F-35
Credit: USMC
Defense Secretary James Mattis made some frank remarks about the Pentagon’s budget woes last month. “I cannot right now look you in the eye and say that we can tell you that every penny in the past has been spent in a strategically sound manner,” he said during a speech to graduating Air Force cadets in Colorado Springs, CO. “And so this year, for the first time in 70 years, the Pentagon will perform an audit.”
The idea is simple, in theory: get some outsiders (1,200 accountants and some big-name firms) to scrutinize the books to identify where the money goes. But the process promises to be a painful exercise for the Pentagon, which has struggled to manage its $700 billion annual budget. Big-ticket items have the biggest cost overruns, most notably the F-35 Lightning II. But even well-run programs, like the effort to create the new B-61-12 nuclear bomb, have baseline discrepancies that […]
We needn’t look any further to see a great cause of why our society is in a death spiral. Such gargantuan expenditures – including this unthinkable wastage – have drained the life fource from our society like an enormous vampire.
Never enough air craft carriers or F35 fighters but too much spent on the undeserving. The country can’t afford health care or education spending as I have been told by trumpers. I don’t understand how we continue as a country cutting taxes to the wealthy and increasing borrowing to fund the government. Yet congress must cut more from social spending because we can’t pass this debt to future generations. It is hard to wrap one’s head around this warped logic.
Do we have to go through a collapse as did the Soviet Union? I think so, I see no other likely end. The arrogance of those in charge is beyond redemption.