Posted on 09/06/2014 4:42:32 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
For Saturday night, a classic tale which apparently could only happen in Washington, brought to us by our friends at Outside the Beltway. Our Army… our troops and equipment, are the finest in the world, ideally suited to fulfill their mission when called upon to fight in defense of the nation. But any operation of such a massive size requires a mountain of paperwork to manage things in the background and lots of money to keep it running. And that, my friends, is a job for a different sort of army… a battalion of bureaucrats.
What could possibly go wrong? You need a good system to track funding, equipment and expenses in an organization like the Army, and beginning in the late nineties they developed a program to do just that. Unfortunately, things took a turn… (Emphasis mine)
The Global Combat Support System-Army, a logistical support system meant to track supplies, spare parts and other equipment, was launched in 1997. In 2003, the program switched from custom software to a web-based commercial software system.
About $95 million was spent before the switch was made, according to the report from the Department of Defense IG.
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
Only in the Bampster’s America...
David Packard once told the Joint Chiefs that if he could, he’d fire them all. Something about the cost of coffee pots.
RE: Only in the Bampster’s America...
This has been happening long before Bammy became President.
OMG!!! AMerica is so F@CKED UP!!!
OTOH, woe be it to the PFC/SGT/LT/CPT who lose accountability for a piece of equipment they have signed for.
Winning bidder needs to supply free freight to anywhere in the world, applicable power cords worldwide and have a 4 hour onsite world wide response should a unit fail.
The monitors will still cost $200 each, but the cost of freight and support means that these monitors may cost $600 each, easily.
Modern monitors seldom fail, and it would be cheaper to ship a second monitor for free rather than provide this kind of support - whether CONUS or OCONUS.
Would also be easier to ship to those weird third world countries (like Afghanistan) a care package of power cables.
I completely understand a requirement like this for OCONUS - but why burden the CONUS purchasers with these expenses, except as an advanced form of cost shifting?
I’m in the military, and I’ve seen how complex and stupid a lot of this crap is. At the very basic Troop/Squadron level. I really don’t see how hard it is for them to lose billions of dollars. Actually, I can see why, I just don’t understand the why. It’s a damn Rube Goldberg when all they need a a ladder and a slide.
This has nothing to do with Obama. The DoD is not very good at keeping track of money. They never have been.
I hate it when that happens.
One often repeated political canard is that the military once spent a thousand dollars for a coffee pot.
The ‘coffee pot’ in question turned out to be a continuous flow machine like airlines routinely use and the Pentagon had paid $100 less than the going rate.
Once you start digging into claims about $1,000 wrenches, washing machines for tanks, and $10,000 toilet seats the stories fall apart.
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