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Dissecting a $231 Million High-Tech Boondoggle
The L.A. Times takes to task the U.S. Congress, the Obama administration, and various military agencies for their combined role in supporting the expenditure of vast amount of money on a system called the Precision Tracking Space System. All told, according to the paper, the PTSS program -- which was to have provided early warning of missile launches, and precision tracking of the missiles themselves -- ended up blowing through more than $230 million before being cancelled. After talking to defense experts and reviewing hundreds of documents, the Times comes to what probably sounds like an easy conclusion for any big-budget military program that never reaches operation: it shouldn't have even left the drawing board.
Follow the money
who got paid? this passed congress in 09 so who voted for it? eventually the cronyism will show itself
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The Republican Congress is a fine example.
it's good that they cancelled the project. the only thing left is for everyone involved to pay back the money they took... with interest. to be fair, they can have the rest of their lives to pay it back.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
For government projects, isn't $231M "never leaving the drawing board"?
For other projects? Is this better or worse than the Fed printing money for failed financial institutions?
$231 million? Shit, that wouldn't even pay for a single Marine Corps F-35B.
(Which is still a fucking bargain compared to the Navy version (the F-35C) that weighs in at ~$337 million.)
But hey, it's only money, no sense on wasting it on schools or medical research or feeding hungry people, right?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
We are in scores of trillions of dollars in debt, and this is just one example of the reason. No accountability and no expenditure limits. Layer upon layer of bureaucracy and we keep throwing money towards the problem.
In addition to all the other comments about $231 million being chump-change, recognize something else about advanced technological research: sometimes it doesn't pan out.
That doesn't mean that we should never try to research new things though. Not everything can be discovered the way the Japanese like to do it, through hundreds of small polishes to an existing working design. Sometimes you need to think big to make a real breakthrough.
I would also put this story and some of the kneejerk responses to it in the category of "why the US isn't as successful as it once was". If the 60s were like today, with anti-science teabaggers controlling half of congress, would we have made a manned mission to the moon? Especially given that every one of those missions could easily have ended in disaster?
No people. Even the vaunted Solyndra failure came out of a program that overall had a better success rate than most private funding, and in the end, not only advanced technology, it made a considerable profit for the taxpayer. The willingness to scream and cry and throw tantrums by the anti-technology/pro-fundamentalist haters, every time some risk doesn't come out out 100% perfectly, is a cancer on the body politic. And we're sinking due to the over caution that results.
But what about inspiring the kids and the tech spinoffs? For each dollar spent on the PTSS, seven dollars were injected directly back into the economy!
Because space!
Republicans do this to funnel money from the working poor to corporations.
large uncontrolled budget, with unlimited spending increases, and zero common fiscal sense.
In terms of military budgets, $230M is nothing. We have other boondoggles that have burned through a thousand times that. In fact, this program is such a trivial amount, I suspect it is being emphasized to distract people from the real waste. The F35 program burns through $230M every three days.
A typical republican budget plan.
This program was proposed by the Obama administration, and passed by congress with plenty of votes from both parties.
The real problem is that this project is derived from the Regan fantasy Star Wars program and the Bush fantasy 'hit a bullet with a bullet' program. Neither are reasonable programs, given any level of technology, because they are defensive and we must always assume that our enemies have equal levels of technology. Sure when we invade we can insure we only invade technologically backwards countries, and then cry like babies when they use their wits to defends themselves, but that does not work in the general case.
The thing is about a decade ago actual scientists published an actual plan on how we could actually defend the US against a power that launched a single ICBM with a warhead of multiple payloads. The first was fast detection and verification. This required that we know the launch sites, monitor them, and verify a real launch. This is important because a feasible countermeasure is decoy launches. We can't really deal with more than one launch, yet.
The second challenge is to track and destroy the missile as early as possible in boost phase. This is done not only to not have to deal with decoy weapons, but also to minimize debris impacting friendly populations. The best option for this is an airborne laser. That program was canceled in 2010 after spending $10 billion. Sea based lasers are an option, but a fleet to make them functional would be vast, and require us to expose sailors to dangerous situations.
It is reasonable to destroy an ICBM during mid phase flight assuming that no countermeasures have been deployed. This is what the PTSS might have been trying to do. The problem is the timing and the inability to modify hardware already launched into orbit. What is not reasonable is to try to destroy individual warheads after deployment. Decoys can be made to look like active warheads, and, worse yet, if an enemy agent knows the algorithm used to detect decoys, warheads can be re engineered to look like decoys, and decoys like active warheads.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
large uncontrolled budget, with unlimited spending increases, and zero common fiscal sense.
In terms of military budgets, $230M is nothing. We have other boondoggles that have burned through a thousand times that. In fact, this program is such a trivial amount, I suspect it is being emphasized to distract people from the real waste. The F35 program burns through $230M every three days.
A typical republican budget plan.
This program was proposed by the Obama administration, and passed by congress with plenty of votes from both parties.
And then defunded by the Republican House in 2011 & 2012. Had it been proposed by a Republican, it would have been funded til the 2nd Coming of Elvis. 230 mil over 5 years, all in? Hell, that's coffee and donut money for the Pentagon.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
The democrats at least pretend to justify their spending with increased in taxes.
Oh joy.
millions or billions. if not, let's stop right here.
If/When government fails at anything, it's almost always because they didn't have enough funds, and the only cure for that is more and more funding.
You just know some Republican got wealthy off of this.
According to the document the manufacturing contract was awarded between the establishment of the office to oversee a non-existing program and a requirements review. It also took two years to set up the administration of the program and these administrators are now merged with another office.
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so you are saying the republicans killed this boondoggle, yet you are going to make the claim that they only did it because...obama?
is there anything, anything at all that is obamas fault to folks like you??
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Yes they were voting against absolutely everything back then because...obama - please try to keep up.
Spite is a very childish way to run an opposition and shows utter contempt for the country but it can be effective at times.
It's all about the banksters stealing from the people.
The article makes it sound more like deliberate fraud to me.
The solution is simple:
Amendment 28: The government of these united states shall not borrow money for any reason without a popular vote by referendum requiring no less than 75% of the popular vote and requiring a quorum of no less than 25% of eligible voters.
Bam, no more deficit spending. You'll find that most of these idiotic boondoggles will get the ax when The money dries up. Force these elected officials to have to demonstrate a balanced budget, and give the courts the ammo they need to end any budget that runs a deficit.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
The problem is that it needed many more satellites to work than actually planned. Otherwise, the project seemed technically fine. To the point that land based radars were cheaper. Sort of like telescopes. If SpaceX were mass producing and launching the satellites, it might have been the cheaper option.
Actually the program was created in 2008/2009, while the Democrats controlled everything- the House, Senate, and White House. Additional funding was added later by the Democrat-controlled Senate while Republicans argued against it.
http://graphics.latimes.com/mi...
Our previous Labor government spent more than a billion dollars refurbishing junked helicopters, none ever left the ground. Corruption la grande.
As a tax payer, I'd like my money back, but I suspect that there are no consumer protections built into that lucrative racket, are there?
--Udo.
Why don't we just copy theirs? They work better than anything we have.
That's about half a bubble off. Nobody expected the banks to just give away money. They were expected to accept slightly more risky loans on starter homes. Slightly more risky, but not so much that they would lose money.
In many cases, the banks set the loans up to fail rather than simply risking failure. That is very much on them. They also made the loans on McMansions. I don't mean starter homes that now cost more due to demand, I mean ginormous houses on teeny little lots. That too is on them. It was relentless. My father in law moved during that time and when he went to get a mortgage on the new home, they poured on the pressure to take a larger loan and get a bigger house. Fortunately, he was a sensible man and insisted on a more affordable mortgage, but he had to insist. That had nothing at all to do with Clinton. It wasn't a starter home, his credit was good and he made decent money at a stable job.
This continued unabated for 8 years under Bush as well. In spite of warnings from SOME Dems in Congress.
With a few notable exceptions, nobody Democrat or Republican seems all that interested in punishing the criminals or using new regulations to stop them from doing it again.
Most of the banks were bailed out to get them over their cash shortage. As a thank you, they made loans even harder to get, doubled down on robosigning, and dumped the money into commodities and executive bonuses.
I often make a point that the US is very deranged about justifying military vs civilian expenditures. If anything civilian expenditures are subject to excessive cost benefit analysis, nimbism, and reflexive rejection. Plus pie an the sky libertarian thinking (AKA private enterprise always spends the tax payers money more wisely then the government). When it comes to military spending all that goes right out the window.
Bam, no more anything.
In Canada we mostly created a long gun registry. The idea was to basically keep a record of what guns were where. Before it was cancelled it had cost 2 billion dollars to create.
I want you to think about that. There are 33 million Canadians. So assuming every Canadian has 10 guns we are talking 330 million gun records distributed among 33 million owner records and then assuming that we are all police with varying levels of access let's assume 33 million admin records. So assuming 5K per gun record and something similar for the user and admin records, we are talking about 2 Terabytes.
Unless we were to have started to store high resolution photos of all those guns we weren't talking about something that is much of a system at all. A few call centers, some extra security... Can anyone figure out where the 2 billion could possibly have been spent?
One could argue that at the time storage cost more but not 100,000 times more.
My country is going to buy fighter jets worth ~200 million $ each.
Interesting, if government is so bad, where is my gm freeway? My Ford road? My electrical power costs more each year because of profit, not cost of labor, fuel and is cut off if I would not pay, are my government services cut off if I don't pay? Same with water and sewer, all private, could you , would you like to live in smog filled bejing? Or dehli? Or San Francisco? Start using your brain for something other then reptoid falicies. Both government and capitalism need to be well regulated.
> The F35 program burns through $230M every three days.
Indeed, $230 million will buy you maybe two F-35s -- with money left over for a nice dinner. Of course that's if you believe the current cost projections for the USAF version(why would anyone do that?). The Navy and Marine corps models come with more cup holders, wi-fi and simulated leopard seat covers. They cost a bit more.
And all the models are priced without engines.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Bush didn't sit idly by. From a 2008 article:
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Yes, the banks made loans that would "fail", to use your word. Why did they suddenly start doing that? Why did banks, all of the sudden, start handing money to people who couldn't repay? Two reasons. First, because it had been arranged that bad loans, loans that would fail, would still be profitable.
The noble intent of the dems was to encourage (and force) banks to make loans to people whom they thought "should" be able to own a home, because it would be more fair if everyone could own a home. That's a noble goal. By artificially making that profitable, they have the banks the opportunity to make make money by writing bad loans. When banks got a new opportunity to make money, they sure did so. You can sure blame the banks, they knowingly wrote loans in which a high percentage would fail, since they were assured they'd make money anyway. You assign blame to them, but then what?
You can approach in a solution in either of two ways. They didn't make these bad loans before, when writing a bad loan meant that they lost money; so you can go back to that, you can say "if you write a bad loan, that's on you, you lose your own money". But then you can't also force them to make bad loans. Alternately, you can double down. You can write more laws to manipulate the market further. But remember, laws manipulating the mortgage market are what started the whole mess. Yet another law will surely have further unintended consequences. Then you need another law or three to fix those side effects.
Again, the intent is noble and good, yet when you start artificially manipulating markets on a national scale their will be side-effects. Unintended consequences will happen.
Libertarianism is not an economic model but a political ideology. I am a Libertarian. While I'm not overly fond of the term, I don't have time to give you an eduction this morning. So, suffice to say, I'm often referred to as a "Socialist Libertarian." See the first four or five paragraphs on Wikipedia, it's actually authored fairly well.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
This is just how we do socialism in America. Our ruling class got really scared of communism so they spent most of the 50s, 60s and 70s pounding it into our skulls that socialism == bad (especially while we were children). But there were quite a few that broke ranks (FDR, Eisenhower, etc) and wanted to keep the economy from sinking back into the Pre-WWII world of winner take all and insane inequality. The Military Industrial Complex with all it's waste was the solution. This way wealth gets moved around without the icky after taste of socialism...
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Why did banks, all of the sudden, start handing money to people who couldn't repay?
Once upon a time in America, banks kept their mortgage loans on the books indefinitely. The good, the bag and the ugly. This meant that quality of the borrower was supremely important for the health of the bank. This was before the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which made banks very conservative and very boring. And then Wall Street got the bright idea of buying mortgage loans, packaging them up, and selling them as Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO's). The mortgage loans came off the books to become someone else's problem and the banks no longer cared about the quality of the borrower. This process got taken one step further when outfits opened shop to manufacture this stuff as quickly as possible. What was previously an obscure corner of Wall Street became the heart of the economy.
Once upon a time banks didn't sell their loans, that's true, but not really relevant because that was prior to Fannie Mae - in 1938. By the 1970s, most mortgages were probably sold at least once, not kept on the issuers books. Mortgage-backed securities aren't a new thing. Assigning top credit ratings to low tranche ones was new.
It's also disingenuous to suggest that Glass-Steagall, which FORCED commercial banks to sell off their mortgages if they wanted the diversification of MBS, had prevented it. Quite the opposite.
> while Glass-Steagall was in effect, banks were BORING AS HELL for 50 years of economic stability. What happened after Wall Street got the rules changed: the savings and loans scandals in the 1980's, Enron in the 1990's
I hate to be the one to point this out, but Glass-Steagall was repealed at the end of 1999, allowing banks to begin expanding into investments in the mid 2000s. The problems you pointed out were while Glass-Steagall was in full effect.
For a government program that did nothing, I'd consider it $$ well spent. Think of the scientists and engineers it kept employed, yet didn't cause one death anywhere in the world!
If a missile launched from another country, would I want our military to track it really good?
My answer: YES !!
Is this because I am a tea party republican?
I suggest to you it is not. In that event I could see Debbie Wasserman-Schultz wishing very dearly we had better missile tracking capabilities.
So why does the media resent military R&D all the time?
Political assumptions that have nothing to do with the wishes of ordinary voters.