A small tale of waste in the military.
 

A friend of mine is retired military. He now works for a defense contractor. They developed a state of the art piece of equipment that needed a 727 to fly in. The plane cost 20 million. The platform was switched to a drone style airframe. It was decided not the use the plane after it sat on the runway for 60 days. The plane was auctioned for 2 million. It was never even boarded by a flight crew. It gets better the drone airframe changes needed for this thing gets canceled and then the whole project gets #^&#^&#^&#^& canned. Total loss to the tax payer ....drum roll please .........$3.4 billion dollars. We are going to have to raises some serious taxes to pay for that blunder and the thousands more just like it. Military spending a black hole super nova of waste, greed and coruption.

Don't blame the contractor. Some people cannot ever stay with a decision. even if the project is fixed price, the military continually changes their mind. It's crazy

Duke, you are correct, there is certainly waste in the military (I did almost 2 tours with the USMC). However, as that industry becomes more and more reliant on technology, there will always be experiments and prototypes that get scrapped for a myriad of reasons. That what happens in the research & development stages...some ideas go into production, many do not. And it can be an expensive process. Just because a prototype doesn't go into production, doesn't mean it was a bad idea to build the prototype.

I don't mind some of my tax dollars going to fund military research, as long as the money is spent wisely. I have a much bigger issue with welfare checks being just handed to lazy slobs for not doing anything, and I have a bigger issue with (for example) cops retiring at age 43 and collecting a pension for life. That is absolutely un-justifiable...

But I think we're saying thge same thing...there is just so much waste out there. My guess is that there's enough STUPID waste waiting for a gutsy politician to cut, that we could balance the budget without raising taxes. But every cut is going to anger someone, and many politicians (in both parties) are more concerned with getting re-electd than with making the tough decisions. This fact (politicians being too concerned with re-election) is, IMHO, the single biggets contributor to the mess we're in. It could be solved instantly be implementing term limits. I have never heard a compelling argument in support of unlimited terms for legislators.

Great day Jim finally something we are in complete agreement on. Term limits are the only way to go if we are ever to limit the influence of special interests groups on both sides of the debate.

JDF, LCS programme, F-35, airborne laser?, A navy, a marine corps navy and airforce, Army Airborne, Airforce, 4 chains of commands, boots on the ground 2 forces unable to tactically communicate?

USS Kearsarge rocks though.

Sound familiar JimCT?

Well said, I could not agree more. I just don't see how anyone can disagree. That would solve SO MANY problems...

It would be harder then getting lawyers to agree on limits for medical malpractice.

F35 - Massive FAIL. With the services (and congressional oversight) thinking they'd save money by being 80% common in the aoirframe between three services instead has created an awful monster. Made worse by trying to get the STOVL F35B variant which further fails the AF and Navy models. And after bbiiillliioonnss spent, will likely be a half-azzed aircraft.

Kill the JSF. Build more F22s and enhanced F16s and F18s.

Use what you can in a new system. Send the people involved in this costly Nunn-Mccurdy breech to court. Congress included.
LCS - Littoral Combat Ship Little Crappy Ship. Steel version, overweight so bad it needs floaties on the a$$ end. and such a pig on fuel it can't go far at top speed. Aluminum trimaran version is way cool and way delicate. Both models can't defend themselves adequately and both are way TOOOOO expensive yet their congress reps have kept them afloat. What was supposed to be $200 mil a piece (which was too cheap to begin with) they've hit $700+ mil for sexy speedboats. Crewsize: optimal manning not enough crew to survive a Sammy B moment circa '88. And these are supercrews with the best of the Navy but there are not enough of them.

ABL? Flawed because you'd need to have a ton of them within a short distance of the launch areas to make it work, but it is a good tech demonstrator to learn from - direct energy weapons will be a needed tech to have. We need to have that developed so we can learn to bring down costs. We can't afford having 20 million dollar systems to defend against $10,000 munitions. We need to have the defending system cost effective against the offensive system. ABL pays off 20 years down the road.

The bad guys are not going away anytime soon. In many ways we are like the 1900-1910 range a century ago. This is not good.

Army? Doesn't do forced entry from the sea and is too heavy to do any real expeditionary work. Marines can do some forced entry and can do expeditionary. I think they are man for man better than the army (one yahoo's opinion anyway) but there are not enough and they are typically lighter than comparable army units.

AF / Naval Air, two necessary complimentary systems. Each can do things the other can't. Marine air? That might be redundant. At leaswt the most redundant of the three.

Commands? Gates eliminate much of the joint of "jointness" so expected it to actually get worse?

I'm way out of my league on this but it is something I've been following as an Armchair SECDEF for more than a few years.

JDF? Jamaican Defense Force ?:devil2:

Its not always the military, congress decides what to fund and this puts a lot of pressure on programs. Missions change. They also hedge, a lot, creating redundant programs and often chopping the big ones up across multiple contractors causing A LOT of waste.

Some of it it justified but there's a lot that's just pork.
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I would have like to see the effect of 2 billion $$ spread across Mass and RI schools. Instead of throwaway money. Can you imagine the effect of $2 billion went into fisheries mgt or gamefish mgt.