In 2015, the United States spent $585 billion on its military. The United States has added more than $300 billion in military spending in less than a decade.
Biden has added nearly $150 billion to the military budget since 2021, the last budget approved by President Trump.
Military contractors have taken advantage of the political dynamics. According to a 60 Minutes investigation that aired earlier this month, "[m]ilitary contractors overcharge the Pentagon on almost everything the Department of Defense buys each year."
The problem has its roots in the early 1990s "when the Pentagon, looking to reduce costs, urged defense companies to merge and 51 major contractors consolidated to five giants."
That means there was no longer much competition for defense contracts.
The issue became more severe "in the early 2000s when the Pentagon, in another cost-saving move, cut 130,000 employees whose jobs were to negotiate and oversee defense contracts."
Today, the Pentagon has to trust contractors to do the right thing.
Revolting! And I bet Raytheon’s employees didn’t get a seven-fold raises between 1991 and now — but you better believe the execs got a 700-fold raise! #capitalism#greed
A Department of Defense report released last month concluded that the five major defense contractors "generate substantial amounts of cash beyond their needs for operations or capital investment."
Over the last 20 years, the defense industry has "spent $2.5 billion on lobbying." During that period, defense contractors employed an average of 700 lobbyists — more than one lobbyist for every member of Congress.
Despite rampant abuse and complex weapons systems like the F-35 that are rarely operational, Democrats and Republicans keep shoveling more money at the industry
@juddlegum Almost every Congressional district and every state has a vested interest in the #military. Whether bases or #contractors, a #politicians view is that a vote for is supporting the local #economy while a vote against makes reelection more difficult. Welcome to money in US politics and why the system is in trouble.
@juddlegum The military found the secret. Spread the spending among all or most states to get all the reps to buy into the defense jobs and revenue for their states.
@juddlegum shouldn't Ukraine's budget be counted as from all of the NATO (primarily the US) countries that provided that military budget? It's not like they would make it in to the top 10 by their own domestic revenue.
@juddlegum I appreciate the point you're trying to make here, but this article is woefully incomplete without an acknowledgement of how much it's falling to the United States to finance the Ukrainian war effort, the ways in which Ukraine is showing that our GWOT/COIN-oriented Army is ill-equipped for peer conflict, and/or the potential costs should Ukraine go pear-shaped.
The collapse in the number of major DoD contractors in the 1990's was because the DoD budget declined after the fall of the Soviet Union and those companies were going to go out of business (taking their expertise with them) if they weren't merged. It wasn't so much a cost saving measure as an industry saving measure.
The Stinger production line is essentially moribund, operating at a low rate to serve one overseas customer using legacy electronic parts. Raytheon says that in order to meet desired production rates they're going to have to redesign parts of the system to use in-production parts. By Congressionally mandated accounting rules, the cost of the redesign and reopening of the production line have to be amortized across the number of missiles in specified in the new DoD request.
@FoundOnWeb@juddlegum If you have to renegotiate an entire contract with the government to make changes to cut costs (something you really only know for sure at the end of a contract) companies have been known to not do it. Unless the heavens opened and we changed our ways, the rules just don't make it easy. Auditing is unlikely but rules can change if Congress finds the will.
@juddlegum There are concepts that should not be for profit. Anything involving the military, the police, prisons, and medical should be non-profit at the least, government run at best.
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