Suspicions Confirmed
James Rosen at McClatchy confirms something I’ve suspected for a long time: Military spending defies efforts to track it.
Throughout the Rumsfeld reign of error at the Pentagon he made numerous statements to the effect that various complaints were unjustified because he could only work within his budget. In many of those cases which involved improvements to personal and vehicle armor, I knew that the money had been specifically appropriated and the suppliers were just waiting for the word to ramp up production, but the word wasn’t sent. I was constantly blogging about a need to audit the Pentagon’s books, because billions of dollars seemed to have been misplaced.
So they attempted to audit and discovered the bookkeeping is so bad you can’t really do an audit, and this problem goes back twenty years with no progress being made by the military to fix a worthless system. The bottom line is that the military doesn’t really know how much money it has, or how much it spends. They have no real inventory control, even on nuclear and nuclear-related items.
Apparently the latest target date to fix these problems is 2017, after the next Presidential election naturally. There are probably a lot of unemployed people available to inventory all of the stores of equipment, and to actually institute a new, unified bookkeeping system, if the government really wanted to fix this. and it could be fixed a lot sooner than 2017.
7 comments
Can we get you to be in charge, Bryan? It seems we have these attacks of counting pennies and yell at the military to stop spending so much and then feel faint trying to shuffle through all the accounts and papers and such and leave it all for someone else to do…
I like your idea. But it will never work. It’s too simple.
I like your idea. But it will never work. It’s too simple.
Sadly, I have to agree with that! And not just the Politicians and snr. Military cadre that don’t want it fixed, but also the MIC. Guaranteed!
And no Bryan, it’s definitely no surprise! And I’ll think you’ll find it goes back farther than 20 years m8.
It’s simple, because the problem is simple. This is a basic element of all businesses and organizations and the it is the classic teaching tool for business IT – the order entry accounting system that tracts inventory, receivables and payables. This is accounting 101 double-entry bookkeeping that every business from the smallest to the largest gets involved in. The process is basically the same whether you are a one-person small business or a huge corporation. The hard part of business accounting is the part involving taxes which is rarely logical or sensible, but beyond that it is a matter of scale.
Things got screwed up when they consolidated all of the services into a single accounting authority, because they didn’t plan for the change, they just did it. Melding different accounting systems requires planning because different systems often use different accounting codes for the same function. The Marines would use a lot of the Navy’s codes, but they would have extra codes for expenses that only the Marines occur.
Every time I changed stations part of the process was an inventory of the equipment that had been issued to me. If something was lost or destroyed it had to be accounted for by me. There were things I used that had to be signed out and signed in every time I used them. There was an process, but the process was lost. Rumsfeld in particular damaged the entire inventory control system by privatizing the clerical positions in the military. You needed people to keep track of the equipment even in war zones, and you can’t send civilians into war zones.
Look at all of the cases of nuclear triggers being shipped by mistake, nuclear weapons being misplaced, and similar incidents. That absolutely did not happen when I was in. The weapons on the alert aircraft of SAC were counted before take off, and after landing. There wasn’t just a record of how many, but they could tell you what the individual serial numbers were, and that was checked.
It doesn’t take long to remember the serial numbers on the weapons you were issued, and the thought that they might start putting serial numbers on individual rounds wasn’t really out of the realm of possibility.
They don’t have the logistics people any more. They don’t know what they have or where it is. They have removed all of the continuity in the system, and have forgotten that one of the reasons that William Tecumseh Sherman was so successful was because he knew the importance of logistics and was good at it. His march across Georgia was only possible because he knew his army could live off the land, and didn’t need to protect supply lines.
The real problem is that a real fix will endanger the ’empires’ of many people who have been using the dysfunction to increase their personal power. This is going to require Presidential action – a direct order from the Commander in Chief to clean up the mess, but Congress won’t like it, because some of the mess was the result of private deals with individual Congresscritters that help their districts or friends – like the extra C-130s that Newt Gringrich always required the Air Force to buy, even though the Air Force didn’t need or want them.
Sherman’s march across Georgia was only possible because he spent a lot of time stockpiling rounds of ammunition and knew he had enough ammunition to fight any battle he was likely to fight — and food would take care of itself there in the fertile heartland of the Confederacy. Once he reached Charleston he could be — and was — resupplied by sea.
Logistics was one of the things the Confederacy was bad at. They managed to scrape up enough rifles and rounds for their soldiers, but forgot about little things like food and shoes and clothing for their soldiers. On paper, Joe Johnson’s Army of North Carolina, mustered up to meet Sherman as Sherman marched north from Charleston, was larger than Sherman’s army. On paper. In reality, 90% of his soldiers had deserted because they were starving.
Logistics is something that traditionally the U.S. military was very good at. It astounds me that things have crumbled to the point they’ve crumbled. While the big boys play with high tech weaponry the basics are being ignored. But in the end it’s not high tech weaponry that wins wars. Just ask Nazi Germany, who fielded the most dominant fighter and tank of WW2 — and lost the war. In the end amateurs talk about stuff like cool weapons. Professionals talk about logistics. Our military apparently is now being run by amateurs. SIGH!
They have out-sourced logistics to contractors who don’t know anything about the military and are trying to run it like MalWart. They don’t know where things are stored, they don’t know what things are called, and every contractor is doing things differently.
There is no system, no one is in charge, and no one is responsible for anything.
I read about a desert depot that has 2000 MiAI tanks parked for repairs because the depot doesn’t have the people or parts to fix them, but Congresscritters want to buy more. At EBM, she was talking about brand new C-27s being sent to the Yuma boneyard for mothballing. It’s a mess, a total mess.
The problem with the C-27 is that it is smaller than a C130 yet more expensive to operate and the number of airfields that it will land on is not appreciably larger than the C130. It was a bad choice to begin with. Yet the contracts were signed, so they get flown straight to the boneyard. Inexplicable.
It’s a good thing that there’s no country with a real military that threatens the United States. Because if there was, we would be so fscked…
Comrade Misfit noted that the Forest Service was looking for fire fighting aircraft and wondered why the military didn’t just give them the C-27s instead of mothballing them. Except for two fewer throttles the C-27 has the same flight deck as a C-130 and the uses the same engines, so you just need a smaller version of the firefighting payload that is currently used for the National Guard C-130s to make them useful.
If they can give MRAPs to rural counties like Warren County in New York, they can certainly give C-27s to the Forest Service. I have no idea what they are going to do with the MRAPs because, other than I-87 there isn’t a road up there [Lake George] that wouldn’t be destroyed by a vehicle that heavy, and I doubt any of the bridges will support it. I was concerned about some of the bridges supporting my VW Rabbit the last time I was up there.