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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.
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.
Has this guy seen Detroit? You can't distinguish it from a missile strike.
I agree with the sentiment, but the way that the funds are allocated does not lead to good results. You need to spend a lot of money on projects that will fail to find the ones that will work, but you don't want to spend a lot of money on individual projects that will fail, and most especially you don't want to keep funding projects after it becomes obvious that they will fail. You don't want to fund projects based on which congressional district will get the money and you want to make it clear that researchers who discover something won't work early can easily get funding to work on their next project.
There are some good points in the above response. In response to the original post, the complains aren't always the case with all government research. For example, the SBIR program which often involves research projects that are "out there". They do it in a tiered system where they have phases: I, II and III. Phase I is a prototype/proof of concept. After that, the government project managers make a decision about whether the product is good enough to warrant Phase II funding. If it is, they go ahead and fund it. If it's REALLY good, they do a Phase III which is basically a commercialization. The company making the product is allowed to commercialize it, but the government gets it for free for a significant period (10 years or more). Additionally, even if the research is a flop, the government gets all rights to the data and as such, can use what was discovered/created as a base for other projects. So the money isn't "wasted", as was said in the original post, but the research/work completed on the project is available to help steer decisions on later projects.
With the OP's logic, we've "wasted" a lot of money on cancer research, but is it worth it? I would argue it is.
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.
perhaps greece can stay.
it would mean that tsipras lied pre-elections, of course. that's hardly anything new even in greece though.
the real kicker though is how ungrateful the greeks are of the money loaned to them. it's like they're totally oblivious to it being greeks who spent the money.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Yes, but a lot of that pork goes to Democratic districts too. I for one have a tough time listing to all this talk about the 'wealth' gap while they support programs that basically hand billions to defense contractors with 300:1 CEO/employee pay rations to make stuff we don't need.
If any of these social just DNC members want me to give a shit about the wealth gap they need to spine to up deal with the issue head on. We collect taxes form a person earning 80K trying to support a partner and 4 kids so we build weapons, for sale to Egypt, which they will purchase with aide money we gave them to do it, again out of that guys tax dollars. Meanwhile its probably a violation of our own law, because there was a coup there (even if that ass hat John Kerry doesn't care to determine so).
Until than I am sticking with 'tax cuts only' crowd because I don't see any good reason throw 'real' money away on these misappropriations, much better to toss debt at them if they can't be stopped, at least debt can one day be defaulted on! I also don't think using the military simultaneously as 'Team America World Police' and a Jobs program is a noble effort. I don't particularly think make work programs are a good idea to begin with but at least if we shifted like 60% of military resource allocations (in terms of people and money) to a new WPA our society might end up with something to show for it.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Is that you, naivete? Yes, there is some degree of experimentation necessary but you clearly didn't RTFA. So many of these projects were dead from the get-go if anyone was paying attention. BUT, you gotta spend that budget or you don't get it back.
Your blind "thank the boys and girls who protect us" is simply facile and ignores the massive corruption and waste in the MIC.
Well said, the pair of you. What's more, $10 billion, while a lot of money to the rest of us, is a molecule of sweat on a lip of the bucket (i.e., not even a drop in it) compared to the US national budget.
There are what, 200 million taxpayers in the United States? That means that the Pentagon spent about $50 per taxpayer. I'd say that much can afford to be "wasted" without really hurting anyone.
Besides, $10 billion is literally less than what Americans spent on Starbucks coffee last year alone. (2014 US revenue for Starbucks was $12.4bn.) You can't really complain about these projects when it's less than your coffee, can you?
I'm certainly in favour of responsible spending at the government level. But the OP (and TFA, for that matter) clearly doesn't understand the scale here, using these numbers for political grandstanding. This is less than 2% of the DoD's yearly budget... being spent over 15 years.
There really isn't much of a story here.
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.
Riiiiight........ because they were the ones that racked up huge deficits, started a criminal war in Iraq, and were the ones who put together the bank bailout plans and then bullied the next administration into implementing it. Nice job rewriting history.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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+
The republicans do not have a good spending record either. They cut democratic lead initiatives, and put money in their own, then they cut taxes that they really don't have budgeted to do. So they raise taxes other ways.
The democrats when in charge will cut republican lead initiatives, put money in their own, they will not revert the tax cuts that the republicans made, even though it doesn't solve the budget, so they raise taxes in other ways.
The real problem is the polarization of the normal citizen. The politicians will only cater to them. Those damn moderates who sway the elections are who the politicians should be really kissing up to... But moderates have been toss aside, figuring they do no have any political ideals. Because the more extreme on the Right and Left have pulled many of them who are in the edges away.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If you think our problems can be solved by Democrats instead of Republicans, or Republicans instead of Democrats, you are watching the shell and not the pea.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Hell yes, I can complain about it. There's always a huge list of deserving but unfunded Federal projects that would actually work that could have been paid for with that money. The problem isn't trying something that didn't work out. The problem is putting this kind of money into something when the reasons why it didn't work out are simple and obvious enough to fit into short paragraphs in that article. It's not just 20-20 hindsight. It's people telling those who saw these problems on day one "you may be right, but lets just build it and find out" when they're the ones getting paid to do the building. For less than half a billion dollars you could hire a lot of incredibly smart people who could explain with simple diagrams and small words why a given project is conceptually doomed and throwing a couple billion dollars at it can't be classified as anything other than pork. Then, the people thinking up these projects could keep trying until they come up with something that, should it fail, will do so for reasons that are actually complex and unforeseen.
Grateful for being scammed and conquered?
Eurozone is a brilliant trap, nothing more:
1. Create a free trade zone with a single currency, so weaker economies can't balance their imports and exports through the exchange rate.
2. Mandate that every nation must have a positive trade balance, which is of course impossible since they trade mainly with one another and every credit on one nation's balance sheet is a debit on another's.
3. As all economies weaker than your own fail one by one, "rescue" them with loans who's terms destabilize their society and further cripple their economy.
4. Enjoy your new colonial empire. Deutschland uber alles!
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.