Pricing Ourselves Out Of Weapons

If anyone has ever seen the prices we are paying for the weapons we use they know why I picked this title for this article. Every time a new weapon is built in this country, it costs more than the weapon it replaces. If it is a new type of weapon which is developed you know it will cost a bundle of money even if it is not performing as it should and many times we will buy it anyway. I may have mentioned this before, but it is worth mentioning again. The P-51 fighter plane, known as the Mustang cost $50,900 each and it was probably the best fighter we ever had up to that time. Supposedly the best fighter plane we have now is the F-35B. This plane is costing us $142 million dollars each. Before we go any further let’s look at what the average salary was in 1942 when the Mustang came out and what it is today. In 1942 the average salary was $2,400 a year. In 2015 the average salary is said to be $51,100. This means salaries have risen on average to about 21 times of what they were in 1942. If we apply this formula to fighter planes, the best plane today should seem to cost about $1,070,000. This is not what they cost. If we look at what they should cost and what they do cost we can’t help but notice they cost almost 133 times that amount.

The argument will be they have a lot more in them now, development is more expensive for some reason, they use exotic materials, blah, blah, blah. The good old Mustang had quite a few innovations for its day including a device which showed a gun sight reflection for easier aiming and a supercharged engine for faster speed. The entire plane was designed and built in a few months. Today years drift by while most planes are being designed. It would be interesting to know how much it cost a company to build a plane so we could know how much they are making on it. If a company back in World War II ever put out a plane like the F-35 they would have been dumped. That plane has the most problems of any plane we have ever built and the project cost us so much money, 1.5 trillion dollars to be exact, it limited what the US Air Force could spend on anything else. As a matter of fact CNBC ran an article titled, How DOD’s $1.5 Trillion F-35 Broke the Air Force.

Don’t think for one second this problem is only with our planes. In the 1970s there was a project for building cheaper aircraft carriers. They would be smaller about 50,000 to 60,000 tons and non-nuclear. The idea was to build more of them. They would hold 60 aircraft vs. about 90 aircraft for the nuclear supercarriers. It is said that by 1977 the cost of the smaller carriers would have been 1.5 billion dollars vs. 2.4 billion for the Nimitz supercarriers. This meant for 10 supercarriers we would have paid 24 billion dollars and got a fleet of about 900 planes. For the same 24 billion dollars we could have gotten a fleet of about 16 carriers and 960 planes. The more carriers we had the better the odds of survival. Here was the real rub however, the bigger carriers had their costs rising faster. The $2.4 billion dollar nuclear supercarrier in the 1970s became the 13 billion dollar USS Gerald R. Ford in 2015. How can we continue to build these giants if the cost keeps going up? The carrier before this one was the George Bush and cost 6.2 billion dollars. You will notice we were charged more than double that price for the Ford. This is insanity. If we look at nuclear powered submarines we see the same trend. A Virginia class attack submarine costs us $2.64 Billion Dollars, a Seawolf nuclear submarine $2.8 Billion Dollars. The US Navy has said its cost for the lead boat in the new submarine building program will cost $12 Billion dollars and boats 2-12 were estimated to cost $6-7 billion each, but they revised this cost down to $4.9 Billion each. Remember this. these things always seem to come in over the cost estimate.

Excuse me if I let out a loud laugh at the following statement which was made by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller)/Chief Financial Officer. “The combined capabilities and performance of U.S. weapon systems are unmatched throughout the world…” I guess this doesn’t include the F-35 with all its faults and high cost. Anyway it is not only the US Air Force and US Navy which have been struggling with the high cost of weapons. Of the three major forces in this country, the US Army has the smallest budget for procurement and research and development. It is almost $17 Billion Dollars. Each US Army Apache Helicopter designated AH-64D costs $65 million dollars. The AH-64A was $20 million. We spent almost $2 Billion to turn AH-64As into Ah-64Ds. The AH-64D program cost us $11 Billion Dollars through 2007.

The opinion in the military is that one of the best weapons we ever made, the modern tank, will no longer be needed in modern warfare and we will need more submarines, long range bombers and drones. Is this the military talking out of true need or are the spiraling cost of weapons forcing them to make choices which could hurt them in the future. The Abrahams tank is an incredible machine. Not one of them was destroyed when deployed in the invasion in Iraq. The Army is saying they are too cumbersome and we need more maneuverability, but do they really believe this. I don’t think anyone wants to tell the true story here because the military industrial complex is raking in money and the bigger the project the more they make. They must love aircraft carriers, fleets of planes and submarines with their huge costs.

I have talked before about when an expensive project is started it is almost expected that the manufacturer will ask for increases in the purchase price at least two or three times. It is almost a rule. What is really happening here is the armed forces and indirectly the American people are being drained of money. Some of the systems we buy are not suited to the new kind of warfare which is taking place and yet we buy them anyway. If we look at the F-22 Raptor, we spent $150 million on each plane and had to discontinue the program after only 187 operational planes were built at a program cost of $66.7 Billion Dollars. This made the real cost of each plane triple what we were told. One of the reasons it was discontinued besides the huge cost was there was no clear mission for the plane.

It is time we stopped wasting money on weapons we don’t need and put the money into ones we do. It is also time to end the flood of wasted money pouring into the hands of the manufacturers. If something doesn’t work as advertised, don’t pay for it. If it is going to go way over the promised price, don’t buy it. I am sure the message will be received loud and clear.