training of troops is not one of them. They take it very seriously and for the business of war-fighting they do an outstanding job overall. Nobody wants to go toe to toe with the US military in a conventional war and training is a huge part of that.
frigging conscript armies have longer training and they don't even expect to go to war.
Name one conscript army with meaningfully better or longer training than the US military.
where as your grunts basically get just bootcamp and then it's to another culture to act effectively in the role of police, so it's rather ridiculous that the training hasn't been geared towards that.
If you think troops are sent overseas right out of boot then you know nothing about how the US military functions. They get quite a lot more training than that before they are sent in harms way.
it's rather ridiculous that your mercenary grunts have such short and shoddy training(yeah it's a mercenary army, they're all getting paid and benefits and none of them were forced to be there at the moment).
The US military is by definition not a mercenary unit. They are the military arm of the US government. They do not fight battles in exchange for private financial gain. The French Foreign Legion is a mercenary unit. The US Army is unequivocally not a mercenary unit.
Lets not forget how much that social welfare payment is, where it goes and how much profit is in it. Compare that to pork, where one, just one scamming corporate executive can pay off a politician and in one corrupt act, pay something like 150,000 social welfare payments for a whole year. Now you bloody conservative morons, all of that money rolls on right back into the economy and keeps everything circulating. Where as that top end payment, up to half of it can go flying offshore into a tax haven and for the other half you end up with nothing at all much to show for it.
The military industrial complex is an obscene black hole of waste, graft, corruption. Why does the left not care to much about social welfare payments because by far the majority of it circulates directly back into the economy and especially favours small business and when cheats are caught they have to pay it back and then some.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
A woman on WIC driving a 10-20 year old Mercedes Beater with a Supercharger (that's what Kompressor means, it's not a model it's a feature)... probably a C-class Sudan bought at auction for a song, with low taxes. Sounds about right. Cheap insurance on those too, since there cheap as hell to maintain at this point (lots of 3rd party parts).
No but it does label you a humorless twit.
We get the government we deserve. Until we stop electing candidates (from either party) who promise pork, we will continue to get pork, and waste, and a society that is steadily going bankrupt.
The job of an elected representative is to look out for the interests of his constituents. By definition that includes trying to bring projects and economic benefit to their district/state. The notion that voters will stop electing representatives that seek to bring those same voters economic benefits is absurdly naive.
Some amount of pork is fine and to be expected. What you have to worry about is when it gets big, expensive projects spread out among a lot of districts so that even a boondoggle cannot be killed. See the Space Shuttle for a good example. Basically you cannot realistically eliminate pork spending but you can work to keep it under control.
Frankly however $10 billion, while a lot of money is a rounding error in a $3 trillion + federal budget. I'm MUCH more concerned about the imbalance between our spending priorities (Medicare + Military specifically) and our unwillingness to fund those priorities with an adequate tax base. Either the spending needs to be cut or the taxes need to go up or both. But currently we just borrow and pretend that we can sustain this imbalance to this absurd spending level without adequate tax revenue indefinitely.
Actually, there was a real welfare queen that fits the details of the urban legend.
Her name was Linda Taylor. And welfare fraud was probably among the least of her crimes. It's a fascinating story.
Now obviously, she's the exception, rather than the rule. Most people on welfare aren't creating multiple fake identities in order to bilk the system. And most sure aren't involved in possible kidnappings and suspicious deaths.
Tell your conservative friend that a Mercedes-Benz C230 Kompressor is only worth about $6000 in good condition, and far from some indicator that they are cheating the system.
There's probably people on welfare that have far more expensive cars.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
until they notify us that taxes are now 100% of what we earn.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
DARPA never should have funded that pie in the sky internet thing. It's obviously been a complete and utter waste of money.
In 2015 the pentagon budget is 555 Billion dollars. So a billion dollars wasted is only about 1/5th of 1 percent.
I defy you to find another organization, public or private, with as little waste.
Sure, we would like to see no waste at all, but as long as we have human beings making decisions we are going to have stupid (in retrospect) projects being funded.
You'd expect a lot more waste given that they receive more money than any beneficial social program (health care, space exploration, scientific research) in the USA. Bad projects are part of any business. The waste on programs that haven't been mothballed yet but continue trudging on well beyond their original budgets and timelines are much worse.
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No but it does label you a humorless twit.
I have a sense of humour---when the joke's actually funny. "lol its funny because women belong in the kitchen make me a sandwich har har" doesn't cut it for me. Same way I don't find racist jokes funny either.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Pretty much anything else you are going to "blame it on" is going to be less, since the only thing with more spending is Social Security - which has a separate income stream that has been running a surplus. Add in veterans benefits and other similar services, which aren't considered defense, and it would even be more.
You accidently mispelled 'twat'.
They were making enough to pay for expensive cars, even though now paid off, yet had no savings to use when the economy turned? Why bother with basics like saving money for a rainy day when the government will just throw money at any issue.
It doesn't matter what they promise, campaign promises are not illegal to break. Until you realize this, 'voting' is just a concept they're using to give you the illusion of control.
What's that, per day or by the hour?
Peace, or Not?
After they take out the mandatory cost of government iphone, housing, food stamps, medical, and education they put the rest in a retirement fund for you. When you reach 99 years old, you may spend whatever you don't owe to the federal reserve anyway you wish.
While I've long been a critic of all ABM programs, and so should in theory agree with the basis of this post, but this article downright stinks. It is clear the author doesn't really understand any of the technical issues he writes about with feigned authority. The baseball analogy section is particularly laughable, picking apart a dumb offhand statement while utterly missing the entire point of the analogy, and failing to consider the issue that the radar can't possibly do what it claims to anyway.
For those of you interested in all of this, I suggest you read the Wiki article on Nike Zeus. The problems with decoys were well known in 1958, and panel after panel of the super-smart (including nobel laureates) examined the issue in depth and basically said that a good decoy is literally impossible to distinguish from the warhead. Why? Because you can put the warhead in a mylar balloon and launch several similar balloons on nearby trajectories, and that's basically that.
Everyone has been aware of this issue ever since. Nike-X and LOADS were invented to work at much lower altitudes, where the decoys were no longer a factor (they're balloons, they begin to float once they start to re-enter), while the PRESS series attempted to find differences in ionization or other physical effects of the earliest stages of reentry to the same end. Both ultimately failed - Nike-X could be overwhelmed with MIRV for almost zero cost, and PRESS demonstrated that no such measurable difference actually exists.
No amount of engineering can fix this. All you can do is hope that the decoys have bad trajectories or tumble, with the later being of zero use if it's spherical. It is entirely possible that North Korea has bad decoys, but given that the UK built really good ones in the 60s as part of Chevaline, its certainly not a $10 billion bet I'd make. And then there's the killer problem - you deliberately launch the RV on a "bad" trajectory so its not a threat, and then maneuver after the midcourse onto the target. This problem killed Hardsite, and it only had to work over about 10 miles, not 10,000.
I'm not saying that BMD is a bad idea, but everyone should be perfectly aware that any BMD can be penetrated with some degree of ease. The question, as it has been since the 50s, is whether by spending XXX dollars on improving the defense can be offset by spending XXX on better penaids. NK is a poor country so its a question to ponder, but for anyone else the answer is, and always has been, that it's about 20 times cheaper to penetrate the BMD than build it.
He's a twit that rips on libertarians every chance he gets... probably because one of them made him look like a total ass at one point in his life.
Honestly guys, the amount of correct factual information in there would make it about 1 page in length.
"Manual steering the SBX"? Seriously? What do they think, it was built in 1952?
Pathetic.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Tell me how OUR society continues to benefit form ordinance detonated over IRAQ 13 years ago..
Without that, there wouldn't be any demand for the ordnance detonated over Iraq today.
Last post!
probably a C-class Sudan bought at auction for a song, with low taxes
I don't care what the tax rate is in Sudan. You shouldn't be able to buy another country on or off of WIC.
You know what else came from military R&D (DARPA) ? The Internet.
Keep in mind that without hugely expensive research projects, you wouldn't be posting a message on Slashdot today.
Wow, modded down for pointing out ragingly sexist joke. The mysoginist mods are clearly out in force today!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
More white people as a percentage of the total white population? I think not.
US defence spending is 4.4% of GDP. You can blame the deficit on many things but not that.
Or you could say 23% of federal govt spending in 2014. Sounds like a large amount.
And when conservatives wail on about "cutting wasteful spending" they mean spending like WIC, SNAP, Medicare, and Social Security - not Military Spending which must be a Good Thing [especially contracts given to large corporations].
Look to the Reagan administration's "Star Wars" project. In fact, that was just the tip of the iceberg of funds misspent by that regime. After concocting outlandish scenarios of a Soviet arms buildup, admin wonks tasked the CIA with finding proof of such. The CIA came back with the observation that there was no such evidence. The administration successfully spun this as "proof" the Soviets were up to much worse than even the wonks' wildest claims, and allocated tens of billions of dollars to wasteful, unnecessary defence spending. The fall of the Soviet Union, and the release of Soviet documents, revealed the arms buildup to be a Reagan administration fantasy.
GDP talk is full of crap.
The US takes in about 3.525 trillion a year. 77 billion goes to interest, 1.1 trillion is dedicated to SS, Unemployment etc, leaving 1.655 trillion left. 994 billion of that is spent on the military... well over half of our discretionary income. FUCK the war industry.
You never learn what it takes to succeed
sedan, Sudan...whatever (bloody autocorrect, I hate /. on mobile.)
... until the internet actually worked.
The U.S. has de facto confiscated all the oil in the world to support its bankrupt currency and continue its hegemony. The U.S. could give every citizen a thousand dollars a week and the rest of the world would still have to acquire U.S. currency at any cost to buy oil. Any country trying to sell oil in any other currency or gold will have its leaders assassinated.
Conservative friend here. (Well, I'm someone's conservative friend. Maybe not OP's conservative friend.)
If memory serves, the story in this case was that the couple had both suffered job loss at roughly the same time and were long-term unemployed. The Mercedes was already paid for from back when the happy couple had jobs. In order to "look the part" of being poor, they would have had to have replaced the Mercedes for a beater that almost certainly would have been more expensive to maintain than the 'Benz. That would not have been a sound financial decision.
I understand the perceived inconsistency of someone pulling up to the welfare office in a Mercedes, but it also seems that some people are a little eager to rush to judgment.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Has this guy seen Detroit? You can't distinguish it from a missile strike.
I love how this got an "Insightful" mod instead of a "Funny"!
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
The woman with the Mercedes was actually broke.
The safety net was working.
Yes. This is entirely allowed. Indeed required.
Laid off, you pay off your debts because you haven't got the income to keep servicing the debt. Result, nothing left.
Why? Are you going to slag people off for being poor because they lost their jobs now???
Ten billion injected into Detroit really would save it. But then again, where would they get their desperate poverty stricken minorities to risk their lives for 25k a year.
If we just kept one congresscritter from pork-barreling away our money...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They said that? I think not.
What they said was more whites were pulling welfare cheques than blacks.
This is absolutely true. Therefore if you want to save the most money, target the whites first.
Feel free to leave then. You don't dictate policy, despite your moniker. You only rule over neckbeards.
I bet Obama fired him.
More white people as a percentage of the total white population? I think not.
You are correct. Still, think of it, millions upon millions of white folk, just like you!
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
And that worked so well that UK is still the world's superpower in naval might. Right?
Well, they ruled for a century. The US has yet to match that longevity.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
The problem is that they have the system rigged so that you can't just cut defense spending. Defense spending isn't just boots on the ground, it's a lot of research jobs and grants. Those are the programs that would get cut long before you starved the contractors. Not to mention entire towns that depend on whatever military base is nearby or the Boeing/Lockheed plant. Cutting back on military spending has been made to be near completely impossible. You can't just cut the funding and hope they spend the rest responsibly.
X
In my entire life only times I can think of soldiers keeping anything safe was American interests in other countries overseas, think oil. Otherwise they don't keep us safe. Seems their job is more protecting US interests.
"War Is a Racket" by General Smedley Butler should be required reading in High School.
(checking out my window) Detroit is still here. Doesn't look like a missle strike.
And this surely isn't the only city in America to experience an economic downturn.
The Detroit jokes are getting a bit old and tired guys, that is all...
Making contractors rich with no-bid contracts is in the constitution? please do indicate where..
One of MANY prime examples?
http://gazette.com/west-virgin...
Yep.... Ask yourself why the border patrol would need an office in West Virginia.
Oh dear, an economic/political rant on Slashdot...
The US cannot go bankrupt. We are a sovereign nation that issues its own currency. Get over it.
This "waste" creates jobs and spurs R&D. It inflates our money supply at a time when the economy is sluggish, and boosts the private sector. Why are people complaining?
If you think taxpayers are funding this "waste", you're wrong. Taxpayers pay taxes, that's it. Unless the budget is balanced there's no association between federal spending and revenue, they are just two different dollar totals on the books. (And I'm not advocating balancing the budget simply to curtail spending.)
If you think our children (or grandchildren, great-grandchildren etc.) are going to have to pay off this debt, that's also incorrect. Federal debt is always serviced by issuing more currency.
I'm not saying the government can spend without limit, but there are no hard limits. The practical limits are set by inflation rates and real resources. At present, real resources are abundant and inflation is low. So let's raise spending. If we reach 99% employment and inflation sets in, we can curtail government spending.
This isn't solely my view--lookup Modern Money Theory. Many economists understand these principles of a fiat currency. Few politicians do, unfortunately, and they like to throw around words like "debt" and "waste" without understanding their meaning.
In 2013, the Unites States gave foreign governments $23 billion in "humanitarian aid" and $14 billion in military aid (that's in ONE YEAR). We also doubled food stamps during the Obama years from approx $40 billion PER YEAR to approx $80 billion PER YEAR (did I miss the speech where Mr Obama bragged about doubling the number of hungry people? probably not... maybe some of this money is being wasted or shunted to other priorities EVERY YEAR)
Also, if you pay attention to how the article is carefully written and you know about these systems from other sources, you know that this is a hit piece. Most of the systems mentioned actually DO work, but they do NOT work as the author of the article and critics of those systems THINK they should work.
For example, the Laser-Armed 747 actually works as intended.... and the original intent was to forward-deploy these things at high-tension times to areas where bad regimes where threatening to launch missiles in order to knocck down a limited number of missiles in boost-phase (thereby averting lots of dead civilians and an unnecessary war). Apparently the idiot author and critics of the system think we are better-off with no-such capability.... I hope the first rogue nation that launches a ballistic missile at the US aims for Los Angeles (apparently the LA Times would be just FINE with that...)
The X-Band RADAR is similarly NOT the flop it is portrayed as. As with most military R&D projects, these things develop an initial capability, allowing their users and developers to try things and find what aspects of the initial concept are not needed, what could be improved, what is needed but missing and so forth. Today's F-35 fighter and the modern aircraft xarrier look nothing like the first airplanes and warships.
Hey, it's the LA Times, none of the people who work there have probably ever MET a person who did not vote for president Obama (and you'll note that all of these projects were killed by the Obama admin). This is not a comment to drag Obama into it specifically, but just about the left-leaning nature of the LA Times; it DOES make good birdcage lining though....
The "war on terror", fought in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Pakistan has cost over $6 trillion, and resulted in complete strategic failure in each nation.
You would think the fact that the US has failed in every shooting war since Vietnam would be enough to convince politicians that the "military option" is the last thing they want to do. They would be better served to gut the military budget because clearly believing that they have the "best military in the world" leads them into wars they never end up winning.
No, I'm going to slag people off for not having the brains to save money for the future, then running to the state for handouts when bad stuff happens. I also don't like people who build houses on the beach, then cry when a storm washes it away. They love to get gov't money too.
Isn't the real cause of "devastation look" in Detroit the negligence of property owners and the city to cleanup, demolish and recycle the buildings and materials from the now unoccupied areas?
But my conservative friend sent me an opinion article from two years ago about a woman on WIC driving a Mercedes Kompressor to pick up her groceries! Sometimes I think your political alignment just reveals where you ignore graft from: conservatives ignore overspending from the top; liberals ignore overspending from the bottom. And the argument between the two is just which is more burdensome.
Whatever your political alignment, I'd hope you base your opinions and (in the case of politicians) policy decisions on more than anecdotal articles. Articles like that appeal on an emotion level, but that's all. You need to look at aggregate data on the state/nation level to evaluate how a policy is working. You can't do it based on an article your mate sent you.
I doubt it, but here's the flipside to the FOX NEWS ALERT of that sort of story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/07/08/this-is-what-happened-when-i-drove-my-mercedes-to-pick-up-food-stamps/
The word is Briton, sir.
and the war mongers will be screaming that we just can't afford such frivolities. Especially if some of the money would go to help "those people"
I don't like the way reality paints me. Please stop so I can feel good about myself.
used the very same time machine that he created to plant the false birth certificates to go back and tank the economy just so he could pretend to take it and take all our guns while impregnating our wymon. Wake up sheeple!!!!!
and cut out the BS pork versions.
>"In the past decade, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency has wasted $10 billion on defense projects that were either impractical and impossible."
And to put that in perspective, this "tiny" example of federal waste in a never ending huge bucket of waste is probably over $800 for every active taxpayer (depending on how many or few Americans are actually paying meaningful taxes)... not counting the compounded interest on the debt it, no-doubt, incurred.
Not to be a killjoy, but all this does is prove what the Right says: "government cannot do anything right". And for those of you that think that's it's only the *military* part of the govt that is incompetent...you're delusional. Besides, have some perspective: the US govt spends ~22billion EVERY DAY. 10 billion over 10 years is barely a rounding error.
Wow, modded down for pointing out blatantly sexist moderation. Well, at least my grandparent post got modded back up. You're fighting an uphill battle, mysoginist mods :)
SJW n. One who posts facts.
As I recall, they had actually gone several months before applying for the food stamps - i.e., on savings. You know you probably could look up the article and get the info for yourself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/us/politics/20data.html?_r=0
You guys need to get you story straight. Ether the Benz was new, valuable and cheap to maintain or it was old, valueless and _unbelievably_ expensive to maintain. Those are the endpoints of Benz ownership.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I don't really remember for sure, honestly. If I really cared that much about this story I would just Google it and get the answer. You could do the same if you are so inclined.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
My point being, which I need to clarify, is that people on welfare are struggling. In my personal experience most of the people who I met who needed public assistance desperately wanted to get a decent job and get out. If you are honest, it is a bad way of life.
see here for a better analysis. http://www.cracked.com/blog/th...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Like someone pointed out later the woman might have just become poor and owned the car already. Sadly These days I know some people on food stamps not one is doing this to rip off the system. They need them to eat. I know one couple that both have jobs and still need food stamps to pay for food in order to survive.
If you get a job at Walmart part of the hire in process is signing you up for food stamps. Why? The bastards won't pay you enough so you can survive. In this case Walmart is the one supplementing food stamps as part of the salary for an employee. This from a company that could pay every employee $60,000.00 a year and still show a profit.
You got to remember the pork we are talking about only funnels back to the rich. The poor need fucking help. The rich need nothing.
I truly hope you never need to go on welfare because you lost your job. If you do you will have a different opion of welfare.
I would have guessed the amount to be much higher. A responsible Congress will take these numbers and cut future funding by that amount. My guess is that the current trigger happy Republican dominated Congress will more likely up the funding for DoD by that amount.