Report: US Military Is Wasting Millions On Satellite Comms 154
An anonymous reader writes: Fast information exchange is the key to a powerful military, and satellites have been an incredible boon to the commanders of modern fighting forces. But a new report from the Government Accountability Office says the U.S. military is vastly overpaying for its satellite communications, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. They say the Department of Defense "has become increasingly reliant on commercial SATCOM to support ongoing U.S. military operations." You see, every part of the DoD is required to go through the Defense Information Systems Agency when procuring SATCOM equipment. The problem is that this process is incredibly slow, and fraught with red tape. Because of this, many in the military skip DISA and go straight to commercial providers — at a steep markup. The GAO estimates that this cost taxpayers around $45 million extra in a single year.
45 million? Tha's all? (Score:2)
Re:45 million? Tha's all? (Score:4, Informative)
When I read tens of millions, my first thought was "chump change among billions", but the summary is wrong. Here's the text from the actual article:
If the GAO is correct, then the military could have gotten that same service for about $45 billion less.
Re:45 million? Tha's all? (Score:5, Informative)
Looks like TFS is correct and the article is wrong.
> The most recent data available show that the military paid more than $1 billion for satellite capacity in 2011, according to GAO. That year, about $280 million worth of satellite capability was bought outside the DISA process. If the GAO is correct, then the military could have gotten that same service for about $45 billion less.
It's hard to save $45 billion on a total expenditure of $280 million.
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I just read TFA. It is millions with an M, our of a total spend of $1 billion. That's mouse nuts. I mean, that's a chunk of change in absolute terms but it's around 15 cents per citizen.
If you want to get outraged there are higher priority issues. Just apply Amdahl's law to budget reduction: you have to reduce where the money is spent.
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I just read TFA. It is millions with an M, our of a total spend of $1 billion. That's mouse nuts. I mean, that's a chunk of change in absolute terms but it's around 15 cents per citizen.
If you want to get outraged there are higher priority issues. Just apply Amdahl's law to budget reduction: you have to reduce where the money is spent.
Oh, but you DON'T touch that third rail of politics. You cannot even slow the growth of things like Medicare, Social Security, and other social programs (like Obama Care, Welfare, Head Start, School Lunches what have you) without getting accused of outright hate, racism or worse.
Where both sides play lip service to deficit reduction, balance budgets and the like, FEW politicians even dare to get specific because they will be castigated in the press, by their opponents and otherwise vilified for suggesting
Re: 45 million? Tha's all? (Score:1)
Things like the affordable care act are just putting a bandaid on a bigger problem. Which is private companies with a medical monopoly gauging consumers for all they are worth. There should not be a free market where health is concerned because it's quite obvious that just means - price life saving drugs and procedures at the highest price possible - not the lowest.
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Things like the affordable care act are just putting a bandaid on a bigger problem. Which is private companies with a medical monopoly gauging consumers for all they are worth. There should not be a free market where health is concerned because it's quite obvious that just means - price life saving drugs and procedures at the highest price possible - not the lowest.
You are correct.
People shouldn't ask how are we going to pay these huge medical costs, they should ask why these costs are huge.
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70% of the cost of your health care bill is either directly, or indirectly caused by insurance. Abolish all insurance that is related to health care, and your health care costs will drop by 70%.
Unless, of course, that doesn't happen. There are two things to note here. First, a huge part of the insurance is to pay for other peoples' inflated health care costs. Insurance would be considerably cheaper, if health care costs were cheaper. A nationalized program doesn't reduce peoples' consumption of health care any more than capped cost insurance does.
And it's worth noting that the rest of the developed world doesn't have health care costs that are 30% of the US's. For example, if we look at Wikiped
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The problem is pretty simple.
If you talk generally about spending cuts this has 70% approval / 30% disapproval
If you talk specifically about any particular spending cut that has 30% approval / 70% disapproval.
The problem isn't the politicians it is the electorate being inconsistent and fantastical. As Russel Long put it, "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree!".
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That's like the old joke about foreign aid bills - 57% of those polled disagree with foreign aid, and 45% think it should be cut... ... leaving 12% that disagree with foreign aid, but are just fine with the budget for it.
Re:45 million? Tha's all? (Score:4, Interesting)
Which is exactly why sequestration actually worked and why we need more of it.
There isn't political will to cut any specific program. Its like a comment up that page said "oh its only a nickle per tax payer" so the generally electorate does not get excited and won't vote for you because of you tough stance on support of Emu breading research. On the other hand the handful of Emu farmers and researchers out there will be very concerned about and run scary ads about how you are killing all the jobs in the Bumbfuck County [Insert Square State].
Congress is to freckles to deal with any specific budge line item or even any specific department level budget. On the other hand if you push big cross the board cuts it may leave all of our problems of in appropriate allocation in place, but at least you bring the aggregate numbers down.
In the best case:
Someone figures out away to save a few million by negotiating better contracts and eliminating some waste.
In the next best case:
That leaves the folks on the ground in a position to say well we don't have enough budget to do all this mandated activity lets divert resources from this effort we know really does not work so we can maintain this other that does or this other that is more important. Sure we have to "officially" still research Emu breading but will just have a intern book an hour to it once a month.
Worst case:
Some actually productive and beneficial program / policy gets short shrift-ed because the money isn't there even though plenty of money is still being foolish spent elsewhere.
Still this is the best we can do in the current state of political system. Until some real calamity forces people to get real I don't see things changing. I thought the financial crisis might have done it, but the pols managed to kick the can down the road by printing their way out and our biggest trade partners were sufficiently upside down as well that is kept a lit on inflation. With Asia now getting the shakes they can probably get away with it for another decade.
The next president is going to be one luck SOB or DOB? whoever it is. They going to get to continue to enjoy the real stimulative effects of the low interest rate, policy, and the benefits of all the medical industry growth which is already a sixth of the economy. Obama care is going to be good short term here. It will move a lot of money around. 9-10 years from now when the next guy is on his way out office though its going all come off the rails.
1) Demographics will be further screwed older
2) We will likely be even more a service economy having seen little growth in real wages
3) The Debt will be larger, meaning more borrowing will cost more
4) The once insatiable appetites for our bonds in foreign markets that is now gone will still be
5) Even if the dollar is still the reserve currency of many alternative currency markets for commodities like oil will probably exist.
6) Mandatory health insurance while having prevented a handful of personal bankruptcies will have further reduced the savings rate among the general population.
I don't think the formula from 2008-10, which barely worked then will get us out of the next hole
Re:45 million? Tha's all? (Score:4, Informative)
Ummm... sequestration did not work, and was not the massive deterrent that it was made out to be. Pure pork programs like the F-35 were completely untouched. The only consistent aspect of sequestration was that federal employees (common people, not the asshats in congress) took a 5-10% paycut.
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Ummm... sequestration did not work...
I guess that depends on how you define "work". Based on 30 seconds of Googling, total federal spending has been more or less flat since FY 2009 so something worked. Maybe budgeting by continuing resolution isn't all that bad. Sequestration certainly had a role in halting the increases, as did divided government (yay gridlock!). Interestingly, it looks like both defense and welfare spending peaked in 2011 and have dropped since then.
I'm getting my data from here [usgovernmentspending.com], YMMV.
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Yes I agreed with you during the George HW Bush time. I was at that time very much supportive of cutting government spending and was furious at the lack of cuts. This round of sequestration has also been a huge success for spending cuts. Congress is starting to freak because it has been so succesful on defense.
___
Some comments:
1) Demographics will be further screwed older
True but health is rapidly improving. Also not as much
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Yes I agreed with you during the George HW Bush time. I was at that time very much supportive of cutting government spending and was furious at the lack of cuts. This round of sequestration has also been a huge success for spending cuts. Congress is starting to freak because it has been so succesful on defense.
I loved the Base Closure Commission process. I'm still amazed we managed to close a bunch of military bases. I'd love to have a Spending Cut Commission which could offer a non-negotiable package of cuts for an up-or-down vote.
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We had that. It was the Simpson-Bowles commission. It needed 14 out of 18 for supermajority to pass with amendment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Mmmm, fried emu.
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They corrected the article. My post above was a copy/paste directly from the original text.
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Re:45 million? Tha's all? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just for this part of things. One of the problems with putting in mechanisms to deal with fraud, waste, and abuse--a major part of the red tape--is that it adds waste to the process. Financially, this is acceptable up to the cost of the waste it's fighting, but after that, it becomes a bigger drain and should be curtailed.
Any large system is going to have some level of fraud, waste, and abuse, and it should be dealt with to a degree. Perfection in such systems cannot be obtained, so a certain amount of loss must be tolerated. Unfortunately, that's a lesson that politicians can never publicly learn.
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Perfection in such systems cannot be obtained, so a certain amount of loss must be tolerated.
Yeah really! I mean, like, what's the big deal [reuters.com], right?
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It can be easily argued that any money spent to reduce waste that results in expenditures above what the waste would cost is itself waste. If you have a $1 billion project and identify that $100 million of it is waste (whether through fraud, abuse, or inefficiency), spending money to reduce the waste only makes sense as long as the combined costs of waste and waste-reduction are equal to or less than $100 million. Anything more than that and you're just adding to the waste.
When you have a more complex sit
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That's only true from an accounting perspective. There's also other perspectives such as the perception of massive fraud which leads to the project losing support. It may be worth more then $100 million to show the public/congress that fraud won't be tolerated and by discouraging future fraud may still save money long term.
The same can be true for other forms of waste but fraud is something that people really don't like and even spending money to prove that fraud does not exist can help the project as perce
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The accounting perspective is what the General Accounting Office examines. What you're talking about is more of a political exercise.
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For Pete's sake... It's not like the expensive toilet seat was available at the local Home Depot... It was an aircraft part as I recall, one that the manufacturer stopped making decades before, and had to set up to build. So the costs wasn't for the seat, but the tooling, setup and manufacture of a one off airplane part and documentation to prove it met the original manufacturer's specifications for use on an aircraft.
If you have EVER seen how the federal government works it's supply systems, specifically
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It's not about the actual thing they need, but the paperwork ...
Indeed. My personal favorite form was the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 [wikipedia.org] compliance form. It was a form that you filled out and stapled to every other form to indicate that the attached form conformed to the requirements of the paperwork reduction act. I was in the military at the time, and we used PWRA compliance forms by the truckload.
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If you have EVER seen how the federal government works it's supply systems, specifically the defense department and the Federal Stock System, it's abundantly clear WHY things are so expensive. It's not about the actual thing they need, but the paperwork that proves that what the supplier sold to the government was EXACTLY what the stock system requires.
Exactly.
Bolt for nuclear submarine piping: $2
Paperwork to prove it meets all the mil spec and you can trace the manufacturing back to the raw material source: $1000
Being able to surface at end of cruise: Priceless
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I think the extra cost for the satcom was for getting -now-, when it's needed, instead of sometime in the future...
Exactly. The operational forces can't say to the bad guys "Timeout while we wait for the administrative folks to get us the comms we need to launch an airstrike. Take a bresk and we'll get back to you in a few months."
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So the costs wasn't for the seat, but the tooling, setup and manufacture of a one off airplane part and documentation to prove it met the original manufacturer's specifications for use on an aircraft.
That right there though IS THE PROBLEM with BIG government. That sort of thinking. When it turned out the seat could not be easily sourced. Some other mandate to keep that particular air craft in service effectively put the government in a position of doing whatever it takes to keep that bird in the air.
Nobody stopped to say gee maybe we should just run the risk of using an 'out of spec toilet seat'. Its not likely to bring the plane down after all. How much could a injury law suit really cost us for t
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It wasn't just a freaking seat, it was the entire bathroom, and they had to make large injection molding dies to create the new bathroom. The seat was just one of the parts that went into the new bathroom and the project cost was spread over x number of pieces of deliverable parts. Any time you deal with injection molding or just about any significant manufacturing process there are large upfront costs that lead to VERY expensive parts if you don't produce a lot of something (heck, even business cards get s
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Thanks, I didn't recall/know the details of this, but I understood that this "toilet seat" thing has always been a bluster about something that actually made sense overall and wasn't a waste of government resources, but was putting an older aircraft back into shape so we could use them longer....
That's not to say the government doesn't have huge amounts of waste.... I heard a story where the FSN of an "anchor chain" used to hold a dust cover on a piece of test gear differed from an "anchor chain" used to
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Hehe, nice story. Btw I looked it up and the air force did decide to build a replacement for the P3, the new P8 is based on an ~$100M 737NG airframe but so far the cost per P8 is ~$1.1 billion, those were some damn cheap seats if they allowed us to kick that kind of cost down the road 30-40 years.
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And compared to the tremendous fraud that occurs in countries without this kind of paper trail, it's probably worth it. Not that things couldn't be improved, but it's not all senseless. Accountability is expensive.
Now, if only they'd do the same for the large scale projects. They can procure a fighter jet with the right kind of screws, but they can't procure a fighter jet that does what they want it to do.
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Given how sliw the procurement process works and at the end you get the lowers"qualified" bidder who may or may not provide what tou need it isno wonder people bypass it any way they can.
Also, there is an added cost to go through a bid process for both the vendor and the government, and there is added cost to move to a new vendor both in schedule in interface development. I would hope they took this in to account when estimating the savings, but I haven't read the detailed report. But $45 million out of a $1 billion set of contracts is not that bad. Of course, it all adds up.......
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It does not add up; it multiplies. There is an important difference: multiplication is addition across a span of repetition.
$45 million out of $1 billion? Let's take that as a bench mark. It's 4.5%. Let's say that kind of waste is all across military discretionary spending only (not the mandatory military spending), since we know that's about $500 billion. People make a lot of noise about this number, since they can compare all discretionary spending and show the government throws some 80% of its dis
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Given how sliw the procurement process works and at the end you get the lowers"qualified" bidder who may or may not provide what tou need it isno wonder people bypass it any way they can. Of course, DOD can't just have one giant blanket purchase agreement because that wouldn't spread the wealth around to enough businesses in as many congressional districts as possible.
$45 million is like one drone strike on a wedding party.
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Excuse me for a moment. *Yawn*
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Gotta make ice bowls somehow or another (Score:1)
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Excess labor is self-buffering. We have welfare systems for that (and I advocate a better one because it's time). Even in the appropriate economic conditions for full communism (which may never occur, even though we can define them easily), you would run out of shit to spend your money on (nothing you want or need), and so simply take shorter working hours (and give up part of your income), requiring the hiring of more employees, until everyone is working 10-15 hour weeks, or 1 hour work weeks, making a f
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Your ideas are intriguing to me and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Worry about drips while an river floods (Score:5, Insightful)
Talk about worrying about drips while the river floods. Hundreds of billions wasted on the F35's alone, and someone is worried about $35 million for satcom.
No wonder there are never any *real* cuts to the military budgets with "prioritization" like this.
Have you even looked at their reports? (Score:2)
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And which is a better use of funds, providing medical care to people that need it, or developing a fighter jet that is years behind schedule, billions over budget, and that we didn't need in the first place?
Government wasting money. Whaaa...? (Score:4, Insightful)
Government wasting money. Whaaa...?
>> many in the military skip Defense Information Systems Agency
Oh, I see. This article was planted to whip military buyers back into the corral of politically-connected overspending that is DISA.
Patriotism (Score:3)
What rip off? (Score:2)
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Be bothered by? Our fucking mission is over before DISA can get their head out of their ass and read what we need. covering 30% of our needs is not adequate, acceptable, or worth the wasted brain cells spent trying to manipulate DISA into doing their damn job.
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Pure Pork (Score:1)
Yum
Uh huh. (Score:5, Interesting)
The GAO estimates that this cost taxpayers around $45 million extra in a single year.
So about $450 million over the last 10 years opposed to how much spent in Afghanistan and Iraq over the same period? How about checking into that? Oh right, that stuff is "off book" and not accounted for - though probably still affects our budget, economy and taxes. The SATCOM bill is chump-change by comparison. While we're looking at blips in the account, why not also cancel Public Radio and NASA - they probably also cost us each a nickel.
Yes, it may be an unnecessary expense that can be avoided by fixing the in-channel SATCOM process but our Government (and specifically Congress) is notoriously penny-wise and pound-foolish.
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No, it's $45 Billion... With a B, according to the actual article.
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No. If you read the actual article, it's million, with an m. The actual article quote (emphasis added):
News at 11: Government paid $45m more then it had to. Citizens shocked that i
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Then they just corrected it.
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So about $450 million over the last 10 years opposed to how much spent in Afghanistan and Iraq over the same period? \
There was some statistic a few years ago about how the cost of air-conditioning for the troops in Afghanistan and the Middle East exceed NASA's budget.
Waste of Time vs Waste of Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Chump Change. 45 million is 0.01% of our military budget, and it is a waste of time to worry about it. This is a distraction from budgetary issues that do matter, such as the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted on the F35 [google.com].
I have no problem with the military going around red tape to get communication satellites up faster. If we go by the general idea that a life is worth $9 million dollars [wikipedia.org], then these satellites going up faster only need to save 5 lives and they have done their job.
Spend your attention wisely; don't quibble about the theft of a penny by a child while your bank account is being emptied by your brother.
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Summary is wrong...it's $45B not M.
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Well damn, now I feel stupid. I doubt the comm sats would save 5000 lives or equivalent. So yeah... something to be concerned about.
Thank you for the correction.
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It's not a correction. It's a lie. The original article says $45 million, not billion. The total revenues for the commercial satellite industry were about $195 billion in 2013, and that includes satellite TV, photography, and communications. Even the US military isn't providing a quarter of that industry's revenue.
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I'm sure that they corrected the article to show M instead of B now. I'd copy/pasted the original text in an earlier post above.
Long story short...let's not waste more time quibbling over M when B are being wasted.
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"The High Frontier" (Broadcast: 02/05/2005)
"Outer space is open for business. It’s a booming $50 billion a year industry"
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners... [abc.net.au]
from the transcript at http://www.abc.net.au/4corners... [abc.net.au]
".. makes $100,000,000 a year, buying and selling airtime on communication satellites.
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Sometimes looking at the smaller items gives a better idea of systemic problems that contribute to larger amounts elsewhere. The procedures meant to prevent losses have gummed up the works to such a degree that an alternate path was found that, while more expensive, got the job done. It might provide some opportunity to alter how things operate and ultimately save money later. (I'm not holding my breath, but it does sometimes happen.)
This is pretty common in the military. Red tape is just an obstruction
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The whole program over it's 50 year life span is expected to cost $1T. The expected cost is about $600B for maintenance training, etc. About $250B for actually buying all ~2,000 planes. And about $150B for development. Even if the the whole development of the F-35 was a waste and all 100 or so planes already built were dumped in the scrap heap it still wouldn't amount to "hundreds of billions".
I understand some people don't like the F-35, but the hype
I thought they *used* to launch their own (Score:3)
But y'know it's *so* much cheaper to outsource the launches and satellites so that a) the people who actually *build* the stuff get the same salaries and bennies as government employees, or a good bit less (how much was assembled in, say, China?), but whose profits and execs make up for that by earning *so* much more, tens of times what, say, the President of the US earns.
I think I remember when the military launched its own satellites with its own rockets....
mark
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That's probably still true but lets not pretend that government salary represents any notable portion of what the president, presidential appointees, or congress critters make. Not even when you only consider the bribes in the form of high salaries and benefits without actual duties that are paid on leaving office and offered while in office for favors.
It may actually represent a savings! (Score:1)
The choice field commanders face isn't expensive vs. less expensive. It's communicating vs. not communicating! So, the real question is how much field capability would be lost during the wait needed to save that $45M?
The key to having maximum flexibility and nimble response is abundant communications.
Can you imagine a commander saying: "Sure, we'd love to handle that deployment, but we can't until DISA sends us our SATCOM gear."
I suspect it would cost far more than $45M to provide redundant force levels t
Seriously? (Score:2)
In Related News.... (Score:2)
Water Found to have Physical Quality called Wetness.
Bears seen Defecating in the Woods.
Pope makes Declaration, "I am a Practicing Catholic."
Sun to Set over West Coast.
Fixed it for you... (Score:2)
ah, well... (Score:2)
Pound, Ounce...what's the diff? (Other than a factor of 16...)
Spelling (Score:1)
First hand (Score:1)
Posting as AC because I have first hand experience
As ANYONE who has worked govt jobs before - the poor people stuck there HATE central purchasing for a REASON. These group exist to generate red tape and waste. I'm serious.
They will block buy MASSIVE amounts of equipment that go unused. Why? So they can crow about their stupid 10% discount. The equipment goes totally UNUSED, but they "saved" lots of money.
Seriously, this satcom stuff is going to be like that. The question is not if it's 16% cheaper (I'm sure
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One of the most humorous examples of this kind of thing that I've seen involved a busted faucet in a break room. The faucet was leaking and had to be replaced. So the facilities people came in and removed it. Then as they didn't have a replacement part, put up a sign saying the part had been ordered and would arrive in a few weeks. This is the main break room that gets lots of use throughout the day. Someone printed up a map showing directions from the building to a nearby Home Depot, along with a part numb
Government Is Wasting Millions (Score:2)
There, fixed the title for you. You didn't really think, it was only the Military, that wastes money — or that satellite communications is the only sinkhole?
Corporate equivalent = Shadow IT (Score:5, Interesting)
I have almost exclusively worked for large corporations. In almost every one of them, there has been a central purchasing department that does nothing more than forward orders to a pre-approved supplier. I think you become a pre-approved supplier by kicking back a certain percentage of sales to the purchasing manager.
When faced with this, every place I have worked at has had a shadow IT department. Back in the pre-cloud days, this was the department buying equipment that IT didn't know about simply because the quoted price was too much or it took too long. These days, it's a manager whipping out the credit card and putting company data out on AWS or Azure. The usual "better to ask for forgiveness than beg per permission" applies here, and IT ends up supporting it anyway. Centralized purchasing doesn't work for IT stuff -- it *may* save you money on toilet paper and light bulbs, but IT is too complex to reduce to a line item in a PO.
This is just the government equivalent. The only reason we know about it is because the records are public.
Perspective helps when talking about large numbers (Score:2)
The GAO estimates that this cost taxpayers around $45 million extra in a single year.
Lets put this into perspective. $45 million/yr works out to:
- 0.00129% of the 2014 total US expenditures ($3.5 Trillion)
- 0.00409% of 2015 Discretionary Spending ($1.1 Trillion)
- 0.00752% of the 2015 US Military Spending ($589.5 Billion)
Why is this news? I'm all for efficiency, but savings that small are not worth it in a budget that freaking large
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Go back over the years of getting:
"That year, about $280 million worth of satellite capability was bought outside the DISA process. If the GAO is correct, then the military could have gotten that same service for about $45 million less."
Back to 1990? 2000? 2010? The decades add up. The billions of $ needed to just to buy into the private sector can be very expensive.
The linked "DO
Re: Perspective helps when talking about large num (Score:2)
Stating $45million out of context helps no one. I'm sure there are much large potential savings in the de
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The US seems fixated on moving data from satellite to satellite avoiding parts of the world and having to add extensive encryption to its own bespoke satellites. Data flow was the key from Australia, Japan, UK, Slivermine South Africa and other interesting locations.
The NSA and GCHQ seemed to distrust all other methods and hoped to stay ahe
For all x, the military wastes millions on x. (Score:2)
Keynesian military (Score:2)
Keynesian spending in military has been an US economy booster for decades. The major drawback is that it tends to get people killed. Pooring money on military satellites seems a better way to fuel the economy.
What this is really about (Score:2)
Bureaucrats are pissed that they're being bypassed by military departments that have neither the time nor the inclination to waste the lives of soldiers on these pencil kings.
Here is the salient point: The military departments find the process too slow to be useful and so bypass it.
That's the story. Full stop. Not that the military over pays for stuff. But that this budget approval office is SLOW.
Fix that and the military will route their orders through them instead.
Here they'll say "we need more money to d
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If were going off in this direction again I have to say I am all for paying for more preventative care. Emergency rooms should be for !@#$%^& emergency's not things that could have easily been prevented from needing anything further.
But no we are cheap we don't think we should have to pay for others health care....but you can't refuse to provide emergency care. That would be wrong WTF america?? Emergency care costs a fortune in comparison to preventive care!
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I don't know where you live, but even my smallish town has a public health clinic. Many area hospitals also have walk in care for people that can't pay. These things are possible without overreaching federal legislation or abusing the ER. There's also the more recent trend of having urgent care clinics for things that are not life or death emergencies.
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Poor people can't go to urgent care clinics: they require payment. So they go instead to ERs, where they're not allowed to turn them away until they're stabilized. This is the result of right-wing short-sightedness.
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The ER isn't going to treat someone for a non-emergent issue unless it's something quick. They're going to point the person to urgent care or a public health clinic or whatever the equivalent is for the area. If it actually is an emergency, guess what? The ER treats them. You seem to think you can go to the ER for a flu shot and they're required to give it to you. Go try that sometime, tell us how it goes. If the person needs to be stabilized (by your words), then that sure sounds like an emergency to
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There is the short term view, and the long term one...
You have a decidedly short term view apparently, because the logical extension of social programs IS communism in all it's glory. While keeping a military is actually one of the few examples of something our founding fathers actually had the federal government involved in.. They didn't print and spend bundles of money on "social welfare" programs, but they DID authorize a lot of defense spending.... Well that and outright land purchases.. But they wher
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Our founding father's were AGAINST a standing army FYI. They would shit themselves at the percentage of our taxes that go to our military complex...
Re: Who'da thunk (Score:2)
Given the existence of superpowers, nukes, the airplane, and transportation reduction in general, this is unlikely. They would however mandate that our soldiers go armed at all times while on duty, this stopping any shooting incidents before they start. Fucking Clinton. They would also mandate all non-NBC weapons be available to the common citizen. Well, maybe not FAE devices.
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Our founding father's were AGAINST a standing army FYI. They would shit themselves at the percentage of our taxes that go to our military complex...
It's not the Cold War: we only spend about 16% of the federal budget on defense (don't be misled by "discretionary spending" BS). A non-trivial portion of that goes to basic research.
We spent 60% more on Medi* than on defense, and there's far more waste and fraud in that system. (Both must balance cost of waste and fraud vs cost of policing waste and fraud, and it's not obvious what the optimal balance is.) We spend 48% more on Social Security than on defense. It's not like we're ignoring social program
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Ah, come on... Remember that Clinton took all that Social Security and Medicare spending OFF BUDGET....
We don't put budget money into those programs anymore... They are separately funded though that Social Security Trust fund "lock box" which only has a pile of IOU's in it.. Wait you say, what happened to all my social security taxes I paid in? Um, we SPENT that money and left you with I pile of US Government bonds, T-Bills, for which somebody will have to be taxed or money printed to repay.
We may not go d
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able to protect their SATCOM assets in orbit?
This.
China/Russia can probably take down the Iridium and Globalstar systems easily. The DoD owned satellite systems are probably better protected. But when you go through the DISA, what are you getting? A military system up/downlink? Or time leased from a commercial operator which will most certainly go off the air in a conflict with a capable enemy?