Good day all. The Department of Government Efficiency has been rampaging through the various federal departments, tracking down DEI expenditures, huge amounts of waste and outright fraud. Now the Weaponized Autistics of DOGE are taking aim at the Department of Defense.
The DOD has a budget of almost $1 Trillion dollars. While there are many constitutional questions regarding many of the departments and agencies of the Federal government. There is no question on the Department of Defense. This is one of the Federal Government’s constitutional responsibilities.
However, the DOD is also a massive, bloated bureaucracy with way to many senior officers who are, bluntly, not thinking about their oath as officers, but their next promotion, assignment and what defense contractor they will go to after leaving the service. The DOD has also failed every single audit for the last 7+ years, (If not longer), and there are billions of dollars of equipment, not to mention other expenditures that can’t be tracked. Now DOGE is coming in and the DOD Perfumed Princes and PowerPoint Rangers are running scared. Here are the details from Fox Business News:
A former Department of Defense insider, Steve Simoni, says it’s “no surprise” DOGE has set its sights on the Pentagon for its next bout of uncovering “waste, fraud and abuse,” and predicted Monday that the Elon Musk-led group will uncover “all kinds of wasteful spending” in the process.
“It’s actually sending shockwaves through the department right now,” the Allen Control Systems CEO told FOX Business.
“When I was at the Department of Defense, we were spending $10,000 on HDMI cables that were ‘ruggedized’ when we could have purchased them for $20 or $30 at Best Buy… We need to get more efficient with our spending, because there’s a massive threat of drones that are proliferating on the battlefield right now, and the new administration, Secretary [Pete] Hegeth knows this.”
Part of the problem with the procurement system is rules, regulations and requirements put in place by Congress. It’s quite common that a system that is available for both the civilian and military markets will cost significantly more for the Pentagon. A lot of this is due to the documentation requirements en every single item. Napoleon once said an Army moves on it’s stomach. For the United States, it runs on red tape and paperwork.
Simoni, a former Navy nuclear engineer, suggested waste identified by DOGE could be reallocated to modernize military technology and prepare for the battlefield of the future, particularly homing in on developments capable of taking out drones.
“We’re actually very vulnerable right now, and we need to have solutions to be able to take these drone threats out,” he warned.
The Russia-Ukraine war has blown up a lot of preconceptions on what a near peer war might be like. The United States has been using drones for years, but these have been fairly large and expensive. The Ukrainians, and now the Russians are using very simple, cheap, throwaway systems and they have been devastating, mostly against the Russians. The United States has started looking into ways to deal with small drones, looking at everything from focused EMP weapons to old fashioned shotguns.
In an X post on Friday, DOGE announced that it held an initial meeting with the Defense Department as it prepares to take its controversial cost-cutting measures to yet another realm of the federal bureaucracy.
“Great kickoff with @DeptofDefense. Looking forward to working together to safely save taxpayer dollars and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse,” DOGE wrote.
Going through the Defense Department is going to take a lot of work and planning. To begin with, there are a lot of things that are and need to be kept secret. However, a full, detailed and accurate audit of where the money is going has to be undertaken. We may find that upwards of 30% of the budget is just wasted on things like $10,000 HDMI cables, $30,000 toilet seats, $1000 hammers, etc.
The $800 billion defense budget, like other areas of exorbitant government spending, could soon see some fat trimmed as DOGE roots out certain areas and identifies ways to streamline other processes.
And it certainly needs to be. Another thing that needs to be looked into is the whole process the military uses to determine what they need and how to get it. Currently, the model we use hasn’t really changed all that much since World War 2. It tends to be very centralized. You also have way to many senior officers running projects who will be “Rewarded” with a successful completion, but either ignored or outright punished if they try to kill a project that they’ve found just isn’t going to work.
Another issue is the “To many chefs” problem. A lot of weapon systems are designed by a committee. These committees will keep adding things to a project things that weren’t even part of the original requirements. This raises costs as the manufacturers have to make the changes and retool production. We need to figure out what a system is needed for, design to that requirement and only make changes if problems are found. We used to do this with aircraft. You would have an “A” model, then after using it for a while, they would find that things needed to be changed and you would then have the “B” model. (Look at the old Boeing B-17 and compare the original “A” model to the final “G” model)
These days it take decades to get a design into production because they want to make it perfect. The people making these decisions have forgotten that “Good enough now” is far better than perfect years later. We shall see how things progress. Secretary of Defense Hegseth is all in on having Musk and DOGE review everything in the Pentagon. The generals and admirals? Some think this is a good idea, others will try and fight it tooth and nail, right up until SecDef Hegseth and President Trump relieve them and discharge them from any further service.
Thatisall
(4 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading...
~The Angry Webmaster~
