What a country we have. It has to be the biggest honey pot for some businesses that ever existed. Look at what is happening with the military industrial complex. They have sold us a thirteen billion dollar aircraft carrier which doesn’t work. It can’t even make 400 launches of planes without a major breakdown. On top of that we are going to fill it with the most expensive planes which don’t work and are slower than the older models they replace. We are told some pilots don’t want to fly in them, because they are too dangerous in that there are over 700 problems with them including oxygen systems cutting off. What is wrong with us? If we would have run World War II this way we would have lost the war. Isn’t it high time we did something about this? It is simple to do, just don’t pay for anything until it works, but the problem is too many people are on the cash train and receiving “rewards” for pushing these weapons systems through. It is time we stopped the practice of getting a price quote and then allowing a company to half build something then constantly ask for more money. This is a national disgrace.

There does seem to be some light, but this could change. Take the laser systems. It is much cheaper to fire a laser than to send an expensive shell into a target. People don’t realize how much munitions cost. In 1997 one 5 inch extended range shell cost about $45,000. In 2006 the same shell cost $191,000. This program had to be cancelled due to cost. In 1997 The normal 5 inch shell cost was about $30,000. The United States wants to buy smart munitions and these have a very high price tag. The new Excalibur smart munition for a 5 inch naval gun cost about $50,000 each and can travel about 25 miles. This is actually quite a bargain since it costs about $20,000 per hour to fly a modern war plane to drop the equivalent in a bomb. Ammo has become so expensive that the U.S. Marines want to replace the M16 with the M4 carbine to conserve ammo. This reminds me of the U.S. Civil War when the Northern generals didn’t want repeating rifles because they felt they used too much ammo.

We spend a lot of money on defense programs to develop new weapons and many of them fail after costing us a fortune. One of these programs which really soaked the American tax payer was the U.S. Navy’s Surface Combatant for the 21at Century Program. The idea was to develop a class of destroyer which would be very stealthy. We know these ships today as the Zumwalt class of destroyers. We spent over $200,000,000 before the navy realized the new ships would not have much more capability than the existing upgraded Arleigh Burke class of destroyer and cancelled the test program, but not the program to build them. Why couldn’t this be figured out before we spent all that money? We built three of these ships and cancelled 29 more. The program to build them cost almost 4 billion dollars each. Why were they built when there was no advantage to them? These ships were by far the most incredibly expensive destroyers ever built.

We decided we wanted to build a Kinetic energy interceptor known as the KEI. It just kept growing in cost and before you knew It over $1,300,000,000 had been spent for a missile which could not be fired from a ship because it was just too big. The program was cancelled in 2009. You would have thought when it was designed someone would have said “hey this is too big.” Could it be this was never said, because then there would have been no money to be made? How come the navy never noticed the size problem? Sometimes you look at these programs and have to wonder if the only reason they were started were to milk us from our hard earned money.

How about the Transformational Satellite Communication System also known as TSAT. The idea was to speed up battlefield communications and lasers were said to be the way to go, because more data could be sent at one time. The program experienced extremely high cost overruns. After spending an incredible $3,200,000,000 the defense secretary decided in 2009 they didn’t need it, because new high frequency satellites could handle the missions. Talk about not having any foresight, this is a prime example. One would have thought the Department of Defense would have known high frequency communication satellites were in the works and it seems to me they did, but wanted new toys and after the military defense contractors spread some bucks around and lobbied the government, no one cared about the tax payer.

Another program which also cost us $3,300,000,000 before it was cancelled was the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle Program or EFV. The Marines said they wanted what was basically a medium weight tank which could act like a boat until it got onto the land. As time went by the military decided there probably would no longer be beach assaults due to missiles and the Secretary of Defense cancelled the program, but not before a huge sum of money was wasted. You would think there would be some oversight to decide which programs were impractical and the reasons for this and yet these things seem to be decided only after billions of dollars are wasted.

The last program full of waste I want to mention was the Joint Tactical Radio System known as JTRS. It started in 1997. The army spent $6,000,000,000 and then cancelled it. Later they restarted it. It was cancelled, because the system failed testing. Meanwhile they then spent $11,000,000,000 on old radios while waiting for the system to be perfected. The old radios now need to be replaced.

It is time for those in charge of this stuff to be investigated. I am personally tired of hearing we have no money for Social Security and such when these huge sums are just being wasted or used to line someone’s pockets. If people were made to stand trial who cheated the government and contracts were not paid until all work was finished and cost overruns were not allowed, we would be saving hundreds of billions of dollars and get true bids on contracts.

By the way it isn’t only the military being overcharged, it happens in all branches of government. The replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope was supposed to cost $500 million and be completed within 10 years. It is now estimated to cost 8.8 Billion dollars and take 20 years to finish.