How the Pentagon Wasted $10 Billion On Military Projects 370
schwit1 writes: In the past decade, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency has wasted $10 billion on defense projects that were either impractical and impossible.
It's hard to choose a single quote showing the absurd stupidity of these projects — the article is filled with too many to choose from. Read it all and weep. However, here's one quote that typifies the attitude:
"Henry A. Obering III, a retired director of the Missile Defense Agency, said any unfulfilled expectations for SBX and the other projects were the fault of the Obama administration and Congress — for not doubling down with more spending. 'If we can stop one missile from destroying one American city,' said Obering, a former Air Force lieutenant general, 'we have justified the entire program many times over from its initiation in terms of cost.'"
We get the government we deserve. Until we stop electing candidates (from either party) who promise pork, we will continue to get pork, and waste, and a society that is steadily going bankrupt.
"Henry A. Obering III, a retired director of the Missile Defense Agency, said any unfulfilled expectations for SBX and the other projects were the fault of the Obama administration and Congress — for not doubling down with more spending. 'If we can stop one missile from destroying one American city,' said Obering, a former Air Force lieutenant general, 'we have justified the entire program many times over from its initiation in terms of cost.'"
We get the government we deserve. Until we stop electing candidates (from either party) who promise pork, we will continue to get pork, and waste, and a society that is steadily going bankrupt.
But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupting (Score:3, Insightful)
Now cue the Libertarians that want to march us back to the feudal ages and isolation.
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But my conservative friend sent me an opinion article from two years ago about a woman on WIC driving a Mercedes Kompressor to pick up her groceries! Sometimes I think your political alignment just reveals where you ignore graft from: conservatives ignore overspending from the top; liberals ignore overspending from the bottom. And the argument between the two is just which is more burdensome.
Whatever your political alignment, I'd hope you base your opinions and (in the case of politicians) policy decisions on more than anecdotal articles. Articles like that appeal on an emotion level, but that's all. You need to look at aggregate data on the state/nation level to evaluate how a policy is working. You can't do it based on an article your mate sent you.
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How are you isolated when you talk and trade with people? Isn't sanctions and war more isolating?
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Fraud and abuse in social programs.. a fairly low percentage of the total spent, millions of people get a little help or hand up, and we arent using the money to kill people.
Your Kompressor example is an anecdote. Waste in spending is the norm. I am not saying that either end of the spectrum could not be administered better -
Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt (Score:5, Insightful)
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Lets not forget how much that social welfare payment is, where it goes and how much profit is in it. Compare that to pork, where one, just one scamming corporate executive can pay off a politician and in one corrupt act, pay something like 150,000 social welfare payments for a whole year. Now you bloody conservative morons, all of that money rolls on right back into the economy and keeps everything circulating. Where as that top end payment, up to half of it can go flying offshore into a tax haven and for
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If by "isolation" you mean we quit trying to be the world police and let the rest of the world pay for their own defense, then yes. Otherwise, sounds like a straw man to me. The thought that we are suddenly going to become isolated now is pretty funny, almost.
Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt (Score:5, Insightful)
The 'Welfare Queen' myth started under the Nixon Administration. It has never been proven out either when the facts are checked or in my personal experience. Oh, and it seems that the 'Welfare Queen' is almost always black even though more white people are on welfare of one form or another, Perhaps a bit of racism in the mix?
Re:But But But It's the Handouts That Are Bankrupt (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, there was a real welfare queen that fits the details of the urban legend.
Her name was Linda Taylor [slate.com]. And welfare fraud was probably among the least of her crimes. It's a fascinating story.
Now obviously, she's the exception, rather than the rule. Most people on welfare aren't creating multiple fake identities in order to bilk the system. And most sure aren't involved in possible kidnappings and suspicious deaths.
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Tell your conservative friend that a Mercedes-Benz C230 Kompressor is only worth about $6000 in good condition, and far from some indicator that they are cheating the system.
There's probably people on welfare that have far more expensive cars.
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US defence spending is 4.4% of GDP. You can blame the deficit on many things but not that.
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Right but you have to start somewhere. The 'technocrats' are always telling us the lie that government spending is somehow different. Over the short term maybe that is true, in that I can't print money but they can, over the long term however its wealth in vs wealth out. Military spending is almost uniquely consumptive. When you build a bomb once you use it you no longer have a bomb any more, unless it did something like end WII it probably ultimately means nothing. Sometimes you do get technological a
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Tell me how OUR society continues to benefit form ordinance detonated over IRAQ 13 years ago..
Without that, there wouldn't be any demand for the ordnance detonated over Iraq today.
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10% more? Pathetic. The USA will call you a commie pinko terrorist-sympathizer if you propose reducing the military to 200% more than the next two nations combined.
No one promises pork (Score:3)
No one promises pork spending. They just do it and don't tell you. Things like this are never really election items and if they are, they are ignored post election.
We don't have the congress we deserve, we don't have a democracy in any useful sense, and we don't have freedom in any useful sense of the word.
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They promise it - just not publically. This sort of thing goes on out of the spotlight, based on unwritten understandings that if pork flows one way, campaign contributions will go the other.
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It would be wrong to characterise this as entirely the fault of politicians, beach the electors also do not care if it's worthwhile or not.
It works for the politicians to do this because their local electorate recognise that the cost will fall mostly on other tax payers, and each of the tax payers is trying to screw as many as the others as possible, and they'll vote for the candidate that will be complicit in the scheme.
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I'm not from the USA, but politicians everywhere are known for promising their electors that they will "increase employment" and other such claims.. Employment for the locals such as this, is pork. The politician doesn't care if its worthwhile or not, just that their electors are enriched.
There is a reason why the F-35 is sourced from about 45 different states...
$10 Billion? They wasted far more than that on this turkey alone.
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They do publicly propose increasing military spending, and the people applaud that. What do you think that'll go to? All the reasonable military needs have been met many times over, and nobody's going to say "ah we don't need that much money, here take some back" because that means their department gets the layoffs for admitting it.
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They promise it to the direct recipients of the pork, in exchange for a timely political contribution to the committee to re-elect...
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No one promises pork spending
Actually, they consistently promise to eliminate pork. But if it's for their constituents, then it's not "pork" it's vital infrastructure and jobs. It's only pork if it's for a different strict represented by someone from the other party.
A lot of that stuff actually worked (Score:5, Interesting)
The CMCM campaigns (specifically 2) were classified, so you will not be able to Google the results.
The radar on SBX is quite awesome actually. It shares a common linage with a radar known as TPS-X (which IIRC was renamed to FBX-T) which functions very well as part of the THAAD system. These radars are precision weapons guidance radars. While they do have a search function they do indeed stink at that: they are rifle sights, not binoculars. Try to locate a flying bird with your rifle scope.
The discrimination capabilities of these radars are really a function of software as well as the radar characteristics, see my comment about the CMCM-2. However during a launch a target would typically drop bolt mounts, explosive bolts for the stages, the stages themselves, and other such debris (in addition to counter measures). Individual radars (there were about a dozen tracking just the target vehicle) were assigned to and could track the individual pieces in flight as they spun around and bounced off of each other. This was easier than discrimination as the flight characteristics and origin of the debris were known ahead of time, but this is a small unclassified example of the capabilities.
Now, it is debatable if this was all a waste of money, but to say none of the stuff worked is disingenuous as the success stories will not be found in unclassified sources.
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Ah but there is the rub. Throwing money accomplishes nothing. With these systems there was a perceived (real or imagined) threat, which defined the mission. Without a purpose project seems to languish, or at the very least take much longer. War, it seems, is a prime motivator for Homo Sapiens.
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Or, we could just throw similar amounts of money at general purpose research, some of which might also be useful in military applications. Call it the "War on not Having Flying Cars"
No, We need to have a 'War on balanced budgets'. Based on the way previous 'wars on...' have went we'll have the deficit eliminated in 20 years!
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This is true, plenty of classified failures (for reasons other than to protect a budget... you do realize that many members of Congress have the clearance to review this information right?).
That said I counter with plenty of unclassified successes... that the article does not mention. My main point is that is it damn near impossible to draw an informed conclusion with most of the information is not available, especially so when the author has a clear bias.
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Yeah, but it's far more effective to leak failures than successes if you're looking to make noise in the media.
747s with lasers! (Score:3)
The Airborne Laser, envisioned as a fleet of converted Boeing 747s that would fire laser beams to destroy enemy missiles soon after launch, before they could release decoys.
It turned out that the lasers could not be fired over sufficient distances, so the planes would have to fly within or near an enemy’s borders continuously. That would leave the 747s all but defenseless against antiaircraft missiles. The program was canceled in 2012, after a decade of testing.
The problem would have gone smoothly if they had used tried technology. For example, instead of 747s they should have gone with DC-10s, as they have successfully been converted in the past even for interstellar travel. And you could always go with sharks of course... No missile deployment stands any chance against a sharknado... with lasers...
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My question is how much the research into these laser-mounted 747s advanced the state of the art of lasers. Perhaps with what they learned in making a laser powerful enough to fit in a 747 that can still fly, they learned something that could help the National Ignition Facility [wikipedia.org] at Lawrence Livermore National Labratory?
I'm sure that kind of thing is classified, but the results of research aren't thrown out when something doesn't work - very likely there was useful information gained in the process.
$10b is Small change. (Score:4, Interesting)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
$2.3 trillion unaccounted for.
Only $10B? (Score:5, Interesting)
Colour me entirely unsurprised. This investigative article [reuters.com] has details of many more billions of the Pentagon's wasted taxpayer money - and the real number could be dramatically higher. We'll never know, because the Pentagon has failed to perform the required audits of its accounting ever, despite tens of billions still being sunk into modernising its infosystems.
A few random details of what we do know:
- $5.8B of inventory "lost" between 2003-2011.
- $9B of ledger adjustments simply made up to get the books to balance in 2012, up from $7.4B the previous year.
- "Probably half" of its $7B general inventory is in excess of needs, but they're still spending $700+M buying more of the same.
- Hundreds of thousands of contracts that have not been audited for completion. Solution: raise the threshold to contracts worth $250+M.
There's much worse, but you wouldn't believe it coming from a random Slashdot post. Read the article.
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My first thought about TFA was that 10B was small change in a 640B military budget. 1.5% or so. Assuming that the entire 10B was in a single year (hint: it wasn't).
My second thought was: "They only wasted 10B???" Damn, but that's efficient use of resources - I don't know anyone who only wastes 1.5% of their money...."
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I don't disagree with your post, but it always strikes me as funny when people compare federal government budgets for the largest economy in the world with their personal finances. It's NOT the same, no matter how much the presidential candidates like to pretend it is. No individual's revenue comes from within itself like a government's does. No individual has their own internal "economy" to mind.
If we can stop one missile from destroying one cit (Score:4, Insightful)
Has this guy seen Detroit? You can't distinguish it from a missile strike.
$10 Billion is a drop in the bucket (Score:5, Informative)
So $757.8 billion is the low ball amount that even the Pentagon can't hide. It seems a lot more likely that the Brown figure of $1.1 trillion is a more realistic number. No one at Brown has a personal stake in fudging the figures, unlike those in the military-industrial complex who live and die by the defense budget.
And that $757.8 billion is just the down payment. You want to see the real big bucks, look at the long term costs [wikipedia.org].
Remember, the Iraq War was completely voluntary. It was a war of choice. The two justifications used to start it were both completely wrong. First, Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack. It was Al Qaeda, and had nothing to do with Sadam Hussein. Second, there were no weapons of mass destruction, except for the left-overs from the Iran-Iraq war. These were the chemical weapons that the US helped Iraq obtain when they were fighting a proxy war for the US against Iran.
So upwards of $2 trillion has been spent on a war that we started for the wrong reasons. That's real serious government waste.
And it's not just the money. If you want to get really upset, check out the Casualties of the Iraq War [wikipedia.org]. It will make you sick to your stomach.
Missile waste? Look at the F-35 aircraft (Score:5, Informative)
The anticipated, and constantly rising, cost of the F-35 aircraft is approximately $300 million each for the expected 32 aircraft of the _testing_ manufacturing run. The attempt to use the same airframe with different versions for all three military branches and their very different needs has made it so expensive that it's next to useless and many times the cost of a normal aircraft for _any_ of the planned roles. It has incredibly expensive "stealth" technology that does not work, it's incredibly fast but it cannot turn in air combat, and it's so overmuscled and heavy that the $1500/each tires keep failing when it lands.
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Eh? F-35 is slow and underpowered, not fast and overmuscled. Its engine is very powerful indeed, maybe the most powerful ever built for a jet fighter, but it is only one for an airframe that is heavier than a much larger F-15. It cannot even fly Mach 2.
Death... (Score:5, Insightful)
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So, lining the pockets of defense contractors with their ridiculously inflated costs for projects of dubious utility is ridiculous bullshit, while lining the pockets of con-men and medical professionals for social welfare and medical projects of dubious actual utility is money well spent?
Fuck yeah, I say as well!
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Isn't this just how R&D works? (Score:2)
Nothing like a helping of FUD for breakfast (Score:3)
...'If we can stop one missile from destroying one American city,'
Damn, is that all it takes to get a multi-billion dollar defense program justified?
The only thing stronger than the FUD being slung here is the stench of the bullshit coming from it.
No wonder I still have to take my damn shoes off at the airport. Stupid Americans will believe anything under the guise of national security.
Only ten billion in a decade? (Score:2)
If they promise pork... (Score:3)
best case is, you get spam.
average case is just manure.
Manhattan project was the same thing (Score:4, Interesting)
... Only it worked. They were able to build a bomb that could flatten a city that was small enough to be dropped by a single plane.
We take that for granted, but that was a pie in the sky concept at the time... at least from perspective of the non-physicists.
So today they're building lasers, magnetically accelerated cannons, autonomous hunter killer robots, etc...
Can you blame the pentagon for not being able to tell what will work from what won't?
I hate waste as much as the next guy, but how the hell are they to know half the time. F'ing radar invisible airplanes? Jet fighters that take off vertically?
A lot of it sounded crazy until it had already happened and was proven to work.
Just have a little sympathy for them. They can't really know sometimes. Neither can you. Any number of the dumb ideas there could have worked or could still work in the future.
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That may be... I am sure corruption happens.
However, my point is that they CANNOT KNOW what will and will not work because fucking insane shit has worked on a regular basis.
Again, a bomb that a single plane could carry that could flatten a city all by itself.
Radar
Planes invisible to radar
Robotic drones
Laser cannons
magnetic cannons
etc etc etc. If I came to you in 1939 and told you that I had a plan to build a bomb that a single plane could carry that could flatten a city... would you take that seriously? Onl
Opinion from a scientist (Score:5, Informative)
I am a scientist in real life (yes, biomed PhD and everything) and I would like to offer a different opinion. We spent all this money on something that didn't work. Ok, that's less than desirable. However, I think it's inaccurate to call it a complete waste. For one, it employed people and secondly and maybe most importantly, it funded research, which is almost always a good thing. The only way this would be a complete waste, is if they did not use what they learned from these projects to take with them to the next. That's my real fear: we'll keep spending money in a very inefficient way. My only beef with the whole thing, is that they should have given that $10B to the NIH, NSF, NASA, universities, etc...
Military Projects (Score:2)
How the Pentagon Wasted $10 Billion On Military Projects
That's more reassuring than if the Pentagon wasted that money on personal projects instead of military ones...
Naive (Score:5, Interesting)
We get the government we deserve. Until we stop electing candidates (from either party) who promise pork, we will continue to get pork, and waste, and a society that is steadily going bankrupt.
The job of an elected representative is to look out for the interests of his constituents. By definition that includes trying to bring projects and economic benefit to their district/state. The notion that voters will stop electing representatives that seek to bring those same voters economic benefits is absurdly naive.
Some amount of pork is fine and to be expected. What you have to worry about is when it gets big, expensive projects spread out among a lot of districts so that even a boondoggle cannot be killed. See the Space Shuttle for a good example. Basically you cannot realistically eliminate pork spending but you can work to keep it under control.
Frankly however $10 billion, while a lot of money is a rounding error in a $3 trillion + federal budget. I'm MUCH more concerned about the imbalance between our spending priorities (Medicare + Military specifically) and our unwillingness to fund those priorities with an adequate tax base. Either the spending needs to be cut or the taxes need to go up or both. But currently we just borrow and pretend that we can sustain this imbalance to this absurd spending level without adequate tax revenue indefinitely.
I'm just waiting (Score:3)
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Welcome to France.
Only 10B? (Score:2)
You'd expect a lot more waste given that they receive more money than any beneficial social program (health care, space exploration, scientific research) in the USA. Bad projects are part of any business. The waste on programs that haven't been mothballed yet but continue trudging on well beyond their original budgets and timelines are much worse.
Uggg (Score:5, Informative)
While I've long been a critic of all ABM programs, and so should in theory agree with the basis of this post, but this article downright stinks. It is clear the author doesn't really understand any of the technical issues he writes about with feigned authority. The baseball analogy section is particularly laughable, picking apart a dumb offhand statement while utterly missing the entire point of the analogy, and failing to consider the issue that the radar can't possibly do what it claims to anyway.
For those of you interested in all of this, I suggest you read the Wiki article on Nike Zeus. The problems with decoys were well known in 1958, and panel after panel of the super-smart (including nobel laureates) examined the issue in depth and basically said that a good decoy is literally impossible to distinguish from the warhead. Why? Because you can put the warhead in a mylar balloon and launch several similar balloons on nearby trajectories, and that's basically that.
Everyone has been aware of this issue ever since. Nike-X and LOADS were invented to work at much lower altitudes, where the decoys were no longer a factor (they're balloons, they begin to float once they start to re-enter), while the PRESS series attempted to find differences in ionization or other physical effects of the earliest stages of reentry to the same end. Both ultimately failed - Nike-X could be overwhelmed with MIRV for almost zero cost, and PRESS demonstrated that no such measurable difference actually exists.
No amount of engineering can fix this. All you can do is hope that the decoys have bad trajectories or tumble, with the later being of zero use if it's spherical. It is entirely possible that North Korea has bad decoys, but given that the UK built really good ones in the 60s as part of Chevaline, its certainly not a $10 billion bet I'd make. And then there's the killer problem - you deliberately launch the RV on a "bad" trajectory so its not a threat, and then maneuver after the midcourse onto the target. This problem killed Hardsite, and it only had to work over about 10 miles, not 10,000.
I'm not saying that BMD is a bad idea, but everyone should be perfectly aware that any BMD can be penetrated with some degree of ease. The question, as it has been since the 50s, is whether by spending XXX dollars on improving the defense can be offset by spending XXX on better penaids. NK is a poor country so its a question to ponder, but for anyone else the answer is, and always has been, that it's about 20 times cheaper to penetrate the BMD than build it.
This is nothing new. (Score:3)
Stop worrying about "waste". (Score:3)
Oh dear, an economic/political rant on Slashdot...
The US cannot go bankrupt. We are a sovereign nation that issues its own currency. Get over it.
This "waste" creates jobs and spurs R&D. It inflates our money supply at a time when the economy is sluggish, and boosts the private sector. Why are people complaining?
If you think taxpayers are funding this "waste", you're wrong. Taxpayers pay taxes, that's it. Unless the budget is balanced there's no association between federal spending and revenue, they are just two different dollar totals on the books. (And I'm not advocating balancing the budget simply to curtail spending.)
If you think our children (or grandchildren, great-grandchildren etc.) are going to have to pay off this debt, that's also incorrect. Federal debt is always serviced by issuing more currency.
I'm not saying the government can spend without limit, but there are no hard limits. The practical limits are set by inflation rates and real resources. At present, real resources are abundant and inflation is low. So let's raise spending. If we reach 99% employment and inflation sets in, we can curtail government spending.
This isn't solely my view--lookup Modern Money Theory. Many economists understand these principles of a fiat currency. Few politicians do, unfortunately, and they like to throw around words like "debt" and "waste" without understanding their meaning.
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I'm extremely curious, how exactly are you managing to post on Slashdot from the year 1963?
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Reference. [lyrics007.com]
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Seems we have a lot of people online with mod points who seem to appreciate the "lol its funny because women belong in the kitchen, geddit? har har" style jokes. I wonder if they're the same people who concern-troll and shout down any articles about sexism in IT.
I now await someone who will accuse me of being a "social justice warrior" because pointing out blatantly sexist jokes is completely equivalent to also forcing all science fiction to be dystopic [slashdot.org].
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No but it does label you a humorless twit.
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No but it does label you a humorless twit.
I have a sense of humour---when the joke's actually funny. "lol its funny because women belong in the kitchen make me a sandwich har har" doesn't cut it for me. Same way I don't find racist jokes funny either.
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are you willing to sacrifice your quality of life, you and your children's future, and possibly even your life? Because all of that can happen when an empire collapses. The Brits were an anomaly when they let their empire fade away and even they did not get off scot free.
Re:Get over it ! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Get over it ! (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with the sentiment, but the way that the funds are allocated does not lead to good results. You need to spend a lot of money on projects that will fail to find the ones that will work, but you don't want to spend a lot of money on individual projects that will fail, and most especially you don't want to keep funding projects after it becomes obvious that they will fail. You don't want to fund projects based on which congressional district will get the money and you want to make it clear that researchers who discover something won't work early can easily get funding to work on their next project.
There are some good points in the above response. In response to the original post, the complains aren't always the case with all government research. For example, the SBIR program which often involves research projects that are "out there". They do it in a tiered system where they have phases: I, II and III. Phase I is a prototype/proof of concept. After that, the government project managers make a decision about whether the product is good enough to warrant Phase II funding. If it is, they go ahead and fund it. If it's REALLY good, they do a Phase III which is basically a commercialization. The company making the product is allowed to commercialize it, but the government gets it for free for a significant period (10 years or more). Additionally, even if the research is a flop, the government gets all rights to the data and as such, can use what was discovered/created as a base for other projects. So the money isn't "wasted", as was said in the original post, but the research/work completed on the project is available to help steer decisions on later projects.
With the OP's logic, we've "wasted" a lot of money on cancer research, but is it worth it? I would argue it is.
Re:Get over it ! (Score:4, Insightful)
Well said, the pair of you. What's more, $10 billion, while a lot of money to the rest of us, is a molecule of sweat on a lip of the bucket (i.e., not even a drop in it) compared to the US national budget.
There are what, 200 million taxpayers in the United States? That means that the Pentagon spent about $50 per taxpayer. I'd say that much can afford to be "wasted" without really hurting anyone.
Besides, $10 billion is literally less than what Americans spent on Starbucks coffee last year alone. (2014 US revenue for Starbucks was $12.4bn.) You can't really complain about these projects when it's less than your coffee, can you?
I'm certainly in favour of responsible spending at the government level. But the OP (and TFA, for that matter) clearly doesn't understand the scale here, using these numbers for political grandstanding. This is less than 2% of the DoD's yearly budget... being spent over 15 years.
There really isn't much of a story here.
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So, I'm not allowed to argue against excessive Starbucks spending, either?
Personally, I'd rather argue against both. (I have no problem losing a good argument, if you can convince me $10 billion was really worth it for the experience, but I don't think any one in this thread has the actual information to know one way or the other.)
Re:Get over it ! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Typical Progressive thinking is being evidenced by the article. ...
I don't understand why you need to label the article to a group of people? It can be anyone. Even though many progressive people are that way, labelling doesn't make things better in a discussion but rather try to find a scape goat to be blamed on. It is easy to do so, but it helps no one and does no good. Instead, you try to sway the point of discussion to accommodate your political opposition.
Re:Get over it ! (Score:5, Interesting)
Frankly just about every new system introduced was considered a total failure by the Press at one time or another.
The F-4 Phantom, F-14, F-15, F-18, M1A1, AH-64, M2 Bradley, B-1, F-111, The Nimitz class carrier, and going way back to pre WWII the B-17 crashed in testing and was thought to be too big and expensive.
This article is full of fluff and opinions from unnamed experts. The SBX may be a disaster but I don't see the limited angle as that big of a deal. It is designed so that if the US feels threatened by North Korea then we target them with the SBX. It is a system that is designed to respond to an escalation in threats not to stand guard for a sneak attack.
If you 24/7 protection from sneak attack that will cost you. You will need to build many X-Band and S-Band radars and re-establish the DEW Line. Then you will want to re-establish the Pine Line in Canada. Next you will want to convert the old Safeguard system in ND to house BMDs and then add installations in along the coasts. Maybe Land Aegis along the coasts. And we should probably build some X-Band Radars in American Samoa , Midway, Hawaii, and Christmas Island. In the Atlantic interceptors should be based in Greenland....
As you see it would be a massive project. Truth is that it is unlikely that North Korea or Iran would just go and pop a nuke at the US without any escalation. The simple truth is the interceptors are to save lives in North Korea and or Iran. If a single warhead hits a US city the response would be terrible. Those nations would cease. The death toll would be staggering.
If the leaders of those nations did get stupid and we manage to intercept the warhead the response would be much lower.
Re:Get over it ! (Score:4, Insightful)
Your blind "thank the boys and girls who protect us" is simply facile and ignores the massive corruption and waste in the MIC.
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The failed projects are the ones we hear about.
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Re:Get over it ! (Score:4, Interesting)
In my entire life only times I can think of soldiers keeping anything safe was American interests in other countries overseas, think oil. Otherwise they don't keep us safe. Seems their job is more protecting US interests.
I would also like to note I am in no way attempting to diminish any soldiers service to their country it is greatly appreciated, but the truth is the military is not in the business of protecting Americans.
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In my entire life only times I can think of soldiers keeping anything safe was American interests in other countries overseas, think oil. Otherwise they don't keep us safe. Seems their job is more protecting US interests.
But if they put it that way, no one would join!
War Is a Racket (Score:3)
In my entire life only times I can think of soldiers keeping anything safe was American interests in other countries overseas, think oil. Otherwise they don't keep us safe. Seems their job is more protecting US interests.
"War Is a Racket" [wikipedia.org] by General Smedley Butler should be required reading in High School.
Re: We need More Pork! More! (Score:2, Funny)
Yup. Recall the whole point of SDI was to get the USSR to spend itself into oblivion. Mission accomplished. Now we are doing it to _ourselves_.
Re: (Score:3)
That is a decent plan... right up to the point when you realize that we breathe the same air.
Re: We need More Pork! More! (Score:3, Funny)
Hurry up and kill each other
-Aliens
Re: We need More Pork! More! (Score:5, Insightful)
Riiiiight........ because they were the ones that racked up huge deficits, started a criminal war in Iraq, and were the ones who put together the bank bailout plans and then bullied the next administration into implementing it. Nice job rewriting history.
Re: We need More Pork! More! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: We need More Pork! More! (Score:5, Insightful)
The republicans do not have a good spending record either. They cut democratic lead initiatives, and put money in their own, then they cut taxes that they really don't have budgeted to do. So they raise taxes other ways.
The democrats when in charge will cut republican lead initiatives, put money in their own, they will not revert the tax cuts that the republicans made, even though it doesn't solve the budget, so they raise taxes in other ways.
The real problem is the polarization of the normal citizen. The politicians will only cater to them. Those damn moderates who sway the elections are who the politicians should be really kissing up to... But moderates have been toss aside, figuring they do no have any political ideals. Because the more extreme on the Right and Left have pulled many of them who are in the edges away.
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Re: (Score:2)
It was so huge that it affects the past!
Re: (Score:3)
You serious man? There was a huge collapse in the stock market in 2098 and were still in a recession. Coincides perfectly with the time Obama entered office and the dems took both houses.
Coincidence much?
Pssst. Obama didn't enter office until 2009. Just FYI.
Re: (Score:2)
Couldn't you of said that of Ancient Egypt, Roman Empire, British Empire, and now US? China has a fairly strong economy, why could they not be the next super power? America could become so bankrupt, that china just takes over.
Re:only government? (Score:5, Informative)
A mere $10 billion?
The IMF, European Central Bank and the EU wasted 330€ billion on keeping Greece in the Eurozone, which is both impractical and impossible.
Although the 330€ billion is officially loans, that money ain't no never be coming back. And Greece will have to leave the Eurozone. Although the majority of Greeks would like to stay in the Eurozone, the fiscal policies of Greece's Prime Minister Tsipras and Finance Minister Varoufakis can only work if Greece has it's own currency to devalue. So the game is for Greece to exit the Eurozone, and that each side can blame the other for what happened.
Anyway, the politicians in the EU sold this 330€ billion bailout package to the public as necessary for the "security" of the Eurozone. In the US, the politicians sell the $10 million on failed projects as necessary for US military superiority . . . in other words, also as necessary for "security" of the US public.
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perhaps greece can stay.
it would mean that tsipras lied pre-elections, of course. that's hardly anything new even in greece though.
the real kicker though is how ungrateful the greeks are of the money loaned to them. it's like they're totally oblivious to it being greeks who spent the money.
Re:only government? (Score:4, Insightful)
Grateful for being scammed and conquered?
Eurozone is a brilliant trap, nothing more:
1. Create a free trade zone with a single currency, so weaker economies can't balance their imports and exports through the exchange rate.
2. Mandate that every nation must have a positive trade balance, which is of course impossible since they trade mainly with one another and every credit on one nation's balance sheet is a debit on another's.
3. As all economies weaker than your own fail one by one, "rescue" them with loans who's terms destabilize their society and further cripple their economy.
4. Enjoy your new colonial empire. Deutschland uber alles!
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, but a lot of that pork goes to Democratic districts too. I for one have a tough time listing to all this talk about the 'wealth' gap while they support programs that basically hand billions to defense contractors with 300:1 CEO/employee pay rations to make stuff we don't need.
If any of these social just DNC members want me to give a shit about the wealth gap they need to spine to up deal with the issue head on. We collect taxes form a person earning 80K trying to support a partner and 4 kids so we bu
Re:only government? (Score:5, Informative)
yeah it's a mercenary army, they're all getting paid and benefits and none of them were forced to be there at the moment
They're professional, or regular, soldiers rather than conscripts and certainly not mercenaries. Mercenaries are defined by the Geneva Conventions.
Art 47. Mercenaries
1. A mercenary shall not have the right to be a combatant or a prisoner of war.
2. A mercenary is any person who:
(a) is especially recruited locally or abroad in order to fight in an armed conflict;
(b) does, in fact, take a direct part in the hostilities;
(c) is motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and, in fact, is promised, by or on behalf of a Party to the conflict, material compensation substantially in excess of that promised or paid to combatants of similar ranks and functions in the armed forces of that Party;
(d) is neither a national of a Party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by a Party to the conflict;
(e) is not a member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict; and
(f) has not been sent by a State which is not a Party to the conflict on official duty as a member of its armed forces.
Training (Score:5, Informative)
Here's an idea for how to spend the next 1 trillion in USA military better: just fucking educate your troops better, make the grunts have 3 year training.
I defy you to find a national army with meaningfully better training than the US military. Seriously. I have many criticisms of the US military but their training of troops is not one of them. They take it very seriously and for the business of war-fighting they do an outstanding job overall. Nobody wants to go toe to toe with the US military in a conventional war and training is a huge part of that.
frigging conscript armies have longer training and they don't even expect to go to war.
Name one conscript army with meaningfully better or longer training than the US military.
where as your grunts basically get just bootcamp and then it's to another culture to act effectively in the role of police, so it's rather ridiculous that the training hasn't been geared towards that.
If you think troops are sent overseas right out of boot then you know nothing about how the US military functions. They get quite a lot more [wikipedia.org] training than that before they are sent in harms way.
it's rather ridiculous that your mercenary grunts have such short and shoddy training(yeah it's a mercenary army, they're all getting paid and benefits and none of them were forced to be there at the moment).
The US military is by definition not a mercenary unit. They are the military arm of the US government. They do not fight battles in exchange for private financial gain. The French Foreign Legion is a mercenary unit. The US Army is unequivocally not a mercenary unit.
Re:only government? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ummmm.... through taxes the Federal budget IS a part of the GDP and private sector. You cannot separate them, it is all the same pot of money.
Re: (Score:2)
Not all of it, but there is pork in military spending. Are you telling me that the military needs each and every piece of equipment and ordinance it has, built exactly the way it was and where it was built, and that it couldn't have possibly been done more efficiently?
If you are, then you're dreaming. If you aren't, then there is pork. How many large artillery pieces are we using to keep the peace in Afghanistan these days?