The US Government Has To Stop Throwing Money Away
When Pres. Eisenhower was leaving office he made a statement warning us about the military-industrial complex. He said we should never let it get too strong, which is exactly what we did against his advice. There has been a steady progression of overpriced underperforming weapons which are so incredibly expensive they are pulling down the country. I am sure at least some of you must have seen the disgrace of the littoral ships. A littoral ship is one which was built to fight near the shore and be able to go into water which is much shallower than an ordinary warship would be able to go into. The program went seven years over the allotted time and the cost increased astronomically and yet the ships so far have proved to be a disaster. The original order of 52 ships has been cut down to what is now 40, but might be further cut to 32. They are so lightly armed many consider them to be sitting ducks. The idea was to create a ship which could use different weapons packages, but after all this time none were ready. In its wisdom the Navy allowed two different contractors to build two different versions of the ship which are not interchangeable, so that separate training courses were required depending on who manufactured the ship you were on. The Secretary of Defense ordered the Secretary of the Navy to reduce the amount of these ships on December 14, 2015.
What is wrong with this picture? I for one say that if a company is going to build a defective weapon then we shouldn’t pay for it. Would you stand for a contractor building a house for you that took seven years longer than promised, had defective plumbing, the electrical didn’t work properly and was full of drafts? I know I certainly wouldn’t, but the Defense Department and the Armed Forces have been doing this for many years which leads to only one conclusion, people are getting their pockets lined with money, our tax money. I often wondered if corruption could be eliminated from the government how much money would actually be saved and is beginning to look to me that it would not be billions of dollars, it would be trillions. I know many politicians would say this is ridiculous it is nothing like that, but I would refer them to the fact that Donald Rumsfeld on September 10, 2001 announced the Defense Department could not account for $2 trillion. When you run your household affairs do you ever notice a large amount of money missing that cannot be accounted for? Of course you don’t and if you did you’d know somebody stole it wouldn’t you?
For many years people building expensive weapons for the United States have had a routine and this routine was to ask for money for overruns which was automatically granted. It is probably done on almost all weapon systems, but it is a lot more noticeable in the real expensive ones. If we look at the F-22 program which took far longer than it was supposed to and had all sorts of critical issues and cost overruns we find that we have spent $66.7 billion for 187 operational aircraft and a test aircraft. The Air Force originally was going to order 750 aircraft at a cost of $26.2 billion starting in 1994. How can anyone justify the difference in cost and reduction of the amount of aircraft which we purchased? Why wasn’t this program canceled? It clearly did not meet requirements for this weapon system and why wasn’t the manufacturer investigated along with the people who are responsible for purchasing this system? Would a taxicab fleet owner order 100 cabs for $20,000 each and settle for 30 cabs at $60,000 each? I don’t think anybody in the private community would ever settle for what was done to us by these builders and their government overseers.
One thing which seems to stand out to me is that there are other fine weapons being produced by other countries for a fraction of the cost we spend. Russia has some planes which are said to be superior to ours and yet their planes were only a third of the cost of what we spent. I just don’t understand why this country’s federal criminal justice system does not investigate what is going on. Wouldn’t you think after being told what these planes were really going to cost, the United States Air Force would have canceled the order and demanded their money back?
An article came out 2014 which claimed that at that time the Pentagon was spending more than half a trillion dollars more on weapons systems then they were originally quoted. The article was based on testimony for the committee on armed services in the U.S. Senate. I would like to know if the Senate investigated this why wasn’t anything done? That is the problem in Washington, nothing ever seems to get accomplished that is of any value to the citizens of the United States. It seems if you are not a special interest group there is nothing there for you. The following is the address of the report online, http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/662837.pdf
You can copy and paste it into your browser’s address bar. Sorry Truth Facts does not use live links. The report reflected 80 separate weapons programs. I wouldn’t be surprised if the price of overruns has risen even higher by now.
Cost overruns have hit every area of the government, even the president’s helicopter fleet. Sen. John McCain pointed out how unacceptable the cost for these helicopters was. The real question is why hasn’t a law been passed to protect us from these huge cost overruns? It seems like the answer is pretty simple, if we did that palms might not be greased anymore. Can you imagine the size of the group of lobbyists for the military-industrial complex and how much money they have to spread around Washington DC? It must be enormous. In Washington money talks and nobody wants to be the one to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. This has always gone on, but now it has gotten to the point where it is destroying our country.
We just can’t afford to spend $13 billion or more on one aircraft carrier. This aircraft carrier was originally supposed to cost $10.6 billion which in itself seems astronomical, when the builder claimed cost overruns it was able to raise the price by another $2.4 billion and we still bought the damn thing. There is a feeling among military experts that aircraft carriers may be too vulnerable and that their days are numbered and yet we just keep building them and making them bigger targets. The truth of the matter is we could probably build four or five smaller carriers for the same price and they would hold at least as many if not more aircraft in total. The point here is all our eggs would not be in one basket. An enemy would have to hit 4 or 5 targets instead of one. We just seem to always go for the most expensive option. Something has to be done about all this careless spending and automatic increases in prices as things are being built and a time to do it is now when we have these huge deficits.
