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Report: US Military Is Wasting Millions On Satellite Comms
An anonymous reader writes: Fast information exchange is the key to a powerful military, and satellites have been an incredible boon to the commanders of modern fighting forces. But a new report from the Government Accountability Office says the U.S. military is vastly overpaying for its satellite communications, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. They say the Department of Defense "has become increasingly reliant on commercial SATCOM to support ongoing U.S. military operations." You see, every part of the DoD is required to go through the Defense Information Systems Agency when procuring SATCOM equipment. The problem is that this process is incredibly slow, and fraught with red tape. Because of this, many in the military skip DISA and go straight to commercial providers — at a steep markup. The GAO estimates that this cost taxpayers around $45 million extra in a single year.
Talk about worrying about drips while the river floods. Hundreds of billions wasted on the F35's alone, and someone is worried about $35 million for satcom.
No wonder there are never any *real* cuts to the military budgets with "prioritization" like this.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Government wasting money. Whaaa...?
>> many in the military skip Defense Information Systems Agency
Oh, I see. This article was planted to whip military buyers back into the corral of politically-connected overspending that is DISA.
Chump Change. 45 million is 0.01% of our military budget, and it is a waste of time to worry about it. This is a distraction from budgetary issues that do matter, such as the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted on the F35.
I have no problem with the military going around red tape to get communication satellites up faster. If we go by the general idea that a life is worth $9 million dollars, then these satellites going up faster only need to save 5 lives and they have done their job.
Spend your attention wisely; don't quibble about the theft of a penny by a child while your bank account is being emptied by your brother.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
That's just for this part of things. One of the problems with putting in mechanisms to deal with fraud, waste, and abuse--a major part of the red tape--is that it adds waste to the process. Financially, this is acceptable up to the cost of the waste it's fighting, but after that, it becomes a bigger drain and should be curtailed.
Any large system is going to have some level of fraud, waste, and abuse, and it should be dealt with to a degree. Perfection in such systems cannot be obtained, so a certain amount of loss must be tolerated. Unfortunately, that's a lesson that politicians can never publicly learn.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I just read TFA. It is millions with an M, our of a total spend of $1 billion. That's mouse nuts. I mean, that's a chunk of change in absolute terms but it's around 15 cents per citizen.
If you want to get outraged there are higher priority issues. Just apply Amdahl's law to budget reduction: you have to reduce where the money is spent.
Oh, but you DON'T touch that third rail of politics. You cannot even slow the growth of things like Medicare, Social Security, and other social programs (like Obama Care, Welfare, Head Start, School Lunches what have you) without getting accused of outright hate, racism or worse.
Where both sides play lip service to deficit reduction, balance budgets and the like, FEW politicians even dare to get specific because they will be castigated in the press, by their opponents and otherwise vilified for suggesting we not spend the money "for the children" or some other such nonsense...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Our founding father's were AGAINST a standing army FYI. They would shit themselves at the percentage of our taxes that go to our military complex...