4 ms·

It would appear this nation's military is a fat, bloated welfare recipient, feeling entitled and too powerful for anyone to do anything about it, impoverishing

by spodek 12y ago

It would appear this nation's military is a fat, bloated welfare recipient, feeling entitled and too powerful for anyone to do anything about it, impoverishing the nation. We all know it has many brilliant and capable individuals and teams in it who can do great work, but the system is anything but. The money ultimately goes to people, meaning we are paying people to do unproductive work, though I'm sure plenty of it goes to executives extracting rents without working productively. Weapons are not the only way to make a nation secure. Collaborative relations with other countries and less disparity of wealth help too. Imagine the security that money could create if used to help others instead of threaten them, or invested into entrepreneurship or helping keep the government accountable. History shows what happens to cultures where the people can't rein in its powerful who look for more power. I hope we figure out how to.

rickdale 12y ago
All the money we spend on the fighting the wars, yet we can't over spend on treating the veterans. It's really pathetic.
- lostgame 12y ago
  Veterans, yes. But how about all the people who lost their jobs in the US over the last 20 years because of the obvious incompetence of the government to budget in any way that makes sense. Priorities. If you have a ton of starving and jobless people in your country, you do not spend a quarter of a TRILLION dollars on killing more people. I'm sorry, you just don't.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Getting people to work means more people paid, more jobs. How does a large govt project reduce available jobs? Not following.
    - karmajunkie 12y ago
      It doesn't. The point is not that it reduces available jobs, but that nearly half a trillion dollars could have been spent more directly on any number of options which A) don't involve blowing up people in foreign countries; and B) produce a substantially better quality of life in this country. Basic income, healthcare, even jobs just standing around that paid a living wage. It boggles the mind.
    - _yosefk 12y ago
      By reducing consumer spending and investment through the taxation necessary for funding said project?
  - Tloewald 12y ago
    Actually government jobs programs kind of directly affect joblessness and hunger. The question is whether this is the right kind of jobs program. Fixing infrastructure would create more jobs with a greater multiplier (construction workers are lower paid and spend more of their income) and produce lasting value. Edit: weird typo.
    - JPKab 12y ago
      You are exactly right. These huge military projects (which for the most part are utterly unnecessary) are nothing more than jobs programs cloaked as national security. There is certainly a huge element of rent extraction by defense contractor executives, as well as small business owners who utilize specialized direct award "set asides" designed for minorities, women, service disabled veterans (the vast majority of these are people who were never in combat, and have minor injuries at best such as back-pain), etc. Of course, the large defense contractors simply sub-contract to these small businesses and then do all the work, while the 3 people who constitute the small business pocket money for doing nothing other than existing. But beyond the rent-extraction, you have a nation with a hugely oversized, overstaffed military. We take people, the vast majority of whom have an average high school record and zero college experience, and then put them into an immensely bloated, 1950's era organization. A small percentage of them will learn how to perform combat operations. The majority of them will learn to perform the logistics functions (supply, maintenance, repair, administration) that are the backbone of any military. While some of these skills learned (electronics, software, etc) are in demand in the private sector, the vast, vast majority are not. In fact, a huge percentage of the administrative functions in the military have long been automated in the private sector. It is a truly overstaffed, bloated beyond belief organization. So where do you go when you get out of active duty? If you are like many folks, you are truly fed up with being in a large government institution, and you want nothing more to do with the military. You go to school, aggressively learn some trade/skill that is in demand in the private sector, and you leave it. The majority of people I've encountered don't do this. Instead, they take the only jobs they are qualified for: "quals" (somebody with military experience in some obscure area of logistics for an organization that is required on paper for a contractor to have employed upon award of a contract) for a defense contractor, or a civil service civilian job in the Department of Defense or other segments of the Federal gov't. Both are, to some degree, do nothing jobs. A "Qual" might provide lots of advice to a defense contractor they are employed by, but typically they are just there because the contract demands that they are. They are mostly figure-heads. The joke in the industry is that many are hired and hang out in darkened offices playing video games, separated from the software developers and managers who were never in the military. The civil service jobs in the Federal gov't are like working in any large bureaucracy. Mediocrity isn't just tolerated, but is the norm. People come in at 9 and leave at 3. If you care about your job, you work hard and end up carrying the weight of several of your coworkers who do nothing but watch the clock. Promotions are based on paper qualifications and certifications, are decided by people who have never met you, and are frequently awarded to people who dedicated their time to gaming the paper system instead of performing their job function. What I am saying sounds anecdotal, but organizational experts who have studied failures at places such as the V.A. have all summed these findings up in a scientific way. In Arlington, VA, there is a neighborhood called Crystal City. In Crystal City, there is a large, brand-new environmentally sustainable building which houses a huge number of EPA employees. The EPA has a valuable, important mission. For someone like me, it is beyond depressing seeing the employees milling about on 2 hour lunch breaks. The vast majority of them drive to work, despite the building being walking distance from a subway station. There is a mass exodus at 3PM as they all leave for suburbia. Just like the rest of the Federal gov't, the EPA and the DOD are nothing more than giant employment programs. The difference is that the EPA gets its budget hammered by one political party that hates it, while the DOD is universally praised and worshipped by people who don't understand that the percentage of members who will ever see combat is in the single digits.
  - antidaily 12y ago
    If only it was a quarter trillion.
    - higherpurpose 12y ago
      More like a quarter trillion per year.
- GVIrish 12y ago
  Yes it really is shameful how bad the VA is. I wish someone would pass a law that would prohibit deploying troops to anymore deployments until we fix the VA.
jaxytee 12y ago
Problem is, any politician who mentions a decrease in military spending is demonized by the right and "left".
danmaz74 12y ago
Did those $400BN go to the military? Or to the private contractors that designed and built the plane?
jebblue 12y ago
>> It would appear this nation's military is a fat, bloated welfare recipient This can also be said in regards to a large populace of Democratic voters.
- aeturnum 12y ago
  Sure, if you consider 4% large [1]. Or maybe you're thinking of the 15% too poor to feed themselves. Which is about the same thing as building a $400B plane. [1] http://www.statisticbrain.com/welfare-statistics/ http://www.statisticbrain.com/welfare-statistics/
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
adamtj 12y ago
I'm a realist, so I understand and accept that the Pentagon's main goal is keep its budget healthy. What I don't understand is why can't we do that in a way that gets us good airplanes? I'm a wary optimist. Trust, but verify. Hope, but plan for the worst. I don't understand enough to know whether we're living in a Pax Americana or a Pax McDonalds. I hope it's the spread of globalization and liberal democracy, but I'm willing to spend the money just in case it's actually the shadow of the American military machine that keeps our relative peace. If my fears are justified, however, it's our military machine, not our military budget that keeps nation-states polite. I can be a ruthless critic. I'll buy spin (multi-role is cheaper) only as long as I don't think much about it. But, now I'm thinking about it. It's obvious that an F-35 is a joke. 2500 of them is less funny, but still not nearly as awe-inspiring as it could be. But, I'm apparently naive. I don't understand why some ambitious politician can't take this opportunity to really do something of note. Why can't somebody take this political machine we've built, with contractors lined up in many states, and repurpose it to produce useful, best-of-breed airplanes? I would buy the spin that it's cheaper and easier to design four different planes each tasked do one job extremely well than it is to design one single plane to fill those four roles simultaneously. There is such a thing as the opposite of synergy. Somebody could coin a phrase here, sell the public something huge, and come out looking like a hero for making good on the money we're inevitably going to spend. Let the Pentagon have their budget. Let the politicians have their jobs. And let me have a military with the best equipment in the world.

by spodek 12y ago

rickdale 12y ago

All the money we spend on the fighting the wars, yet we can't over spend on treating the veterans. It's really pathetic.

lostgame 12y ago
Veterans, yes. But how about all the people who lost their jobs in the US over the last 20 years because of the obvious incompetence of the government to budget in any way that makes sense. Priorities. If you have a ton of starving and jobless people in your country, you do not spend a quarter of a TRILLION dollars on killing more people. I'm sorry, you just don't.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Getting people to work means more people paid, more jobs. How does a large govt project reduce available jobs? Not following.
  - karmajunkie 12y ago
    It doesn't. The point is not that it reduces available jobs, but that nearly half a trillion dollars could have been spent more directly on any number of options which A) don't involve blowing up people in foreign countries; and B) produce a substantially better quality of life in this country. Basic income, healthcare, even jobs just standing around that paid a living wage. It boggles the mind.
  - _yosefk 12y ago
    By reducing consumer spending and investment through the taxation necessary for funding said project?
- Tloewald 12y ago
  Actually government jobs programs kind of directly affect joblessness and hunger. The question is whether this is the right kind of jobs program. Fixing infrastructure would create more jobs with a greater multiplier (construction workers are lower paid and spend more of their income) and produce lasting value. Edit: weird typo.
  - JPKab 12y ago
    You are exactly right. These huge military projects (which for the most part are utterly unnecessary) are nothing more than jobs programs cloaked as national security. There is certainly a huge element of rent extraction by defense contractor executives, as well as small business owners who utilize specialized direct award "set asides" designed for minorities, women, service disabled veterans (the vast majority of these are people who were never in combat, and have minor injuries at best such as back-pain), etc. Of course, the large defense contractors simply sub-contract to these small businesses and then do all the work, while the 3 people who constitute the small business pocket money for doing nothing other than existing. But beyond the rent-extraction, you have a nation with a hugely oversized, overstaffed military. We take people, the vast majority of whom have an average high school record and zero college experience, and then put them into an immensely bloated, 1950's era organization. A small percentage of them will learn how to perform combat operations. The majority of them will learn to perform the logistics functions (supply, maintenance, repair, administration) that are the backbone of any military. While some of these skills learned (electronics, software, etc) are in demand in the private sector, the vast, vast majority are not. In fact, a huge percentage of the administrative functions in the military have long been automated in the private sector. It is a truly overstaffed, bloated beyond belief organization. So where do you go when you get out of active duty? If you are like many folks, you are truly fed up with being in a large government institution, and you want nothing more to do with the military. You go to school, aggressively learn some trade/skill that is in demand in the private sector, and you leave it. The majority of people I've encountered don't do this. Instead, they take the only jobs they are qualified for: "quals" (somebody with military experience in some obscure area of logistics for an organization that is required on paper for a contractor to have employed upon award of a contract) for a defense contractor, or a civil service civilian job in the Department of Defense or other segments of the Federal gov't. Both are, to some degree, do nothing jobs. A "Qual" might provide lots of advice to a defense contractor they are employed by, but typically they are just there because the contract demands that they are. They are mostly figure-heads. The joke in the industry is that many are hired and hang out in darkened offices playing video games, separated from the software developers and managers who were never in the military. The civil service jobs in the Federal gov't are like working in any large bureaucracy. Mediocrity isn't just tolerated, but is the norm. People come in at 9 and leave at 3. If you care about your job, you work hard and end up carrying the weight of several of your coworkers who do nothing but watch the clock. Promotions are based on paper qualifications and certifications, are decided by people who have never met you, and are frequently awarded to people who dedicated their time to gaming the paper system instead of performing their job function. What I am saying sounds anecdotal, but organizational experts who have studied failures at places such as the V.A. have all summed these findings up in a scientific way. In Arlington, VA, there is a neighborhood called Crystal City. In Crystal City, there is a large, brand-new environmentally sustainable building which houses a huge number of EPA employees. The EPA has a valuable, important mission. For someone like me, it is beyond depressing seeing the employees milling about on 2 hour lunch breaks. The vast majority of them drive to work, despite the building being walking distance from a subway station. There is a mass exodus at 3PM as they all leave for suburbia. Just like the rest of the Federal gov't, the EPA and the DOD are nothing more than giant employment programs. The difference is that the EPA gets its budget hammered by one political party that hates it, while the DOD is universally praised and worshipped by people who don't understand that the percentage of members who will ever see combat is in the single digits.
- antidaily 12y ago
  If only it was a quarter trillion.
  - higherpurpose 12y ago
    More like a quarter trillion per year.
GVIrish 12y ago
Yes it really is shameful how bad the VA is. I wish someone would pass a law that would prohibit deploying troops to anymore deployments until we fix the VA.

jaxytee 12y ago

Problem is, any politician who mentions a decrease in military spending is demonized by the right and "left".

danmaz74 12y ago

Did those $400BN go to the military? Or to the private contractors that designed and built the plane?

jebblue 12y ago

>> It would appear this nation's military is a fat, bloated welfare recipient This can also be said in regards to a large populace of Democratic voters.

aeturnum 12y ago
Sure, if you consider 4% large [1]. Or maybe you're thinking of the 15% too poor to feed themselves. Which is about the same thing as building a $400B plane. [1] http://www.statisticbrain.com/welfare-statistics/ http://www.statisticbrain.com/welfare-statistics/
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

adamtj 12y ago

I'm a realist, so I understand and accept that the Pentagon's main goal is keep its budget healthy. What I don't understand is why can't we do that in a way that gets us good airplanes? I'm a wary optimist. Trust, but verify. Hope, but plan for the worst. I don't understand enough to know whether we're living in a Pax Americana or a Pax McDonalds. I hope it's the spread of globalization and liberal democracy, but I'm willing to spend the money just in case it's actually the shadow of the American military machine that keeps our relative peace. If my fears are justified, however, it's our military machine, not our military budget that keeps nation-states polite. I can be a ruthless critic. I'll buy spin (multi-role is cheaper) only as long as I don't think much about it. But, now I'm thinking about it. It's obvious that an F-35 is a joke. 2500 of them is less funny, but still not nearly as awe-inspiring as it could be. But, I'm apparently naive. I don't understand why some ambitious politician can't take this opportunity to really do something of note. Why can't somebody take this political machine we've built, with contractors lined up in many states, and repurpose it to produce useful, best-of-breed airplanes? I would buy the spin that it's cheaper and easier to design four different planes each tasked do one job extremely well than it is to design one single plane to fill those four roles simultaneously. There is such a thing as the opposite of synergy. Somebody could coin a phrase here, sell the public something huge, and come out looking like a hero for making good on the money we're inevitably going to spend. Let the Pentagon have their budget. Let the politicians have their jobs. And let me have a military with the best equipment in the world.