bflr
I know this report has a lot that needs to be cut..but how else will the big wigs line their pockets? and if their budget is cut..it won’t stop ..just the care and well being of solders will go down..
How many of these are covers for ‘dark’ projects?
If I, as a hetrosexual soldier or salior, wants to go impregnate some woman to whom I am not married, I'm expected to pay child support out of my regular military pay. So it should be for military who contact STDs with their openly homosexual lifestyle.
Good luck finding Republican or conservative legislators to do anything about it, though.
What the Pentagon wants, it gets. Heck, it even gets stuff it doesn't want & did not ask for.
Quite the sacred cow.
Actually, they benefit active duty military families AND retirees.
Frankly, I am not a fan of commissaries. One can find better products for the same price off base. But there are some bases that don't have a grocery store nearby.....
Republican Golden Calf (pork) ping!
To get their budget approved the military must do some odious things. The Navy was required to buy a bomber that was so obsolete we couldn’t give them, brand new, to our allies. The plant was in the budget chairman’s district. Bush H. finally put the kibosh on it because every time it dropped its iron bombs in Iraq it hit a school, a hospital or a huddling family of tiny children. The Green movement has forced the military to buy oodles of incredibly expensive “green” fuel. The military is now buying Chevy Volts, so too, is the State Department.
A contract may be for five years, but the money to pay for it is approved one year at a time. This forces the contractors to pony-up mullah to Congressmen’s (pardon, Congressperson’s) re-election campaigns. This also prevents money-saving expenditures such as automation. If you knew you had a five year contract you could save lots of money by automating production. But, instead, every major item is virtually hand-built by expensive labor. (Then, that labor gets laid off the moment the contract blips; a condition I’m in as of November 16th.)
Paying themselves and friends.
Much of the “waste” in the defense budget is added on Capitol Hill before the budget “mark” is sent back to Defense. Every member of congress with a pet project will try to get it into a defense bill or steer more defense dollars to their district. When Defense gets their budget back, it will contain all manner of things they never asked for and don’t want. If DoD needs A, they had better to be willing to take B also if Senator Blank wants B funded.
There has always been a duplication of services policy for the DoD. All services were forced to use GSA vehicles in the early 90s, rather than have individual "motor pools" at each base.
Some defense contracts need to be investigated to find out who got a BIL deal to supply things like $600 hammers and $1000 toilet seats like were found several years ago. Same thing applies to uniform changes every few years.
Relook the Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, FOODSTAMP and Social Security Disability programs. Stop all money to these programs and make everyone reapply. Then look to cut the military budget.
What the report doesn’t tell us is how many liberal politicians and bureaucrats are involved in these ancillary avenues of wasting our tax dollars - no opportunity to spend will be ignored.
This is the deal.
First, I will acknowledge there is a lot of waste, especially since the DOD has gone to using ECHO and VistA management methods as a way to ‘save money’ (which actually means it adds in so many layers of bureaucracy it costs ten times as much as it should).
However, there is also a method to some of this. Do you really think that the DOD was paying $2K per toilet seat or $900 per hammer? Nope. Let’s say that the DOD via DARPA is looking into a new weapon system, unlike any other, that is so innovative it has to be absolutely top secret. They don’t create a budget for it. What they do is create a lot of ‘projects’ or other line items. They will, for example, claim to fund a $500K study on rodent poop. They will then pay a college kid $1,000 to write a paper on rodent poop and funnel the rest of the money to that ‘dark project’. It has worked this way since the 50s, if not before.