America

Fraudster Nation?

The Military-Industrial Virus

How bloated defense budgets gut our armed forces

Late in 2018, Spinney’s longtime friend Pierre Sprey, a former Pentagon “whiz kid” revered for codesigning the highly successful ­A-10 and ­F-16 warplanes, and a trenchant critic of defense orthodoxy, suggested to Spinney that he add a novel tweak to his work by depicting budget changes from year to year in terms of percentages rather than dollar amounts. The analysis that Spinney produced at Sprey’s suggestion revealed something intriguing: although the U.S. defense budget clearly increased and decreased over the sixty years following the end of the Korean War, the decreases never dipped below where the budget would have been if it had simply grown at 5 percent per year from 1954 on (with one minor exception in the 1960s).

Only during Obama’s second term did it first dip below this level with any degree of significance. 

Even more interestingly, every single time the growth rate had bumped against that floor, there had been an immediate and forceful reaction in the form of high-­volume public outcry regarding a supposedly imminent military threat.

 Such bouts of threat inflation invariably induced a prompt remedial increase in budget growth, regardless of whether the proclaimed threat actually existed. As General Douglas ­MacArthur remarked, as far back as 1957: “Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters never seem to have happened, never seem to have been quite real.”

The Army and Marines present a hardly less depressing picture. For decades, the Army has been engaged in an expensive struggle to supply troops with reliable radios. 

One recent portable model, which the Institute for Defense Analyses found would cost $72,000 each, is called the Manpack. Not only is the Manpack twice as heavy as the model it replaces, with a shorter range, but it has displayed a tendency to overheat and severely burn the unfortunate infantrymen carrying it.

 The helmets worn by soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan have also been shown to be faulty. As the authors of the recent book Shattered Minds have demonstrated, their design can actually amplify the effects of an explosion on one’s brain. Furthermore, many of the helmets have been found to be dangerously vulnerable to bullets and shrapnel, thanks to a corrupt contractor skimping on the necessary bulletproof material. As is common with those who speak up about official malpractice, the whistle-­blowers who exposed this particular fraud were viciously harassed by their superiors and driven out of their jobs.

DYI:  The above article by Harpers Magazine lists just a few of the multiple weapon systems that either out right doesn’t work or are of far less quality than what they replace.  From huge projects such as the flying pig super cost overruns F-35 or the Navy’s Littoral class mine sweepers called “little crappy ships” named by the sailors manning them.  On top of that the mine sweeping tech – you guessed it – doesn’t work.  Through out the military industrial complex from basic helmets worn by Marine or Army are made with substandard materials with design flaws that magnify injuries all the way to major projects that either incapable of working or take billions to get it right or is scraped.  The cost of our foreign wars actually pale in comparison with the built in cost overruns, incompetency, and outright FRAUD that is emblematic of the military industrial complex.

What we are really seeing is America the nation of Fraudsters.  Bankers who are routinely fined for crimes yet no one goes to prison, the medical industrial complex that colludes to price fix and has grown from local to regional monopolies, or the big pharma pushing out statins that has zero effect in preventing heart attacks with massive negative side effects.  Or student loans since they cannot be discharged in bankruptcy has the effect of “jacking up” the overall cost of higher education AND creating a generation of debt slaves.  The list is almost damn near endless without a massive societal change America will grind down over the decades to a has been nation riddled with liars, cheats, and thieves.

DYI