The military is going to get cut. You think there isn’t any waste there???
“The military is going to get cut. You think there isn’t any waste there???”
I spent thirty-plus years in the military industrial complex. Yes, there’s waste. There are a multitude of reasons, and it would take hours to explain them all. But like most complex things, even if you had the power of God, you couldn’t sort most of them out. But the REAL waste originates in Congress and the politics of who builds what and where. Look at any large project and if you overlaid a map of spending and assembly areas for that project it will look like someone reduced the money to peanut butter and spread it as evenly as possible across the states. The inefficiency of this is astounding. Boeing wants to buy an X module. Instead of getting the module from the most efficient and cheapest source they’ll divide it into tiny purchases just to make certain there’s money spent in the maximum number of districts. What would, in the ideal circumstances, cost, say, $100 comes in at $1,000. Now multiply that by all the things bought on every project. If you could stop Congress from diddling at the line-item level in every project you could buy the same amount of “stuff” for probably half as much. Also, you might have a five-year contract, but the money is allocated one year at a time. This prevents you from automating so everything I worked on with one exception was essentially serial production of one “art” item after another.