From spending<\/a> $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing<\/a> $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn\u2019t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.\u00a0 Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army\u2019s\u00a0purchase<\/a> of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the\u00a0accumulation<\/a> of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there\u2019s the one that would have to be everyone\u2019s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate<\/a> the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here\u2019s a shock: they didn\u2019t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represents chump change in the Pentagon\u2019s wastage sweepstakes and in the context of its $600-billion-plus budget, but think of it as indicative of the absurd lengths the Department of Defense will go to when what\u2019s at stake is throwing away taxpayer dollars.<\/p>\n Keep in mind that the above examples are just the tip of the tip of a titanic iceberg of military waste.\u00a0 In a recent report I did for the Center for International Policy, I identified<\/a> 27 recent examples of such wasteful spending totaling over $33 billion.\u00a0 And that was no more than a sampling of everyday life in the twenty-first-century world of the Pentagon.<\/p>\n The staggering persistence and profusion of such cases suggests that it\u2019s time to rethink what exactly they represent.\u00a0 Far from being aberrations in need of correction to make the Pentagon run more efficiently, wasting vast sums of taxpayer dollars should be seen as a way of life for the Department of Defense.\u00a0 And with that in mind, let\u2019s take a little tour through the highlights of Pentagon waste from the 1960s to the present.<\/a><\/p>\n The first person to bring widespread public attention to the size and scope of the problem of Pentagon waste was Ernest Fitzgerald, an Air Force deputy for management systems.\u00a0 In the late 1960s, he battled that service to bring to light massive cost overruns on Lockheed\u2019s C-5A transport plane.\u00a0 He risked his job, and was ultimately fired<\/a>, for uncovering<\/a> $2 billion in excess expenditures on a plane that was supposed to make the rapid deployment of large quantities of military equipment to Vietnam and other distant conflicts a reality.<\/p>\n The cost increase on the C-5A was twice the price Lockheed had initially promised, and at the time one of the largest cost overruns ever exposed.\u00a0 It was also an episode of special interest then, because Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had been pledging to bring the efficient business methods he had learned<\/a> as Ford Motors\u2019 president to bear on the Pentagon\u2019s budgeting process.<\/p>\n No such luck, as it turned out, but Fitzgerald\u2019s revelations did, at least, spark a decade of media and congressional scrutiny of the business practices of the weapons industry.\u00a0 The C-5A fiasco<\/a>, combined with Lockheed\u2019s financial troubles with its L-1011 airliner project, led the company to approach Congress, hat in hand, for a $250 million government bailout<\/a>.\u00a0 Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire, who had helped bring attention to the C-5A overruns, vigorously opposed<\/a> the measure, and came within one vote of defeating it in the Senate.<\/p>\n In a time-tested lobbying technique that has been used by weapons makers ever since, Lockheed claimed<\/a> that denying it loan guarantees would cost 34,000 jobs in 35 states, while undermining the Pentagon\u2019s ability to prepare for the next war, whatever it might be.\u00a0 The tactic worked like a charm.\u00a0 Montana Senator Lee Metcalf, who cast the deciding vote in favor of the bailout, said<\/a>, \u201cI\u2019m not going to be the one to put those thousands of people out of work.\u201d\u00a0 An analysis by the New York Times<\/em> found that every senator with a Lockheed-related plant in his or her state voted for the deal.<\/p>\n By rewarding Lockheed Martin for its wasteful practices, Congress set a precedent that has never been superseded.\u00a0 A present-day case in point is — speak of the devil — Lockheed Martin\u2019s F-35 combat aircraft.\u00a0 At $1.4 trillion<\/a>\u00a0in procurement and operating costs over its lifetime, it will be the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken by the Pentagon (or anyone else on Planet Earth), and the warning signs are already in: tens of billions of dollars in projected cost overruns and myriad performance problems before the F-35 is even out of its testing phase.\u00a0 Now the Pentagon wants to rush the plane into production by making a \u201cblock buy<\/a>\u201d of more than 400 planes that will involve little or no accountability<\/a> regarding the quality and cost of the final product.<\/p>\n Predictably, almost five decades after the C-5A contretemps, Lockheed Martin has deployed an inflationary version of the jobs argument in defense of the F-35, making the wildly exaggerated claim<\/a> that the plane will produce 125,000 jobs in 46 states.\u00a0 The company has even created a handy interactive map<\/a> to show how many jobs the program will allegedly create state by state.\u00a0 Never mind the fact that weapons spending is the least efficient way to create jobs<\/a>, lagging far behind investment in housing, education, or infrastructure.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Despite the tens of billions being wasted on a project like the F-35, the examples that tend to draw the most attention from the media and the most outrage among taxpayers involve overspending on routine items.\u00a0 This may be because the average person doesn\u2019t have a sense of what a fighter plane should cost, but can more easily grasp that spending<\/a> $640 for a toilet seat or $7,600 for a coffee pot is outrageous.\u00a0 These kinds of examples — first exposed through work done in the 1980s by Dina Rasor<\/a> of the Project on Military Procurement — undermined the position taken by President Ronald Reagan\u2019s administration that not a penny could be cut from its then-record peacetime Pentagon budgets.<\/p>\n The media ate such stories up. Pentagon overpayments for everyday items\u00a0generated<\/a> hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines, including front-page coverage in the Washington Post.\u00a0 <\/em>Two whistleblowers were even interviewed on the Today Show<\/em>, and Johnny Carson joked about such scandals in his introductory monologues on the Tonight Show<\/em>.\u00a0 Perhaps the most memorable depiction of the problem was a cartoon<\/a> by the Washington Post<\/em>\u2019s Herblock that showed Reagan Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger wearing a $640 toilet seat around his neck.\u00a0 This outburst of truth-telling, whistleblowing, investigative journalism, and mockery helped put a cap on the Reagan military buildup, but — you won\u2019t be surprised to learn — didn\u2019t keep the Pentagon from finding ever more innovative ways to misspend tax dollars.<\/p>\n The most outrageous spending choice of the 1990s was undoubtedly the Clinton administration\u2019s decision to subsidize the mergers<\/a> of major defense firms.\u00a0 As Lockheed (yet again!) and Martin Marietta merged, Northrop teamed with Grumman, and Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas, the Pentagon provided funding to pay for everything from closing down factories to subsidizing golden parachutes for displaced executives and board members.\u00a0 At the time, Vermont Congressman Bernie Sanders aptly dubbed the process \u201cpayoffs for layoffs<\/a>,\u201d as executives of defense firms received healthy payouts while laid-off workers were largely left to fend for themselves.<\/p>\n The Pentagon\u2019s rationale for giving hundreds of millions of dollars to these emerging defense behemoths was laughable. The claim — absurd on the face of it — was that the new, larger companies would provide the Pentagon with lower prices once they had eliminated unnecessary overhead. Former Pentagon official Lawrence Korb, who opposed the subsidies at the time,noted<\/a> the obvious: there was no evidence that weapons programs grew any cheaper, cost overruns any less, or wastage any smaller thanks to government subsidized mergers. As in fact became clear in the world of the weapons giants that followed, the increased bargaining power of companies like Lockheed Martin in a significantly less competitive market undoubtedly resulted in higher weapons costs.<\/p>\n The poster child for waste in the first decade of the twenty-first century was certainly the billions of dollars a privatizing Pentagon handed out to up-armored companies like Halliburton<\/a> that accompanied the U.S. military into its war zones and engaged in Pentagon-funded base-building and \u201creconstruction\u201d (aka \u201cnation building\u201d) projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR<\/a>) alone seems to come out with new examples of waste, fraud, and abuse on practically a weekly basis.\u00a0 <\/strong>Among Afghan projects that stood out over the years was a multimillion-dollar \u201chighway to nowhere<\/a>,\u201d a $43 million gas station<\/a> in nowhere, a $25 million<\/a> \u201cstate of the art\u201d headquarters for the U.S. military in Helmand Province, with all the usual cost overruns, that no one ever used, and the payment of actual salaries to countless thousands of no ones aptly labeled \u201cghost soldiers<\/a>.\u201d And that\u2019s just to begin enumerating along, long list<\/a>. Last year, Pro Publica<\/em> created<\/a> an invaluable interactive graphic detailing $17 billion in wasteful spending uncovered by SIGAR, complete with information on what that money could have purchased if it had been used productively.<\/p>\n One reason the Pentagon has been able to get away with all this is that it has proven strangely incapable of doing<\/a> a simple audit of itself, despite a Congressionally mandated requirement dating back to 1990 that it do so. Conveniently enough, this means that the Department of Defense can\u2019t tell us how much equipment it has purchased, or how often it has been overcharged, or even how many contractors it employs. This may be spectacularly bad bookkeeping, but it\u2019s great for defense firms, which profit all the more in an environment of minimal accountability. Call it irony or call it symptomatic of a successful way of life, but a recent analysis by the Project on Government Oversight notes<\/a> that the Pentagon has so far spent roughly $6 billion on \u201cfixing\u201d the audit problem — with no solution in sight.<\/p>\n If anything, in recent years the Pentagon\u2019s accounting practices have been getting worse.\u00a0 Among the many offenses to any reasonable accounting sensibility, perhaps the most striking has been the way the war budget — known in Pentagonese as the Overseas Contingency Operations account — has been used as a slush fund<\/a> to pay for tens of billions of dollars of items that have nothing to do with fighting wars. This evasive maneuver has been used to get around the caps that were placed on the Pentagon\u2019s regular budget by Congress in the Budget Control Act of 2011.<\/p>\n If the Pentagon has its way, nuclear weapons will get their very own slush fund as well. For years, the submarine lobby floated the idea of a separate\u00a0Sea-Based Deterrence Fund<\/a> (outside of the Navy\u2019s regular shipbuilding budget) to pay for ballistic missile-firing submarines. Congress has signed off on this idea, and now there are calls<\/a> for a nuclear deterrent fund that would give special budgetary treatment to bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles as well. If implemented, this change would throw the minimalist budget discipline that now exists at the Pentagon decisively out the nearest window and increase pressures to raise the department\u2019s overall budget, which already exceeds<\/a> the levels reached during the Reagan buildup.<\/p>\n Why has waste at the Pentagon been so hard to rein in?\u00a0 The answer is, in a sense, not complicated: the military-industrial complex profits from waste.\u00a0 Closer scrutiny of waste could mean not just cheaper spare parts, but serious questions about whether cash cows like the F-35 are needed at all.\u00a0 An accurate head count of the hundreds of thousands of private contractors employed by the Pentagon would reveal that a large proportion of them are doing work that is either duplicative or unnecessary. In other words, an effective audit of the Pentagon or any form of serious oversight of its wasteful way of life would pose a financial threat to a sector that is doing just fine under current arrangements.<\/p>\n Who knows? If the Department of Defense\u2019s wasteful ways were ever brought under genuine scrutiny and control, people might start to question, for example, whether a country that already has the capability to destroy the world many times over needs to spend<\/a> $1 trillion over the next three decades on a new generation of ballistic missiles, bombers, and nuclear-armed submarines. None of this would be good news for the contractors or for their allies in the Pentagon and Congress.<\/p>\n Undoubtedly, from time to time, you\u2019ll continue to hear outrageous media stories about waste at the Pentagon and bomb-detecting elephants gone astray. Without a concerted campaign of public pressure of a sort we haven\u2019t seen in recent years, however, the Pentagon\u2019s runaway budget will never be reined in, that audit will never happen, and the weapons makers will whistle a happy tune on their way to the bank with our cash.<\/p>\n William D. Hartung, a <\/em>TomDispatch regular<\/em><\/a>, is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. He is the author, among other books, of <\/em>Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"n-US-AIRSTRIKE-large570](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/n-US-AIRSTRIKE-large570.jpg?resize=253%2C295\" "\\"\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nHow Many States Can You Lose Jobs In?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The Classic $640 Toilet Seat<\/strong><\/h3>\n
It Took $6 Billion Not to Audit the Pentagon<\/strong><\/h3>\n