I have written many articles about how we are being fleeced by the military industrial complex. I have often mentioned the fact we are paying more than two to three times what other countries pay for weapons such as planes, ships, tanks and everything else. When a project is started and a contract given out there is a price set which always seems to get more inflated as time goes by. It has become automatic for contractors to go back to the Defense Department or branches of the armed forces with requests for more money. On top of that many of our defense projects are coming out with all sorts of problems.

Recently we have launched the Zumwalt class destroyer. Traditionally destroyers were called tin cans as they were the smallest and cheapest of the major ships. Their role is to protect the bigger ships and perhaps assist in other areas by launching missiles and drones. The price of US destroyers has been skyrocketing. It went over a billion dollars when the Arieigh Burke class destroyers came out in 1988. Someone thought this wasn’t good enough and to keep up with new technology we needed even bigger and more advanced destroyers so they convinced the navy to get 32 new Zumwalt class destroyers which would be packed with all the new technology which up to now has not been tried. The ships were so expensive the 32 ship order had to be cut to 3. This is what happens when you spend 4.5 billion dollars on one ship and a destroyer to boot. What kind of idiots are we? Maybe the government should just hand over the hardware budget money to the contractors without getting anything, it would save on paperwork.

There has just been too many times lately when we spent so much money on weapons we had to cut the numbers we ordered way back, because the weapons cost far too much. Take the F-35 Lightning II. We decided to save money by letting other countries help finance the project, but as with everything else we are suckers. We took in about 4.4 billion dollars from other countries who plan to use the plane, but we put up over 35 billion dollars. It seems the true cost may not be what we think, because all different figures are being thrown around. One source is saying Great Britain is putting up 2.5 billion dollars and that amounts to 10% of the entire cost, which would make the cost 25 billion dollars.  It seems the planes are far more expensive than that. The plane is not easy to export, because countries are finding the plane too expensive or in its cheapest configuration too watered down. It is also said not to be as competitive with some of the better Russian planes, because it is far slower and not as maneuverable. It has hundreds of problems even to this day, but some are being solved, but ever so slowly. It is estimated the F-35 export copy will cost between 110-130 million dollars while the F-16E/F costs about 50 million dollars.

Let’s talk about another plane, the US F-22 Raptor. The plane is an air superiority fighter and came out in 1997. It is said to be the most advanced fighter in the world. The program cost the United States 66.7 billion dollars and for that we only got 187 operational planes and 8 test planes. This plane also had many problems. We were told we would be able to purchase 750 of these planes for about 26.2 billion dollars and look what we got. Let me repeat myself we got 187 operational fighters at 3 times the cost of the 750 planes we thought we were going to get. Can you imagine someone in private industry who is selling fleets of taxi cabs promising someone a fleet of 1000 new cabs for 5 million dollars and delivering 223 which have problems and asking 15 million dollars for them? How can something like this happen? There is only one way my friends and that is corruption. The government should have refused to pay and sued the company. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to happen. I will let you draw your own conclusions why. We either have the stupidest people running procurement and the worst overseers or something is going on which should not be going on. It seems almost everything the U.S. government buys it is being overcharged for and when we do get the weapons, ships, tanks and planes they have problems.

 A whistleblower came out and stated the Defense Department is paying about 30 billion dollars a year too much for weapons. He went on to say if we forced contractors to be more frugal this is the amount of money we could save. But it is more than frugality and I think he has taken too narrow a view on this problem. Corruption has to be considered. Why aren’t the problems being addressed and why do we just throw billions of dollars away and then say old timers on Social Security need to get their benefits cut? It does make one wonder if we are losing billions upon billions every year due to inflated contracts with the military and as Rumsfeld stated the day before 9/11 that the military couldn’t account for a missing 2 trillion dollars, this is far more than incompetence.

Every contract the government has should be reviewed to see if we are being taken advantage of, I am sure it isn’t only the military contracts where we are losing a fortune. When people talk about saving money by going after corruption they are pooh poohed by the establishment. You could see this during the race for president when the subject was brought up by some. The establishment uses the ridicule factor and saying things like it is very small and the person bringing this up doesn’t know what they are talking about. It is being said a lot of contracts are not above board and I think we can see enough evidence to at least investigate these allegations.

I don’t know about others but I am tired of hearing how short we are of money and then seeing the monumental waste of money by the government. When we as citizens read how our tax money is being spent us should all be very angry.