Our Military is Leaking Money

Let’s not forget Iraq. It was said the average price of the war there was $6,300 for every single U.S. citizen or 1.9 trillion dollars. It is said if we add up all the money we spent on the wars in the middle-east it was really about 3 trillion dollars. It is hard to know who to know what it cost, but it certainly was in the trillions. Pallets of money were disappearing and the pallets were of $100 bills not singles, not tens, not even fifties. Brown University pinned the cost of the wars at 3.6 trillion dollars. Is it any wonder why the deficit is so large? We will be saddled with this debt for the foreseeable future and what did the wars accomplish?

The military has had plenty of projects which it abandoned after sinking an incredible amount of money in them. Business Insider claimed in 2016 the U.S. military spent 51.2 billion dollars on 15 major programs from 2000 to 2016 and never got any of them into the field. It claimed the projects were ditched due to lack of funding. It seems unbelievable to me a country would spend 18.1 billion dollars on a project such as a Non-Line-Of-Sight Cannon and then just cancel it. If the project could have been cancelled it seems it really wasn’t needed. Another cancelled project was the RAH-66 Comanche Armed Reconnaissance and Attack Helicopter. We spent 7.9 billion on this one before cancellation. Both of these projects were projects of the U.S. Army. There are so many cancelled projects and they seem to cross all branches of the armed forced. What seems particularly aggravating to me as a tax payer is starting a project, dropping billions into it then cancelling it, because you think you have a better project. This is what the Marines did when they cancelled the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. You would have thought a study would have been completed first and if there was something better they could have built they would have done just that. Get this one. The U.S. Army cancelled the XM2001 Crusader Self-Propelled Howitzer which they sunk 2.2 billion dollars into for the Non-Line-of-sight Cannon project I mentioned above which cost 7.9 billion, which they later cancelled also. Isn’t anyone overseeing these projects?

Here is another thing I do not understand. It seems the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps were both trying to develop a new sniper rifle. Why would two different branches of the service both be developing the same thing? This seems like a tremendous waste of money. The Marines seemed to like the army rifle better and it is said they wanted to go with that one, but feel it could use more range. This means all the money spent developing the Marine rifle was wasted. It seems to me when it comes to small arms, there should only be one authority which develops them to avoid duplication and waste. The needs of the different branches of the military should be taken into consideration when the project is started.

Another waste of billions of dollars is something I didn’t mention is weak security in weapons development and design protection. Take China for example. It has been said the Chinese military is full of cloned weapons. They seemed to have poured over the stolen designs of planes like the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and created a very similar plane. Even the Northrop Grumman X-47B unmanned combat air vehicle have similar cousins in China. The U.S. Defense Department admitted Chinese hackers have been successful sometimes in stealing our weapons design data among other things. It is also thought some of our allies who purchased U.S. weapons may have made secret deals with the Chinese. This is important, because it means we have to spend even more money to develop even more advanced weapons to maintain a lead. The examples I have given are only the tip of the iceberg.

Then there are the weapons we showered with money, but don’t work as planned. Some are simple such as rifle sights. The U.S. Special forces has refused to accept new rifle sights, because even the manufacturer has admitted they could cost the lives of service members due to a defect. This time a company was sued and the FBI notified, because of charges of a coverup. Faulty machine gun replacement parts were dangerously injuring service members. It isn’t only light weapons and parts which are faulty and don’t work correctly. Defective weapons range all the way up to the F-35 fighter which many feel is inferior to some planes which came before it. There have been so many defects in the plane, including problems with the oxygen that it would be laughable if it were not for the fact it is dangerous. The plane is slow and not as maneuverable as some of its foreign counterparts. It seems this plane was created only for the aerospace company to make money and we should have never spent the many billions of dollars to buy it.

If I really wanted to I could create a very long list of defective weapons we have purchased, but I think you get the idea. We are wasting tax payer money at a monumental pace. It seems oversight is almost non-existent even though it is claimed to be there.