Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Military Contracts - billions of tax payer dollars wasted each year

Our maintenance people pulling their hair out to keep everyone as operationally ready as they could but by God we had beer and plenty of it!!

You must be an idiot. I'm a small businessman & have no ability to change anything that the Navy or government does or doesn't do. No, I lost my a$$ on this order with all the changes, resubmittals, engineering time, calls to manufacturers, & on & on. My point is that this happens time & time again & no one in the military is accountable..

Well, we never ran out of beer where I was but toward the end of the month we were down to Falstaff and Carling Black label. Funny how at the first of the month Budweiser and the other good beers showed up. Right on time every month. miles

Pick on the uniforms with "great sources" like U tube and CBS news. Bottom line is uniformed officers have very little to say about spending. They set requirements and assess then it's in the hands of the politicans. I've written ad-nauseam here about procurement and how the Congress and mostly the civilian leadership drive that train. Make it worse today where the leadership both uniformed and civilial try to run an organization that is essentially wasteful by nature like a business, pad the budget with non-military expenditures and add contractors replacing jobs formerly done by uniformed personnel and you have the waste.

There are a lot of defense contracts that are known wastes of money; performance and budget are poor. Lower level military officers (AF/Army Colonels & Navy Captains who actually run the programs admit it. I have recommended cancelling several (only the Contracting Officer can legally cancel a contract) and feel that my recommendations have saved money; but then, it gets wasted elsewhere. These were in the order of about $100-125 million each, not big, but significant just the same.

The higher level officers are more career conscious than the lower level officers and rarely admit that it is time to pull the plug.

The problem is that each new project or technology appears to offer great benefits at first and then following contract award, the successful bidder starts finding issues that they told the Technical Evaluation panel were negligible or presented no major hurdle. Recall that in 1990 Defense Secretary Richard Cheney ordered the A-12 aircraft cancelled; years of litigation followed.

It is just a system of greedy contractors milking the system

This is typical with what I have seen in the DC area for 40 years. There are certain projects that are minority set-asides & only certified minority firms can bid. A few perform well, but most do poor work, cut corners, etc. Again, they get away with this because they are a minority. In DC everything for their government is bid as an 8A minority. Many minority firms have gotten rich from this system. Its standard practice for non-minority firms to give a kick back to a minority firm so they can bid DC work. I'm an engineer with 50 years experience in the high voltage field & specifications being issued on electrical products has never been worse. Transformers incorrectly specified & the project I referenced had 15KV switchgear. The Navy specified vault mounted switches, then pad mounted gas switches, & finally pad mounted fusible switches. The drawings indicated the correct product - switchgear. The design engineer constantly disapproved our submittals because they did not meet the specification which was incorrect. Letters that were written were ignored. Then panic set in when the switchgear was needed & 100% overtime was paid. The manufacturer lost money because of all the engineering work in preparing resubmittals & having to reorganize production. We could reduce the construction & weapon purchase budget by 50% & not lose anything if efficiency could be obtained. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening. Every where we turn as tax payers there is inefficiency & waste in government, including the military, & both Democrats & Republicans continue down the same old road.

Coming from someone who is milking the system for all he can, as fast as he can.

Defense spending should be easy. Assess the threat, let those in the know put out the requirements to build a counter, compete the candidates, select a winner with REAL TIME capabilites, contract for the units required, pay a portion up front and the rest upn delivery. Congress should write the check and nothing else.

I have saved the government more than your entire lifetime tax payments will be, just by closing one $125 million project.