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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.
Nothing says "Patriotism" like ripping off the military and the government in general, does it? They're only screwing over the 315 million people in their own "home".
The GAO estimates that this cost taxpayers around $45 million extra in a single year.
So about $450 million over the last 10 years opposed to how much spent in Afghanistan and Iraq over the same period? How about checking into that? Oh right, that stuff is "off book" and not accounted for - though probably still affects our budget, economy and taxes. The SATCOM bill is chump-change by comparison. While we're looking at blips in the account, why not also cancel Public Radio and NASA - they probably also cost us each a nickel.
Yes, it may be an unnecessary expense that can be avoided by fixing the in-channel SATCOM process but our Government (and specifically Congress) is notoriously penny-wise and pound-foolish.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
But y'know it's *so* much cheaper to outsource the launches and satellites so that a) the people who actually *build* the stuff get the same salaries and bennies as government employees, or a good bit less (how much was assembled in, say, China?), but whose profits and execs make up for that by earning *so* much more, tens of times what, say, the President of the US earns.
I think I remember when the military launched its own satellites with its own rockets....
mark
When I read tens of millions, my first thought was "chump change among billions", but the summary is wrong. Here's the text from the actual article:
If the GAO is correct, then the military could have gotten that same service for about $45 billion less.
Just another day in Paradise
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.
Looks like TFS is correct and the article is wrong.
> The most recent data available show that the military paid more than $1 billion for satellite capacity in 2011, according to GAO. That year, about $280 million worth of satellite capability was bought outside the DISA process. If the GAO is correct, then the military could have gotten that same service for about $45 billion less.
It's hard to save $45 billion on a total expenditure of $280 million.
Pull my finger for my public key.
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
Given how sliw the procurement process works and at the end you get the lowers"qualified" bidder who may or may not provide what tou need it isno wonder people bypass it any way they can. Of course, DOD can't just have one giant blanket purchase agreement because that wouldn't spread the wealth around to enough businesses in as many congressional districts as possible.
$45 million is like one drone strike on a wedding party.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
For Pete's sake... It's not like the expensive toilet seat was available at the local Home Depot... It was an aircraft part as I recall, one that the manufacturer stopped making decades before, and had to set up to build. So the costs wasn't for the seat, but the tooling, setup and manufacture of a one off airplane part and documentation to prove it met the original manufacturer's specifications for use on an aircraft.
If you have EVER seen how the federal government works it's supply systems, specifically the defense department and the Federal Stock System, it's abundantly clear WHY things are so expensive. It's not about the actual thing they need, but the paperwork that proves that what the supplier sold to the government was EXACTLY what the stock system requires.
I actually know about the $250 hammer first hand.... Let's just say this hammer was for a specific job and had specific requirements because of where and how it was used. It had to be made of specific materials, be of a specific shape, weight. It had to be manufactured in a specific way. Each of these requirements had justified reasons and $250 was a deal for it if you ask me.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Excess labor is self-buffering. We have welfare systems for that (and I advocate a better one because it's time). Even in the appropriate economic conditions for full communism (which may never occur, even though we can define them easily), you would run out of shit to spend your money on (nothing you want or need), and so simply take shorter working hours (and give up part of your income), requiring the hiring of more employees, until everyone is working 10-15 hour weeks, or 1 hour work weeks, making a full salary: you don't "implement" communism; it happens as a natural result of capitalism having expanded wealth beyond what any human society can spend. The Soviets missed this, else they would have realized it won't work unless it's already working.
Every time you improve efficiency--new tools (specialized hand tools, power tools, machines, automated machines) or management techniques (artisan, assembly line, cellular manufacture, advancements in project management)--you reduce the human labor required to produce a unit product or service. Those chairs you sell for $60 involve $40 of human labor; you cut that in half, you sell them for $40, you make the same profit. That makes unemployment, while the rest of consumers have more money in their hands (the extra $20, which is why they come to you and not your ass-expensive competitor still selling for $60; you just got to take away his business for free).
That means new markets can open to target that $20 with a new good or service, or existing markets can expand to sell more of a much-desired good or service. The cost of selling that thing? Ultimately, human labor. Volume discounts, competition, and all other price (read: profit margin) suppression factors later, that $20 employs exactly the same number of laborers your prior efficiency improvements displaced (if your profit margins overall for the new products are exactly the same--your profits, in total, will be higher).
Welfare buffers this turn-over by supplying a means to maintain the labor force in the interim. Even without welfare, as long as they don't die out, we keep the unemployment numbers we need.
Better welfare retains wealth: a Citizen's Dividend would cost as much as our current system (I computed profit plus risk margins; the numbers sound low, but they're on the order of ridiculous shit that will make me richer than Warren Buffet in under 3 years if I become a landlord), and wouldn't inflate in a recession (everyone is getting the dividend; everyone making under $625k is coming out ahead), while keeping the poor and unemployed operating as economic drivers (the poor buy food and housing, which creates employment for other less-poor, who can buy other products... it trickles up).
Functional economic drivers keep money in people's hands, meaning any efficiency gains which damage the economy by creating too much unemployment (AUTOMATION) will benefit even the displaced worker (cheaper goods), helping the economy to more rapidly recover, create more opportunities to sell cheaper goods to consumers who spend less on current goods, creating more need for human labor (someone has to run the machines--that it takes 2 people instead of 20 means you can make those new goods *really* *cheap*, so your market is bigger: more people have that much money to spend; it also means you can make and sell 10 new goods instead of just the one), bringing employment back up. Keeping the consumers well-monetized without giving the unemployed a luxurious lifestyle and without raping the rich and the businesses to fund the poor accelerates this process; as well, reducing labor costs (e.g. by providing for means of living, thus you can repeal minimum wage) helps slow the initial damage (machines don't become as cheap as people quite so fast, and not all at once) and speed the recovery (cheaper labor means cheaper goods).
We don't need fake jobs; that just destroys wealth by increasing costs, decreasing the amount the consumer can spend, slowing market growths, increas
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I have almost exclusively worked for large corporations. In almost every one of them, there has been a central purchasing department that does nothing more than forward orders to a pre-approved supplier. I think you become a pre-approved supplier by kicking back a certain percentage of sales to the purchasing manager.
When faced with this, every place I have worked at has had a shadow IT department. Back in the pre-cloud days, this was the department buying equipment that IT didn't know about simply because the quoted price was too much or it took too long. These days, it's a manager whipping out the credit card and putting company data out on AWS or Azure. The usual "better to ask for forgiveness than beg per permission" applies here, and IT ends up supporting it anyway. Centralized purchasing doesn't work for IT stuff -- it *may* save you money on toilet paper and light bulbs, but IT is too complex to reduce to a line item in a PO.
This is just the government equivalent. The only reason we know about it is because the records are public.
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...
That's like the old joke about foreign aid bills - 57% of those polled disagree with foreign aid, and 45% think it should be cut... ... leaving 12% that disagree with foreign aid, but are just fine with the budget for it.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
It's not about the actual thing they need, but the paperwork ...
Indeed. My personal favorite form was the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 compliance form. It was a form that you filled out and stapled to every other form to indicate that the attached form conformed to the requirements of the paperwork reduction act. I was in the military at the time, and we used PWRA compliance forms by the truckload.
Which is exactly why sequestration actually worked and why we need more of it.
There isn't political will to cut any specific program. Its like a comment up that page said "oh its only a nickle per tax payer" so the generally electorate does not get excited and won't vote for you because of you tough stance on support of Emu breading research. On the other hand the handful of Emu farmers and researchers out there will be very concerned about and run scary ads about how you are killing all the jobs in the Bumbfuck County [Insert Square State].
Congress is to freckles to deal with any specific budge line item or even any specific department level budget. On the other hand if you push big cross the board cuts it may leave all of our problems of in appropriate allocation in place, but at least you bring the aggregate numbers down.
In the best case:
Someone figures out away to save a few million by negotiating better contracts and eliminating some waste.
In the next best case:
That leaves the folks on the ground in a position to say well we don't have enough budget to do all this mandated activity lets divert resources from this effort we know really does not work so we can maintain this other that does or this other that is more important. Sure we have to "officially" still research Emu breading but will just have a intern book an hour to it once a month.
Worst case:
Some actually productive and beneficial program / policy gets short shrift-ed because the money isn't there even though plenty of money is still being foolish spent elsewhere.
Still this is the best we can do in the current state of political system. Until some real calamity forces people to get real I don't see things changing. I thought the financial crisis might have done it, but the pols managed to kick the can down the road by printing their way out and our biggest trade partners were sufficiently upside down as well that is kept a lit on inflation. With Asia now getting the shakes they can probably get away with it for another decade.
The next president is going to be one luck SOB or DOB? whoever it is. They going to get to continue to enjoy the real stimulative effects of the low interest rate, policy, and the benefits of all the medical industry growth which is already a sixth of the economy. Obama care is going to be good short term here. It will move a lot of money around. 9-10 years from now when the next guy is on his way out office though its going all come off the rails.
1) Demographics will be further screwed older
2) We will likely be even more a service economy having seen little growth in real wages
3) The Debt will be larger, meaning more borrowing will cost more
4) The once insatiable appetites for our bonds in foreign markets that is now gone will still be
5) Even if the dollar is still the reserve currency of many alternative currency markets for commodities like oil will probably exist.
6) Mandatory health insurance while having prevented a handful of personal bankruptcies will have further reduced the savings rate among the general population.
I don't think the formula from 2008-10, which barely worked then will get us out of the next hole
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Ummm... sequestration did not work, and was not the massive deterrent that it was made out to be. Pure pork programs like the F-35 were completely untouched. The only consistent aspect of sequestration was that federal employees (common people, not the asshats in congress) took a 5-10% paycut.
--WooooHoooo--
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...
It's not the Cold War: we only spend about 16% of the federal budget on defense (don't be misled by "discretionary spending" BS). A non-trivial portion of that goes to basic research.
We spent 60% more on Medi* than on defense, and there's far more waste and fraud in that system. (Both must balance cost of waste and fraud vs cost of policing waste and fraud, and it's not obvious what the optimal balance is.) We spend 48% more on Social Security than on defense. It's not like we're ignoring social programs here.
For the curious, US Debt Clock has a great 1-page overview of spending, revenue, debt, and unfunded liabilities.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It wasn't just a freaking seat, it was the entire bathroom, and they had to make large injection molding dies to create the new bathroom. The seat was just one of the parts that went into the new bathroom and the project cost was spread over x number of pieces of deliverable parts. Any time you deal with injection molding or just about any significant manufacturing process there are large upfront costs that lead to VERY expensive parts if you don't produce a lot of something (heck, even business cards get stupid expensive if you order less than a few boxes at once, which is why I have a few thousand business cards I'll never use as it's WAY cheaper to order me 10x more than I need then it is to even occasionally need an additional batch run). The alternative to the new bathrooms was scrapping the airframe and designing a new one, and if you haven't been paying attention lately to the way Air Force procurement is done that would have resulted in a LOT more cost than some $640 toilet seats. Btw thanks to those new bathrooms the P-3C Orion is one of a handful of aircraft to serve over 50 years bringing the cost per flight hour down quite a bit over building new replacements =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
We had that. It was the Simpson-Bowles commission. It needed 14 out of 18 for supermajority to pass with amendment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...