America's Security Index Measured by Dollars Spent on the Military

Originally posted by 0zzymand0s
I have no doubt that all of that is true. My question is simple: We have been spending like this for decades now. Where did all the Defense money go?

I'd be interested in reading Zaphod's response to this but just thought I'd throw this in. The short answer is that defence spending goes to defense contractors and thus to the American workforce.

There is more to this story though when it comes to the resale of earlier generations of equipment. It is rumored that there is a very large industry moving military items conducted by elements within the armed forces, particularly the Army. One can regard this equipment as the equivalent to tax dollars. These down market dollars are suspected to be siphoned into private accounts by people conducting this trade.

The entire defence contracting industry can be regarded as an elaborate money filtering/laundering scheme used to direct budget dollars into private hands.

Google Kay Griggs or see her interviews on YouTube. She was the wife of an insider who lifted the cover on a lot of unsavory military activity including the arms trade.

reply to post by 0zzymand0s


A lot of it goes into base upkeep, maintenance for AMARG aircraft, which are in storage, but required to be maintained at a level that allows for quick recall if necessary, basic expenses, such as pay, hospital costs, etc., warfighting for the last 12 years, flight hours for aircraft, maintenance for aircraft and ships, and quite a bit into R&D. Under the 2014 budget, the Air Force gets something like $37B for R&D costs alone.

Base upkeep, under the FY13 budget comes out to $525.4B, which is down from previous years. FY14 it will go up slightly to 526.6B.

Originally posted by ipsedixit


The entire defence contracting industry can be regarded as an elaborate money filtering/laundering scheme used to direct budget dollars into private hands.

I agree completely. When I first enlisted back in '79, the Army pretty much took care of itself. Everything that needed to be done infrastructure wise was done by the Soldiers for the most part. Cooks, plumbing, electrical, automotive and computer/communication repair, etc, etc, was done mostly the Soldier.

About the only time I saw a contractor was when new equipment was being fielded and once the Soldiers knew what they were doing, the contractor went home.

Nowadays, I would swear that there are more contractors than Soldiers. In maintenance bays, cooks, communications etc. Hell, they even mow the lawn.

All because Congress wanted to spread the wealth.

Originally posted by Zaphod58
The contract for the 18 aircraft states that the price can not exceed $4.9B, and anything over that amount will be paid by Boeing to whatever requires the extra money. There's a small amount of wiggle room involved, but nowhere near what previous contracts allowed for. Previously, unless a contract went something like 25 or 50% over budget, it wouldn't trigger an automatic review by the Pentagon and Congress.

This is what went wrong in Iraq. "Cost Plus" contracts that enable the contractor to bill the government for overruns. There's a great British documentary on contracting in Iraq, but I couldn't locate it. Huge amounts of fraud going on and bid rigging and demonizing of government officials trying to do their oversight jobs properly.

reply to post by ipsedixit


That's what went wrong with a lot of contracts in the last 20 or 30 years, especially the F-35. That, and numbers being cut to the point that costs never came down.

If you look back in the 50s and 60s, and Kelly Johnson (the man is almost a god in the aviation world, he designed the F-104, the U-2, and SR-71), he would go to the Air Force, with designs in hand, and ask if they needed them. The U-2 went from design to first flight in just 18 months. And it was designed to operate in an environment that they didn't really understand all that well at the time.

Originally posted by TDawgRex
Nowadays, I would swear that there are more contractors than Soldiers. In maintenance bays, cooks, communications etc. Hell, they even mow the lawn.

All because Congress wanted to spread the wealth.

It sounds like a cartoon I once saw "Civil Service String Trio". One guy held the cello, one guy held the bow and one guy held the music.

I'm not against the idea of creating jobs or spreading the wealth, but it has to be done intelligently, not like the string trio.

Here is a former police chief on the problems associated with militarizing the police forces in urban areas in the US.

He is a good example of what I would consider a remnant in modern policing, a police officer with a sense of a duty to the community as a whole, who sees clearly that the current trends toward increased militarization of police forces does not serve society's interests, except in a corporatist sense.

Here are your defense dollars at work. This is an example of how the corporatist mentality of maximizing profits and moving product is undermining the long established practices of law enforcement at home and it illustrates the consequences of doing so.



From the point of view of the military industrial complex in the United States, this whole Ferguson episode could be titled, "The Trouble With Tribbles" (military equipment). For those too young to remember, Tribbles were cute little animals, like Koala Bears, that reproduced at an alarming rate until they threatened to engulf the interior of the starship Enterprise, as military equipment is now doing in the US.