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.

Comments

only government?

[jbbernar]

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?

Re:only government?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

A mere $10 billion?

The IMF, European Central Bank and the EU wasted 330€ billion on keeping Greece in the Eurozone, which is both impractical and impossible.

Although the 330€ billion is officially loans, that money ain't no never be coming back. And Greece will have to leave the Eurozone. Although the majority of Greeks would like to stay in the Eurozone, the fiscal policies of Greece's Prime Minister Tsipras and Finance Minister Varoufakis can only work if Greece has it's own currency to devalue. So the game is for Greece to exit the Eurozone, and that each side can blame the other for what happened.

Anyway, the politicians in the EU sold this 330€ billion bailout package to the public as necessary for the "security" of the Eurozone. In the US, the politicians sell the $10 million on failed projects as necessary for US military superiority . . . in other words, also as necessary for "security" of the US public.

Re:only government?

[gl4ss]

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.

Re:only government?

[DarkOx]

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.

Re:only government?

[Anonymous Coward]

US military spending remains outrageous at about as much as the rest of the planet put together. And this ~800 billion budget is so opaque that GAO can't even begin to audit DoD.

Re:only government?

[Talderas]

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

They're professional, or regular, soldiers rather than conscripts and certainly not mercenaries. Mercenaries are defined by the Geneva Conventions.

Art 47. Mercenaries
1. A mercenary shall not have the right to be a combatant or a prisoner of war.
2. A mercenary is any person who:
      (a) is especially recruited locally or abroad in order to fight in an armed conflict;
      (b) does, in fact, take a direct part in the hostilities;
      (c) is motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and, in fact, is promised, by or on behalf of a Party to the conflict, material compensation substantially in excess of that promised or paid to combatants of similar ranks and functions in the armed forces of that Party;
      (d) is neither a national of a Party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by a Party to the conflict;
      (e) is not a member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict; and
      (f) has not been sent by a State which is not a Party to the conflict on official duty as a member of its armed forces.

Re:only government?

[plopez]

Ummmm.... through taxes the Federal budget IS a part of the GDP and private sector. You cannot separate them, it is all the same pot of money.

Re:only government?

[ultranova]

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.

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!

Re:only government?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

I usually do not respond to obvious trolls, but in this case I will make an exception.

Have you ever worked with Greeks on an IT project? I have. About three years, on an EU FP7 sponsored project. The "best" of Greece, people from Athens Technology Center (ATC) and the National Technology University of Athens (NTUA) were involved.

They were simply crap, to sum it up succinctly.

Now as to your points . . .

Grateful for being scammed and conquered?

No one forced Greece into the Eurozone. The government of Greece cooked their books to get in. If Greece wants out, don't let the door hit their ass on the way out. But if you owe the EU money, you had better be prepared to pay it back. No free lunch, you lazy mother-fuckers!

Eurozone is a brilliant trap, nothing more:

The Eurozone is for advanced economies . . . Greece is a Third World Country, although, they don't want to admit it.

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.

Greece has such high unemployment . . . because the Greeks are unemployable. What can they do in one hour? Roll a few Dolmades? Germans would push off a Mercedes off the production line in that time.

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.

Sorry, but the Greek government did that to themselves . . . and their citizens . . . and the citizens got the government that they deserved.

4. Enjoy new colonial empire. Deutschland uber alles!

Germans would like nothing better than giving Greece the boot out of the Eurozone and the EU. And who is paying for everything in Greece right now? You should think twice about flipping Germany the bird.

Oh, and I am American, by the way . . . in case you were wondering.

Re:only government?

[Anubis IV]

A mere $10 billion?

That was my gut reaction as well. Doesn't the US put around $600 billion annually into military spending? If so, that would suggest that 98.33% of the money they spent was not considered a waste. Given the nature of the field (i.e. very cost and research-intensive), having only 1.67% of the dollars designated as having been wasted means that they've either had incredible success or have been doing a poor job of recognizing failure.

Re:only government?

[rahvin112]

There is some truth to what the EU leaders have tried to sell. When Greece's house of cards came crashing down everyone realized there was nothing in place to either bail them out or allow them to exit the Euro. A greek collapse at the time would have brought the entire EU group nations credit down into the toilet. This would have been exacerbated by the fact that the people holding the most greek debt were other eurozone countries banks (France in particular was heavily exposed). There was so much money in greek debt in EU member banks that most of them would have collapsed if the Greek debt defaulted. Needless to say a greek default would have been catastrophic to the entire EU because there were no policies in place, nor did the ECB have authority to intervene.

That's now been fixed. The ECB has taken most of the greek debt from the EU banks in a bond exchange program. The EU has also put in place policies and given the ECB authority to intervene in the result of a greek default and the polices put in place will now require that in the event of default, Greece exits the euro (they are calling it grexit for a reason).

Now the worst that will happen to EU member states in the event of a greek default is some inflation as the ECB is forced to absorb the Greek loses by printing money. Greece will of course be fucked but they won't take the whole EU with them. The Greek collapse was an eye opener to the EU leaders. Though they haven't given the ECB all the powers is needs they have given them some tools they can use to limit the damage. If there is a grexit the market believes the EU member states will surrender further powers to the ECB to react.

And though that 330 billion is probably lost, it's better that the ECB take those loses than the member banks that previously held the assets. The ECB is also moving forward on plan to stress test the banks similar to what the US FED has done. In the end that 330 billion has bought the EU significant financial improvements and stability. Is it worth it? Probably not, but don't discount that the emergency Greece created is going to help the EU in the end by bringing better financial policies to the member states. If nothing else the Greek event cause the member states to bring their deficit spending under control.

Re:only government?

[HornWumpus]

Unless the greek exit topples Italy and Spain. (only sovereign nations are capitalized).

But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupting

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

No one promises pork

[davydagger]

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.

Re:No one promises pork

[SuricouRaven]

They promise it - just not publically. This sort of thing goes on out of the spotlight, based on unwritten understandings that if pork flows one way, campaign contributions will go the other.

Re:No one promises pork

[Plunky]

I'm not from the USA, but politicians everywhere are known for promising their electors that they will "increase employment" and other such claims.. Employment for the locals such as this, is pork. The politician doesn't care if its worthwhile or not, just that their electors are enriched.

Re:No one promises pork

[Gavagai80]

They do publicly propose increasing military spending, and the people applaud that. What do you think that'll go to? All the reasonable military needs have been met many times over, and nobody's going to say "ah we don't need that much money, here take some back" because that means their department gets the layoffs for admitting it.

Re:No one promises pork

[slimdave]

It would be wrong to characterise this as entirely the fault of politicians, beach the electors also do not care if it's worthwhile or not.

It works for the politicians to do this because their local electorate recognise that the cost will fall mostly on other tax payers, and each of the tax payers is trying to screw as many as the others as possible, and they'll vote for the candidate that will be complicit in the scheme.

Re:No one promises pork

[jd2112]

I'm not from the USA, but politicians everywhere are known for promising their electors that they will "increase employment" and other such claims.. Employment for the locals such as this, is pork. The politician doesn't care if its worthwhile or not, just that their electors are enriched.

There is a reason why the F-35 is sourced from about 45 different states...
$10 Billion? They wasted far more than that on this turkey alone.

Re:No one promises pork

[MachineShedFred]

They promise it to the direct recipients of the pork, in exchange for a timely political contribution to the committee to re-elect...

Re:No one promises pork

[sysrammer]

> No one promises pork spending. They just do it and don't tell you.

No, they do promise and they brag about it during re-election.
They just don't call it pork. They call it jobs and investment.

Pretty much this.

Re:No one promises pork

[khr]

No one promises pork spending

Actually, they consistently promise to eliminate pork. But if it's for their constituents, then it's not "pork" it's vital infrastructure and jobs. It's only pork if it's for a different strict represented by someone from the other party.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[umafuckit]

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.

A lot of that stuff actually worked

[gatkinso]

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.

Re:A lot of that stuff actually worked

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern weather radars would probably not be as awesome if not for the research done for the military side.
  Military needs basic research like any advanced technology utilizing organization does. Perhaps the technologies could have been put trough DARPA in pieces, after leaving from university laboratories as feasible ideas. Pentagon clearly needs an experienced CTO or a head of research who communicates and manages the expectations of the politicians providing the funding for projects and basic research.

Re:A lot of that stuff actually worked

[king neckbeard]

Or, we could just throw similar amounts of money at general purpose research, some of which might also be useful in military applications. Call it the "War on not Having Flying Cars"

Re:A lot of that stuff actually worked

[slimdave]

I very much doubt that the military is above classifying the failures and limitations of their systems, just as they classify the capabilities. They have even more reason to do so, as it protects their budgets and careers as well.

Re:A lot of that stuff actually worked

[gatkinso]

This is true, plenty of classified failures (for reasons other than to protect a budget... you do realize that many members of Congress have the clearance to review this information right?).

That said I counter with plenty of unclassified successes... that the article does not mention. My main point is that is it damn near impossible to draw an informed conclusion with most of the information is not available, especially so when the author has a clear bias.

Re:A lot of that stuff actually worked

[gatkinso]

Ah but there is the rub. Throwing money accomplishes nothing. With these systems there was a perceived (real or imagined) threat, which defined the mission. Without a purpose project seems to languish, or at the very least take much longer. War, it seems, is a prime motivator for Homo Sapiens.

Re:A lot of that stuff actually worked

[jd2112]

Or, we could just throw similar amounts of money at general purpose research, some of which might also be useful in military applications. Call it the "War on not Having Flying Cars"

No, We need to have a 'War on balanced budgets'. Based on the way previous 'wars on...' have went we'll have the deficit eliminated in 20 years!

Re:A lot of that stuff actually worked

[MachineShedFred]

Yeah, but it's far more effective to leak failures than successes if you're looking to make noise in the media.

Re:A lot of that stuff actually worked

[slimdave]

Well I'd prefer to characterise it as "if you're looking to stop the military from pissing the people's money away".

Re:A lot of that stuff actually worked

[king neckbeard]

It's not as if there is any shortage of purposes that could be more well defined than these projects, and would likely yield more useful results. Even a literal interpretation of a practical flying car would probably lead to more productive research. Maglev has enough conceptual overlap to be able to see research that benefits both, and flying cars should obviously be self-driving. Self driving vehicles and maglev trains could increase the standard of living and lower the costs of travel and distribution.

Re:A lot of that stuff actually worked

[Gliscameria]

You're spot on. A lot of these grants set the goal and let the researchers figure out how to get there. They know there are fundamental problems, and that's what they are paying for solving. Actually making the device is a small part of solving all of the fundamental problems. If it went the other way, with small grants to solve small problems, we'd have a serious problem. How do you manage a decent research group if you only get small grants for small problems? Sure, with the system as it is you have many different groups working on one large problem, and there is a lot of redundancy, but you also gets different attempts and solutions, with everyone working on the final project and not just the tiny pieces. It's significantly better this way. If you've ever been to a DARPA conference you can really appreciate how everyone is working on the same thing and how many different solutions there are... and how angry people get at each other or thinking differently.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep spending!

-The Chinese

Re:What candidate doesn't pork things up?

[Rei]

I'm extremely curious, how exactly are you managing to post on Slashdot from the year 1963?

747s with lasers!

[Ecuador]

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...

Re:747s with lasers!

[MachineShedFred]

My question is how much the research into these laser-mounted 747s advanced the state of the art of lasers. Perhaps with what they learned in making a laser powerful enough to fit in a 747 that can still fly, they learned something that could help the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Labratory?

I'm sure that kind of thing is classified, but the results of research aren't thrown out when something doesn't work - very likely there was useful information gained in the process.

Re:747s with lasers!

[akozakie]

Tried technology... Funny, but I think you just nailed the problem. And it's more within the scope of philosophy of science than anything else. The point is: our civilisation still has no idea how to fund applied science.

There are three main areas of science. Two are well understood and funding for them is well organized. The third one, perhaps most interesting, is a big unknown from the management side.

Disclaimer: I'm looking at this from the other side of the pond and applying my local experience. I wish to do applied science but have no funding mechanisms available for that.

We know how to deal with basic science. You have an idea, a hypothesis, whatever, you want to research it. You have no idea whether it's useful for anything - it's not really important to you. OK! Show that it will expand our general knowledge in a meaningful way. Funding is generally civilian (through the government in most cases). The results are judged using your publications. If you can get published and others cite you, you have increased our knowledge, congrats. Someday someone may build something useful that would be impossible without your work. Cool. The hypothesis is the core.

We know how to deal with R&D. You have an idea how to do something well known better using new technology. Or something new, using known technology. Show that you have a good chance of succeeding, then you get the funding. You might get some funding from the government, from the military, commercial R&D also fit here. If it seems to be a likely success, you get the money. The funding is based on weighing ROI (or other metrics) against the risk of the project - higher, if the technology is new. You may fail, that's accepted, but the risk should be relatively low - you know what you are doing. The application is the core.

Then we have the applied science. You have an idea that some well grounded scientific theory might be useful for a certain application. There's nothing out there proving that yet. You want to find out whether your idea is right. The application is clear, the theoretical side is clear (you need a theory here, not just a hypothesis, otherwise it's basic science), but neither is the core. The risk of failure is very high - if you knew it will work it would be R&D - but you focus on the application, not just gathering knowledge, it might not be very publishable, it might not increase general knowledge much - so, not basic science either.

We have no idea how to fund and manage something like this. Even though this is the road towards real breakthroughs. R&D is only incremental. Basic science has no direct application. Applied science is what moves us ahead. The risktakers mostly lose, but the ones who succeed move us forward to the next era of technology.

In this case the Pentagon seems to have decided that R&D is unlikely to provide the required advantage. R&D is predictable. It is a part of the race between armor and weapon. Protection gets better, but threats develop as well. The only thing that could jump ahead is a radical new idea. Something new that would be very hard to counter. Applied science. But the Pentagon had no management tools, procedures, etc. to handle something like that. So, procedures aimed at R&D were used. A prototype was required from the start - wrong. The decision on whether to continue funding the project was delayed until a prototype could be tested - wrong again.

It is a far more general problem. We need to learn how to conduct applied science in a responsible way. How to create research milestones that make sense and that allow the project to be halted (without prejudice - as a sunk cost) as soon as it becomes obvious that the proposed approach does not show a good chance of success. There are counterexamples, but in general this is something we don't seem to be able to do in a consistent way.

That's the only reason the money could be called "wasted". It made perfect sense to try these approaches. But letting them go this far and generate such costs - that's a proof that management of this type of projects is an art we simply haven't grasped yet.

$10b is Small change.

[MrL0G1C]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

$2.3 trillion unaccounted for.

Re:$10b is Small change.

[Sarius64]

Now you guys trust Rumsfeld.

Re:$10b is Small change.

[MrL0G1C]

I certainly don't trust Rumsfeld, but why would he lie about a big mess that makes him looks bad. AFAIK a sizable chunk of the 2.3T was later found during auditing, but when you've miss-placed 2.3 million million dollars, you should be finding all of it, even if you have to hire several hundred accountants to do so.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[oodaloop]

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?

Obvious troll is obvious, but couldn't resist :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Frankly, I'm shocked.

[Narcocide]

I'm shocked it was only 10 billion. Asshats.

Re:Get over it !

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[trout007]

How are you isolated when you talk and trade with people? Isn't sanctions and war more isolating?

Only $10B?

[Namarrgon]

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.

Re:Only $10B?

[CrimsonAvenger]

My first thought about TFA was that 10B was small change in a 640B military budget. 1.5% or so. Assuming that the entire 10B was in a single year (hint: it wasn't).

My second thought was: "They only wasted 10B???" Damn, but that's efficient use of resources - I don't know anyone who only wastes 1.5% of their money...."

Re:Only $10B?

[asylumx]

I don't know anyone who only wastes 1.5% of their money

I don't disagree with your post, but it always strikes me as funny when people compare federal government budgets for the largest economy in the world with their personal finances. It's NOT the same, no matter how much the presidential candidates like to pretend it is. No individual's revenue comes from within itself like a government's does. No individual has their own internal "economy" to mind.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[king neckbeard]

What if I don't give a shit about being a world power? It doesn't do anything for me.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[Anonymous Coward]

US defence spending is 4.4% of GDP. You can blame the deficit on many things but not that.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[oodaloop]

And that worked so well that UK is still the world's superpower in naval might. Right?

If we can stop one missile from destroying one cit

[dottrap]

Has this guy seen Detroit? You can't distinguish it from a missile strike.

Re:Get over it !

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The common denominator ...

[slimdave]

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.

$10 Billion is a drop in the bucket

[Required Snark]

This is like worrying about dirty dishes when the house is on fire. You're concerned about stupid government spending, just contemplate the Iraq War.

The costs of the 2003-2010 Iraq War are often contested, as academics and critics have unearthed many hidden costs not represented in official estimates. The most recent major report on these costs come from Brown University in the form of the Costs of War, which totaled just over $1.1 trillion. The Department of Defense's direct spending on Iraq totaled at least $757.8 billion, but also highlighting the complementary costs at home, such as interest paid on the funds borrowed to finance the wars.

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.

According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report published in October 2007, the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost taxpayers a total of $2.4 trillion by 2017 when counting the huge interest costs because combat is being financed with borrowed money. The CBO estimated that of the $2.4 trillion long-term price tag for the war, about $1.9 trillion of that would be spent on Iraq, or $6,300 per U.S. citizen.

A 2013 updated study pointed out that U.S. medical and disability claims for veterans after a decade of war had risen to $134.7 billion from $33 billion two years earlier.

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.

Re:$10 Billion is a drop in the bucket

[fustakrakich]

And why is Afghanistan more 'believable'? A Saudi businessman was hiding out in Pakistan, and we bomb their neighbor because the Taliban (remember them?) cut off the flow of opium. And hardly a peep of protest, from anybody. Weird...

Re:$10 Billion is a drop in the bucket

[sysrammer]

That's real serious government waste.

What's really serious is using an adjective in the place of an adverb.

Nonsense. It can be parsed "really serious" as you'd like, or real "serious govt waste".

Re:$10 Billion is a drop in the bucket

[HornWumpus]

Iraq was to restart the Sunni/Shia wars. Success!

Of course we have to make noises like we don't like it.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[Gavagai80]

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.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[wbr1]

Well let's see. Pork and graft in government (primarily military) spending... wastes billions, a few get rich, stuf is built to kill people. We all pay, and it is the status quo.

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.

Missile waste? Look at the F-35 aircraft

[Antique Geekmeister]

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.

Re:Missile waste? Look at the F-35 aircraft

[inhuman_4]

The current cost of an F-35A is $94.8 million (LRIP8), down from $221.2 million (LRIP1) in 2007, and is on track to meet the ~$85 million target in 2018/9. I don't know where your $300 million comes from but the F-35 hasn't cost that much in over 8 years. Further all 3 branches will be using the F-35x as a strike aircraft, hence the name Joint Strike Fighter. I know it's popular to be doom and gloom about the F-35, but the truth is that project has been on track for the last 4-5 years.

Re:Missile waste? Look at the F-35 aircraft

[dunkelfalke]

Eh? F-35 is slow and underpowered, not fast and overmuscled. Its engine is very powerful indeed, maybe the most powerful ever built for a jet fighter, but it is only one for an airframe that is heavier than a much larger F-15. It cannot even fly Mach 2.

Re:Missile waste? Look at the F-35 aircraft

[Anonymous Coward]

It costs $300 Million each because of development (testing, research, etc) costs which are currently topping $10 Billion for only 32 aircraft. That however does not even begin to show the entire cost of the program (procurement, operations, parts, etc) which will easily be $1.5 Trillion over a ~50 year lifecycle. If you throw in all of those it is costing almost a billion dollars per aircraft per year and given the Pentagons history that number is likely to grow not shrink.

Re:Missile waste? Look at the F-35 aircraft

[maestroX]

It's not a waste.
It's just multi-role in the sense the role can change every month.
Which is preferable to a war every month.

Re:Missile waste? Look at the F-35 aircraft

[rahvin112]

You know every single plane the airforce has produced has had similar issues and reports. I'm old enough to remember the press trashing the F-16.

Those costs are fake. The R&D money is spread across the individual planes without regard to actual construction cost nor that the R&D is already spent. The real construction cost to build an F-35A was pegged at about $120 million. Which is roughly a bit more ($110 million) what it costs to build an F-18 and the F-18 is fully paid for so the R&D costs aren't calculated in anymore. The fact is the F-35 isn't that much more expensive then older generation planes to build. It's problems like all jets in the past will be ironed out over time and testing. I remember all the crashes the F-16 had until they identified the high-G problem (F-16 could turn sharper than the human body could sustain without blackout) and the press labeling it a catastrophic failure that kills pilots. Ironically not that different than language being used to describe the F-35.

Personally I think the future is taking all those old fighters we have stored in the desert and putting an AI and drone type system into the pilot seat. The F-4 is a great fighter, particularly when you don't have to worry about losing a pilot because there isn't one. The F-35 is likely to be the last manned aircraft the US every produces and it is needed until drone and AI systems improve to the point that they can be relied upon in a real battlefield where ECM is raging (we aren't there yet and probably won't be for a while).

Re:Missile waste? Look at the F-35 aircraft

[Antique Geekmeister]

> Further all 3 branches will be using the F-35x as a strike aircraft,

I'm afraid they won't, not as budgets develop over the next 2 decades That was the original plan, and it's pretty clearly failed.

Since the F-35 is too big as a multi-purpose design, eats too much fuel, and has too hot an exhaust at takeoff, it can't be used effectively on carriers. It's not agile and the field of view make it useless for dogfighting, so it's entirely reliant on the "stealth" technology to avoid enemy aircraft or missiles. The stealth technology has never worked except in simulation because of its size and heat signature. It eats far, far too much fuel, so its effective bombing range is quite limited. The overpowered short-takeoff single engine design keeps failing because of excess stress, so the only way to use the aircraft consistently is with low speed, short range "stealth" runs. Its "low altitude stealth bombing" capability is ineffective and inefficient compared to cruise missile or drones for the short range attacks which are the only remaining use for this craft, since both cost far less and have better stealth capability: you simply cannot fly that large an aircraft as close to the ground as a drone or cruise missile.

Death...

[zm]

So, preventing death using some sort of a missile defense is money well spent. Preventing death using health care is socialist bullshit. Fuck, yeah.

Re:Death...

[argStyopa]

So, lining the pockets of defense contractors with their ridiculously inflated costs for projects of dubious utility is ridiculous bullshit, while lining the pockets of con-men and medical professionals for social welfare and medical projects of dubious actual utility is money well spent?

Fuck yeah, I say as well!

Re:Death...

[Ferretman]

One is called for in the Constitution.

The other isn't.

What's your point again?

Ferret

Re:Death...

[StikyPad]

As far as I can tell from available evidence, it's just postponing death in either case. If you've found a way to prevent death, that would definitely be news.

A lot of the waste is inherent to the rules

[MikeRT]

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.

Re:A lot of the waste is inherent to the rules

[kcitren]

You mean primes on the IDIQ. Only primes on the IDIQ can bid on the task order. There are 16 primes on that particular IDIQ, but only a few (estimates are between 2 and 5) bid the particular task order.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[transporter_ii]

Now cue the Libertarians that want to march us back to the feudal ages and isolation.

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.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[gatkinso]

That is a decent plan... right up to the point when you realize that we breathe the same air.

Isn't this just how R&D works?

[sabbede]

Spend a bunch of money, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but either way you learn a lot.

Re:Get over it !

[Rigel47]

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.

Re:Get over it !

[DigiShaman]

...or not doubling down with more spending. 'If we can stop one missile from destroying one American city

It's called a law of diminishing returns. Yes, we could -in theory- save one city from an ICBM with double the funding. Another report states other offending nations would just overwhelm the system further by launching multiple weapons in what would be a computer analogy of a DDOS. Given that the radar system has a very precise yet myopic view, it's not hard to overwhelm it.

At some point, you just have to take a step back and re-evaluate your whole objective at achieving defense and where best to spend the funds, and where. As technology changes, sometimes the effectiveness of an entire project can get derailed by quick obsolescence.

Sometimes you just need to know when to hold em and know when to fold em.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[DarkOx]

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.

Re:If we can stop one missile from destroying one

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Nothing like a helping of FUD for breakfast

[geekmux]

...'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.

Re:Obvious troll is obvious, but couldn't resist :

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[Anonymous Coward]

Right republicanism Never bring home the bacon. They would never refurbish M1 tanks the army does not want to "preserve jobs"

Re:Get over it !

[jbmartin6]

What good is stopping one missile if the next ten get through and bounce the rubble?

Only ten billion in a decade?

[Ihlosi]

This number sounds awfully low.

Re:We need More Pork! More!

[plopez]

are you willing to sacrifice your quality of life, you and your children's future, and possibly even your life? Because all of that can happen when an empire collapses. The Brits were an anomaly when they let their empire fade away and even they did not get off scot free.

Re:Get over it !

[Mattcelt]

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.

Re:A bit much

[Lonewolf666]

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

The claim that these systems were designed for stopping North Korean missiles are indeed absurd.

But North Korea is not that far from China. So the real objective was probably stopping Chinese missiles, while North Korea was just the pretext and bogeyman.

If they promise pork...

[xophos]

best case is, you get spam.
average case is just manure.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[Skater]

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.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[plopez]

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.

Manhattan project was the same thing

[Karmashock]

... 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.

Re:Manhattan project was the same thing

[slimdave]

The top officials in the Pentagon have little personal incentive to discriminate between what will and what will not work, when they can arrange massive contracts for companies that will then offer them a senior position when they retire on their 100% government salaries.

Re:Manhattan project was the same thing

[Karmashock]

That may be... I am sure corruption happens.

However, my point is that they CANNOT KNOW what will and will not work because fucking insane shit has worked on a regular basis.

Again, a bomb that a single plane could carry that could flatten a city all by itself.

Radar

Planes invisible to radar

Robotic drones

Laser cannons

magnetic cannons

etc etc etc. If I came to you in 1939 and told you that I had a plan to build a bomb that a single plane could carry that could flatten a city... would you take that seriously? Only nuclear physicists would have seen the potential there. Everyone else thought the bomb was magic.

When I told my brother that Raytheon was trying to sell laser cannons for weapons payloads on their drones, he thought I was full of shit. I showed him the pitch from Raytheon to the pentagon.

You don't know what is going to work and what won't. Crazy stuff has worked remarkably well when everyone said it was bonkers and it looked bonkers.

Look at this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Not weapons but the point is the same thing. Insane things work if you throw enough brain power at it. You thread the needle. You have to do 1000 things right for it to work and one mistake means death... All they have to do is not make any mistakes.

Re:Manhattan project was the same thing

[slimdave]

At least the Manhattan Project was possible according the the laws of physics, and represented mostly an engineering problem. Modern procurement seems to be a bunch of engineering trying to do what the laws of physics disallow -- like detecting over the horizon objects with straight-line signals.

Re:Manhattan project was the same thing

[Karmashock]

None of those projects were physically impossible. You're making a false equivalency between the physics on one side and the costs on the other.

Re:Manhattan project was the same thing

[maestroX]

Just have a little sympathy for them. They can't really know sometimes. Neither can you.

The word is fear.
Only a fucking lunatic would sympathize a kid bent on lethal destruction in the classroom.

Re:Manhattan project was the same thing

[Karmashock]

War is a reality that adults need to deal with... children such as yourself should be more respectful of your elders.

Re:Manhattan project was the same thing

[Karmashock]

So, stupid insults is all you're good for? And you accuse me of being a man child?

Pathetic.

War happens. You say only basement dwellers acknowledge this but you're contradicting most of the politicians and leaders in human history.

I think I'll stand with adults, welp.

Re:Manhattan project was the same thing

[Karmashock]

And what in your post proved anything, mr AC?

I love the non-falsifiable arguments from the AC trolls... the cowards are too afraid to use their fake forum names and too afraid to make anything but vague comments that can't be proven or disproven because they're so fucking non-specific that there's no way to logically evaluate them.

Useless to a fucking man.

And on top of that, half of you are sock puppets where in the same guy pretends to be multiple people by referring to his fucking own posts in the third person.

Re:Manhattan project was the same thing

[Karmashock]

I see, so all educated and knowledgable people are respectful and patient with idiots?

Is that your premise?

Seriously?

I'm not sure why people like you are so bad at forming rational thoughts. It could be a weakness in the education system. They don't seem to teach critical thinking or especially understand what it means.

Saying that "all people of knowledge must hold certain cultural tropes" is an obvious logical fallacy. There is nothing inherent in being educated or knowledgeable that would require anyone to be either respectful or tolerant of halfwits.

Re:Manhattan project was the same thing

[Karmashock]

Shows what you know. Issac Newton was well known to have very little patience for idiots and would get rapidly rude and dismissive with people that annoyed him.

I'm not claiming I'm Issac Newton by the way, I feel the need to point that out because you're clearly an idiot. If you weren't an idiot that statement wouldn't be required.

What I am saying is that there are many examples of outright geniuses that were quite rude to morons.

So you're wrong and go fuck yourself.

Re:Manhattan project was the same thing

[Karmashock]

Jesus, you don't know how to use google either? I literally typed in "Issac newton rude" and got this link almost immediately:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ro...

He was well known to be an asshole. A total genius... easily one of the most brilliant minds ever... but kind of a dick.

In any case, your premise that anyone that is educated and intelligent must be nice and respectful towards you is idiotic.

There is no logical rule that requires that an intelligent person has to be anything other than intelligent.

This is similar to those stupid arguments that Aliens have to be peaceful because they're advanced which ignores that the most advanced societies on earth are pretty fucking warlike.

You don't have a logical mind. You have a lot of feelings and ideologies and you've confused lookup tables with actual thinking.

I don't know if this is because you're stupid or if you were taught to think in a stupid way which makes you stupid. Either way, the person I am unfortunately being subjected to is not especially intelligent and it annoys me because on top of being stupid you're arrogant... so I can't even educate you. And that means you're just a waste of my time.

Worse still... you're boring... and apparently not very well read because the thing about Newton was something I learned in high school. Apparently either you weren't paying attention or your school was garbage. Either way... boring boring boring.

Re:Manhattan project was the same thing

[Karmashock]

First, you've never made me mad and never could. You exasperate me with your stupidity.

Second, as my link showed, I didn't need to look it up because what I initially said was accurate. I told YOU something you clearly didn't know and then when you asked for a link I KINDLY provided you one. And then you have the idiotic gall to say try and turn that around and claim I needed to look it up? See, this is what I'm talking about... you're so fucking stupid.

Third, you apparently think "being nice to you" is the same thing as "being intelligent"... this is hilariously narcissistic and unworthy of any respect. Honestly, comments like yours merely vindicate my dismissiveness of you. You're such an astounding tool that no one that actually understands you could take you seriously.

Re:Manhattan project was the same thing

[Karmashock]

You claim to be a mind reader now? *yawn*

Does your absurd hubris have any bounds, little one?

As to me being clearly pissed off because I treat you poorly and respond quickly... neither of those is logically conclusive. This is what I'm talking about. You're not a rational person.

Using harsh language doesn't require that I have emotion at all. I could intentionally use very gory language with severed body parts etc and not have any hostile or murderous intent.

And as to responding quickly, you assume that an ability to respond quickly only is possible if I'm angry or upset. There is no logic for that conclusion.

As to your pathetic claim that I just got lucky when I told you something and then you asked for a link... and I was able to instantly substantiate my position. This comment on your part is so stupid that it merits no further comment. I am now starting to feel sorry for you.

Which I won't tolerate... I'm going to spend 10 seconds of meditation to hunt down and kill that portion of myself that would be so absurd as to feel compassion for you. *mediates*

There we go... clean again.

As to your association between being nice to you and being intelligent, that is the entire premise you're running on, little one. You're so illogical that you have no way of knowing not only what I am saying but what you are saying. You're a monkey that has taught how to grunt out some of his feelings but your mind isn't quite human. You don't think rationally or logically or systematically. And as such the product of your thinking is not rational much less educated.

You're a beast that has unfortunately learned how to logon to the internet. Like that cat that runs across the keyboard... you don't know what you're doing.

Re:Manhattan project was the same thing

[Karmashock]

I didn't move any goal posts. You're just repeating things you've heard before that sounded clever to you and you don't especially understand.

As to your continuing belief that the occasional grammatical error on my part confers upon you any sort of superiority... *yawn*

Beyond that you allusions to academic superiority are odd given that you've at no point demonstrated any knowledge of anything. The only one of the two of us that has done that was me. I enlightened you as to the personal character of Issac Newton of which you were entirely ignorant. And upon receiving that insight backed up with a citation because you doubted me, you then speculated that I had simply guessed a very specific piece of obscure information perfectly accurately. Apparently because your cognitive dissonance won't permit you to realize that I am and always have been your intellectual superior.

Am I rude to you? Sure... But whether someone is nice to you or not doesn't make them intelligent or not... no matter how much you'd like that to be so, dear one.

*yawn*... so stupid. :D

I assume you're the same one that has been stalking me all over slashdot, so I might as well just keep responding to you here since if I stop you'll just follow me to the next thread to make moronic comments. :P

Re:Manhattan project was the same thing

[Karmashock]

More mindless insults after being outwitted AGAIN?

You are a sad sad monkey.

Re:Manhattan project was the same thing

[Karmashock]

Given that you're the one following me around from thread to thread in a pathetic attempt to undermine me while I have no interest in doing the same to you... you have no basis to question my emotional balance.

Perhaps this is projection on your part, mr AC?

What went wrong in your life that you get some sort of satisfaction following me around only to get donkey stomped over and over again... pretty much effortlessly. I mean, you've got pretty much an unbroken track record of failure with me.

Here you'll presume to contradict me. But on what basis? You've long ago learned never make a falsifiable argument against me because you're I'm so much smarter than you that every time you do, I almost instantly disprove your point.

Which is why you keep your comments either so vague that no one can prove or disprove them. OR you just make stupid insults.

Here is how you prove me wrong by the way: Make a falsifiable argument. And if I either don't either agree with it or disprove it then you'll have shown that in at least that case you did make such an argument and it did withstand me.

But you won't... because you're a coward.... and an idiot.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hurry up and kill each other

-Aliens

Opinion from a scientist

[xanthines-R-yummy]

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...

Re:Opinion from a scientist

[error_logic]

You just made me think of how the best strategy underlying any victory in Civilization is to get as much Science as possible. :-)

Re:Opinion from a scientist

[T.E.D.]

I worked at the time for what is now Lockheed-Martin. So as someone who was an indirect beneficiary of the "Star Wars" $'s, perhaps I can pipe in too?

Sure, the free money for engineers (and their employers) was nice. But you know what else would have been nice? Spending that exact same amount of money on NASA, for stuff that we might have had something to show for at the end. Maybe something that might have accomplished something (eg: a visit to mars), or advanced science a bit (better space propulsion, habitation tech), rather than just blowing it all on something that everyone involved knew going in was a total waste, just to make some politicians feel better about their personal constructed reality.

That's what I would have liked to see.

Re:Opinion from a scientist

[Tablizer]

It wasn't sold that way to Congress etc. If it's pie-in-the-sky research, then call it pie-in-the-sky research rather than make it sound like mere implementation of proven ideas.

I'm not against research, but I am against the mislabeling of it.
       

Not even close

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Military Projects

[khr]

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...

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what you'all said in 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012. No collapse. Instead, we've had an economy growing faster than under Republican leadership. Right wingers do nothing but cry fantasy. Sure the Dems ain't perfect, but the GOP has become the party of lunatics.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[jellomizer]

It was so huge that it affects the past!

Re:Get over it !

[LWATCDR]

Frankly just about every new system introduced was considered a total failure by the Press at one time or another.
The F-4 Phantom, F-14, F-15, F-18, M1A1, AH-64, M2 Bradley, B-1, F-111, The Nimitz class carrier, and going way back to pre WWII the B-17 crashed in testing and was thought to be too big and expensive.
This article is full of fluff and opinions from unnamed experts. The SBX may be a disaster but I don't see the limited angle as that big of a deal. It is designed so that if the US feels threatened by North Korea then we target them with the SBX. It is a system that is designed to respond to an escalation in threats not to stand guard for a sneak attack.

If you 24/7 protection from sneak attack that will cost you. You will need to build many X-Band and S-Band radars and re-establish the DEW Line. Then you will want to re-establish the Pine Line in Canada. Next you will want to convert the old Safeguard system in ND to house BMDs and then add installations in along the coasts. Maybe Land Aegis along the coasts. And we should probably build some X-Band Radars in American Samoa , Midway, Hawaii, and Christmas Island. In the Atlantic interceptors should be based in Greenland....
As you see it would be a massive project. Truth is that it is unlikely that North Korea or Iran would just go and pop a nuke at the US without any escalation. The simple truth is the interceptors are to save lives in North Korea and or Iran. If a single warhead hits a US city the response would be terrible. Those nations would cease. The death toll would be staggering.
If the leaders of those nations did get stupid and we manage to intercept the warhead the response would be much lower.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[plopez]

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?

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. Recall the whole point of SDI was to get the USSR to spend itself into oblivion. Mission accomplished. Now we are doing it to _ourselves_.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[jellomizer]

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.

Training

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Training

[Anonymous Coward]

Name one conscript army with meaningfully better or longer training than the US military.

Granted, my experiences are a bit dated (I served in the german army 15 years ago), but at least the shooting skills of the "professional" US soldiers back then were abysmal. They lost almost every single shooting competition with our recruits that had passed basic training.

Now, I don't want to say that the training of the US army was in general bad, since there's more to training than shooting, and at least for small arms, the german army emphasized precision single shots over quick firing, as the US army often practices it, so it comes down in part to the operational doctrine. But I was amazed at how bad the US tank gunners were when we were training with them, since their tanks were essentially the same as ours, but on average we had significantly higher scores.

Re:Training

[ultranova]

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 French Foreign Legion is part of the French military. How could it be any more of a mercenary than US military?

Re:Training

[Anonymous Coward]

While GP seems confused about mercenaries, you seem confused about the relative quality of training in the U.S. military. I only have anecdotal evidence due to never bothering to compare in detail, but I have quite a few American friends here... what they related to me about "boot camp" sounded rather shoddy and rushed, no offense meant.
Here in Switzerland the majority of males undergo 43 weeks of mandatory military training (the first 23 weeks at once, the rest either appended or spaced out over 8-10 years). For example, I did the 10 months at once, including a 6 week driver's training (trucks and lightly armoured vehicles), 8 weeks as rescue trooper and another 4 weeks as transmission soldier, for my specialisations. Plus, besides a few hundred hours of repetition for each of the above, all the rifle manipulation, drills and generic lessons about combat, tactics, first aid etc.
And that's just for conscripts, i.e. people who _don't_ join the military.

Not sure what to make of it, could bring up the "we were successfully invaded only once in the last 700 years" yada yada... but at least I guess that solves your "name one ..." challenge?

Re:Training

[sjbe]

While GP seems confused about mercenaries, you seem confused about the relative quality of training in the U.S. military.

I'm not confused in the slightest about the quality of training in the US military.

I only have anecdotal evidence due to never bothering to compare in detail, but I have quite a few American friends here... what they related to me about "boot camp" sounded rather shoddy and rushed, no offense meant.

Boot camp is merely the first introductory training and it isn't very long. There is a considerable amount of training after boot camp.

Here in Switzerland the majority of males undergo 43 weeks of mandatory military training

Those who enlist in the US military regularly receive more training than that by the time they complete their Advanced Individual Training. Boot lasts 8 weeks and the length of AIT varies but can be as long as 84 weeks. Training doesn't end after boot camp except in rare circumstances.

Not sure what to make of it, could bring up the "we were successfully invaded only once in the last 700 years" yada yada... but at least I guess that solves your "name one ..." challenge?

Which has more to do with the terrain and lack of any strategic value to Switzerland than it does to the quality of their military, though I'll freely admit that the Swiss seem to have a quality armed forces and have rigged their country to be one giant death trap to invaders. However the USA hasn't been successfully invaded in over 200 years (not since the War of 1812) so I'm not really sure what your point is.

There are other militaries with excellent training but there isn't one with meaningfully better training. Comparable? Yes. Better? Not that I can tell.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[rtb61]

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.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[RavenLrD20k]

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).

Re:Obvious troll is obvious, but couldn't resist :

[Crashmarik]

No but it does label you a humorless twit.

Naive

[sjbe]

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.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[dasunt]

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.

Re:What candidate doesn't pork things up?

[meta-monkey]

Reference.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[MachineShedFred]

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.

Re:Not pork

[MachineShedFred]

Not all of it, but there is pork in military spending. Are you telling me that the military needs each and every piece of equipment and ordinance it has, built exactly the way it was and where it was built, and that it couldn't have possibly been done more efficiently?

If you are, then you're dreaming. If you aren't, then there is pork. How many large artillery pieces are we using to keep the peace in Afghanistan these days?

I'm just waiting

[g0bshiTe]

until they notify us that taxes are now 100% of what we earn.

Re:I'm just waiting

[gatkinso]

Welcome to France.

Re:We need More Pork! More!

[master_kaos]

Couldn't you of said that of Ancient Egypt, Roman Empire, British Empire, and now US? China has a fairly strong economy, why could they not be the next super power? America could become so bankrupt, that china just takes over.

Re:Get over it !

[g0bshiTe]

Next time my nation is invaded by a foreign nation I'll make sure and thank the soldiers for keeping me safe.

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.

I would also like to note I am in no way attempting to diminish any soldiers service to their country it is greatly appreciated, but the truth is the military is not in the business of protecting Americans.

Only 10B?

[guruevi]

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.

Re:Obvious troll is obvious, but couldn't resist :

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Re:Get over it !

[parkinglot777]

Typical Progressive thinking is being evidenced by the article. ...

I don't understand why you need to label the article to a group of people? It can be anyone. Even though many progressive people are that way, labelling doesn't make things better in a discussion but rather try to find a scape goat to be blamed on. It is easy to do so, but it helps no one and does no good. Instead, you try to sway the point of discussion to accommodate your political opposition.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a huge collapse in the stock market in [2008] and were still in a recession. Coincides perfectly with the time Obama entered office and the dems took both houses.

So, what? You're saying that the stock market collapse in March-June of 2008 was clever Wall Streeters anticipating Obama's election in November, and not related to financial and regulatory policy at the time? That the bankruptcy of AIG in September was a pre-action to Obama taking office 4 months later?

Given your reasoning skills, I imagine that definitions are not especially important to you, but "Recession" means two successive quarters of falling GDP. US GDP hit bottom around June 2009, and has been rising ever since. You may still feel poorer than you were 7 years ago, but the actual recession is long gone. GDP is up about 20% from its pre-recession peak; stock market is up 25% from pre-recession. If you were rich in 2007, you're even richer today.

Only $10 Billion?

[jjn1056]

What's that, per day or by the hour?

Uggg

[Maury Markowitz]

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.

Re:Uggg

[DerekLyons]

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.

What's worth pointing out is that none of these of super-smart people have any actual experience with putting warheads in mylar ballons. Your entire argument essentially boils down to a false appeal to authority.

On top of which, you miss the bigger issue - a good decoy (one which is impossible to distinguish from a warhead), essentially replaces a warhead thus reducing the carrying capacity of your missile. (This is essentially what happened with Chevaline, which was developed in the 1980's, not the 1960's.) This means that to deliver the same weight of attack, your force needs to be proportionally larger - and ABM missiles are much, much, cheaper than ICBM's. (And modern phased array radars and computing means you need less infrastructure per ABM in flight.)

Etc... etc...

The short version is, you've made the classic mistake of the armchair general in that you've assigned all the positives to one side and neglected their negatives and conversely to the "other" side. You've also based your entire argument on 1950's technology for that "other" side and completely neglected the developments of the past half century plus. (Which have mostly been to the positive of the "other" side.)

Re:Uggg

[Maury Markowitz]

> What's worth pointing out is that none of these of super-smart people have
> any actual experience with putting warheads in mylar ballons

Ummm, yeah they did. The RBIG's report started development of Minuteman's decoy suite.

> Your entire argument essentially boils down to a false appeal to authority.

The world's leading authorities on the topic. I'll take Hans Bethe's word on the topic over what you offer, which is precisely nothing.

> a good decoy (one which is impossible to distinguish from a warhead), essentially
> replaces a warhead thus reducing the carrying capacity of your missile

You clearly have no idea what you are talking about.

A credible decoy weighs a few kilos. Launch support adds to that. A W87 is maybe 200 to 300 kilos. It is generally stated that you can include 10 credible decoys for every RV, and that even the most basic ICBMs will produce 10s to 100s of decoys, along with chaff, booster fragments, etc. Thousands of objects per ICBM would be typical.

Which is every ICBM and SLBM in the world has been packed with decoys and chaff starting in the 1960s. It's simple and cheap and capable of defeating even the most elaborate BMDs through the midcourse.

> and ABM missiles are much, much, cheaper than ICBM's

The cost exchange ratio is around 20 in favour of ICBMs.

> neglected the developments of the past half century plus

Right, because the laws of physics changed in the last 50 years.

But whatever, there's a massive amount of literature on the topic that can easily be found in Google, dating from the 1950s right into this year. So all the other readers here can peruse that at their leisure and make up their own mind. This will get you started:

https://books.google.ca/books?id=jsH_AwAAQBAJ

Re:Uggg

[DerekLyons]

What's worth pointing out is that none of these of super-smart people have any actual experience with putting warheads in mylar ballons

Ummm, yeah they did. The RBIG's report started development of Minuteman's decoy suite.

In other words, you've got cause and effect completely backward - you can't have experience before starting development.
 

Which is every ICBM and SLBM in the world has been packed with decoys and chaff starting in the 1960s.

As a former SLBM technician, I can safely say there is absolutely no publicly available information supporting this claim. (Nor is there much need to so stuff said missiles given the lack of BMD systems to defeat.)
 

neglected the developments of the past half century plus

Right, because the laws of physics changed in the last 50 years.

Right. Which is why we don't have VLSI IC chips. And we certainly don't have nearly microscopic lasers so cheap they're embedded in common household items. And why we don't have cell phones. And why... well, you get the picture. Technology has evolved in the last fifty years, and your arguments entirely ignore that.

Re:Not Surprising

[will_die]

They did a really bad job on not discussing it again http://www.defense.gov/news/ne... along with other press releases
Also you think they would remove the original speech, along with the discussion of what happened with the money that you ignored, http://www.defense.gov/speeche...

Re:Get over it !

[Sarius64]

I agree! But I caution you from disparaging the cabal of news writers; known for their meticulously screening of the facts before publishing.

Re:Get over it !

[jythie]

*nod* and 10 billion spread out across so many projects, usually at only a few 100k at a time, is not that unreasonable.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[datavirtue]

Defense capability requires employing people on highly technical if not impractical projects to enhance, preserve, or maintain skill sets required to build practical projects. The press either doesn't get it or they do and are looking to create a story out of nothing. The post is naive.

Re:Get over it !

[Applehu Akbar]

The failed projects are the ones we hear about.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[kilfarsnar]

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.

Re:Get over it !

[jbengt]

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.

Problem is, most of these got well beyond Phase 1 without a chance in hell of ever getting to Phase 3, and still got plenty of funding that would have been better spent in Phase 1.
(Additionally, I would argue that you may need another Phase category - basic research/proof of concept would be Phase 1, and a prototype more of Phase 2)

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[TheCastro1689]

So immediately after taking office they screwed up the economy? Are you dense?

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[kilfarsnar]

You serious man? There was a huge collapse in the stock market in 2098 and were still in a recession. Coincides perfectly with the time Obama entered office and the dems took both houses.

Coincidence much?

Pssst. Obama didn't enter office until 2009. Just FYI.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[kilfarsnar]

...If you were rich in 2007, you're even richer today.

Well, that was kind of the point, now wasn't it?

Re:Not pork

[Sarius64]

Good to hear from you Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf! How's that hospital living going?

Re:Get over it !

[jbengt]

Besides, $10 billion is literally less than what Americans spent on Starbucks coffee last year alone.

So, I'm not allowed to argue against excessive Starbucks spending, either?
Personally, I'd rather argue against both. (I have no problem losing a good argument, if you can convince me $10 billion was really worth it for the experience, but I don't think any one in this thread has the actual information to know one way or the other.)

Re:Get over it !

[kilfarsnar]

Typical Progressive thinking is being evidenced by the article. We blew 10 billion on this in their minds, that could've been spent on "other things" (Never mind that they NEVER tell anyone what those "other things" that it wouldn't have been wasted on was) and that we have "gaping holes in our defense" as a result.

They never back up any of the claims with proof. Especially the "holes" remarks. When get them cornered on details, you're a "racist", "bigot", and the like from them.

Like you said...not much of any real story here, but they'll beat that drum so that they can reduce the defense budget and pour it into a real hole in the ground. Their little pet projects don't get even half of the "scrutiny" that this got from them- and produce even less results than these DoD "failues" did. But it's all about the feels, don't you know?

You mad!

There's SO Much Wrong in the Article

[Ferretman]

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

Re:Get over it !

[kilfarsnar]

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.

But if they put it that way, no one would join!

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

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.

Re:Guess...

[moeinvt]

Yay! Give a government agency annual(inflation adjusted) budgets in the hundreds of billions of dollars over the course of several decades and they will invent something useful by random chance.

You're seriously implying that the internet would not currently exist had it not been for government? I beg to differ.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[DrLang21]

The real reason moderates have been tossed aside is because it is a lot more expensive to campaign to them. All politicians have figured out that it is much more cost effective to divide people into an us vs them mentality and drive them to the polls through fear. You will no longer find many successful candidates who campaign to the middle because it just requires too much damn money. How can you compete when your opponent can spend orders of magnitude less per vote that you can trying to run a sensible campaign? The only long term solution is to raise children to think independently and to have enough emotional maturity to break away from the group when it goes insane. Hopefully over time the middle can be strengthened to the point of making FUD campaigns not cost effective any more. It doesn't look too though because even if the "independent" vote is growing, I see no evidence that they do not fall into a right or left camp.

Re:Pork port pork

[moeinvt]

Give a government agency hundreds of billions of no-strings-attached taxpayer dollars over a span of many decades and they will develop a few useful things purely by random chance!

If they were accountable for earning a positive ROI on every R&D dollar, they would have gone bankrupt 100 times over.

Re:Get over it !

[John.Banister]

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.

This is nothing new.

[Rambo Tribble]

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.

Re:This is nothing new.

[sysrammer]

Union of Soviets downfall, brought about by Star Wars it was.

Re:This is nothing new.

[fustakrakich]

...the release of Soviet documents, revealed the arms buildup to be a Reagan administration fantasy.

This is why, as the summary stated, we should stop electing/reelecting these people.

Re:This is nothing new.

[Rambo Tribble]

Let the Farce be with you.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just waiting for an expose on how the Feds wasted $20 TRILLION fighting poverty only to have the poverty rate the same today as it was in the 60's

Re:What candidate doesn't pork things up?

[pr0fessor]

housing which is by far the most massive bill in everyone's budget

Silly Billy a home is a long term investment. Renting is vital when you are young and starting out but not something you should do forever.

Let me give you an example. My oldest brother has owned his house the longest Minimum wage was 4.25 when he bought his home and it has increased considerably in value, but his mortgage doesn't go up and will soon be paid. As time goes by the amount you pay stays the same until it's paid and your pay and minimum wage go up eventually you are in a position where your power bill exceeds your mortgage. So the 3 bed 2 bath 30k house he purchase in 1990s is now worth 90k and his mortgage is around $180.

I was just trying to convince my son to purchase a 2 bed 1 bath starter home I found, I hope to get him into a house before minimum wage goes up again.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[blue9steel]

Changing the voting system to not force a two party setup might be a good idea too.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[RavenLrD20k]

sedan, Sudan...whatever (bloody autocorrect, I hate /. on mobile.)

DARPA was a boondoggle too.

[DutchUncle]

... until the internet actually worked.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[chilenexus]

The pea is silent.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[Mullen]

> were still in a recession

We're not in a recession and have not been for some time and unemployment is at 5.5%.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[TemporalBeing]

If you were rich in 2007, you're even richer today.

It's called Inflation.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[Slashdot Parent]

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.

Re:If we can stop one missile from destroying one

[Slashdot Parent]

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"!

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[fustakrakich]

...started a criminal war in Iraq...

I'm still trying to figure why everybody gives the Afghanistan opium war a pass. Why would they believe one lie and not the other? It makes no sense. And please, don't let the democrats play innocent on this. They all stood together and made some good money.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[aisaac]

The woman with the Mercedes was actually broke.
The safety net was working.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[Anonymous Coward]

Aye, 'tis a sad story...

Obama quickly figured out all those dead people could keep him in power forever. So he started championing Zombie rights, and decrying their current depiction in video games. At first, the living resisted, but eventually they were made to see how Zombie discrimination was harmful to social welfare. Zombie's don't need to eat (much), and are basically free labor, if a little slow. Businesses jumped right on board, with Starbucks leading the way with their "Die together" initiative.

Eventually, the living allowed Zombies the right to vote. Younger Zombies still bristling about FDR only being elected for 4 terms, so they and their older brethren have passed constitutional amendments to repeal the 2 term limit for president, and later to allow Zombies to run president, so long as they are at least 36 zombie years old.

At Obama's 10th election after-party, he had the Undead Presidents celebrate his 40 years in office with their new hit single, "Braaains, Braaaain, Braaaains". Obama spoke eloquently about his love for the Zombie way of life, and reveals he's secretly been a Zombie for years. No living could be found to comment on the prospect of Zombie Obama possibly being an eternal American President.

Drop a nuke on congress

[Opportunist]

If we just kept one congresscritter from pork-barreling away our money...

Re:What candidate doesn't pork things up?

[sysrammer]

+1 for rant-parsing skills.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[sysrammer]

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!

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[sysrammer]

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.

Re:Get over it !

[Gliscameria]

If it's wasn't for these grants there would be no fundamental research done. You get work on a very big problem, and yes you generally fail, but in the process countless publications and fundamental problems are solved. Those problems would never get funding on their own. Hell, without DARPA and the like half of our college research groups wouldn't exist.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[Locke2005]

Wait... is this a pterodactyl joke?

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[Gliscameria]

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.

War Is a Racket

[riverat1]

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.

Re:If we can stop one missile from destroying one

[codealot]

(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...

Re:Death..

[Rujiel]

Making contractors rich with no-bid contracts is in the constitution? please do indicate where..

Wasting money to "increase employment"

[King_TJ]

One of MANY prime examples?

http://gazette.com/west-virgin...

Yep.... Ask yourself why the border patrol would need an office in West Virginia.

Stop worrying about "waste".

[codealot]

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.

Re:We need More Pork! More!

[cheater512]

1) http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Looks pretty bad to me.

2) Did you look at a photo of the SBX? And did you read that it has about a fifth of the field of view of a regular radar? And they realign it manually?
It should have been shut down quick smart.

Just $10 billion?

[katorga]

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.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[DrLang21]

It could certainly change the dynamic to have more than two parties in office. But I can't imagine getting a third party in office would come without generational change. Even when there are third parties on the ballot, there is a perception that it is a wasted vote, so people don't bother. Campaign financing and access to the major privately funded public debates is a big part of the issue. When Perot had both, he demonstrated what was possible. But funding is a serious problem and since debates are privately sponsored, the government can't force candidate inclusion. Maybe I am too dire on the situation. But forced run off elections and guaranteed ballot inclusion don't really go very far to promote change. Money is the problem. And now with corporations opening their pockets to candidates and parties more than ever, the problem seems to be worse than it ever has been.

Re:Get over it !

[rahvin112]

If 10 Billion is nothing to worry about why then the GOP drive to cut the same amount from food stamps as a terrible waste of money?

Sometimes priorities are important. I'd rather "waste" that 10 billion providing food to kids in the US that aren't getting full meals than waste that money on the cost plus fixed fee defense contracts where the value is in stretching the thing out as long as possible to feed those contractors pockets. If we feel the budget is constrained to the point that 10 billion dollars needs to be cut from such an important program (food stamps) then we certainly shouldn't be wasting it on pie in the sky defense schemes we wouldn't even need if we stopped messing about in other people's business.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[blue9steel]

Actually I meant changing from first past the post voting to another voting system, ranked voting for example.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[terjeber]

For the record, Repugnicans are more likely to add pork than Dems.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[kilfarsnar]

LOL! The pea is a lie!

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[AK Marc]

Cheaper is to let someone else do it, then copy them, or buy it from them. Then build/buy two (to their one). You'll still beat them in a fair fight, and paid less.

but try spending that much on education or roads..

[publiclurker]

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.e.

[publiclurker]

I don't like the way reality paints me. Please stop so I can feel good about myself.

nonsense, you know Obama

[publiclurker]

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!!!!!

how about we just build the practical projects.

[publiclurker]

and cut out the BS pork versions.

A little is a lot when it is from YOUR POCKETS

[markdavis]

>"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.

Re:Obvious troll is obvious, but couldn't resist :

[serviscope_minor]

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 :)

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[avatar avatar]

Americans have long been suspicious of candidates funny with peculiar names and origins. That such a man was elected at a time of national crisis and division was an unavoidable recipe for paranoid meltdown.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[Skater]

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.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[baristabrian]

Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum. Hmmm. I know some really intelligent people who seem to think we really are better off with one or the other. And millions of other who are not too bright, but vote the same. We *are* doomed! Just saying.

Re: We need More Pork! More!

[baristabrian]

Anybody who cites the "official" unemployment numbers truly is a dolt or a shill for Congress/POTUS. Just saying. -- Unemployed & Homeless

Re:We need More Pork! More!

[HornWumpus]

The good parts of China's banking reserves are US treasuries. The bad parts or loans to central committee members sons.

If the dollar goes pop, China has a violent revolution.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[HornWumpus]

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.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[Slashdot Parent]

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.

Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt

[plopez]

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...

Re:Get over it !

[LWATCDR]

"Both are horribly expensive things that don't work"
Funny but the Bradley did very well in Desert Storm. At least my friend that was on gunner on one thought they did and he was their.
As I get older I tend to doubt that any large project is ever properly managed.

Just 10 billion?

[MoarSauce123]

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.