The War Department has wasted truckloads of money on weaponry…..the F-35 comes to mind (it is called a ‘flying brick’ because it spends more time on the ground than in the air)….wasted money that that cannot let go and just scrap the POS.
This and a story I read over the weekend reminds of a movie about the design of a new tank for our troops….the movie is called the Pentagon Wars and it describes the process of a new weapon with humor.
For those interested the movie is clever and can be watched here…..https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0144550/
The Bradley Fighting Vehicle project, already stalled in development for seventeen years and at the running cost of $14 billion is the charge of Major General Partridge. In an effort to curtail further excessive Pentagon spending, Congress appoints U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel James Burton to observe the Bradley’s field development and tests.
Burton delves into the extensive and protracted development history, beginning in the 1960s originally under design supervision of then Colonel Robert L. Smith, who quickly becomes frustrated with the continuous change of design by the higher ups, eventually leading to the Bradley being drastically changed from its original role as a light troop carrier into a bulky tank-like vehicle that can only carry half of its original capacity.
The report that I referred to is about a new tank that has a similar humorous outcome.
As the 101st Airborne Division prepared last year to receive their first M10 Bookers—armored combat vehicles designed specifically for infantry forces—staff planners realized something: eight of the 11 bridges on Fort Campbell would crack under the weight of the “light tank.”
It turns out that though the vehicle was initially conceptualized as relatively lightweight—airdroppable by C-130—the twists and turns of the Army requirements process had rendered the tank too heavy to roll across the infrastructure at the infantry-centric Kentucky post, and nobody had thought about that until it was too late.
“This is not a story of acquisition gone awry,” Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer, told Defense One. “This is a story of the requirements process creating so much inertia that the Army couldn’t get out of its own way, and it just kept rolling and rolling and rolling.”
It’s a twist on the classic Pentagon procurement snafu—a program that moves so slowly that it’s outdated by the time it reaches the field.
In this case, the Army knew early on that it wasn’t going to be able to make the thing it had set out to make, but it was bound and determined to make something. So it made something it doesn’t actually need.
Classic case of stupidity….wasting butt-loads of cash all in the name of national defense.
Can you now see the problem with the War Department and its defense industry co-conspirators?
On an unrelated topic….Hogsbreath (Hegseth)…..the idiot Donny put in charge of the US War machine….
Apparently he still using unsecured lines of communication and betting on sports.
Remember when defense secretary of the United States Pete Hegseth, the man at the center of all the “Signalgate” drama, accidentally texted a journalist about the need to maintain “100 percent OPSEC” about secret war plans?
As the New York Times reports, the same phone Hegseth used when he accidentally shared those covert military maneuvers is also his personal one. And embarrassingly, its number could easily be found online on a variety of public apps as recently as March, including WhatsApp, Facebook, Airbnb, and — we kid you not — a sports betting website.
“There’s zero percent chance that someone hasn’t tried to install Pegasus or some other spyware on his phone,” Mike Casey, the former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, told the NYT. “He is one of the top five, probably, most targeted people in the world for espionage.”
According to security experts, it’s not surprising that Hegseth’s personal number is on the web, since he was a private citizen before being sworn in. Instead, the former Fox News host’s staggeringly stupid mistake was using the same phone number to do all his official top secret military stuff, like announcing the details of an airstrike in Yemen against Houthi forces in a group chat that also had his wife and brother (we should clarify: that was a separate incident from when he accidentally leaked stuff to a journalist).
As the NYT notes, even low-level government employees are forbidden from using personal devices for work-related tasks — and here’s the guy in charge of the entire nation’s defense efforts, leaving it all out in the open.
https://futurism.com/head-pentagon-personal-phone
This is what we get when amateurs are allowed to govern….if these transgressions do not worry then you need to return to head in sand.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
Is there really enough sand In the world to accommodate all those heads?
It will be a push but I believe they will find a way…LOL chuq
Surely the current war in Ukraine has shown that battle tanks and heavy AFVs are no longer relevant in modern warfare? Even the best of them can be disabled or even destroyed by a drone explosive that costs very little to produce and can be delivered on target with terrifying accuracy. Time to stop lining the pockets of arms manufacturers and stop developing any new tanks.
Best wishes, Pete.
Pete it is not what is relevant but rather how to milk the most money out of the idea. chuq
Not sure if you stream movies these days but there is a 1998 movie, “The Pentagon Wars” starring Kelsey Grammer and Cary Elwes. It’s a rather tongue-in-cheek satirical representation of the Pentagon’s development of the Bradley… illustrating the contant changes and waste… taken from the book from the guy who was part of it.
Doug I gave a link to IMbD for the movie…..I compared it to what happens within the War Department and their ‘new’ weapons division. chuq
Anyone who knew anything about military aircraft knew the F-35 “joint strike fighter” was going to be pretty much a fiasco from day one. Comgress and the powers that be at the Pentagon decided that to save money they would design a single aircraft that would serve the needs of the Airforce, the Marines And the Navy, all three of them, despite the fact that all three have entirely different needs when it comes to an aircraft. What we’ve ended up with is an aircraft that doesn’t do anything very well. Same thing happened with the navy’s littoral ship program. The idea was to have a basic platform which could be equipped with different modules that could be swapped in or out depending on what mission the ship was needed for. After sinking hundreds of millions into ships that didn’t actually work, the navy finally gave up. The few that were built were all mothballed and I think only one is still in service.
I know wasted time and lots of cash….typical defense spending. chuq