The more I see the more I believe they really are just playing us for fools.
For some reason the wanton waste just drives me crazy. Maybe it is my Scottish blood. I recall reading where after WWII we had the British just push hundreds if not thousands of new lend lease aircraft into the ocean.
Then, sure enough, in Korea we needed them and didn't have them.
These were really great binoculars, extremely hidgh quality. I have a pair and they are better than all but the very best even today.
They did the same thing with small arms they conned American civiliians into lending "for the British home guard". After the war, instead of returning the hunting rifles to the American sportsmen, they were destroyed.
I remember watching news footage of perfectly good helicopters being shoved off of aircraft carriers at the "end" of the Vietnam war.
Not only do they soak the fools (you, me, and the rest of the taxwallets) for stuff like $600 toilet seats, but then they destroy them, so that they can turn around and replace them.
This is the stuff Eisenhower warned us against -- the "military/industrial complex." The "lesson of Vietnam" is that wars are apparently no longer "fought to win" -- they are managed as a valuable resource. It takes a war to bleed taxpayers dry, and funnel the money into the pockets of some very large contractors who tend to have a revolving door policy at the management level for former government bigwigs.
It's crap like this that gives corruption a bad name. /sarcasm