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Tag: DoD

  • The Pentagon Keeps Losing Equipment and Buying Stuff It Doesn’t Need

    The Pentagon Keeps Losing Equipment and Buying Stuff It Doesn’t Need

    The Pentagon Keeps Losing Equipment and Buying Stuff It Doesn’t Need

    Matthew Petti February Issue of Reason Magazine

    ​ Summary

    The article describes the U.S. military’s tendency to lose equipment and buy unnecessary items. It highlights the wasteful spending on the F-35 fighter jet spare parts and the 7.12 billion in equipment left behind in Afghanistan. The article also criticizes the military’s tendency to prioritize short-term gains over long-term strategic planning. Table of Contents

    1. Military Spending as a Stand-Alone Strategy
    2. The Afghanistan Spending Quagmire
    3. The Little Crappy Ship

    ​

    How the U.S. military busts its budget on wasteful, careless, and unnecessary ‘self-licking ice cream cones.’

    Drawings of military equipment | Illustrations: Mladjana P./Fiverr

    (Illustrations: Mladjana P./Fiverr)

    Keeping track of inventory is hard for any large organization. Workers misplace items, administrators fill out the wrong paperwork, and things just go missing. But losing $85 million in inventory? That’s a job for the U.S. military.

    In 2023, the Government Accountability Office revealed that a government contractor had lost 2 million spare parts for the F-35 fighter jet, together worth tens of millions of dollars, since 2018. The Department of Defense followed up on only 20,000 of those parts. Military officials don’t know how many F-35 spare parts exist in total, paid for by American taxpayers but spread out at contractor warehouses around the world.

    The F-35 spare parts debacle is just one part of a budget-busting pattern of inventory failures. In 2018, the U.S. Navy found a warehouse in Jacksonville, Florida, full of parts for the F-14 Tomcat, the now-obsolete fighter jet made famous in Top Gun, and for the P-8 Poseidon and P-3 Orion, two submarine-hunting aircraft. The parts were worth $126 million. Had Navy auditors not found them, taxpayers might have ended up paying twice for the same part.

    “Not only did we not know that the parts existed, we didn’t even know the warehouse existed,” then–Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly told reporters the following year. “When they brought those parts into the inventory system, within a couple of weeks there were like $20 million in requisitions on those parts for aircraft that were down because we didn’t know we had the parts of the inventory.”

    The 1985 aircraft carrier scandal continued this pattern of failure to keep track of valuable materiel. After a group of smugglers was caught stealing F-14 parts to sell to Iran, the Pentagon ran an audit on the spare parts stored on aircraft carriers. Auditors found the Navy had lost track of $394 million in parts between 1984 and 1985. Not to worry! It turns out only about $7 million in parts had been stolen by the gunrunners, and the remaining $387 million were misidentified or misplaced.

    Some of these losses are simple bureaucratic inefficiency. “It’s a good example of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing,” says Scott Amey, a lawyer for the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. In other cases, the government and contractors don’t seem to even want to keep good track of their inventory. “Sometimes it’s easier to just buy something, especially near the end of the fiscal year in August or September, to drive the budget up than to use something that you already have,” Amey adds. 

    Military Spending as a Stand-Alone Strategy

    In addition to losing or misplacing expensive parts, the Army has been letting them go bad, according to a March 2024 report by the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General. When inspectors visited warehouses for tanks and other armored vehicles in 2022 and 2023, they found $1.31 billion of equipment in “critical” condition. Tank treads were strewn about on the grass. Transmissions were sitting outside in the humid air. A group of engines was visibly rusted, and a manager was “unsure whether any of the engines were in a condition that they could still be repaired.”

    “This world in arms is not spending money alone,” then–President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said in 1953. “It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” Some of that sweat doesn’t even turn into usable guns, warships, and rockets. Much of it flows into the pockets of military contractors, who overcharge and underdeliver. Or it disappears into thin air, left to rot in a warehouse until it is unceremoniously disposed of. Sometimes Congress even forces the armed services to keep maintaining gear they don’t want.

    Between dysfunctional bureaucracy and bad incentives, a lot of military spending is simply wasted.

    “We have a defense budget that is disconnected from a coherent grand strategy,” says Dan Caldwell, a public policy adviser at Defense Priorities, a nonprofit that advocates a more restrained military policy. “A lot of policymakers and a lot of individuals in the national security think tank community think that a topline spending number—whether it’s a total spending number or a percentage of GDP—they think that in and of itself is a strategy.”

    Whether or not the United States needs more military power, you can’t count on getting that power just by throwing more money into the Pentagon. Manufacturers are facing bottlenecks in the production of key munitions, which are being burned up in Ukraine and the Middle East faster than they can be replaced. These bottlenecks are related to shortages of labor and physical resources that money can’t solve.

    Pouring more cash into the military budget may be like pumping water into a clogged pipe. Instead of getting through, the fluid leaks out of places it shouldn’t. While the U.S. military runs short of weapons it would actually need to win a war, the Pentagon has found itself buying things it doesn’t need.

    The Defense Department has infamously failed every single audit Congress has ever mandated for it. Nobody even knows where all of the money is going. All the while, officials continue to insist they’re making progress. “We keep getting better and better at it,” deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said at a 2023 news conference, after the sixth failed audit.

    The Afghanistan Spending Quagmire

    Perhaps the most infamous cases of waste occurred in Afghanistan, where the United States spent 20 years trying to prop up a friendly Afghan government only to have Taliban rebels sweep the capital in a lightning-quick August 2021 offensive. Although the U.S. military extracted all of its own gear, it left $7.12 billion of American-provided equipment with the doomed Afghan army; it soon fell into the Taliban’s hands. Images of Taliban fighters riding around with captured vehicles became a symbol of American failure.

    But even before the Taliban takeover, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a watchdog created in 2008, had spent years documenting the incompetence and disorganization of the war effort. In February 2021, as U.S. forces were working on pulling out of the country, SIGAR released a damning summary of its findings.

    Out of the $7.8 billion in U.S.-funded “capital assets” that SIGAR reviewed, $2.4 billion were either abandoned, misused, or falling apart. The majority of these projects had been funded by the Defense Department, with smaller contributions from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the State Department, and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a government agency that encourages American investment in developing countries.

    In other words, even if the United States had won the war, a huge portion of the money spent on the war would not have made any difference for victory.

    For example, the military spent $25 million for a new headquarters in Helmand, Afghanistan—and kept construction going even after U.S. troops were leaving the province.

    In 2009, then-President Barack Obama announced a surge of troops across Afghanistan, including 11,000 Marines sent to Helmand. Although the surge was supposed to be a temporary measure, with the Marines scheduled to leave Helmand in July 2011, “the military quietly assumed troop strengths would be maintained for five years and had master plans for 10,” ProPublica later reported.

    Pentagon planners designed a state-of-the-art headquarters for U.S. forces in Helmand, nicknamed “64k” because it was 64,000 square feet. The completion date was set for January 2012, after the Marines were supposed to leave.

    Commanders on the ground realized what a waste 64k would be. Two Army generals and a Marine general all requested permission to stop construction, arguing the current plywood headquarters in Helmand was just fine. They were rebuffed by Maj. Gen. Peter Vangjel, then the deputy commander of Army forces in the Middle East and Central Asia. He wasn’t thinking of military needs—just the military budget. Congress had budgeted money for 64k, and getting permission to do something else with the cash would require congressional approval, so “reprogramming it for a later year is not prudent,” Vangjel wrote in a memo, later published in a SIGAR report.

    The military broke ground for 64k in May 2011, only a few months before the troops were scheduled to leave. Construction continued, over budget and behind schedule, as the Marine base emptied out. In April 2013, the building was completed—and the Marines decided not to use it. When SIGAR inspectors visited a few months later, they found a fancy, empty building. The furniture still had plastic wrap all over it.

    “They did end up building a great building. It just wasn’t the right size and scope,” says a federal oversight official familiar with the project, who spoke to Reason on condition of anonymity.

    The 64k building became a symbol of the war’s economic wastefulness. “A number of generals came up to me the last time I was in Afghanistan and said ‘Please, look at this,’” said SIGAR head John F. Sopko in a 2013 interview with C-SPAN. “This is indicative of the problem of military construction. Once it starts, it never stops.”

    The worst return on investment came from aircraft. The Defense Department purchased 20 used Italian transport planes for the Afghan army in 2008, at a cost of $549 million. Soon after, Afghan air crews discovered severe issues with the aircrafts’ maintenance and performance. The U.S. military flew four of the planes back to Europe and sold the remaining 16 for scrap in Afghanistan, earning back just $40,257.

    The problems with this deal should have been obvious from the beginning. Alenia, the company that sold the used planes, claimed to have warehouses full of spare parts, but no one was able to verify the contents, an official told SIGAR. The planes themselves had nasty-looking corrosion—or “exfoliation,” as the Air Force put it—on their wings.

    An official from the State Department told the military to “run as far away from Alenia as you possibly can,” according to a SIGAR follow-up report. The military went ahead with the contract anyway. The problem, again, was the use-it-or-lose-it nature of the military budget. The fiscal year was ending in September 2008, and any funds for the planes that weren’t spent would expire. “Due to the compressed time schedule to get the contract awarded, a lot of details were ‘taken on faith’” from Alenia, an official later told SIGAR.

    One of the Air Force officials involved in the debacle later went on to work for Alenia, which SIGAR called a “clear conflict of interest.” (The FBI worked with SIGAR and other agencies to investigate Alenia and the Air Force official. The Justice Department declined to prosecute the case.) The Defense Department denied SIGAR’s conclusions, claiming the planes were rushed to meet “an urgent operational requirement” for the Afghan army.

    Another problem with military spending in Afghanistan was a tendency to ignore local needs. “A lot of times, it was not taking the local context into account,” the federal oversight official says. “You hear what you want to hear, not necessarily what was said.”

    The Little Crappy Ship

    Like foreign military advisers foisting equipment on Afghan troops the Afghans neither needed nor could use, Congress has pushed the U.S. military to take on more equipment than it asks for. For the past several years, the Navy has asked for funds for a certain number of ships—and Congress has budgeted an even larger number. In March 2024, the Senate Appropriations Committee bragged that it gave the Navy $732 million more in shipbuilding money than it requested.

    Littoral combat ships have been a particular fiasco. In the early 2000s, the Navy promised to create small, fast-moving warships that could easily be retrofitted for different kinds of missions in coastal waters. Admiral Vernon Clark, the spiritual father of the project, compared his vision to a space fighter from Star Wars “that’s got R2-D2 in it.” Instead, the final results were nicknamed the “Little Crappy Ship.”

    Originally estimated to cost $220 million each, the ships ended up costing half a billion dollars apiece—and couldn’t even sail right. The gears on the engine transmission were flawed, causing ships to stall in the water. (One of them, the USS Milwaukee, broke down on its way out of the shipyard in 2015.) Lockheed Martin, the ship’s manufacturer, spent years haggling over the cost of overhauling the transmission.

    Nor was the littoral combat ship very good at fighting. Putting it more delicately, a Pentagon report said the ships would be “challenged in a contested environment.”

    The Navy spent 15 years and $700 million trying to build a minisubmarine that could be towed behind the littoral combat ship to find naval mines, then abandoned the project. Similarly, the littoral combat ship was supposed to have a towed sonar probe to find submarines, but the ship’s engines were so loud it drowned out the sonar signals. That technology, too, was shelved.

    Instead of a ship that could have its weapons swapped out like Lego bricks at a moment’s notice, as the admirals had imagined, the Navy ended up with a ship that wasn’t very good at anything. It decided to cut its losses. In 2017, the Pentagon requested funding for just one more littoral combat ship, after which the shipyards would be closed down. The Navy would begin developing a new frigate, the Constellation class, instead.

    But there was too much contractor money—and too many contractor jobs—tied up in the Little Crappy Ship. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D–Wis.) wrote a letter to President Donald Trump protesting that 1,850 shipyard workers in Wisconsin risked being laid off. She emphasized her and Trump’s “shared goals” to “revitalize American manufacturing, strengthen the defense industrial base, and preserve American jobs, especially in the Midwest.”

    Those concerns swayed the Trump administration, which edited the Navy budget to add a second $500 million ship. “Maintaining the industrial base was really the sole consideration,” a source told Defense News. It didn’t matter whether the money was buying usable equipment. What mattered was the factories kept running.

    “That’s like saying you need to keep eating junk food so maybe one day you can eat vegetables. It’s an absurd argument,” argues Caldwell of Defense Priorities. “The people that work in shipyards, and the capacity, the tools, the equipment—there is high demand for all that stuff. If they weren’t building the LCS, there would still be work for them to do.”

    In 2020, the Navy signed a contract with Fincantieri Marinette Marine, the manufacturer of the littoral combat ship, for a new Constellation-class frigate. Then the military brass started trying to retire the littoral combat ship, a decade ahead of schedule. Keeping the ships would have made the whole project even more wasteful. The Navy estimated in 2022 it would cost $4.3 billion to bring littoral combat ships up to speed, not counting the cost of a new antisubmarine system.

    Admiral John Gumbleton asked reporters to think about the opportunity cost, since the resources for maintaining littoral combat ships could have gone into the new frigates. “We need a capable lethal-ready Navy more than we need a larger Navy that’s less capable, less lethal, and less ready,” then–Chief of Naval Operations Michael Gilday told a congressional committee.

    Again, members of Congress from shipbuilding states wouldn’t have that. Rep. John Rutherford (R–Fla.) took calls from military contractors and meetings with Florida officials, then introduced an amendment forbidding the Navy from retiring any littoral combat ships early. After a bit of haggling, Congress reluctantly allowed the Navy to decommission four littoral combat ships out of the nine that were originally chosen for early retirement.

    The USS Milwaukee was retired in September 2023, fewer than 10 years after its failed maiden voyage. It had deployed twice to patrol the Caribbean Sea. The Navy held a small ceremony to celebrate the Milwaukee‘s achievements over its life span: Seizing $30 million of “suspected cocaine” and arresting three suspected smugglers. That same month, the USS Little Rock was decommissioned after less than six years of service. That ship had seized $127 million of cocaine.

    “Every problem with our defense budget ultimately flows from the fact that we are trying to pursue an American grand strategy of primacy in a world where we are facing increasing constraints,” says Caldwell. “That ultimately leads us to try and build weapon systems like the [littoral combat ship] that try to either do too much or too little and are not suited to the real threats that we face.”

    He adds that the military contractors are the primary “political constituency in parts of the country,” leading to a “self-licking ice cream cone.”

    In other words, one reason the United States government won’t give up trying to dominate the entire world is because cutting military contractor jobs is just bad politics. American politicians use preparations for war as a jobs program. Those goals have forced the military to act as jack of all trades, master of none. Those bad political incentives are hurting genuine military readiness.

    No one begrudges our military having those things needed to meet a state of readiness. We should have a major issue with waste and management that is totally unable to pass a required audit.

  • Congress and DOGE Can Find Spending Cuts at the Department of Defense

    Congress and DOGE Can Find Spending Cuts at the Department of Defense

    Congress and DOGE Can Find Spending Cuts at the Department of Defense


    The U.S. can defend itself at a lot less expense.

    J.D. Tuccille for Reason.com 3.12.2025 7:00 AM

    The growing distance between the United States and its allies in NATO is an overdue nudge to European nations to start paying for their own defense rather than relying on Uncle Sugar. But it’s also an opportunity for the cash-strapped U.S. government to cut costs on military expenditures as it shifts responsibilities to countries that have huddled under the U.S. umbrella for decades. Given the enormous role that defense spending plays in the federal budget, closing the gap between revenues and spending and reducing debt requires that hard choices be made by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Congress about the military.

    The Pentagon Welcomes DOGE

    “We welcome DOGE to the Pentagon, and I hope to welcome Elon to the Pentagon very soon and his team, working in collaboration with us,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth commented last month to reporters in Germany about scrutiny from Elon Musk and his cost-cutters. “There are waste, redundancies and headcounts in headquarters that need to be addressed.”

    Last week, a quick, early review by the DOGE found “some $80 million in funds wasted on programs that do not support [the Department of Defense]’s core mission.”

    That’s an encouraging start, but there is a very long way to go. The federal government’s 2025 fiscal year began October 1, 2024, and $334 billion has been spent on national defense to-date on its way to roughly $850 billion, not counting veterans’ benefits and Department of Energy expenditures on nuclear weapons. The Congressional Budget Office projects that this year the federal government will spend $1.9 trillion more than it collects in revenues. With defense as the third largest category of spending after Social Security and Medicare, the military will have to take some cuts if there’s any hope of getting the federal government’s books balanced. Fortunately, there’s room to do just that.

    Last month, The Washington Post’s Dan Lamothe, Alex Horton, and Hannah Natanson reported that a leaked memo revealed “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered senior leaders at the Pentagon and throughout the U.S. military to develop plans for cutting 8 percent from the defense budget in each of the next five years.” Exempted from the cuts are “operations at the southern U.S. border, modernization of nuclear weapons and missile defense, and acquisition of submarines, one-way attack drones and other munitions.”

    Opportunities for Reducing Costs

    What’s interesting is that the planned 8 percent cut is very close to the 7 percent increase in defense spending in inflation-adjusted dollars that The Wall Street Journal’s Richard Rubin and Kara Dapena found in federal spending just since 2015. Readopting the 2015 budget, adjusted for the declining value of the dollar, would almost give us the Trump administration’s cost savings all by itself.

    Of course, blindly readopting an old budget wouldn’t allow for shifting threats and priorities. A more thoughtful approach is needed to adjust to a changing world and America’s place in it.

    Looking at the massive amount of money passing through the national security establishment, the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh and Ryan Bourne note that trimming “waste, fraud, and abuse” by themselves won’t be sufficient. Real changes are needed in how the military deploys its efforts and in converting a global mission into one where allies do their share of the work in their own neighborhoods.

    “The foreign-policy establishment has pursued policies that throw away America’s greatest advantage: geography,” they note. “Great oceans remove the United States from most military threats.”

    To that end, Nowrasteh and Bourne recommend that the U.S. resume withdrawing troops from Europe for a potential annual savings of $100 billion. They also suggest that Army end-strength—numbers of active-duty soldiers—be reduced by 25 percent as the U.S. places reliance on the oceans that separate it from world hotspots. They warn that combatant commands with geographic and functional missions have become “costly lobbies for intervention that do little to make US forces more combat-effective” and call for them to be dissolved. They also point out that the Defense Department employs a civilian workforce of nearly 800,000 (or more) that could certainly be trimmed to a less bloated size.

    The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) agrees that the military could be shrunk. “The number of active-component military personnel could be reduced by about 17 percent,” it noted in December, for a savings over the next 10 years of about $1 trillion in 2025 dollars.

    In a more detailed 2022 paper, the CBO proposed deeper cuts in military personnel of between 18 and 21 percent. Force reductions could be concentrated on units with older equipment “to preserve modernization plans.” Under the CBO’s plans, the number of Navy ships would increase, emphasizing America’s reliance on the world’s oceans, as mentioned by Nowrasteh and Bourne, for trade and defense. Freedom of navigation in air and space would also be protected. In two of the three options considered by the CBO, the U.S. “would seek to deter military aggression by helping allies strengthen themselves against attack.”

    In both the Cato and CBO plans, the biggest savings would be found in reducing ground combat forces.

    We Can Cut Military Spending and Still Protect the Country

    “A 13 percent reduction in real defense funding over 10 years, though substantial, would be smaller than the two largest reductions that have occurred since the Korean War,” the CBO observed in its 2022 document. After the Cold War ended, defense budgets declined by 30 percent, adjusted for inflation.

    Importantly, while such cuts would reduce the ability of the U.S. government to project power around the world, they would maintain protection for the homeland and for freedom of navigation. By focusing on its own defense and encouraging allies to take responsibility for their own protection, the U.S. could keep itself safe while also giving the federal government an opportunity to balance the books and, hopefully, avoid the looming catastrophe of a default on the soaring national debt.

    Like all countries, the United States needs to defend itself from real and potential threats around the world. But defending the U.S. doesn’t mean defending other prosperous countries that can afford to provide for their own protection. Nor does it mean spending massive amounts of money to serve as the world’s policeman.

    The DOGE and Congress should find fertile ground for cost-cutting in the defense budget.

    There is little doubt that there are outdated programs and other areas to institute cost-cutting. There simply has to be the will to accomplish it.

  • DoD Bans All Trans Servicemembers

    DoD Bans All Trans Servicemembers

    In an overdue move, the Department of Defense has banned all transgendered individuals from serving in the military.

    In an memo issued today, Undersecretary Darrin Selnick stopped the accession of any transgendered individuals to the military and discharged any transgenders currently serving

    The memo spells out the new DoD wide policy in great specificity.

    f. The Department only recognizes two sexes: male and female. An individual’s sex is immutable, unchanging during a person’s life. All Service members will only serve in accordance with their sex, defined in Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” as “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.” 

    It is a big step in the right direction for the Military.

    Your editor endured the enactment of don’t ask, don’t tell and while it did not affect the Unit I was with at the time, I saw the corrosive effects in other units. The tranny thing was 1000 times worse according to troops I know who have endured it.

    One current E-6 of my acquaintance fell afoul of the trans madness and had to apply for a transfer to a different unit because of it. The unit had such low morale, the Army split the whole thing up and scattered the troops all over the country.

  • Some Accountability? It’s About Time

    Some Accountability? It’s About Time

    Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has decided on investigators to look into the mess that was the Afghanistan withdrawal.

    In an interview with Breitbart, Hegseth said “We’ve already identified folks that’ll be in charge of that full investigation inside the Pentagon . . . I don’t have a timeframe on it. Sadly, we’ve already waited two-and-a-half years, three years since what occurred. I don’t want to wait longer, but I always want to get it right,”

    The entire withdrawal was screwed up and Hegseth wants answers. “So, we’re going to drive that full investigation and get a sense of what happened. And as I stated to the workforce on Friday, I guess less than a week ago, accountability will be coming for what happened in Afghanistan, and that’s important to reestablishing trust at the Defense Department,” he said.

    As of right now, the only officer to be punished for the withdrawal that cost 13 US service members their lives, was LtCol Stuart Scheller. Except Scheller wasn’t involved directly in the debacle. His sin was making a video complaining about the lack of accountability at the flag levels in the military. He has been named as a senior advisor to the DOD under Hegseth.

  • Slash Military Spending: “Defense” Budgets are Bigger than Ever Before

    Slash Military Spending: “Defense” Budgets are Bigger than Ever Before

    Ryan McMaken for Mises.org

    def

    It should go without saying that asking generals and other Pentagon bureaucrats about defense spending is like asking your barber if you need a haircut. They are hardly disinterested observers. 

    So, it’s not surprising at all that the usual pentagon uniformed technocrats, after failing their audit for the seventh time in a row, remain unrepentant. Last month, after failing to provide documentation showing the Pentagon actually knows what it does with its money, the DoD engaged in the song and dance we have come to expect. For example, the Pentagon’s CFO Michael McCord announced that in spite of its abysmal performance in its audit, the Department “has turned a corner in its understanding of the depth and breadth of its challenges.” “I think we’re making progress,” he added.

    That’s swell, but it’s unclear that this “progress” amounts to much given that last year, the Pentagon admitted it can’t account for 63% of nearly $4 trillion in assets.

    The Pentagon has never passed an audit since the agency became legally obligated to carry them out in 2018. 

    Not that any of this matters in terms of any real consequences for the privileged class of parasite tax-eaters that are high ranking military officers and their corporate cronies at places like Boeing. 

    Military spending just keeps growing to new historic highs every few years, even in inflation-adjusted dollars. 

    Moreover, the dollars that go to the DoD directly are just part of the spending on so-called “defense.” The Pentagon effectively shares its functions with two other federal agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA, after all, is just an agency tasked with spending the deferred costs of previous military operations. That is, the VA delivers the benefits to veterans who were promised ongoing compensation—in the form of healthcare and other benefits—for military “service.” Without VA benefits, the Pentagon would never be able to recruit the troops it needs for its next round of foreign policy debacles. Thus, any true accounting for military budgets has to account for the long-term personnel costs that become apparent in VA spending.

    Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security contains numerous agencies related to nuclear war, biowarfare, the Coast Guard, and more. 

    Source: Office of Management and Budget. 

    When we look at these three agencies combined, the spending is astronomical. In 2024, the Department of Defense’s budget is still fourteen percent higher than it was at the height of Reagan’s Cold War buildup. After nearly 25 years of nearly continuous war, however, the costs of veteran’s benefits have soared, meaning that the total combined costs of military and defense spending are now 60 percent above their old Cold War peak. 

    None of this, by the way, takes into account the immense contribution to the national debt made by defense spending. In the 2024 fiscal year, the US paid $884 billion in interest payments on the debt. It’s safe to say that federal interest payments would be hundreds of billions of dollars lower were it not for military and defense spending.

    The cost of various failed military occupations contributes much to this endless gravy train for the military, but much of the waste now comes in the form of technology spending. This spending on newer and more expensive toys for government agencies often amounts to little more than corporate welfare. The F-35, for example, is the quintessential example. William Hartung writes: 

    If carried to completion, the F-35 will be the most expensive weapons program in history, at a cost of $1.7 trillion over its lifetime. Yet 23 years into the program, the F-35 still has major flaws in its software and hardware — over 800 unresolved defects according to one Pentagon analysis. And it spends inordinate amounts of time out of action for maintenance. Versions of the plane for the Air Force, Navy, and Marines were designed to carry out multiple functions — aerial dogfights, bombing targets on the ground, close air support for troops, landing on both airstrips on land and the decks of aircraft carriers — and it does none of them particularly well.

    For his part, [Elon] Musk has referred to the F-35 as “jack of all trades, master of none” and “the worst military value for money in history.” His critique is right on target. It is long past time to cut the F-35 program short in favor of cheaper, more reliable alternatives.

    In other words, that’s $1.7 trillion down the drain in terms of actual defense. But it sure has made many of the Pentagon’s 500,000 “private” contractors rich. 

    Hartung has also noted that the Pentagon’s tech spending—i.e., corporate welfare—has now begun flowing in every larger quantities to Silicon Valley. The alliance between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon has substantially grown in recent years. Parasite “capitalists” like Peter Thiel are among the biggest beneficiaries. For example, Thiel’s Palantir, an AI platform designed to help the CIA spy on Americans, has seen big gains in its stock price following another infusion of more than $400 million in the third quarter alone. Taxpayer dollars accounted for 56 percent of Palantir’s revenue during the period, while actual private-sector revenues disappointed. Silicon Valley is increasingly fueled by government contracts, and defense spending is a growing part of this. 

    It remains to be seen what any of this has to do with actually effective deterrence, diplomacy, or defense. But, it does help build a corps of corporate welfare-queen lobbyists who will fight tooth and nail to prevent any meaningful cuts to defense spending. 

    Unfortunately, there will be no meaningful progress made on bringing the federal government’s runaway spending under control without substantial cuts to military spending. Much of the “discretionary” spending that can be cut in the appropriations process is found in the military and defense budgets. Elderly voters, of course, will throw a fit if anyone mentions cutting their favorite welfare programs, Social Security and Medicare. Moreover, that spending is “non-discretionary” meaning Congress must pass new laws changing spending formulas on top of the appropriations process. That should all be done, of course, but it also means we might as well start with cuts to defense spending. 

    There is plenty of fat to trim. American taxpayers still spend generously to maintain more than 165,000 US troops overseas, many in countries that are wealthy allies who can easily afford their own military defense. As reported by Statista this week

    According to data from the Defense Manpower Data Center, South Korea has the third highest number of active U.S. troops deployed of any country outside of the contiguous U.S., at over 23,000 personnel. It follows only after Japan (52,852) and Germany (34,894). As of June 2024, there are 165,830 active personnel overseas, rising to 1,294,191 active personnel when including those in the U.S.

    Meanwhile, in spite of the Pentagon’s gargantuan budgets, dirt-poor Houthi rebels have effectively sent Red-Sea shipping into chaos. Yet, Americans have been told for 200-plus years that the US Navy keeps the “high seas” open for shipping. This is not money well spent. 

    If so-called fiscal hawks were serious about cutting federal spending, they’d be advocating for hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to the military and defense budgets. At the very least, spending must be returned to its old Cold War peak with a cut of more than $470 billion right off the top. Most of that should come out of the Pentagon budget since cuts to the VA would rightly be portrayed as a ghoulish attempt by Pentagon brass to preserve their own salaries and toys at the expense of ordinary veterans. 

    Even these “huge” cuts wouldn’t abolish even half of the $2-trillion-plus deficits that the US will be facing each year in coming years. 

    But, we all know that, until a significant change in the public’s ideology about federal spending takes place, we will not see any real cuts to federal spending, military or otherwise. The American public still largely views federal deficits and debt as free money, so there are few calls for any real cuts. This is reflected in public opinion surveys that show Americans still want to see more spending pretty much everywhere. 

    Nor will there be any top-down reforms. Contrary to the beloved beltway myth that “personnel is policy,” policy actually stems from public opinion, and the regime will never push anything more than the most milquetoast reforms until the public demands otherwise. Those who think otherwise are lost in the throes of “cope” and wishful thinking. This administration will not spend political capital on any sizable cuts to any program given that there is no public demand for any such thing. It doesn’t matter that Trump’s newest Secretary of Whatever wrote an op-ed ten years ago calling for big budget cuts. That’s simply not going to translate into anything meaningful in the year 2024. 

    Rather, what is really going to happen is the US will continue downward in its debt spiral, racking up ever larger deficits. Yields on Treasuries will gradually rise as the federal government floods the markets with ever more debt. Interest on the debt will rise ever higher, siphoning off more and more resources from present spending to pay off the deficits of long-ago failed wars and welfare programs. 

    Meanwhile, the central bank will attempt to keep yields under control by being the “buyer of last resort” and mopping up the excess Treasuries. That will manifest as price inflation as the central bank must create new money to pay for all those bonds. Then, it will be “rinse and repeat” as inflation and debt mounts, and federal spending continues unabated, funneling ever larger dollar amounts to Silicon Valley billionaires and fat-cat weapons makers. 

    Only after the debt- and inflation-fueled destruction of the middle class becomes undeniable will the public finally lose faith in the idea that ever more government spending makes the people better off. Only then will we see the bottom-up demands for change that are badly needed right now.

    That, of course, is the good-case scenario. If we do our job as free-market activists, a growing share of the public will see the destruction wrought by our debt spiral, and real reform will come sooner than later. Without free-market activists, on the other hand, there may be no end in sight at all. In the bad-case scenario, the public rejects markets and laissez-faire entirely, and simply concludes that the only way out is total central planning and soviet-style socialism. The time for fight for radical change toward laissez-faire is right now. 

  • SECDEF ClusterF*ck

    SECDEF ClusterF*ck

    Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was admitted into the ICU at Walter Reed National Military Medical center on Monday of last week. He apparently suffered complications after an elective surgery. The Pentagon issued a statement on Friday.

    Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder provided the following statement on Secretary of Defense Austin:

    On the evening of January 1, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for complications following a recent elective medical procedure. He is recovering well and is expecting to resume his full duties today. At all times, the Deputy Secretary of Defense was prepared to act for and exercise the powers of the Secretary, if required.

    Yah, except he didn’t bother to tell ANYONE that he got admitted. From what I’ve seen, and I have no reason to doubt the veracity of those reports, the first anyone heard of his admission to the ICU was three days later. His deputy, Kathleen Hicks, was on vacation in Puerto Rico and unaware Austin had been hospitalized. The White House first found out late on Thursday. Congress wasn’t informed until Friday, 15 minutes before the news broke. Meanwhile, his staff kept telling people “the Secretary is working from home for the week” while recovering.

    WTAF?!?! Seriously, in what world is this acceptable? It’s not as if the world is ready to burst into flames at any second. Oh, wait, it is. Hell, someone at DOD ordered a drone strike on an Iraqi militia leader while Austin was in the ICU.

    It gets worse, POTATUS said he still supports Austin and his job is not in jeopardy. How that’s possible, I don’t know. Someone is going to have to get the axe for this, but it won’t be anyone that should get it. Look for some mid-level staffer to get loudly and publicly get defenestrated in the coming days. It’s just a matter of finding the correct scapegoat.

    Addendum: as I was getting ready to publish this piece, some new information came to light. Austin was not released from Walter Reed on Friday as the DOD release insinuated. He is still admitted, but no longer in the ICU.

  • Pentagon Official Charged With Running Dogfighting Ring

    Pentagon Official Charged With Running Dogfighting Ring

    A senior communications official at the Defense Department allegedly took part in an illegal dog fighting ring for more than two decades in the Washington, D.C. area.

    Maryland resident Frederick Douglass Moorefield Jr., a deputy chief information officer for command, control and communications for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and an associate, Mario Damon Flythe, 49, also of Maryland, were arrested and charged with “promoting and furthering” a dog fighting venture, the Department of Justice said in a release on Monday.   

    The two used an encrypted messaging app to discuss their operation, dubbed “the DMV Board,” with individuals across the U.S., including how to train dogs for the fights. They also shared videos about dogfighting, planned the events and bet on them, shared media reports about people who were caught, and communicated about how to keep their operation hidden from law enforcement.

    Authorities recovered 12 dogs at Moorefield and Flythe’s residences and found veterinary steroids, training schedules, a bloodied carpet, and a “device consisting of an electrical plug and jumper cables, which the affidavit alleges is consistent with devices used to execute dogs that lose dogfights,” the DOJ said. 

    Anne Arundel County authorities had received complaints about Moorefield and Flythe for years, and in November 2018 the county animal control was alerted to a report of two dead dogs in a plastic dog food bag in Annapolis, about six miles from Moorefield’s home, Daly wrote. In addition to the dogs in the bag, investigators found mail addressed to Moorefield, Daly’s affidavit stated.

    When Daly spoke to Moorefield on the day of the raid, he acknowledged that he operated under the name “Geehad Kennels,” and that local animal control and law enforcement had previously visited his property, the affidavit states. Flythe told another FBI agent that he used the name “Razor Sharp Kennels” and “admitted to having engaged in dogfighting in the past.” (The Washington Post)

    A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Tim Gorman, said the DOD was “aware of the criminal complaint” filed against Moorefield and confirmed “the individual is no longer in the workplace” but did not comment further. 

    https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1709039167345176604?s=20

    Source: October 3, 2023 https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2023/10/03/pentagon-official-arrested-for-allegedly-running-dog-fighting-ring-n2629248

  • Biden doesn’t want military promotions awarded on merit?

    Biden doesn’t want military promotions awarded on merit?

    (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

    BEEGE WELBORN | HotAir

    I saw this late yesterday afternoon and I have to admit it is baffling to me.

    Biden Admin Opposes Merit-Based Military Promotions, Wants Provisions For Race And Gender

    President Joe Biden’s administration is fighting back against a new provision in the annual defense spending bill that would require military promotions to be based solely on merit rather than considering race or gender.

    Why is it baffling? Because – cock-eyed optimist that I am – I always thought that’s how promotions pretty much went. In theory, the best candidate gets the next stripe or rank. Now, in reality is that true? Of course not, and we have a stellar airman in our family to prove it. A kid who came out of deployment to Djibouti with not one, but two joint awards from the Special Operations command (which he was not assigned to, but requested by name to fap over and help out) – both the Joint Service Achievement and Commendation medals – and do you think he could get promoted in the Air Force?

    Nah. They have to tickee some stupid pre-determined “qualities we’re looking for THIS year” boxes to even be considered by their promotion board, which have zero to do with war-fighting or making the Air Force better. And they wonder why they’re losing their self-motivated, innovative superstars.

    But, at least in the Marine Corps, if you were a stellar performer, I always felt you had a great shot going in, no matter who you were up against. Everybody’s face gets seen/record briefed who is in the zone. There’s no preselection, like Ebola and his compadres face – no “commander’s choice” BS.

    I can’t speak to the other services, but I would hope they traditionally handle it with an open door policy. Everyone, however worthy, has a chance to get their shiny mug glanced at and if you came up short, usually that was on you.

    Not your skin color or gender.

    I do understand where the officer corps, especially as you get into the rarified ranks, starts to become a “beauty pageant,” if you will. Quotas, real and imagined, are probably a factor, thanks to Congressional pressure and outside interest groups who are always crawling up the DoD’s butt, since even before the first time I spit after hearing Pat Schroeder’s name. Believe me, as an enlisted WM (Woman Marine, which is no longer PC) in the 80s and 90s, we hated that woman.

    This blows my mind. There has to be at least a veneer of merit based achievement counting for the bulk of your score, however it’s computed. Who wants to stand perhaps almost a point above another candidate, and still possibly lose because they had a vagina or darker skin or whatever the “special class bonus round” award was?

    What in the Sam HELL?!

    Like I told Ed yesterday, we all used to be green or blue and life sucked, or was wonderful equally across the board.

    I’m curious if Congressman Jim Banks, who wrote this provision as well as one eliminating the DEIA efforts in the current version of the defense authorization bill, has done this as a preemptive strike, a clarification, or if he had word of directives to promotion boards calling for racial or gender quotas?

    That would certainly be yet another disheartening slide toward the abyss for the military.

    …Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), who wrote both the merit and DEI pay limit provisions, told The Post that he “consider[s] the White House’s opposition to my amendments a badge of honor.”

    “Wokeness is a cancer that will destroy our military from the inside out if we don’t stop it,” Banks said.

    But the merit provision, unlike some of the other provisions, is not explicitly anti-DEIA.

    It would simply require the Pentagon to make all military hiring, assignment, selection and promotion decisions “on the basis of merit in order to advance those individuals who exhibit the talent and abilities necessary to promote the national security of the United States,” according to the draft bill, which sets annual defense spending and policy priorities.

    I did find it interesting that they tried removing photos when Mark Esper was SecDef, and it didn’t work out numbers-wise the way they wanted or felt they needed.

    Let me also caveat that the “they” referenced is the Biden administration, which came into office as the numbers from the previous boards came back. Milley, Kirby, and the extremist/white rage hunting DoD DEI mob were doing the proportion math.

    …Diversity among leadership dropped after photos were removed last year from Navy promotion packages, Vice Adm. John Nowell said during a panel discussion on diversity and inclusion at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference.

    “I think we should consider reinstating photos in selection boards,” he said. “We look at, for instance, the one-star board over the last five years, and we can show you where, as you look at diversity, it went down with photos removed.”

    …Williamson said there was an “assumption that there’s bias in the boardroom,” but a recent review of the Marine Corps’ promotion board process by the Department of the Navy’s office for diversity, equity and inclusion found that’s likely untrue.

    “We’re doing a survey right now to see if there’s bias inside the evaluation system,” he said. “[If] we find out that there’s disparities within the way we do business within a service, we need to be intellectually curious enough to ask why and then figure out what we need to do.”

    The comments come as the Defense Department works to address extremism and promote diversity in the military. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has spoken “very publicly that at the senior leaders’ level, we are not as diverse as the rest of the force,” Chief Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday.

    Call me cynical, but I’m not surprised at all “the numbers” didn’t make that group happy.

    If you take a look at the DoD response to the proposed provisions – and particularly the one which includes the DEIA elimination and merit-based promotions – they are all major butthurt at the very thought of losing their focus on diversity…

    Screencap Dod H.R. 2670

    …but nowhere in that litany of the wonders of inclusion, life experiences, and positive work environments does it say anything about war-fighting.

    Promotion selection boards should be selecting the BEST in their field, not the prettiest, politest or best BIPOC volunteer in the community.

    As a dear friend of ours – a brilliant retired Marine Corps LtCol himself and Ebola’s godfather – just told me:

    “Select war fighters. Select ONLY war fighters!!!”

    There can’t be an argument about that.

    Original Here

  • Our Military in Decay?

    Our Military in Decay?

    In reading one article, there was a link to an older article from November 2021. If anything, the ’decay’ may have become worse under Biden.

    Our Military in Decay? Facing Some Hard Truths

    Twenty years after 9/11, is its leadership about anything more than Washington’s revolving door and huge contracts?

    Kelley Beaucar Vlahosfor Spectator.org.

    When USMC Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller first got news that an explosion had rocked one of the gates at the Kabul airport on Aug. 26, killing 13 U.S. service members and 169 Afghan civilians, he decided to post a YouTube video with his reaction — knowing it could kill his 17-year career and current post as a Marine advanced infantry battalion commander.

    “I’m making this video because I have a growing disconnect and contempt for perceived ineptitude at the policy level,” said Scheller, donned in his Marine fatigues and looking a bit shell shocked.  “The reason people are so upset right now … they are upset that senior leaders let them down and no one is raising their hands and saying we messed this up.”

    Lt.Col. Stuart Scheller

    He pointed to Secretary of Defense Austin and other senior civilian and military leaders who had assured Congress in May that the Afghan Security forces would be able to withstand the Taliban sweep when American and NATO forces withdrew. He questioned the decision to evacuate the fortified Bagram Airfield in early July.

    “Clearly they were wrong,” he said, noting he was fielding emails questioning whether fellow Marines had died in vain over the last 20 years. “What I’ll say is, from my position, potentially all those people did die in vain if we do not have senior leaders who own up, who raise their hands to say we did not do well in the end. Without that we are just repeating the same mistakes.”

    Lt.Col. Stuart Scheller

    Scheller was relieved of his command, jailed briefly, and court-martialed, but a largely sympathetic military judge gave him a reprimand and $5,000 fine (much to the consternation of the prosecution). While the military community was split over his punishment for violating code, there was clearly something more powerful going on. Scheller’s decision to put his career on the line to demand accountability became a mantra, not just about the August evacuation — but a reckoning of the last two decades.

    (Ret.) Col. Doug Macgregor, writing in the American Conservative in October:

    The generals always knew that the public admission of failure would not simply throw 20 years of graft and deceit into sharp relief; such an admission would expose the four stars themselves to serious scrutiny. To explain the rapid collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan state and the inexcusable waste of American blood and treasure, the American people would discover the long process of moral and professional decline in the senior ranks of the Army and the Marines, their outdated doctrine, thinking, and organization for combat. For the generals it was always better to preserve the façade in Kabul, propping up the illusion of strength, than face the truth.

    It was as if the Afghanistan debacle had finally ripped the last scab off the military’s role in the failed enterprise. Suddenly the superstar warrior/monk generals for whom the mainstream media had written endless paeans, before which members of Congress had bowed and scraped, were under the garish light of delayed circumspection.

    As a result, there is plenty of talk about what went wrong and what shape the military is in for the future. And certainly just focusing on “the generals” would be shortsighted. This is about the institution — for which America’s trust is actually plummeting. So can the military really afford not to take stock of the cultural, institutional — and yes, political — changes that have swept over it in the last 20 years or more?

    “My major concern is military effectiveness,” says (Ret.) Marine Corps. Capt. Dan Grazier, who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan in a tank battalion and is now a military analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, “that in the rare event where the military does need to be deployed that we can be the most effective, lethal force possible when the situation calls for it.”

    After interviews with several infantry veterans who served in the post-9/11 wars, The American Spectator picked up on a familiar theme as the main obstacle for rebuilding the forces and the faith: leadership corrupted by careerism and influenced by outside interests that don’t always coincide with the interests of the national defense.

    The forces aren’t healthy: whose fault?

    To Grazier’s mind, after 20 years of constant deployments the military is “going to naturally decay.” It’s impossible to sustain systems on a tempo of that measure without undergoing entropy. According to the most recent RAND Corporation study on deployments, 2.7 million service members have served in 5.4 million deployments across the globe since 2001. The National Guard and reserves account for about 35 percent of the total (as of 2015). In fact, thanks to COVID, wildfires, border patrol, and the extra security put on the nation’s capital in January, the Guard was used in 2020 more than any time since World War II. Missions peaked in June when more than 120,000 of its 450,000 members were on duty here or abroad.

    Gil Barndollar, who served in Afghanistan with the Marines and is now a fellow with Defense Priorities, says retention will be a concern. These “citizen soldiers” have “become an operational reserve, not the strategic reserve they were originally intended to be,” he told the Spectator.“Manpower is a rollercoaster, the effects on recruiting and retention always have a lag after events and policy decisions.”

    He laments that the Guard, of which he is currently a member, has been used to augment the active duty force so that it can maintain what has become protracted, unending overseas conflicts, often using resources and equipment that are needed stateside, particularly helicopters necessary to fight wildfires in western states.

    “It hasn’t been just a long year, it’s been a long 20 years,” Army Maj. Gen. Bret Daugherty, commander of the Washington state Guard, said back in January. “I just want to focus on that. We’re all consumed with our domestic operations right now, but it is simultaneous with our overseas deployments, which have not let up one iota.”

    Unfortunately, instead of pouring resources and energy into maintaining readiness, much of Washington’s zeal today is about throwing money at shiny new objects: big-ticket weapons systems, ships, and aircraft that either take years to build, become obsolete, or don’t work. A boon to the Beltway defense lobby, not so much for the fighting forces.

    “The military has gotten into a lot of bad habits over the last 20 years. If you look at the amount of money that was thrown at the Pentagon, it’s created a lack of discipline,” Grazier charges. “After 9/11 the floodgates were opened wide. That played to the worst tendencies of the military industrial congressional complex.”

    He points specifically to the F-35 fighter, which reached its 20-year anniversary in October and is the most expensive military project in history at $1.7 trillion in lifetime costs. One Air Force Secretary called the industry cost overruns in the program a “poster child for acquisitions malpractice.” And it still hasn’t passed full mission testing, mostly because its super-advanced technological bells and whistles have created a maintenance nightmare. The tragic irony? It’s likely to become obsolete. Yet Congress keeps buying more. Lockheed Martin, the F-35’s primary contractor, has spent $76 million in lobbying over the last five years alone, so it’s sure to get its money’s worth.

    Then there is the Littoral Combat Ship, which was based on strategic planning in the 1990s. After spending $500 million for 21 ships, the Navy has decided the early designs are  largely obsolete, particularly for “great power competition” with China. So it’s already decommissioned one ship — after only 13 years of service  — and plans to take several more offlinerather than spend the $2.5 billion upgrading them. Today there are still 31 built or under construction.

    (Ret.) Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, who also served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, blames the influence of private industry, particularly its cozy relationships inside the Pentagon for the dysfunctional nature of procurement and acquisitions. Private defense firms spent $1 billion lobbying Washington since 2001, and in return received some $7 trillionin taxpayer funds over the course of the post-9/11 wars — that’s half of the $14 trillion spent overall.

    Davis says this amount of money sloshing around has created enormous boondoggles that leave the forces ultimately high and dry (and the contractors fat and happy). Chew on this: the Air Force now wants to cut more than 87,000 pilot training hours because aircraft sustainment costs soared to $1 billion this year.

    A favorite example of the lunacy, Davis says, is failure of the Army’s Future Combat Systems, which in 2003 promised to replace the M1 Abrams and M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles by 2010.  It was canceled in 2009 after $18 billion spent and without a functional prototype.

    In 2010 the Army announced the new Ground Combat Vehicle. That was canceled in 2014. Then the Army proposed the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle. This had to take a “tactical pause” in 2020 after a poor showing by contractors. As of today the program is back to square one, with five vendors sharing $244 million for the initial design phase, with full production by 2027. That’s a nearly quarter-century saga. Unfinished.

    “This is a service-wide failure of the highest order,” Davis tells the Spectator. “The Russians started their own vehicle modernization program and started making production units of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles in a total of six years, yet the vaunted U.S. Army with all its alleged brilliance, has started multiple new programs since 1999 — and has yet to produce even a single prototype.”

    Davis and Grazier say the problem is too much money and industry influence going on the E-Ring to get at it. Thus the revolving door: one POGO report from 2008 to 2018 found that 280 high ranking officialsbecame lobbyists, board members, executives, or consultants for defense contractors within two years of leaving the service. Military officers going through the revolving door included 25 generals, 9 admirals, 43 lieutenant generals, and 23 vice admirals.

    And then they come back. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper was a Raytheon lobbyist ($27 billion in federal contracts in 2020); Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan came from Boeing ($21 billion), Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy bounced over from Lockheed ($74 billion), and current Secretary of Defense Austin was a paid member of the Raytheon board after leaving the service in 2016.

    Ethics rules are notoriously weak and the culture within the Pentagon incentivizes what many call “cronyism” or “rent seeking” inside, in which the top five companies get a third of all federal defense contracts, crowding out competition and making programs — like the F-35 — notoriously inefficient. Grazier says service members are conditioned early on to believe that industry interests are one in the same with the country’s interests (and to act accordingly), but that is not always true.

    “I remember going through the quad in the Pentagon, it must have been late 2012,” said Davis. “I remember being disgusted by the fairs that defense companies would hold. It looked like the circus had come to town … it was all ‘buy this, buy that.’ There was nothing about how this might accomplish our strategic objectives; it was all about buying cool stuff. Find a place to make it fit.”

    No Pattons or MacArthurs here

    Barndollar sees the “careerism” that has overtaken the officer ranks over the last two decades as an even bigger issue. To his mind, this has led to a culture of risk avoidance and “CYA” (cover your ass) among the ambitious, where often blind loyalty and the ability to play politics play second fiddle to merit and competence on the path to higher promotions. In order to stay on that upward trajectory, one has to keep his or her head down, play the game.

    Critics say this tends to produce ineffectual, mediocre commanders, and that can lead to serious leadership failures.

    Barndollar points to the two Navy ship collisions in a span of months in 2017 which actually left 17 sailors dead. “Officers (and civilians) at the top refused to listen to warnings and bad news,” leading up to the accidents, said Barndollar. An official Navy report confirmed that leadership issues were rampant and both events were “avoidable.”

    “It’s easier to see this in the Navy because they are running massive equipment in a tougher environment,” but it is happening in all of the services, said Barndollar.

    On the greatest level, you see it manifest in the failures of the war strategy, the generals telling Congress only what they wanted to hear for 20 years, the inability of officers to stand up and say no, we aren’t doing this right. “When you see moral cowardice from the general officers, that’s about careerism. It’s a failure to speak truth to power and call out the institution and its problems.”

    If the zeal with which the prosecution wanted to punish Stuart Scheller is any indication, it’s going to be very difficult to turn this particular ship around. The rank and file may be ready for the truth, but until the leadership is provided different incentives beyond cozy industry sinecures and stars, critics say the military is headed for more hurt than healing.

    Should there be rules precluding retiring officers from going, immediately, into employment with ’defense contractors’?

  • Quid Pro Joe, Postal Workers Use Leverage from 2020 Mail-in Ballot Fraud…

    Quid Pro Joe, Postal Workers Use Leverage from 2020 Mail-in Ballot Fraud…

    Quid Pro Joe, Postal Workers Use Leverage from 2020 Mail-in Ballot Fraud to Gain Exemption From Vaccine Mandate

    The United States Postal Service (USPS) workers will be exempt from the mandatory vaccine requirements of all federal workers.  The most logical reason for the Biden carve-out is the blackmail and leverage carried by the USPS for their role in the 2020 mail-in ballot fraud.   Quid pro Joe.

    WASHINGTON POST – U.S. Postal Service workers were not included in Biden’s executive order requiring all federal employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, according to a White House official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss not-yet-public portions of the president’s plan. The postal workers would be strongly encouraged to comply with the mandate, the official said. 

    The move exempts a massive chunk of the federal workforce — 644,000 employees and growing as the agency ramps up seasonal hiring — that interacts daily with an equally large swath of the public.  One of the Postal Service’s powerful unions, the American Postal Workers Union, in July criticized the administration’s efforts to require federal workers to be vaccinated and demanded that postal leadership collectively bargain on the issue. (read more)

    On a positive note, this unilateral exemption provides massive support for any lawsuit against the Biden administration over the forced vaccination order.  The DOJ cannot claim ‘public health’ as a reason for the mandate and simultaneously claim the USPS carve-out is unrelated.
    September 9, 2021 https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/09/09/quid-pro-joe-postal-workers-use-leverage-from-2020-mail-in-ballot-fraud-to-gain-exemption-from-vaccine-mandate/

    Joe Biden Promises to Bully, Harass GOP Governors Who Refuse His Vax Mandates
    Direct Video Link: https://rumble.com/vmam13-joe-biden-promises-to-bully-harass-gop-governors-who-refuse-his-vax-mandate.html

    A BioFascist Coup Was Declared Today – Bannon speaks with Dr. Naomi Wolf
    Direct Video Link: https://rumble.com/vmas3g-a-biofascist-coup-was-declared-today.html

    Comment/Opinion: Serious & immediate steps must be taken in consideration to the removal of President Biden. Daily we witness his diminishing cognitive abilities. Now, this extraordinary aggression towards governors. Quite simply, he is placing ALL Americans lives in danger.