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How the Pentagon Wasted $10 Billion On Military Projects
schwit1 writes: In the past decade, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency has wasted $10 billion on defense projects that were either impractical and impossible.
It's hard to choose a single quote showing the absurd stupidity of these projects — the article is filled with too many to choose from. Read it all and weep. However, here's one quote that typifies the attitude:
"Henry A. Obering III, a retired director of the Missile Defense Agency, said any unfulfilled expectations for SBX and the other projects were the fault of the Obama administration and Congress — for not doubling down with more spending. 'If we can stop one missile from destroying one American city,' said Obering, a former Air Force lieutenant general, 'we have justified the entire program many times over from its initiation in terms of cost.'"
We get the government we deserve. Until we stop electing candidates (from either party) who promise pork, we will continue to get pork, and waste, and a society that is steadily going bankrupt.
"Henry A. Obering III, a retired director of the Missile Defense Agency, said any unfulfilled expectations for SBX and the other projects were the fault of the Obama administration and Congress — for not doubling down with more spending. 'If we can stop one missile from destroying one American city,' said Obering, a former Air Force lieutenant general, 'we have justified the entire program many times over from its initiation in terms of cost.'"
We get the government we deserve. Until we stop electing candidates (from either party) who promise pork, we will continue to get pork, and waste, and a society that is steadily going bankrupt.
But my conservative friend sent me an opinion article from two years ago about a woman on WIC driving a Mercedes Kompressor to pick up her groceries! Sometimes I think your political alignment just reveals where you ignore graft from: conservatives ignore overspending from the top; liberals ignore overspending from the bottom. And the argument between the two is just which is more burdensome.
Now cue the Libertarians that want to march us back to the feudal ages and isolation.
The CMCM campaigns (specifically 2) were classified, so you will not be able to Google the results.
The radar on SBX is quite awesome actually. It shares a common linage with a radar known as TPS-X (which IIRC was renamed to FBX-T) which functions very well as part of the THAAD system. These radars are precision weapons guidance radars. While they do have a search function they do indeed stink at that: they are rifle sights, not binoculars. Try to locate a flying bird with your rifle scope.
The discrimination capabilities of these radars are really a function of software as well as the radar characteristics, see my comment about the CMCM-2. However during a launch a target would typically drop bolt mounts, explosive bolts for the stages, the stages themselves, and other such debris (in addition to counter measures). Individual radars (there were about a dozen tracking just the target vehicle) were assigned to and could track the individual pieces in flight as they spun around and bounced off of each other. This was easier than discrimination as the flight characteristics and origin of the debris were known ahead of time, but this is a small unclassified example of the capabilities.
Now, it is debatable if this was all a waste of money, but to say none of the stuff worked is disingenuous as the success stories will not be found in unclassified sources.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
$2.3 trillion unaccounted for.
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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.
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Colour me entirely unsurprised. This investigative article has details of many more billions of the Pentagon's wasted taxpayer money - and the real number could be dramatically higher. We'll never know, because the Pentagon has failed to perform the required audits of its accounting ever, despite tens of billions still being sunk into modernising its infosystems.
A few random details of what we do know:
- $5.8B of inventory "lost" between 2003-2011.
- $9B of ledger adjustments simply made up to get the books to balance in 2012, up from $7.4B the previous year.
- "Probably half" of its $7B general inventory is in excess of needs, but they're still spending $700+M buying more of the same.
- Hundreds of thousands of contracts that have not been audited for completion. Solution: raise the threshold to contracts worth $250+M.
There's much worse, but you wouldn't believe it coming from a random Slashdot post. Read the article.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Has this guy seen Detroit? You can't distinguish it from a missile strike.
I agree with the sentiment, but the way that the funds are allocated does not lead to good results. You need to spend a lot of money on projects that will fail to find the ones that will work, but you don't want to spend a lot of money on individual projects that will fail, and most especially you don't want to keep funding projects after it becomes obvious that they will fail. You don't want to fund projects based on which congressional district will get the money and you want to make it clear that researchers who discover something won't work early can easily get funding to work on their next project.
There are some good points in the above response. In response to the original post, the complains aren't always the case with all government research. For example, the SBIR program which often involves research projects that are "out there". They do it in a tiered system where they have phases: I, II and III. Phase I is a prototype/proof of concept. After that, the government project managers make a decision about whether the product is good enough to warrant Phase II funding. If it is, they go ahead and fund it. If it's REALLY good, they do a Phase III which is basically a commercialization. The company making the product is allowed to commercialize it, but the government gets it for free for a significant period (10 years or more). Additionally, even if the research is a flop, the government gets all rights to the data and as such, can use what was discovered/created as a base for other projects. So the money isn't "wasted", as was said in the original post, but the research/work completed on the project is available to help steer decisions on later projects.
With the OP's logic, we've "wasted" a lot of money on cancer research, but is it worth it? I would argue it is.
So $757.8 billion is the low ball amount that even the Pentagon can't hide. It seems a lot more likely that the Brown figure of $1.1 trillion is a more realistic number. No one at Brown has a personal stake in fudging the figures, unlike those in the military-industrial complex who live and die by the defense budget.
And that $757.8 billion is just the down payment. You want to see the real big bucks, look at the long term costs.
Remember, the Iraq War was completely voluntary. It was a war of choice. The two justifications used to start it were both completely wrong. First, Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack. It was Al Qaeda, and had nothing to do with Sadam Hussein. Second, there were no weapons of mass destruction, except for the left-overs from the Iran-Iraq war. These were the chemical weapons that the US helped Iraq obtain when they were fighting a proxy war for the US against Iran.
So upwards of $2 trillion has been spent on a war that we started for the wrong reasons. That's real serious government waste.
And it's not just the money. If you want to get really upset, check out the Casualties of the Iraq War. It will make you sick to your stomach.
Why is Snark Required?
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.
So, preventing death using some sort of a missile defense is money well spent. Preventing death using health care is socialist bullshit. Fuck, yeah.
Sig ?
I saw on Fox News someone say there were millions of companies that could slap together healthcare.gov at a fraction of the cost, so what possible justification was there for CGI Federal? Well those "millions of companies" were not on the DHHS task order under which that contract was issued. Only about 40 some companies were, apparently. You're not a prime on the task order, then fuck you. You better cozy up to one of the primes on that task order so you can bid on it.
$10B on impractical stuff doesn't upset me. $10b is a drop in the bucket of the federal budget. The rules, by their very nature, probably waste 10x that by favoring incompetent incumbents especially in IT.
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.
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.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Well said, the pair of you. What's more, $10 billion, while a lot of money to the rest of us, is a molecule of sweat on a lip of the bucket (i.e., not even a drop in it) compared to the US national budget.
There are what, 200 million taxpayers in the United States? That means that the Pentagon spent about $50 per taxpayer. I'd say that much can afford to be "wasted" without really hurting anyone.
Besides, $10 billion is literally less than what Americans spent on Starbucks coffee last year alone. (2014 US revenue for Starbucks was $12.4bn.) You can't really complain about these projects when it's less than your coffee, can you?
I'm certainly in favour of responsible spending at the government level. But the OP (and TFA, for that matter) clearly doesn't understand the scale here, using these numbers for political grandstanding. This is less than 2% of the DoD's yearly budget... being spent over 15 years.
There really isn't much of a story here.
Actually, if it's the Kompressor article I'm thinking of: The situation was that the husband and wife both had had well-paying jobs, then they both lost their jobs via the downturn in the economy, and the CAR WAS PAID FOR and not worth much, so they kept it, rather than - what? Trading it in on a used beater or something? So, yes, she was driving the Mercedes to pick up welfare checks, but they were, for lack of a better term, newly poor. It was likely if something happened to the Mercedes that they wouldn't be buying another one while still on welfare. Holding it up as an example of poor people owning nice cars and the handouts being out of control is misleading.
Riiiiight........ because they were the ones that racked up huge deficits, started a criminal war in Iraq, and were the ones who put together the bank bailout plans and then bullied the next administration into implementing it. Nice job rewriting history.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
... Only it worked. They were able to build a bomb that could flatten a city that was small enough to be dropped by a single plane.
We take that for granted, but that was a pie in the sky concept at the time... at least from perspective of the non-physicists.
So today they're building lasers, magnetically accelerated cannons, autonomous hunter killer robots, etc...
Can you blame the pentagon for not being able to tell what will work from what won't?
I hate waste as much as the next guy, but how the hell are they to know half the time. F'ing radar invisible airplanes? Jet fighters that take off vertically?
A lot of it sounded crazy until it had already happened and was proven to work.
Just have a little sympathy for them. They can't really know sometimes. Neither can you. Any number of the dumb ideas there could have worked or could still work in the future.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Hurry up and kill each other
-Aliens
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.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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...
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The 'Welfare Queen' myth started under the Nixon Administration. It has never been proven out either when the facts are checked or in my personal experience. Oh, and it seems that the 'Welfare Queen' is almost always black even though more white people are on welfare of one form or another, Perhaps a bit of racism in the mix?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The republicans do not have a good spending record either. They cut democratic lead initiatives, and put money in their own, then they cut taxes that they really don't have budgeted to do. So they raise taxes other ways.
The democrats when in charge will cut republican lead initiatives, put money in their own, they will not revert the tax cuts that the republicans made, even though it doesn't solve the budget, so they raise taxes in other ways.
The real problem is the polarization of the normal citizen. The politicians will only cater to them. Those damn moderates who sway the elections are who the politicians should be really kissing up to... But moderates have been toss aside, figuring they do no have any political ideals. Because the more extreme on the Right and Left have pulled many of them who are in the edges away.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
We get the government we deserve. Until we stop electing candidates (from either party) who promise pork, we will continue to get pork, and waste, and a society that is steadily going bankrupt.
The job of an elected representative is to look out for the interests of his constituents. By definition that includes trying to bring projects and economic benefit to their district/state. The notion that voters will stop electing representatives that seek to bring those same voters economic benefits is absurdly naive.
Some amount of pork is fine and to be expected. What you have to worry about is when it gets big, expensive projects spread out among a lot of districts so that even a boondoggle cannot be killed. See the Space Shuttle for a good example. Basically you cannot realistically eliminate pork spending but you can work to keep it under control.
Frankly however $10 billion, while a lot of money is a rounding error in a $3 trillion + federal budget. I'm MUCH more concerned about the imbalance between our spending priorities (Medicare + Military specifically) and our unwillingness to fund those priorities with an adequate tax base. Either the spending needs to be cut or the taxes need to go up or both. But currently we just borrow and pretend that we can sustain this imbalance to this absurd spending level without adequate tax revenue indefinitely.
Actually, there was a real welfare queen that fits the details of the urban legend.
Her name was Linda Taylor. And welfare fraud was probably among the least of her crimes. It's a fascinating story.
Now obviously, she's the exception, rather than the rule. Most people on welfare aren't creating multiple fake identities in order to bilk the system. And most sure aren't involved in possible kidnappings and suspicious deaths.
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.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
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.
If you think our problems can be solved by Democrats instead of Republicans, or Republicans instead of Democrats, you are watching the shell and not the pea.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Hell yes, I can complain about it. There's always a huge list of deserving but unfunded Federal projects that would actually work that could have been paid for with that money. The problem isn't trying something that didn't work out. The problem is putting this kind of money into something when the reasons why it didn't work out are simple and obvious enough to fit into short paragraphs in that article. It's not just 20-20 hindsight. It's people telling those who saw these problems on day one "you may be right, but lets just build it and find out" when they're the ones getting paid to do the building. For less than half a billion dollars you could hire a lot of incredibly smart people who could explain with simple diagrams and small words why a given project is conceptually doomed and throwing a couple billion dollars at it can't be classified as anything other than pork. Then, the people thinking up these projects could keep trying until they come up with something that, should it fail, will do so for reasons that are actually complex and unforeseen.
Grateful for being scammed and conquered?
Eurozone is a brilliant trap, nothing more:
1. Create a free trade zone with a single currency, so weaker economies can't balance their imports and exports through the exchange rate.
2. Mandate that every nation must have a positive trade balance, which is of course impossible since they trade mainly with one another and every credit on one nation's balance sheet is a debit on another's.
3. As all economies weaker than your own fail one by one, "rescue" them with loans who's terms destabilize their society and further cripple their economy.
4. Enjoy your new colonial empire. Deutschland uber alles!
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.