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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.
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.
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 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.