While headlines on government waste have tended to focus on larger projects like the F-35, the latest testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee has once again revealed just how calamitous smaller, less ambitious programs like the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program can be.
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Sean Stackley described the program as having “broke the Navy,” saying the cost overruns have put the Navy’s program managers under a microscope to ensure they don’t ignore cost overruns in other projects as well.
The LCS project’s overruns are virtually unprecedented as a percentage, with per-unit costs just to buy the ships more than doubling from the estimates, and upkeep costs for the largely useless ships to set the taxpayers back another $14 billion, a figure which continues to grow.
The Navy came up with the LCS project as part of a quantity over quality push which aimed at having more boats in the water than they otherwise could, intending the LCS to be a low-cost, reliable ship for limited operations around coastlines.
In practice, the costs are far higher than anyone expected, the ships have been breaking down pretty much constantly, and even when they get them seaworthy, officials concede they’re so small and unarmored that they have no survivability in combat.
Adding insult to injury, the Navy is facing lawsuits over the LCS project on the claims that the design of one of the ships was stolen.
When I was a Navy electronics technician during the Korean War, we regularly tested and threw in the trash as defective about 50% of the brand new vacuum tubes we were getting from Raytheon and other Navy suppliers. There is indeed nothing new under the sun, when it comes to screwing our Armed Forces and the we US taxpayers who support them. And so it goes.
For the last 45 years, I have been a small electronics contractor to the Navy and other military branches. Lately, I have all but given up trying to get contracts to build or repair military equipment. Back when I started, the military tried to do business with small contractors – they paid “progress payments” up to 95% of the contract value. Every month, an inspector would come by my plant and authorize a financial draw for me on contracts which showed progress and expenditures. That way, I could get contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars without selling my house.
But the big banks said to the government, “Hey, quit acting like a bank to these small contractors – it is our business to loan to small businesses, which we will gladly do.” Of course, the banks got their way, and of course, they wouldn’t spit on small businesses, so that required self-financing for the small guys from then on.
Today, the big contractors like Raytheon get every job – they are supposed to farm some minor jobs out, but you know, their motto is : “Not a dime will leave the house”. So, the big guys farm out the work to their own wholly-owned subsidiaries. Foreign owned firms take a chunk too. No wonder, our industrial base has gone to crap.
Giving defense contracts to foreign owned firms ought to be considered an act of treason.
It is not that the costs are higher it is that the profits have skyrocketed for the manufacturers. These are the folks making campaign contributions to the Congress, Senate and Presidential Candidates.
It used to be called corruption/bribery but now it’s just pay to play and there is no accountability. Keep taxing and keep banking the profits is the new American mantra.