Pentagon bloat, etc. thread

[rstrong]

Gwynne Dyer: Obama’s Minimalist Foreign Policy

As you would expect when discussing a man whose basic rule is “Don’t do stupid shit”, Goldberg’s piece is mostly an examination of what Obama didn’t do, not what he did. He didn’t go to war with the Assad regime in Syria. He didn’t get into a new Cold War with Russia over Ukraine. He didn’t bomb Iran, instead making a political deal to block its nuclear weapons ambitions. He didn’t attack North Korea even when it did test nuclear weapons.
[...]
But in the Washington foreign policy establishment, where every conflict on the planet tends to be redefined as an American problem and almost unlimited military force is available to attack the problem, Obama’s approach was heretical.

Democrats were just as opposed to his heresy as Republicans. Indeed, despite the wreckage of George W. Bush’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that Obama’s administration inherited when it took office in early 2009, his own first secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, was a classic interventionist.

The whole thing is well worth reading.

[Vrede too]

The Trillion Dollar Question

Isn’t it rather odd that America’s largest single public expenditure scheduled for the coming decades has received no attention in the 2015-2016 presidential debates?

The expenditure is for a thirty-year program to “modernize” the U.S. nuclear arsenal and production facilities. Although President Obama began his administration with a dramatic public commitment to build a nuclear weapons-free world, that commitment has long ago dwindled and died. It has been replaced by an administration plan to build a new generation of U.S. nuclear weapons and nuclear production facilities to last the nation well into the second half of the twenty-first century. This plan, which has received almost no attention by the mass media, includes redesigned nuclear warheads, as well as new nuclear bombers, submarines, land-based missiles, weapons labs, and production plants. The estimated cost? $1,000,000,000,000.00—or, for those readers unfamiliar with such lofty figures, $1 trillion.

Critics charge that the expenditure of this staggering sum will either bankrupt the country or, at the least, require massive cutbacks in funding for other federal government programs. “We’re . . . wondering how the heck we’re going to pay for it,” admitted Brian McKeon, an undersecretary of defense. And we’re “probably thanking our stars we won’t be here to have to have to answer the question,” he added with a chuckle.

Of course, this nuclear “modernization” plan violates the terms of the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which requires the nuclear powers to engage in nuclear disarmament. The plan is also moving forward despite the fact that the U.S. government already possesses roughly 7,000 nuclear weapons that can easily destroy the world. Although climate change might end up accomplishing much the same thing, a nuclear war does have the advantage of terminating life on earth more rapidly.

This trillion dollar nuclear weapons buildup has yet to inspire any questions about it by the moderators during the numerous presidential debates....

[rstrong]

Posted without context: HMCS Vancouver off America's west coast last week, firing a missile at a target in California.

[Vrede too]

I don't blame y'all. Can I suggest some NC and SC targets?

[Vrede too]

The U.S. Military—What a Waste

[O Really]

The U.S. Military—What a Waste

It seems to me that "TruthDig" might want to change it's name. It seems also that there are probably enough legitimate issues with the military budget to look into so it wouldn't be necessary to haul up urban legends and half-stories from decades ago. Yes, the C-5 had problems ummm, "getting off the ground" but it became an absolute workhorse for close to a half century. For anybody willing to do a modicum of research, the reason for the "$640" toilet seats" becomes quite clear.

"The P-3C Orion antisubmarine aircraft went into service in 1962. Twenty-five years later, in 1987, it was determined that the toilet shroud, the cover that fits over the toilet, needed replacement. Since the airplane was out of production this would require new tooling to produce. These on-board toilets required a uniquely shaped, molded fiberglass shroud that had to satisfy specifications for vibration resistance, weight, and durability. The molds had to be specially made, as it had been decades since their original production. The price reflected the design work and the cost of the equipment to manufacture them. Lockheed Corporation charged $34,560 for 54 toilet covers, or $640 each."

So there never was a $640 toilet seat. More like 53 $10 covers and $30K for new design, tooling and labor for the first one. Anybody who has ever done any renovation of an older house or restoration of a car can certainly vouch for not always (ever!) being able to get a replacement part off the shelf.

McKayla is not impressed with "TruthDig"

[Vrede too]

A couple of quibbles don't negate the point.

William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. He is the author, among other books, of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.

William Hartung

William D. Hartung (born 7 June 1955) is director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. He has also served as a Senior Research Fellow in the New America Foundation's American Strategy Program, and is former director of the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute. He specializes in issues of weapons proliferation, the economics of military spending, and alternative approaches to national security strategy. Hartung was the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. Prior to that, he served as the director of the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute. He also worked as a speechwriter and policy analyst for New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams.

He has contributed to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Mother Jones.

He featured in the documentaries Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire (2004) and Making a Killing: Inside the International Arms Trade (2006).

Hartung opposed the Iraq War and criticised the War on Terror on the basis that it would not 'quell the political powerlessness and frustration that fuels terrorism' in the Middle East, and that the Bush administration lacked moral authority as it supported Israel and undemocratic regimes.

Hartung resides in N.Y.

Works

And Weapons For All HarperCollins, 1995, ISBN 0-06-092641-4
William D. Hartung (2003). How Much are You Making on the War, Daddy?: A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration. Nation Books. pp. 145–. ISBN 978-1-56025-561-1.
Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Large Print 16pt). ReadHowYouWant.com. December 2010. ISBN 978-1-4596-0893-1.
Miriam Pemberton; William D. Hartung (2008). Lessons from Iraq: avoiding the next war. Paradigm Publishers. ISBN 978-1-59451-498-2.

... Yes, the C-5 had problems ummm, "getting off the ground" but it became an absolute workhorse for close to a half century....

Irrelevant to what the article says about it:

... The first person to bring widespread public attention to the size and scope of the problem of Pentagon waste was Ernest Fitzgerald, an Air Force deputy for management systems. In the late 1960s, he battled that service to bring to light massive cost overruns on Lockheed’s C-5A transport plane. He risked his job, and was ultimately fired, for uncovering $2 billion in excess expenditures on a plane that was supposed to make the rapid deployment of large quantities of military equipment to Vietnam and other distant conflicts a reality.

The cost increase on the C-5A was twice the price Lockheed had initially promised, and at the time one of the largest cost overruns ever exposed. It was also an episode of special interest then, because Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had been pledging to bring the efficient business methods he had learned as Ford Motors’ president to bear on the Pentagon’s budgeting process.

No such luck, as it turned out, but Fitzgerald’s revelations did, at least, spark a decade of media and congressional scrutiny of the business practices of the weapons industry. The C-5A fiasco, combined with Lockheed’s financial troubles with its L-1011 airliner project, led the company to approach Congress, hat in hand, for a $250 million government bailout. Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire, who had helped bring attention to the C-5A overruns, vigorously opposed the measure, and came within one vote of defeating it in the Senate....

He doesn't discuss its later worthiness.

... So there never was a $640 toilet seat....

Also irrelevant to what the article says about it. He says it was media and public popular while minimizing its importance relative to other waste:

... Despite the tens of billions being wasted on a project like the F-35, the examples that tend to draw the most attention from the media and the most outrage among taxpayers involve overspending on routine items. This may be because the average person doesn’t have a sense of what a fighter plane should cost, but can more easily grasp that spending $640 for a toilet seat or $7,600 for a coffee pot is outrageous. These kinds of examples—first exposed through work done in the 1980s by Dina Rasor of the Project on Military Procurement—undermined the position taken by President Ronald Reagan’s administration that not a penny could be cut from its then-record peacetime Pentagon budgets.

The media ate such stories up. Pentagon overpayments for everyday items generated hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines, including front-page coverage in the Washington Post. Two whistleblowers were even interviewed on the Today Show, and Johnny Carson joked about such scandals in his introductory monologues on the Tonight Show. Perhaps the most memorable depiction of the problem was a cartoon by the Washington Post’s Herblock that showed Reagan Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger wearing a $640 toilet seat around his neck. This outburst of truth-telling, whistleblowing, investigative journalism, and mockery helped put a cap on the Reagan military buildup, but—you won’t be surprised to learn—didn’t keep the Pentagon from finding ever more innovative ways to misspend tax dollars....

Try again, this time dealing with what William D. Hartung actually writes.

[O Really]

I'm sure Mr. Hartung is a very knowledgeable fellow. Thus I would expect better from such an expert.

No, he didn't address the later value of the C-5A, which if he had would have made the initial overruns less traumatic and weaken his point. To his credit, he just used it as one of several examples.

I did respond to what he actually wrote. He wrote about the "$650 toilet seat" as if it really existed. Sure, he used it as an example of how certain things catch the attention of media and the public, but never bothered to say that the interest/excitement was over a false (mis-characterized) issue.

Hey, I'm not going to take on a real expert on whether the military wastes money, although "waste" is always somewhat in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure he has many other tales he could tell if I don't like the ones he presented here. But even the best of experts can distort their writing.

Same principle as the difference in the public story and the real story about the woman who spilled the McDonald's coffee on herself. Lots of opportunity for ridicule there - unless you actually read the case details and find the coffee melted her pantyhose and that McDonald's intentionally keeps its coffee at 170 degrees instead of 140 like most others do and the difference is enough to cause significant burns.

[O Really]

I think this is the real issue:
(from the article) "... people might start to question, for example, whether a country that already has the capability to destroy the world many times over needs to spend $1 trillion over the next three decades on a new generation of ballistic missiles, bombers, and nuclear-armed submarines..."

Most, if not all, of entrants in the parade of horribles will have some backstory or reason (even if the reason is fuckup) for the cost overrides, etc. But if the "strategery" from the top changed, the instances of sloppy acquisition or whatever wouldn't really matter much.

[Vrede too]

The strategy is to transfer wealth from citizens to fat cat merchants of death. It's working just fine.

You want a complete history of the C-5A, but that's not the subject of the article. He rightly discusses the procurement fiasco of a plane that came in at twice the projected cost and was never really made serviceable until we were out of Vietnam - it's intended purpose in 1965 when the contract was awarded. That it was finally made useful years later and so far over budget after our being trapped by so much already being invested doesn't diminish his point at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_C-5_Galaxy

Do you think the Pentagon and Congress ever would have pursued it if they knew how it really would go? And, what value would we have realized if we'd gone a different route?

You want a complete history of the toilet seat, but he's clearly discussing the history of public awareness in citing it. Are you really griping because he doesn't minimize "easily grasp" enough?

You called him a liar but in reality no distortion is there, just your wish that the article be twice as long and have an entirely different focus. The Pentagon is and has long been our greatest source of waste, fraud and abuse, just as Ike predicted, and William D. Hartung has the chops to discuss it without being dismissed by a cute gymnast. Thanks to that and other government boondoggles, the Project On Government Oversight is still around 35 years later and is still respected and credible.

Pentagon Testing Office Calls Foul on F-35B “Operational Test”

[O Really]

Well, I didn't intend to call Hartung a liar. I objected to the title of the publication "TruthDig - drilling below the headlines." I don't doubt that these expense excesses exist(ed), but without a context or some analysis or explanation of cause, McKayla remains unimpressed.

Not that it's Hartung's list, but every year the "Citizens Against Government Waste" and similar organizations put out lists of "pork" and "waste" that they have culled from various appropriations bills. One of the things the CAGW finds wasteful is spending on solar energy. And probably some of the "earmarks" they criticize aren't necessary. Problem is, a story entitled "High Cost to Find Zika Vaccine" might be alternatively titled "Government Funds Study of Sex Habits of Mosquitos" by the CAGW.

Not that Hartung or any other author could be expected to care what I think, but McKayla and I would be more impressed by an in-depth article on just one major "wasteful" project, showing how it occurred, who made poor decisions, who was a crook, who was incompetent, and who just had bad luck, etc. Maybe (likely?) some other articles by Hartung may do that.

[Vrede too]

Well sure.

Citizens Against Government Waste

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) is non-profit group that has campaigned on behalf of the tobacco industry and in favour of Microsoft and against open source software.

... It has been a member of ALEC's Communications and Technology Task Force and Tax and Fiscal Policy Task Force.

... In 1999 the New York Times had described CAGW as one of a number of "Microsoft-financed groups".

... CAGW has "received funding from:

Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
Merrill Lynch & Company Foundation
Exxon Corporation (now ExxonMobil)
Ingersoll-Rand Company
Johnson & Johnson
F.M. Kirby Foundation
Philip Morris
RJR Nabisco (now part of the Altria Group)
Sears Roebuck & Company

Others listed include:

John Deere Foundation
Eaton Charitable Fund
Columbia/HCA Foundation

However, CRC's database generally does not record direct corporate contributions as distinct from grants from corporate foundations.

A few examples of tobacco industry donations to CAGW:

Philip Morris ...
The Tobacco Institute ...

Alan Keyes was president of CAGW from 1989 to 1991 ...

Doesn't belong in the same conversation with William D. Hartung and the Project On Government Oversight. They're trying to make government including the military better while Citizens Against Government Waste is trying to make the government better for its rightwing and other corporate benefactors.

There's been reams written on the F-35B, for a modern example. I don't place the same weight on "who" that you do. I see the decades old problem as being systemic, not personal. The players are interchangeable as long as they serve the end of transfering wealth from citizens to fat cat merchants of death. Those that don't do so don't play for long.

[Vrede too]

Watch the Army Waste Three Humvees in Less Than Two Minutes (article)



Who needs ISIS . . .

[Vrede too]

Jesuit priest, peace activist Daniel Berrigan dies at 94

RIP. We crossed paths a couple of times and ran in some of the same circles for decades.

I may track down In the King of Prussia starring Martin Sheen and watch it again in his honor.

[Wneglia]

HaHaHaHaHa

[O Really]

I read the article(s) about all the "waste" on "obsolete tech" and wondered what is considered "waste." Keeping old stuff running because you are too lazy/uninformed/whatever to upgrade would seem to be wasteful. But sometimes keeping old stuff running instead of upgrading is considered frugal (OK, sometimes cheap, but still...) I wonder how many budget requests for new tech have been turned down because money was spent on more war stuff. Are they making do with what they have, or are they such poor managers they can't manage to run conversions? If it was a waste to wait so long to upgrade from floppy disks, who was responsible for the delay? If maintaining the old stuff itself is a waste, is anybody prepared to fund a massive upgrade? And if not, then who is responsible for the waste?

[Vrede too]

The nuclear weapons program is a massive waste however the money is spent.

[Vrede too]

Obama Calls for No Nukes, but the US Still Has Big Plans for Nuclear Weapons

[O Really]

The nuclear weapons program is a massive waste however the money is spent.

Maybe, and cats are a waste of fur, too, but that doesn't address the question of whether it's more or less economical to buy brand name litter.

[Vrede too]

If one believes that cats are a waste of fur, the question of whether it's more or less economical to buy brand name litter is as superfluous as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

You and Wneglia are free to debate the floppy kitty litter disc issue, though.