A pretty good candidate for redundant headline of the year might be “How the Military Wastes Money”. If you’d like to get your blood boiling for the new year, Matthew Gault’s article at WiB could be a pretty good start. Here are his top military boondoggles of 2014:
- the F-35
- the Littoral Combat Ship
- more M-1 Abrams tanks (to add to the 5,000 we already have in storage)
- Too many bullets
- Spare parts for MRAP vehicles that just got thrown away
- Afghanistan
Fortunately, there’s a lot of money sitting around doing nothing. Oh, there’s not a lot of money sitting around doing nothing? The devil you say. Think of it as fiscal stimulus like a good folk Keynesian.
It continues to perplex that a Congress which makes the effort to shaves pennies off of SNAP assistance can’t throw enough cash at the military. Unlike unions and teachers we never take our armed forces seriously enough to consider that more funding may not solve the problems or or contemplate the possibility that the system may be dysfunctional.
For god’s sake the Pentagon openly bribes legislators with promises of sourcing contracts into their districts and states, behavior as deep and dirty in the political process as anything. It’s primary purpose isn’t to defend the United States but to spend money into the hands of crony capitalists, and one of these good ol’ days we’re going to get a bloody nose from someone who prioritized spending that actually enhances its military’s effectiveness on the battlefield.
Yes, it’s shameful and one of the reasons I’ve been calling for reform, particularly with procurement, for years.
Ben, the Tea Party faction and a few Democrats recently voted for reducing military compensation (and a few senior officers are starting to advocate for that as well), but no one seems interested in addressing the gross waste and fraud as detailed in the article.
The one budget item which is clearly waste but with which I have a certain amount of sympathy is buying more tanks. It’s a problem I’ve posted about in the past.
If you have companies that manufacture tanks and you need more tanks, you can always order them. However, if there is no company that manufactures tanks, you can’t.
To make it worthwhile for a company to continue to manufacture tanks, the company must have orders. Once you’ve stopped ordering tanks you can’t go back and order a new company that manufactures tanks. It would take a decade.
So, basically, you’re left with two alternatives. Either you decide you don’t really need tanks at all as part of your arsenal or you decide you do and order tanks you don’t need.
Tough nut to crack. “Supporting the troops” now means never having to cut military spending. We are constantly at war and we get editorials from the WSJ claiming we are not fighting enough. And the contractors have it down to a science when it comes to spreading out production and donations so that politicians almost everywhere benefit. I am very pessimistic about this changing. That is reinforced by frequent conversations with my nephew’s significant other who does military logistics for a living. It is much worse than portrayed by Gault.
Steve