Broken ships. Millions spent replacing a rifle that doesn't need to be replaced. More tanks than it would take to beat Godzilla. Billions of dollars worth of wasted … stuff.
Any large organization can have trouble managing its accounts. But few organizations are as humongous as the U.S. military, so the money problems multiply.
With a $614 billion budget in 2013—expected to decline by $62 billion in 2014—there's plenty of opportunity for waste. Six hundred billion dollars means bloat that floats a lot of needless projects. Some are badly managed, others the result of political pork-barrel spending.
There's ample evidence that the Pentagon has little idea where billions of taxpayer dollars are going. The five-sided building is awash in corruption and claims that an audit is impossible.
Many examples of waste are relatively unknown. And with the New Year approaching—a time of reflection and account taking—we've drawn up a short list of military cautionary tales from the past year.
Remember, this is a short list, and it's drawn from the projects and stories we know about. A comprehensive litany of Pentagon waste is far, far longer.
Littoral Combat Ships USS 'Freedom' and USS 'Independence' in 2012. Navy photoLittoral Combat Ship
One of the Navy's newest vessels is designed to fight a new kind of war. The Littoral Combat Ship sticks close to the crowded coastal littoral zone, where many analysts predict warfare will be concentrated in the future.
LCS was conceived in 2001 as a small, fast and adaptable combatant—seemingly perfect for dangerous duty in chaotic shallow waters. Twelve years, four major defense contractors and a slew of budgetary overruns later, the Navy has built just four LCSs in two sub-classes, with an additional thirteen in various stages of construction. That's slow progress against the original plan for more than 50 ships.
But this isn't surprising. There are a ton of problems with the new vessel.
The first LCS, USS Freedom, developed a six-inch-long crack in its hull during trials and took on five gallons of water every hour. The Navy blamed a welding error, but the flaw serves to highlight real concerns about the ship's durability.
LCS is actually designed to avoid major combat, speeding away from any superior enemy forces. But in war, all bets are off. How can a hull that cracks while just sailing around absorb a blow from a torpedo or missile. Our own Kyle Mizokami recently gamed out a naval engagement pitting an LCS versus Chinese warships … and the LCS got shellacked.
The Pentagon is well aware of the ship's deficiency. "LCS is not expected to be survivable in that it is not expected to maintain mission capability after taking a significant hit in a hostile combat environment," J. Michael Gilmore, a top Pentagon weapons tester, stated in a 2013 report.
There's more. The vessel's 57-millimeter gun wobbles at high speeds and its air-defense radar is inadequate. Even more serious for a littoral ship, its sonar can't detect mines—one of the major dangers in shallow waters.
The LCS is designed to be a little bit of everything to everybody, changing its kit on the fly to add new weapons, sensors and cargoes. Need to send a bunch of Marines to shore? It can support that. Need a vehicle to spy on pirates along the coast? It has gear for that, too. The only problem is that some of these kits weigh too much, cost too much, are way behind schedule and remain untested.
How much does this stinking sinker cost?
Well — according to a report put together by the Congressional Research Service in September — the first LCS cost $670 million and the second $813 million. The Navy has commissioned 17 ships, four of them in 2013.
The Navy's budget request for 2014 requests an additional $1.8 billion for four more of the ships, and additional funding to outfit them with various kits and modules.
The original pitch for the LCS estimated the cost at $220 million. So what happened? According to the CRS report:
Some observers believe that the original cost estimate of $220 million for the LCS sea frame was unrealistically low. If so, a potential follow-on question would be whether the LCS represents a case of "low-balling"—using an unrealistically low cost estimate in the early stages of a proposed weapon program to help the program win approval and become an established procurement effort.
No shit.
read the rest at https://medium.com/war-is-boring/ec86786aae30
No comments:
Post a Comment