The real question I have is this: How is it possible that we spend $800 billion on defense but the Navy doesn't have the money to paint & scrape its ships so they look like rust buckets? Why are ships short of missiles like the SM6? Why is the army short of artillery rounds and air defense? Why does the Air Force have to retire the A10?
Just where is all that money going?
I happen to know someone well who worked in finance at Raytheon for various weapon systems. What he said was that the military consistently ran up costs by change orders: they couldn't decide what they wanted up front and constantly changed requirements & engineering. Raytheon made some extra money but those changes also ran up Raytheon's costs as well and made the accounting and procurement process a nightmare. Stopping & restarting production lines on the F22 and F35 in particular were a tremendous waste of money.
Like the rest of our society we have huge, bloated organizations with -zero- accountability. No one at Raytheon gets sacked, no one at DOD procurement gets sacked, no generals get sacked, no politicians lose office. Everyone gets rewarded even in small ways for this gross inefficiency and there are too many pressure groups feeding at the trough to make it stop.
Ironically a real war like WWII would make it stop: we'd have a War Resources Board and all the waste would be cut out.
The only saving grace is that the weapons we produce do seem to work quite well.
Very good analysis, I share your concerns completely.
There is probably a lot of waste going on.
America’s military might be spoiled, knowing full well Democrats and Republicans always vote in favor for the military no matter what, even when it’s about 800 billion dollars. They don’t feel the necessity to optimize the costs.
When is comes to Russia’s military the money disappears in corruption. The Kremlin believed they had a certain force, a certain capacity, but discovered in their Ukraine-invasion that they were actually subpar. Lack of warm clothes, lack of medicine, rotting equipment in certain areas, less stock of ammunition than what they thought / even though it was all paid for... corruption took a toll on Russias effectiveness when it invaded Ukraine.
The proof of that is that its pretty incredible that Ukraine (which is 30 times smaller than Russia) is still resisting very well against it, even though Russia is now outpacing Ukraine artillery activity 10 to 1... and after 2 full years of war...
Ukraine even managed to recapture about 50% of the land areas Russia had originally captured.
We can thank Russia’s corruption for their botched invasion of Ukraine.
And we can salute the Ukrainians and their thirst for freedom. The don’t want to come back to Stalinism, which Russia has become (albeit without communism).
However... all of Russia’s allies are exclusively hardline communist nations and Islamic (Iran/Hamas).