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WORD COUNT
612
MAY 28, 2008
SUCH WASTE YOU
WOULDN’T BELIEVE – by Jack Shanahan
What would we do with
a big corporation that lost $1 trillion? What if that company operated
with $700 billion budgets and couldn’t pass an independent audit?
Nowhere in the world
would such extravagant mismanagement be tolerated, and yet this
outlandish scenario is the reality in the Pentagon.
America’s defense
budget exceeds $500 billion a year—not counting the “emergency” spending
on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—more than the military spending in
all other nations in the world combined. Add in the $12 billion we are
burning in Iraq each month, and we are seeing the highest Pentagon
budgets since the end of World War II.
The $1 trillion
figure is the amount of money, in 2007 alone, that the United States
Army cannot back up with documents and receipts, according to a report
in a Conde-Nast magazine. However, the Army is one of only four branches
of the armed services, each of which has its own dysfunctional
accounting systems and bureaucratic imperatives to inflate budgets.
I use the word
“inflate” deliberately. A recent report from the non-partisan Government
Accountability Office revealed that 95 major Pentagon weapon systems
(meaning fighter jets, cargo planes, and ships) have all run behind
schedule and exceeded projected budgets by $295 billion.
Each service branch
has invested loads of political and financial capital in building
military hardware since the end of the Cold War, but any real effort to
exercise scrutiny over these projects went out the window in the
spending bonanza after September 11.
Weapons systems like
the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor fighter jet, the Marines’ V-22 Osprey hybrid
aircraft, and the Navy’s Virginia-class submarine have been in the works
since America squared off against the Soviets, but they persist in
Pentagon budgets without any comparable threat from a modern superpower.
Meanwhile, they survive obsolescence at taxpayer expense, to the tune of
tens of billions of dollars each year.
What this profligate
spending means to a nation fighting two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is
that we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on high-tech
weaponry without a penny of it going to the most immediate threat to our
security.
We might ask
ourselves, what can be done to right the ship at the Pentagon?
Winslow Wheeler at
the non-profit Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C., has
outlined several possible solutions, including a pause in new weapons
contracts, an independent panel to phase out unneeded weapons programs,
and eliminating pork-barrel spending in Congress. But in truth, any
common-sense approaches to fixing the Pentagon will require fundamental
reforms in the political process in Washington and the democratic
institutions that are charged with oversight. However, we do not see the
kind of media scrutiny or political frenzy that would normally accompany
this sort of scandal in the private sector or just about any other
government agency outside of defense.
Major reforms in
American government tend to occur in reaction to a crisis or a giant
popular outcry, and major reforms will be needed in the Pentagon. Again,
according to the Conde-Nast report, the Pentagon inspector general tried
and failed to conduct an audit of our military spending every year
between 1990 and 2002. Now, the earliest estimate for an audit to be
completed is 2016.
More important still,
any vague talk of cracking down on waste, even in the form of “straight
talk” from presidential candidate John McCain, will only amount to more
of the same budgetary mess unless we confront the biggest drain on our
military resources: The war in Iraq.
Until we own up to
our mistakes in Iraq, the mess at the Pentagon will remain, waiting for
us to clean it up.
--
Vice Admiral Jack
Shanahan (ret.) is the former commander of the U.S. Second Fleet. – A
photo of Jack Shanahan is available
CLICK HERE
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