Yes, $28 million is peanuts compared to the billions we spent in the middle east in the last 10+ years. Trillions, actually, but even at the height of it, we weren’t spending $28 million an hour. But yes, it cost a shit ton.
What sucks is there is ZERO motivation to be frugal or even wise in government spending. My ex wife works for the Department of Labor. They and every other department get their annual budget. Now lets say towards the end of the year, after all the costs of flights and per diems and other things, they have a budget surplus. Good, right? No, that’s bad! If they have a surplus then it looks like their budget is too high. Instead they go a on a spree buying new printers or computers or what ever to make it come out even. Heck a little in the hole is ok so they can ask for a BIGGER budget. That is just one example, but it seem to me if we rewarded workers for being mindful of the budget and shoot for a surplus, we might use it to pay down say the debt.
I am not as jaded to think that the middle east wars were solely for the military industrial complex, but it is a huge money sink. Part of it has to be, because they are asking for something that doesn’t even exist yet (like a stealth fighter) and that costs money. They also do a lot of generic R&D that might have military applications later (a lot of that trickles down to consumer products at some point.)
But I’d like to see us take a more purely defensive role. We don’t need to keep the cold war readiness anymore. There is no point to it. If we really think Russia or someone else is threat, let our Allies, who are next door to them, up their defense. If they don’t then maybe we don’t need the current level.
The distinction here is not adult vs. spoiled child, it is competent vs. not. Unfortunately, he’s pretty good at what he does, as long as you look past the agenda.
On his watch, the trains will at least be running on time, vs. the average Trump appointee that is still trying to figure out where to put the coal in a diesel/electric engine.
This is of course nothing compared to the likely tens of BILLIONS of dollars wasted on the US Army’s ACU/UCP digital pattern camoflage. Not just uniforms, but patterned field gear like packs, load-bearing equipment, etc… All worthless, simply because the Army wanted to badly have a digital pattern just like the Marine Corps. The pattern they ended up with (OCP) after all that doesn’t look THAT much different than my old BDUs from the 80’s.
The Marines did it on the cheap (and successfully) by borrowing the CADPAT pattern from the Canadians. Probably promised them some Tim Horton’s GIft Certificates or something.
Thats for the combined Afghanistan/Iraq war. Afghanistan alone wasn’t near it.
I am not saying there isn’t wasteful spending in private enterprise, but there are also many companies who strive for cost cutting. Other provide incentives in the forms of profit sharing. And companies are beholden to shareholders, investors, owners, etc. Coming in UNDER budget on a project usually gets people bonuses.
Even evil Walmart gives a healthy bonus to hourly workers if they can keep their shrinkage down to a certain percentage. I missed out on it one year because a lady in the jewelry department stole a bunch of stuff. Man, you have to steal A LOT of Walmart jewelry to screw over the whole store, but she did it.
Camo print became so popular that eventually Navy Personnel began clamoring for it. To the embarrassment of many, the current Navy working uniform is a blue camouflage print. … I asked a Navy commander about the rationale. He looked down at his trousers and sighed. “Thats so no one can see you if you fall overboard.”
According to a USMC family member of mine, the promise was actually for cheap beer.
Right again! You’re on a roll! It wasn’t 1 1/4 hours of expenditure, it was a whole 2 1/2 hours!
Bonus: They could’ve replaced the entire Afghan uniform buy 10 times every day!
(put another way; the $28M spent on uniforms over 10 years represents about 0.0036% of total US spending. In other words, for every $100 spent there, one-third of one cent went on faulty uniforms.)
(for comparison, in 2015 about $2.8M was spent on the faulty uniforms, although that wasn’t a complete waste, since even though the cam pattern was far from ideal it wasn’t worthless, and anyway the ANA had to wear something. Meanwhile, in that same year the US dropped 947 bombs on Afghanistan at a cost - using reasonable assumptions - of about $14M. But that’s just for the bombs themselves; it doesn’t take in to account the fuel and maintenance costs of the planes used to haul the bombs, nor the massive infrastructure costs required to support the zoomies. What was spent on ANA uniforms could’ve been saved by cutting the number of bombs dropped by 20%. That doesn’t necessarily mean a reduction in combat effectiveness, either, if the targeting process were improved by a similar amount [hint: leave the weddings alone]. As interesting as the waste on uniforms is, it’s also interesting to ponder why Mattis chose that as his smoking gun, given the options available to him.)
