Comments by "LRRPFco52" (@LRRPFco52) on "Louis Rossmann"
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The biggest areas of inefficiency, waste, graft, fraud, and abuse happen in the margins:
1. DoD civilian employees from local populations near military bases who provide antiquated or inflated services not directly connected to training, critical logistics, or readiness. Go ahead and try to touch those jobs in Congress and see what happens.
2. Outdated and obsolete accounting, storage, processing, finance, and computing methods that move like molasses when you try to overhaul them, with heavy staffing from #1.
3. Heavy mid-level leadership/officer/senior NCO duty positions who are net negative contributors to the force, riding desks until retirement, who then collect direct deposit until death. Huge chunk of the budget right there.
4. All the land, buildings, offices, office supplies, power, water, computers, IT, landscaping, and resources attached to supporting those net-negative mid-level managers. Good luck taking an ax to those stumps.
5. Turf wars between the above and the actual war-fighters for the budget.
If you want to actually address waste, fraud, and abuse, start there. Good luck, because Congress relies on those votes and dollars at the district level.
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@mattthemouse1 Lockheed doesn’t make the components and subsystems for F-35s though. They’re a finally assembler and the design lead contractor who won the prime. Lockheed doesn’t make 5th Gen turbofans, landing gear, the AESA, the ejection seat, canopy, FLCS, much of the BMI skins, IPP, or just about any of the subsystems you can name.
A lot of them are made all over the world as well with the initial 8 partner nations who coughed up token seed money for RDT&E or industrial share buy-in, even though the US taxpayer foot most of the $62 billion developmental budget for 3 different airframes (which meets the typical $20 billion/airframe trend in US fighters).
If you really want to see spares scheduling foul-ups, hand it over to the DoD.
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Where I have seen the most waste, fraud, and abuse is in the DoD civilian agencies and mid-level staff officer and NCOs just by having a lot of them. The resource mismanagement and all the logistics required to support these personnel, their pay, buildings, offices, housing, waste, computers, supplies, IT, finance, and transportation is a huge drag on the system.
Because they account for jobs in critical Congressional districrs, they are fat sacred cows riding desks until retirement.
Scale that out across the Nation and forward deployed OCONUS bases that employ host nation locals, and you can see where hundreds of billions are spent each year.
Local contracts with civilian providers for basic services and supplies allows for prices to be hiked because the taxpayer isn't involved in the price negotiations, so everyone sees DoD as the golden goose that keeps laying without end.
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A lot of John Stewart's premises are false though, so he enters this conversation with really bad data and then thinks he has the high ground while condescending to someone who actually has to deal with the numbers daily.
To set things straight, I'm a very strong proponent for accountability and I despise waste, fraud, and abuse, but people don't really understand what that entails. Waste, fraud, and abuse often are locally-driven and involve kick-back schemes for labor (jobs) within Congressional districts like a mafia-run operation, on top of poor leadership decisions within the services having to do with resource mismanagement driven by budgetary fears vs operational requirements.
When he mentioned "a $1.7 Trillion airplane that doesn't...." he's talking about the JSF/F-35 program. That's one of those giant false premises because there is no $1.7 Trillion F-35 program.
"Journalists" throwing around the "Trillion dollar+ price tag" for JSF are being incompetent and untruthful. Those numbers are estimates for what the whole program might cost including operations & maintenance through the year 2074. Who does that?
We're not even 1/4 of the way into acquisition of F-35A/B/C for DoD, and the estimated acquisition budget is roughly $400 Billion for 2456 airframes into the 2030s for production. 900+ F-35s have been delivered so far, hundreds of those to European and Pacific partner nations, so we're not even close to US DoD total buy numbers.
Then there's the claim that it doesn't work, doesn't fly because of maintenance, sucks at its job, etc. Nothing can be further from the truth. He shouldn't have mentioned the F-35 program to support his argument, because it undermines addressing the real problems with waste, fraud, and abuse.
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