Price Increases for U.S. Military Gear Dwarf Most Nations’ Defense Budgets
April 5th, 2013Madness.
Via: Wired:
Here’s an example of what Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was talking about in his Wednesday speech on reforming the way the Pentagon buys gear. If you look at just the increases in how much defense gear costs, the bloat dwarfs what nearly every other nation on earth spends on defense annually.
I mentioned this yesterday during an appearance on MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes. Since some of you emailed seeking a linkable explanation, here goes.
In March 2012, the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative agency, took a look at the 96 highest-priority defense programs in the Pentagon acquisitions system. The watchdog organization found that the acquisition programs represented an estimated total cost of $1.58 trillion, and had actually “grown by over $74 billion or 5 percent in the past year.” (.PDF) The sources of that increase were everything from changes in the per-unit costs of all the planes, guns, trucks and ships; upticks in R&D expenses; or plain “production inefficiencies.”
$74 billion is a lot of money. To put it in context, if all that hardware cost growth were a sovereign nation, it would spend more money on its defense sector in a year than Russia does. ($64 billion in 2012, although in Putin’s Russia, defense money spends you.) It would laugh at India’s $44 billion effort in 2012 at becoming a rising military power. It would pen op-eds in British newspapers about the paltry $57.8 billion that once-imperial London spent on defense last year. The only countries’ defense sectors that would eclipse it are China and the U.S. itself.
And remember, $74 billion is not the cost of the gear itself. It’s just the growth in the cost of the hardware. In Washington, the rising prices of defense programs happens so routinely that it seems normal, like a natural cost of doing business, rather than an indicator of money being mismanaged.
Some times I wonder if all those cost increase are not just a way to secretly send money for black projects.