No, the military didn't "lose" $21 Trillion, but it loses a lot every year.

[MineralMan]

Back in the ancient days of 1968, I found myself at a tiny, remote USAF base in Turkey, perched on a hill overlooking the Black Sea. I can't talk about what I was doing there, still, but I can tell a story that addresses this issue in a tiny, remote way.

The exact place where I worked had some electronic stuff. The USAF called it "mission critical" stuff. That translates into "custom-made stuff that cost more than you can even imagine." Well, one day, one of my million dollar gadgets stopped working. Following protocol, I sent a repair request form through channels and someone came from another room in the building a week or two later. He removed the gadget, leaving me with fewer gadgets to play with while I was pretending to do something useful.

After a couple of weeks, my gadget was still gone, and I missed it terribly, for reasons I can't explain here. So, I went to get a cup of coffee from the constantly full 100-cup coffee-maker that had not been cleaned for years. It was in the part of the building where technicians fixed gadgets like the broken one I was missing. While I was there, I spotted the guy who had removed it and taken it away. He was sitting at a workbench.

"Say," I asked him, "whatever happened to that gadget you took away from where I work?"

He looked at me and said, "It's broken."

"I know it's broken. But when will it be fixed?"

"Well, it had a bad part. I've put in a requisition for the part. It went to the factory where they made your gadget. We have to order parts from the manufacturer, see?"

"Crap," I said, since I did miss my gadget. "So, what part was it that went bad?"

"This one," he answered, handing me a plain old resistor. Now, that resistor was a 1% tolerance resistor. I could tell from the brown stripe on it. It was a 47K-ohm resistor. A 1-watt resistor. In my previous life, before the USAF, I was an Electronics Engineering major.

"So, when do you think you'll get a replacement part?" I asked.

"It shouldn't take more than 90 days," he replied.

"OK," I said, and took my mug of battery-acid coffee back to my workstation.

When I got back to the barracks, I dug out my Allied Electronics catalog. I filled out the order form. I ordered four of those 47K-ohm, 1%, 1-watt resistors, along with some other miscellaneous stuff I sort of wanted. I think they were about 25 cents each. I put my APO address on the form, slipped it into the envelope, along with a check for about $15 for all the items. The next day, I sent it off from the post office on the base.

Two weeks later, I got a small box with the stuff I had ordered in it. I opened it, dug out the four resistors and took them with me on my next work shift. I walked back to the repair station where the guy worked. I dropped them on the work bench. "Here you go," I said.

A couple of hours later, the guy came to my workstation, reinstalled my gadget, and all was good again. I told him, "Thanks." He said, "No problem. Thanks for the extras, too."

I don't know if the OEM parts ever showed up. My gadget worked fine, anyhow. But that's how it works in the military. They can't go down to Radio Shack and buy a 25 cent resistor. They have to order one from the original manufacturer, probably for $1000. That's how it works. Still, the repair tech will be happy to install the one you bought, and you can have your gadget back.

[Hoyt]

1. Great post. And a lot of $21T is sitting in the desert, rice patties, boneyards, repair facilities,

etc., or just blown to pieces. Truth is, in war and even peace time, we don't -- and probably shouldn't -- spend a lot time accounting for the bombs and junk we use to kill wage useless war (not talking about WWI and WWII).

[MineralMan]

2. Thanks. Of course, my story is just micro-evidence.

Besides, there were no Radio Shacks in Samsun, Turkey, so...

[Iggo]

3. Also, "unable to account for" often gets translated to "lost" so it'll fit neater into a headline.

"Unable to account for" could easily mean "I'm not going to tell you where it went."

[MineralMan]

4. Oh, absolutely.

I remember being in the casual barracks after Basic. We were waiting for orders for our next assignments. We ended up doing all sorts of details, since the USAF does not like people laying around doing nothing. One of those details was cleaning up a warehouse full of out-of-date uniform items. They were brand new, but no longer current issue items. Our job was to toss them in dump trucks, which were taking them to the base landfill to be buried.

As we worked, I noticed one piece of uniform gear that I really wanted. It was a parka with a zip in liner. I thought it was cool. So, I set one aside. A couple of other guys did the same. It was still part of the official uniform specification, but wasn't being issued any longer to Airmen. At the end of the shift, we all just put them on and went back to the barracks. I put mine in the bottom of my foot-locker, hidden under standard issue items.

It went with me in my duffel bag, through the rest of my enlistment. Came in handy, too, during snowstorms in Turkey. When my enlistment ended, it went home with me, along with all of my other uniform items. It was very handy when I took up skiing a few years later. I tossed most of the other uniform stuff, except for some fatigues and a field jacket.

[DFW]

5. My brother has nothing but stories like that (DARPA--he can't tell my any details, either)

But he says that is how the military is set up, not matter what or where. They are not set up to be efficient, they are set up to follow protocol. If one division spends so much in one year, and the amount is approved, they have to spend at least that amount the next year. If they are efficient and spend less than the year before, their budget allotment for the next year is reduced by the amount they saved, and they have to beg and cajole if they need the amount they spent two years before.Instead, they spend what they need to, and if there is some in their cash left over, they spend it any way they can rather then find themselves in financial straits the next year. Efficiency is not only discouraged, it is punished.

[MineralMan]

6. Yup. Still, I got my gadget back. The repair tech didn't care

that I ordered the part myself. It didn't cost him anything, so what did it matter. He just fixed the gadget.

[DFW]

7. That's the way you do it (no relation)

As long as his own budget wasn't increased, he was cool. Had he been forced to requisition something that cost 25¢ over and above, he would have let the Soviets overrun the base before risking the wrath bound to be incurred by a super-budgetary requisition.

[smirkymonkey]

11. It pretty much works that way in the corporate world as well.

A lot of money gets wasted like that but they make up for it by laying people off instead. It's insane.

[DFW]

12. Maybe in the really big companies

I've mentioned this before, but my friends in Dallas (somewhere between 450 and 500 employees) don't do it that way. The owners (not publicly owned) reduce their salaries to zero in bad times in order not to fire anyone or reduce anyone else's salary, always have.

[Archae]

8. A lot of the waste is due to home-distirct politics too.

The Army says it has more than it needs, of the M1 Abrams tanks.

Congressman Pork-Barrel wants more built by the contractor in his district, so more un-needed and un-wanted tanks are still being built.

Lockheed is here in Wisconsin, building these smaller ships for the US Navy.
The local politicians want to make sure they continue to be built, no matter how mechanically unreliable they are.

And...

Don't forget the grossly over-priced military supplies, like the $800 toilet.

[TexasBushwhacker]

9. We forget that the biggest reason for our bloated military

is to funnel taxpayer dollars back to big businesses.

[jmowreader]

10. There's a good reason for the "$800 toilet"

Which is a $600 fiberglass toilet top, but who's counting?

This went in the P-3 Orion sub-hunting aircraft. The Orion is a militarized version of the Lockheed Electra airliner. When the Electra went out of production, they destroyed all the tooling - including the mold for the toilet top. After many years the tops all cracked and needed replaced. When the Navy went back to Lockheed for new ones, they said sure - as long as you guys pay for a new mold.

[A HERETIC I AM]

13. That's the part of the story that was rarely, if ever told.

I worked on injection molding machines for a little while years ago. The first piece through a new mold costs $1000. (or whatever) The 1000th piece?

Ten cents.

[jmowreader]

14. That part makes the story not fun anymore

Reality time: a lot of the military uses equipment we bought three wars ago.

I was stationed in Berlin in the late 1980s. One of our most important computer systems was so old it was running core memory. A different one was made by Philco, which was the branch of Ford that made their car radios. (They tried to replace the core memory computer, but requirements creep got it...desk 1 wanted it to do everything the old one did except not crash so much, desk 2 thought it would be nice to do this, desk 3 wanted it to do that, desk 4 wanted it to do the other thing, that cause the other thing to fail, this stopped it from doing what we wanted it for...it was five years from completion when the mission we needed it for disappeared.)

We still use the M113 armored personnel carrier. Many of our C-130s started out life during Vietnam and have been rebuilt repeatedly. The P-3 Orion dates to the 1960s.

Now for the real subject of this thread: where’s the fuckin’ money? In a lot of cases, the military never had it. The defense budget is Congress’ favorite place to bury spending they’d never get through if it had to pass on its own. “We need $250 million in aid for the Nambian Armed Forces.” It gets put in the budget, and whoever’s in charge of military aid disbursal dutifully sends the money to Joe in Accounting, who sends it to the Department of Transportation, who paves roads in North Dakota with it. Congress wouldn’t ever be able to get funding to lay a quarter-billion worth of road in America’s least traveled state, but they can get military aid for Trump’s favorite African country. The solution is to quit letting people load the defense bill with the kind of pork that didn’t have hooves.

[gratuitous]

15. Many, many years ago

I worked summers on a framing crew, and there was a guy everyone called "Boots." One day on break, he recounted his time in the Navy during Vietnam. He was on a ship that basically cruised up and down the Vietnamese coast, looking for stuff. Nothing too strenuous about the duty, and nobody had to risk getting shot at as long as they stayed a certain distance from the shore. It was appropriations time back home, and his ship hadn't used up its allotment of ammunition, and if you don't use it, you lose it. So, the crew fired off a lot of ordnance and dumped a lot more into the drink so they could have something to requisition and show the House Appropriations Committee that Something Was Being Done. Boots kind of shook his head at the utter waste of it all.