Senate NDAA would hike defense spending by $32 Billion

“Single-biggest dollar add would go to shipbuilding”

20 years late, but a start. No doubt they could build twice as many ships if they use NON-UNION labor, but that’s a pipe dream.

Don’t you think drones have changed everything, Bob?

“Don’t you think drones have changed everything, Bob?”

Tough to answer. They certainly caught us flatfooted, which is no big surprise (after all, our brass couldn’t even figure out that depending on China for rare earth wasn’t the brightest thing to do), but they also caught Russia flat-footed. Of all countries, Iran seemed to have figured it out first.

They are scary as hell - you’re 10 miles behind the line and they’re buzzing everywhere. The question is whether defenses can be developed as fast as drone technology evolves - for example, a laser that zapps them like a bug-zapper. Not yet, but it’s possible, and if that does happen, then drones may not be so effective.

So nothing is ever permanent. My votes has always been to keep ALL OPTIONS available and then use the options that are effective, given the specific circumstances. For example, who would have thought that motorcycles would be an effective way to advance troops...but that’s happening by both sides now. Horses, ok, not needed, but only because of motorcycles. By the way, battery-powered tanks is also a dumb idea, but it is ‘sustainable’...I guess.

Beyond that, one would HOPE that the idiots at DOD are able to learn from their rare earth experience and understand that it’s critical to be able to produce EVERYTHING locally, from locally-sourced materials, and if the materials aren’t available locally, then STOCKPILE them. It’s not complicated, at least for me, but then I’m not DOD brass, so I can’t think for them.

Also DOD needs to burn their books touting “Just-in-Time” production with supply lines around the world. That may work well for producing bookcases, not so well when you need fighter jets but find 1000 Chinese navy ships lurking about.

I bet DoD could look around and find $32 billion that they already have.

Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi March 2019.
Might be pay-walled; so 2nd link is not pay-walled.

The Pentagon’s Bottomless Money Pit

When the Defense Department flunked its first-ever fiscal review, one of our government’s greatest mysteries was exposed: Where does the DoD’s $700 billion annual budget go?

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/pentagon-budget-mystery-807276/

https://militarytruth.org/the-pentagons-bottomless-money-pit-including-a-personal-experience/

excerpts:

Meanwhile, the Air Force, which has a $156 billion annual budget, still doesn’t always use serial numbers. It has no idea how much of almost anything it has at any given time. Nuclear weapons are the exception, and it started electronically tagging those only after two extraordinary mistakes, in 2006 and 2007. In the first, the Air Force accidentally loaded six nuclear weapons in a B-52 and flew them across the country, unbeknownst to the crew. In the other, the services sent nuclear nose cones by mistake to Taiwan, which had asked for helicopter batteries.

“What kind of an organization,” Andy asks, “doesn’t keep track of $20 billion in inventory?”

Despite being the taxpayers’ greatest investment — more than $700 billion a year — the Department of Defense has remained an organizational black box throughout its history. It’s repelled generations of official inquiries, the latest being an audit three decades in the making, mainly by scrambling its accounting into such a mess that it may never be untangled.

Ahead of misappropriation, fraud, theft, overruns, contracting corruption and other abuses that are almost certainly still going on, the Pentagon’s first problem is its books. It’s the world’s largest producer of wrong numbers, an ingenious bureaucratic defense system that hides all the other rats’ nests underneath. Meet the Gordian knot of legend, brought to life in modern America.

AT THE TAIL end of last year, the Department of Defense finally completed an audit. At a cost of $400 million, some 1,200 auditors charged into the jungle of military finance, but returned in defeat. They were unable to pass the Pentagon or flunk it. They could only offer no opinion, explaining the military’s empire of hundreds of acronymic accounting silos was too illogical to penetrate.

The audit is the last piece in one of the great ass-covering projects ever undertaken, also known as the effort to give the United States government a clean bill of financial health. Twenty-nine years ago, in 1990, Congress ordered all government agencies to begin producing audited financial statements. Others complied. Defense refused from the jump.

It took a Herculean legislative effort lasting 20 years to move the Pentagon off its intransigent starting position. In 2011, it finally agreed to be ready by 2017, which turned into 2018, when the Department of Defense finally complied with part of the law ordering “timely performance reports.”

Last November 15th, when the whiffed audit was announced, Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan said it was nothing to worry about, because “we never expected to pass it.” Asked by a reporter why taxpayers should keep giving the Pentagon roughly $700 billion a year if it can’t even “get their house in order and count ships right or buildings right,” Shanahan quipped, “We count ships right.”

This was an inside joke. The joke was, the Pentagon isn’t so hot at counting buildings. Just a few years ago, in fact, it admitted to losing track of “478 structures,” in addition to 39 Black Hawk helicopters (whose fully loaded versions list for about $21 million a pop).

That didn’t mean 478 buildings disappeared. But they did vanish from the government’s ledgers at some point. The Pentagon bureaucracy is designed to spend money quickly and deploy troops and material to the field quickly, but it has no reliable method of recording transactions. It designs stealth drones and silent-running submarines, but still hasn’t progressed to bar codes when it comes to tracking inventory. Some of its accounting programs are using the ancient computing language COBOL, which was cutting-edge in 1959.

“These systems,” as one Senate staffer puts it, “were not designed to be audited.”

If and when the defense review is ever completed, we’re likely to find a pile of Enrons, with the military’s losses and liabilities hidden in Enron-like special-purpose vehicles, assets systematically overvalued, monies Congress approved for X feloniously diverted to Program Y, contractors paid twice, parts bought twice, repairs done unnecessarily and at great expense, and so on.

Enron at its core was an accounting maze that systematically hid losses and overstated gains in order to keep investor money flowing in. The Pentagon is an exponentially larger financial bureaucracy whose mark is the taxpayer. Of course, less overtly a criminal scheme, the military still churns out Enron-size losses regularly, and this is only possible because its accounting is a long-tolerated fraud.

We’ve seen glimpses already. The infamous F-35 Joint Strike fighter program is now projected to cost the taxpayers $1.5 trillion, roughly what we spent on the entire Iraq War. Overruns and fraud from that program alone are currently expected to cost taxpayers about 100 times what was spent on Obama’s much-ballyhooed Solyndra solar-energy deal.

…..

Even the military’s top-line budget number is an Enron-esque accounting trick. Congress in 2011 passed the Budget Control Act, which caps the defense budget at roughly 54 percent of discretionary spending. Almost immediately, it began using so-called Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), a giant second checking account that can be raised without limit.

Therefore, for this year, the Pentagon has secured $617 billion in “base” budget money, which puts it in technical compliance with the Budget Control law. But it also receives $69 billion in OCO money, sometimes described as “war funding,” a euphemistic term for an open slush fund. (Non-defense spending also exceeds caps, but typically for real emergencies like hurricane relief.) Add in the VA ($83 billion), Homeland Security ($46 billion), the National Nuclear Security Administration ($21.9 billion) and roughly $19 billion more in OCO funds for anti-ISIS operations that go to State and DHS, and the actual defense outlay is north of $855 billion, and that’s just what we know about (other programs, like the CIA’s drones, are part of the secret “black budget”).

….

In a supreme irony, the auditors’ search for boondoggles has itself become a boondoggle. In the early Nineties and 2000s, the Defense Department spent billions hiring private firms in preparation for last year. In many cases, those new outside accountants simply repeated recommendations that had already been raised and ignored by past government auditors like the Defense inspector general.

After last year’s debacle, the services are now spending even more on outside advice to prepare for the next expected flop. The Air Force alone just awarded Deloitte up to $800 million to help the service with future “audit preparation.” The Navy countered with a $980 million audit-readiness contract spread across four companies (Deloitte, Booz Allen Hamilton, Accenture and KPMG).

Taxpayers, in other words, are paying gargantuan sums to private accounting firms to write reports about how previous recommendations were ignored.

The DOD will never “pass” a standard audit and there are many legitimate reasons why.

For example, tracking modifications and conversions to various pieces of equipment is quite difficult to make “audit ready”…….

In a sustainment scenario, You take item “A” which is a legacy item with a value of say $125,000 and you convert it to a newer version “B” which has an updated value of $90,000 (yes newer configurations often are cheaper than the old configurations). In order to convert “A” to “B” you have to apply a conversion kit “C” which cost $30,000 and the labor for the conversion cost $4,000. An audit probably will not capture the labor and conversion kit costs and that same audit will show that converted “A”s no longer exist and are a total loss. The audit might not even catch the increase in the number of “B”s because they do not meet the $100,000 audit thresholds.

So now even though you upgraded and extended the life of a bunch of old “A”s to newer “B” configurations, the audit shows that those “A”s have been totally lost from inventory and it does not account for the conversion parts or labor nor does it account for the increase in “B”s to the DOD inventory because they are not valued high enough to be audit worthy. This can easily run into millions of dollars of “paper loss” for a single item that actually isn’t a real world loss at all.

No doubt they could build twice as many ships if they use NON-UNION labor - if they could find all the machinists, welders, pipe fitters, etc they require in the first place.

“No doubt they could build twice as many ships if they use NON-UNION labor - if they could find all the machinists, welders, pipe fitters, etc they require in the first place.”

True, right now. But give them a steady job for higher pay and no union dues and they’ll flip sides. Nothing wrong with these people, it’s those who lead the unions that wreck everything, including the US Industrial Base. So get rid of the unions and you get rid of the union leaders by default./

Yes, I agree unions drive up the cost of everything. But stupidity at the CIC level is acutely responsible for the mess called the USAF. The DOD spent millions fixing the A-10’s structural issues, particularly with the wings. After fixing the A to B problem, the idiots leading the USAF sent all the greatly needed A-10s to the junkyard. Great thinking leadership. You fool, Generals want a Mach 3 aircraft so you can get your 5 hours of flying time to get your thousands of dollars extra in your paychecks. Called flight pay...... Fire 98% of the Generals in the 5-sided Fools colony...
Ever wonder why? I’ll tell you it’s the best air-to-ground aircraft ever built, with only one problem: the leaders of the USAF want aircraft that cost a billion dollars each, like the B2 Bomber, a great plane. Still, we only bought 20 of them, and of the 20, only 10-12 are usable. Why fly them from Missouri to Iran when you could send them TDY to Diego Garcia, just 1-2 hours flying time away, instead of adding 30 hours of extra flight time to each aircraft? Could you explain the logic behind the USAF’s 12-year history of errors and waste, specifically the LOCAL PURCHASE accounts that allow different squadrons to trade for what they need? I’ve worked on B26s, B57B/C, and B47E aircraft in five different locations, and every single squadron had at least one aircraft sitting on sawhorses, missing 10-30 life-and-death parts, but oh yeah, we don’t need spare parts. That’s the real reason why B2s have to fly for 30-hour missions, zero spare parts, and stupid leadership...Notice when the C17 came along what did the USAF do with the C141A aircraft spent millions converting them from A to B same screw up but now the DOD got a ounce smarter. Fly the 141s low level that way the wings will crack faster an allow the USAF to cut them up as unflyable>> I flew as a C141 Flight Examiner and was never left on the ground due to spare parts but if something broke downrange we and the 25-40 people sat waiting for a mechanic with parts to fly from CHS SC to Bermuda to fix a aircraft for what ? A broken firewarning element????? It seems no parts were available in NAS Bermuda???? Now multiply that times 40 to 50 more times and zero lets give failing Boeing Novelty Store more money for the C17s which I guarantee will be junked within 4-8 years. An meanwhile the C130 all models keeps on flying everywhere. an want more waste in my 12 years I was forced to buy 5 different work uniforms why simple new CIC USAF decreed a new USAF uniform is the real reason we have aircraft sitting on theground as unflyable needing Yep no spare parts oh I know we need more C5s another story of stupidity on a grand scale so ad that at the beginning of desert storm the USAF had to go to the airlines like atlas air, Pan Am, United to fly there 747s to move people to the war zone. Yet the USAF instead of buying the 747s they bought the flying junk yard the C5 then spent billions modifying it to the C5M which also needs the same ground support equipment that the 747 uses and the C17s use also. But oh no 747s are bad need too much specialized ground support equipment hey general the ground support equipment that you already had were used to onload offload the 141s and the C130s. an could have been used on a fleet of 747s??? Thats why we need to get rid of 80% of the Generals in the Pentagon as 90% of the Admirals. Funny the USCG the most underfunded branch of the military is able to save hundreds of kids and adults in the flash floods with undersized equipment and still do a fab job. Meanwhile the USAF is still buying the Pegasis flying junkyard from the worst aircraft manufacturer in the world BOEING DING DONG an oh yeah award Boeing millions of dollars to build missiles when they can’t even, make a 737 safe to fly in???? Hey General explain to me why we bought the KC46 junkers when we could of had the C46 built in Mobile Al by an American outfit yea using Airbus parts of the most successful airliners in the civilian airlines??? I speak of the Airbus A319,320 fleets??? Oh, yea buy American junk with zero spare parts. You really think any airline has aircraft sitting broken waiting for parts that were never bought to arrive???
Shame on the Pentagon and Congress another useless group of spineless leaders....

THANK YOU. I’m having to deal with all the Neocon-supporting CLOWNS here that think if you paint a red, white, and blue on an aircraft, you will win WORLD WAR 3.

Thank God that they weren’t decision makers in World War 2.