The Senate version of the 2023 defense authorization act earmarks $857 billion (PDF) for national defense. The slackers in the House only want $850 billion (PDF), which may be why it’s known as the “lower house.” Both bills are well beyond President Biden’s $813 billion request. Differences between the two versions will be ironed out in the coming weeks, but the bottom line is that the Pentagon is bound to break the trillion-dollar barrier relatively soon.
Turns out U.S. military aircraft are grounded too often because they are too complicated to maintain, according to the GAO’s November 10 report. Complicated translates into costs, which translates into how often a given warbird can fly. Bottom line: Not much.
The CBO inquiry, issued the same day, concludes the Navy is low-balling its shipbuilding plans. Bottom line: Too much wishful sinking (sorry; Freudian ship). Unfortunately, given the id of the military-industrial complex, more money won’t solve the problem: It will only lead to more spending with even more waste. The Pentagon’s quest for silver bullets, it turns out, is fool’s gold…
The U.S. military spends about $1 billion a week (PDF) — $1,650 a second — keeping its airplanes flying. Yet despite that heavy investment, 26 of the 49 planes and helicopters studied by the GAO failed to meet their mission capability goal in any single year from fiscal year 2011 to fiscal year 2021. “DOD did not meet its mission capable goals for fiscal year 2021 for 47 of the 49 aircraft we reviewed,”
Oh Hell. The solution is easy. We just need double the number of existing aircraft.
The new CBO report says the service’s new attack sub and destroyer are going to cost billions more than the Navy projects. This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who has followed the work of the Project On Government Oversight on the sea service’s botched buys of its most recent aircraft carrier, coastal craft, or destroyer. But it does suggest a continuing, and stunning, inability by the Navy to get its ducks, and dollars, in a row.
Buying big-ticket shiny hardware is the crack cocaine of the military-industrial complex
Pentagon Fails Fifth Consecutive Audit Amid Ukraine Oversight Concerns - News From Antiwar.com since. Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord told reporters that things didn’t look much different in the audit from the previous year and that it was “not the progress I would have hoped for.”
The audit of the Pentagon’s $3.5 trillion in assets and $3.7 trillion in liabilities concluded that the department’s internal tracking of money and arms is still not good enough for a passing grade. Pentagon officials have said they hope to pass their first audit by 2027.
