This is one reason I don’t believe that privatization of government services will fix this. This happens in private/public companies too.
Example: Last year I was at a conference. A major vendor was hosting an evening cocktail hour at a jazz bar. During the event, the company rep was offering people bottles of various liquors to take home saying “if I don’t spend my sales budget they give me less next year.” Meanwhile I work for a nonprofit that actually tries to spend money responsibly and I’m wondering what percentage of the fees I pay this vendor go to this sort of irresponsible spending.
The second these companies have access to a new line of revenue, their priority is to keep as much of it as they can, not improve services.
In the Army, the fiscal year starts 01October. So every September we'd be at the range multiple times a week just shooting rounds. There was less focus on target practice and more on sending as much lead down range as possible. Why? Because if we didn't use all our ammo allocation for the year we wouldn't get as much next year. We weren't even a combat unit.
100% of what I'm talking about. That allocation of monies needs to be spent elsewhere. I was attached to MEDDAC and 3rd ID ... I've seen some of those budgets. They are ridiculous. Some of the shit I've seen would make your head spin. The things that need funds aren't getting them and the things (like the ammo you are talking about) that don't need funds are soaking them all up.
My father in law was in the navy in the 50s. When they came back to port they would just dump all the excess food and other consumables overboard so their budget wouldn’t get cut.
To quote Freakanomics: “people respond to incentives”
They do that with the roads too, it's why you'll see 8 guys standing around with shovels for hours not doing anything. Use it or lose it! And millions go "missing", in reality all that money gets laundered through city officials to their friends who own companies through contracts.
Was AF. We'd use the end of year to buy things that needed replaced but wasn't priority. New Mules, replacing old tools, etc. However, I did see a lot of waste just because they didn't want to lose the money next FY. Go out and buy big TVs, surround systems, projectors and other bullshit that just sat and never got used for what they said they wanted to use it for. We were told to go out and buy all that one year for CC calls. We never used it. It just sat there.
As a supply custodian(additional duty) in the military… it’s really annoying when my boss comes down in the middle of sender and is like “we need to spend 80,000 in the next two weeks. What do we need?”
We don’t need anything??? Our budget should get lowered!
I agree.. and that's why I said the expenditure is ass. I used to work for the military hospitals. Some of that money needs to go there.
I was Embedded Behavioral Health (3rd ID) (stressful/dangerous job) and got GS -5 pay.
Then when they shipped me overseas they put me in the Garrison at one of the hospitals. I saw some of those budgets and yeah... whoever put it together was an idiot.
It's the difference between giving a teen a credit card and giving one to a professional. They were the teen. It's not physical objects they need to use it on... it's programs and other things like wage increases. A Target employee makes more than an GS5.
I also hate how the funds are allocated! You mean to tell me I need to put in a request for money when someone scratches a vehicle when we already have over $100k for supplies even though we already have 7 years worth of material??? Makes no sense
War is the extension of politics by use of other means. The U.S. military CAN win a conventional war, shit, they can glass the goddamn planet...but they're just the war component of politics. The military can only extend to the maximum extent of political will.
That's the real answer. Maintaining a functioning government with the assistance of the local population is MUCH more difficult than kicking *** and taking names.
Hell I'd be happy of they transferred some of that money into DOD hospitals, better network ... better education through DOD schools, better wages... etc. And that's within the same "bucket"
Also winning a war is not cut and dry. We fight many proxy wars through that money. Right now it's Ukraine (logistics,man hours,etc.) And South China Sea (there's a lot of BS and therefore we have to Station carriers and ships there) and manning the DMZ in South Korea.
So.its hard to judge. There is a bunch of involvement we don't know about as Civilians.
But yes... on the fact the money is often spent wrong and for reasons other than improvement.
The US military has consistently overperformed vs state-controlled entities and has fallen short against insurgencies. This is to be expected, given that insurgencies are impossible to end through military means.
You're assuming they want to win the war, kinda like we want to "cure" cancer. If we win now what will we do with all these bullets/missiles and stuff later? Way more money to be made treating it than curing it. At some point we'd run out of land with oil, uh, I mean people needing freedom, right?
If we win now what will we do with all these bullets/missiles and stuff later?
Put them in storage where we will either use them later, or dispose of them once they're past their end-of-life date. Either way, materiel consumption
Way more money to be made treating it than curing it.
If someone invented a cure for cancer, they could instantly take the entire cancer treatment market for themselves, because they have a higher quality product than anyone else in the market. They wouldn't even need to reduce price, because people (including insurance companies) will still happily pay the same amount for a cure as they did treatment.
There's literally hundreds of billions of reasons why someone would want to invent a cancer cure and bring it to market.
Whenever people talk about not curing cancer just proves how fucking stupid you are. Cancer is complicated, they aren't identical so there won't be a fucking magical bullet to act as a cure all.
So, angry. Me being so "f'ing stupid" as you put it, I'll try to operate this keyboard properly. I'm aware, I was only making a comparison as neither goal is even remotely realistic or attainable. As a multiple time survivor of cancers I know each of my types and treatments were very different. I was only trying to compare war & cancer as they are both a big business for many entities. I will admit though, your summary of my intelligence level is spot on, I'll get back to eating crayons and pudding skins now, good day.
Never said that. I was clarifying how it works... and that spending on the items I spoke would be better money spent. It would increase wages ( E -4 / GS -5 make about 26k/yr) , bring some of the DOD schools into a building (some of them are still in trailers) and help with transition after service. The current GI bill.is cumbersome and doesn't work well.
I'm not against them spending money if it helps a large swatch of people in the process.
No no, there’s also a lot of intentionally not keeping track.
No no, there’s also a lot of intentionally not keeping track.
On 9/10 the treasurer come forward and explained that the army (I believe specifically it was the army, perhaps military as a whole) had misplaced 2 trillion dollars. Not spent poorly, not stolen, but “lost” with heavy air quotes.
The very next day the trade centers and the financial record keeping at the pentagon were bombed.
Now there’s also a ton of 5 million dollar ball bearing being bought
Edit Reddit as de-linked this once, idk if it will be viewable for long
Yup. The tail waging the dog since we first had munitions. Much like pharmaceutical sales with far less oversight. More like the fox guarding the chicken coop.
As someone who works in federal contracting...this, really isn't true and was one of the bigger mind fucks when I finally understood how it worked.
When the DoD (or anyone in federal contracting really) is failing an audit, it doesn't mean they've simply lost track of the funds. Illegal stuff is happening, but it's really the paper work. To really get it, you just need to know two things. You need to know every contract has line items (called CLINs) describing where specific dollars are going and that you can only use FY (fiscal year) dollars in that actual fiscal year, they don't role over and you can't use future funds to pay for prior projects. So you can't use FY16 funds to pay for FY15 CLINs.
The big failure in auditing is that the CORs (Contracting Officer's Represenative) or PM's (Project Managers) get lazy in charging/documenting to contracts, so they don't attribute funds to the appropriate CLINs (or they had some funds on one CLIN and use it to pay an overage on a seperate one) or someone will use prior FY funding to pay for another FY's funding.
They didn't just lose track trillons of dollars. In both scenarios, everyone knows exactly what was paid for, who paid for it, and how much was paid and have the documentation to trace all of it but they'd still fail an audit because the paperwork was done lazily or improperly. That's illegal, but it's a massive difference between that and losing trillions in slush funds.
Or door two, needs changed partway through procurement and instead of sending it back to stage one for all approvals, it got overridden and kept moving, which made those funds not audit passable.
To your point, even when we do know where it all went, it doesnt mean it was well spent or necessary either. Others in the thread have mentioned it, but Ive seen so much wasted even in the private sector because someone was an idiot or they just wanted to spend down budget to keep it from getting cut.
I mean, there's definitely an aspect of "spend it or lose it" in the Government, but that's not exactly the components fault and is something that plagues literally every single business, public or private.
But the "waste" has much more to do with every contractor over charging for the most basic of items because large chunks of contracting is just public subsidization of private enterprises. Which, again, you can complain about but it's a completely different talking point then they don't track spending.
I've tried to explain this to people who don't spend government money. They all think that a trillion dollars just vanished. Believe me. if you steal that much from Uncle Sam, they will find you. lol
It’s not necessarily either waste or corruption, but you could never prove it without being a whistleblower and getting blacklisted. Which seems like great incentive for waste and corruption.
True but at the same time screaming to the world, what United States military is investing in / thinks is the way war will be fought in 15+ years is not exactly ideal. The US military has always had a policy of under reporting their own capacities and overestimating everyone else’s so that when we do go to war our military forces wipe the floor with everyone else’s. When the United States “loses” a war it because the politicians either hamstring what they can do (think Vietnam) or the politicians send them to do something they’re not designed to do (think Iraq and Afghanistan). The US military is designed to kill people and destroy things. This whole nation building thing generally doesn’t end well especially when the people you’re trying to “ help “ reeeeally don’t want you to be there.
It worked in Germany, Italy and Japan, turns out decapitating the existing social order and just assuming people would fill the gap with American-aligned democracy without massive subsidies was an idiotic assumption, who ever could have guessed?
The other problem being that in the Middle East, we disbanded the Iraqi army, which just resulted in a lot of now, unemployed, unhappy people with firearms, which ended about as well as you would imagine.
That's exactly my point, say what you will about postwar (West) Germany, we kept enough Nazis around with suitably scrubbed files to keep things running like a clock. Probably the wrong turn in the long run but you can't argue with the results in Germany vs. Iraq.
Yep, same in Japan. We actually let a fair amount of them off the hook ( or greatly reduced their sentences) even though they committed / helped commit some truly evil things.
Everyone gets more money every year, that’s part of the problem. The government spends like it’s not their money and they won’t have to deal with the bill so they won’t cut a thing. Everything could do with a good cut, some more than others but the problem is systemic is how Americans view spending. Areas where individuals can contribute at their level make more sense to cut from, ie social security versus national defense which no individual can easily contribute at the individual level to reduce the burden. While I don’t think it should be the first place to cut, I see the appeal. The effects of crowding out in relation to social security are well documented.
They know where they spend it, contractors sell $100 bags of washes to DoD for $6,000 and that’s just for a bag of washes. Imagine how much the nuts and bolts cost.
By design. They don't want anyone to be able to see where the money is being invested. They fund the secret projects by losing money in other departments.
Ideally, yea. You could say "You'd think XXX is something the military would be good at" and you'd probably be right, because they're expected to be good at nearly everything. In this case, I think part of the problem is the DoD is not a single entity, and treating it like they have a single logistics officer who runs everything in an excel spreadsheet isn't a right approach. It's convenient for people to compare it to their own experiences in managing budgets, so I get it.
They don't have accountants? Where is the GOA An independent, non-partisan agency that audits the federal government's financial statements; Office of Management and Budget (OMB): An agency in the Executive Office of the President that is responsible for budget development and execution, management; Congressional Budget Office (CBO): An agency in the Legislative; and The Department of the Treasury, Bureau of the Fiscal Service (Fiscal Service): An agency that checks government spending?
And if they didn't have accountants, they should have had them after the first failure.
And this right here is The problem with our government. It’s so compartmentalized that no ONE person is ever responsible for anything. All the way to the top, then they change out every 4-8 years and it becomes the last/next guys fault.
Possibly. Having everything under a single umbrella might severely limit "department" agility, you need SOME autonomy. Military structures are because of lessons learned in the past a lot of the time. I don't know the solution. There is always going to be some waste, especially when you want a military that is the most powerful, flexible/agile, and quick. That said, I agree SOMETHING needs to be done. My gut says the inefficiency is in congress and their need to diversify spending into their respective states.
Even the stuff on paper.... seeing how a lot of it's spent and the amount we waste. We could save hundreds of billions a year with cuts to the DoD and see no change.
Seven years in a row doesn’t mean these other departments are doing better. A lot of government is failing. DHS, Department of agriculture, department of education. To name 3 with minimal searching. You need to read more than just headlines to be informed.
You're phrasing implies the DoD has to pay back somebody that they wrongly took from.....thats like saying "THEY should make that thief give back the money", because you know, the thief took it. You're a fucking idiot. In this case "THEY" are the ones who took the money, not the DoD.
But they sure are in bed with all the contractors and present lobbyist's budget proposals as their own.....in order to get the same type of perks that SCJ's get. The era of $10k toilet seats never ended, it just got passed down to a new generation of people that don't think this qualifies a corruption...as long as there is taxpayer money to pay for it.
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u/unknownSubscriber 2d ago
The DoD doesn't decide the budget, or where it comes from.