"Treating Internet Addiction": This letter cracks me up. I love how when you sit at a computer all day to crank out code and make somebody else rich, it's called "work," and when you're having fun, it has to be categorized as some kind of addiction with a treatment available -- preferably one involving prescription drugs, no doubt. Reminds me of that joke we used to tell each other: "Prozac makes you want to work and not have sex, weed makes you want to have sex and not work, which one's legal?" The guy who wrote the letter is also owner of SMARTguard, which just has weener written all over it.
I'm experiencing my traditional 2 hour post meal sugar crash which is mellowing me out. I'd like to just go to bed now, but I figure that's a sure way to wake up at 2am and have to fart around for 2 hours before falling back asleep. Anyway, the one other thing that is making me angry today is this article. I could solve the budget crisis in the US in seconds: kill the "future combat systems" and the "joint strike fighter aircraft". Look at the chart in this article: look at how much money we spend on the military. I don't want an army. I want health care, roads, public transit, schools, and spending on r&d. On top of that, our troops in Iraq don't have armor, their gear is getting torn to shreds in the field, and the Air Force and Navy suggest cutting troops so they can pay for their toys. All of this crap is really about is defense contractors bilking tax payers for crap that doesn't work. Or worse, Congressional representatives forcing useless programs down the Pentagon's throat to bring tax dollars to their home distrcits.
Almost 50% of the Budget of the United States goes to the military: check out this analysis.
"In addition, the Future Combat program depends on unacceptably expensive technologies so experimental that the Army is having trouble making them work. So far, 52 of the system's 53 crucial technologies remain unproven, including any workable plan for making tanks light enough to airlift. Meanwhile, projected costs for just the first phase of the program have soared as high as $145 billion, not counting another $25 billion for the communications network that will make it function. That kind of money cannot be found without cutting into more pressing defense needs. Lawmakers, including traditional Republican supporters of Pentagon spending, are rightly beginning to ask hard questions." If you have TimesSelect... click here.
Report Says Pentagon Spending on Weapons to Soar |
"A new report by the Government Accountability Office warned yesterday that the costs of the Pentagon's arsenal could soar by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.
The Pentagon has said it is building more than 70 major weapons systems at a cost of at least $1.3 trillion. But the Pentagon generally understates the time and money spent on weapons programs by 20 to 50 percent, the new report said.
A survey of 26 major weapons systems showed cost overruns of $42.7 billion, or 41.9 percent, in their research and development phase.
Last year, the overall projected cost for those same 26 systems rose $68.6 billion, or 14.3 percent, to $548.9 billion, from $480.3 billion in the last 12 months.
A wider assessment of 54 major weapons systems showed that a majority are costing more and taking longer to develop than planned.
While Defense Department officials questioned details of some assessments of the major weapons systems, they did not dispute the report's overall conclusions."
ASSHOLES. That's all I have to say about it. $1.3 trillion freakin dollars. You could do a lot with that other than flush it down the toilet on weapons that will never work.
Here's an article from 1996 about the large discrepency between the Pentagon's public claims about their success rate with advanced weapons versus what the Government Accounting Office found in an independent audit. Remember, this is from 1996.
SMART' WEAPONS WERE OVERRATED, STUDY CONCLUDES |
During and after the Persian Gulf war, the Pentagon dramatically oversold the effectiveness of its most expensive high-tech aircraft and missiles, the most thorough independent study to date has found.
The Pentagon and its principal military contractors made claims for the pinpoint precision of their most impressive new weapons -- the Stealth fighter jet, the Tomahawk land-attack missile and laser-guided "smart bombs" -- that "were overstated, misleading, inconsistent with the best available data, or unverifiable," the study by the nonpartisan General Accounting Office found.
The accounting office concluded that new, costly "smart" weapons systems did not necessarily perform better in the Persian Gulf war than old-fashioned, cheaper "dumb" ones. It called into question the wisdom of the military's plans to depend increasingly on weapons that extend the state of the art of war at a cost of tens of billions of dollars.
The accounting office analyzes Government programs for Congress. Its secret four-year study of the air war conducted during Operation Desert Storm is the most detailed analysis of its kind to be made public. It used more than one million pieces of information: Defense Department databases compiled for commanders, intelligence reports, after-action analyses and reports from military contractors. The accounting office also interviewed more than 100 Desert Storm pilots, war planners and battlefield commanders.
An unclassified summary of the 250-page secret report is scheduled to be published this week. The report was commissioned in 1992 by Senator David Pryor, an Arkansas Democrat, and Representative John D. Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, to help Congress decide what weapons to buy in the future. The secret report contains facts and figures to buttress the 13-page unclassified summary, which was made available to The New York Times by a Government official familiar with the underlying report.
During the war, Pentagon briefers treated the public to videotapes showing a smart bomb diving down the air shaft of a Baghdad building and told anecdotes about the extraordinary accuracy of Tomahawk missiles. The study concluded that while some of those stories were true, they were not the whole truth.
Nor is this the first time that questions have been raised about praise bestowed upon Pentagon weaponry in the flush of victory after the war.
In 1991, President Bush said the Patriot missile system had been nearly perfect, shooting down 41 out of 42 Iraqi Scud missiles aimed at Israel and Saudi Arabia. Defense Department officials later said that the Patriot was far from perfect, knocking out perhaps 40 percent of the Scuds aimed at Israel and 70 percent of those aimed at Saudi Arabia. Skeptics -- Congressional investigators, Israeli officials and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist -- said the Patriot may not have scored more than one clean hit.
The Pentagon did not dispute the new report's main conclusions. In an April 28 letter to the accounting office, the Defense Department said it "acknowledges the shortcomings" of its precision-guided munitions, the aircraft that carry them, the Tomahawk missiles and the department's ability to assess the effectiveness of its bombing in the gulf war. It said it would deal with those shortcomings by building improved smart weapons, studying whether it has the right mix of weaponry and proposing new ways to find and destroy targets.
American air power overwhelmed the Iraqi military during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and helped win that famous victory. The United States deployed nearly 1,000 combat aircraft and unleashed nearly as many tons of bombs each day as were dropped on Germany and Japan daily during World War II.
But for all their superior technology, pilots often could not tell whether a presumed target was a tank or a truck or whether it already had been destroyed, the report said. Their sensors -- laser, electro-optical and infrared systems -- could not see clearly through clouds, rain, fog, smoke or high humidity, it said.
The sleek black F-117 Stealth fighter jet, despite its high cost and its highly touted ability to get close to a target while evading detection, did not necessarily outperform older, cheaper aircraft. (The fighters cost more than $106 million each in 1990; the plane is different from the B-2 Stealth bomber, which costs more than $2 billion a copy thus far.) The Air Force claimed an 80 percent success rate on bombing runs by the Stealth fighter, but the reality was closer to 40 percent, the report found.
"It is inappropriate, given aircraft use, performance and effectiveness demonstrated in Desert Storm, to characterize higher-cost aircraft as generally more capable than lower-cost aircraft," the summary said.
Nor did smart bombs necessarily deliver the bang for the buck. Only 8 percent of the tonnage of bombs dropped on Iraq were smart bombs. But they accounted for 84 percent of the cost of munitions in the war, the summary said.
"The air campaign data did not validate the purported efficiency or effectiveness of guided munitions, without qualification," the summary said. " 'One-target, one-bomb' efficiency was not achieved."
The cost of smart bombs being built by the Pentagon and planned for the future is now estimated to be more than $58 billion, more than triple what the Government will spend this year on the F.B.I., the war on drugs, immigration control, Customs, Federal courts and prison construction. "The cost of guided munitions," the summary concluded, "and the limitations on their effectiveness demonstrated in Desert Storm need to be addressed by the Department of Defense."
