When a system is so slosh with money that it does not know what its costs are, it is time to take serious action. But what do you do when no one cares?
The US Air Force misreports, even to itself (and to Congress and OSD), the cost to operate and support its own aircraft. That is the bottom line of my recent attempt to uncover operating and support (O&S) costs for aircraft like the F-22 and the B-2.
It also gets more interesting: the official USAF data that are available show that, despite promises to the contrary, “stealth” aircraft are far, far more expensive to operate than the aging (and expensive to maintain) relics they are to replace. Moreover, the data that are available are very likely an understatement. Also, there are some other cost Queens in the USAF inventory; still others are hidden in the missing data.
The amounts of money involved are huge. Generally, O&S costs for aircraft are twice (very probably more) the cost to acquire them. For example, OSD predicts the $379 billion F-35 program will cost an additional $916 billion to operate and support. (However, the O&S number is a low-ball prediction.)
What is happening about this? Nothing.
These are some of the points in a 3,000 word study piece I recently completed. The piece, with a one page summary, follows below. It is also at the CDI website at , and you can also see journalists Colin Clark's take.
The text of the short study and its summary follows:
The revision expanded the government’s surveillance authority, permitting intelligence agencies to collect information on U.S. soil without a warrant identifying a particular individual — as long as the government could assure a surveillance court that its targeting procedures are designed to find people who are not U.S. persons and who are overseas.
U.S. government has typically attempted to block such challenges by arguing that litigation would reveal state secrets or that the plaintiffs lack standing to sue. But in March, a three-judge panel accepted the argument of the plaintiffs, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, that the law had harmed them by forcing them to take draconian measures to avoid government interception of their phone calls and e-mails to overseas clients.
The number of persons who held security clearances for access to classified information last year exceeded 4.2 million — far more than previously estimated — according to a new intelligence community report to Congress (pdf).
The report, which was required by the FY2010 intelligence authorization act, provides the first precise tally of clearances held by federal employees and contractors that has ever been produced. The total figure as of last October 1 was 4,266,091 cleared persons. See “Report on Security Clearance Determinations for Fiscal Year 2010,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence, September 2011.
In 2009, the Government Accountability Office had told Congress that about 2.4 million people held clearances “excluding some of those with clearances who work in areas of national intelligence.” (“More Than 2.4 Million Hold Security Clearances,” Secrecy News, July 29, 2009). But even with a generous allowance for hundreds of thousands of additional intelligence personnel, that estimate somehow missed more than a million clearances.
Likewise, one of the many startling findings in the 2010 Washington Post series (and 2011 book) “Top Secret America” by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, was that “An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.”
But remarkably, that too was a significant underestimate, according to the new report. In actual fact, as of October 2010 there were 1,419,051 federal employees and contractors holding Top Secret clearances.
As high as the newly determined total number of clearances is, it may not be the highest number ever. In the last decade of the cold war, a comparable or greater number of persons seems to have had security clearances. In those years the size of the uniformed military was much larger than today, and a large fraction of its members were routinely granted clearances. Thus, as of 1983, there were approximately 4.2 million clearances, according to 1985 testimony (pdf) from the GAO. But that was an estimate, not a measurement, and the actual number might have been higher (or lower). By 1993, the post-cold war number had declined to around 3.2 million clearances, according to another GAO report (pdf) from 1995.
The unexpectedly large number of security clearances today can presumably be attributed to several related factors: the surge in military and intelligence spending over the past decade, increased government reliance on cleared contractors, and intensive classification activity that continues today.
Phi Beta Iota: For $80-90 billion a year, $15 billion or so of which is the cost of maintaining one of the most extraordinarily inept and unreliable secrecy systems on the planet (much much larger than those of all dictators combined), we get, “at best” 4% of the intelligence (decision-support) that the President or a major commander needs, and nothing for everyone else.
Researchers at Michigan State University have developed a laser that could be used to detect roadside bombs, also known as improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
The device is no stronger than a typical presentation pointer, but it has the sensitivity and selectivity to scan large areas and detect the chemicals used in these deadly bombs, which have accounted for about 60 percent of soldier deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Phi Beta Iota: In 1988, when the Marine Corps Intelligence Center (today a Command) was created, Measurements and Signatures Intelligence (MASINT) was just getting started. The #1 officially-stated Marine Corps requirement for MASINT in 1988 was precisely this: the ability to detect ground explosives at stand-off distance regardless of the containers. Nearly a quarter century later, and billions–not just one billion–later, the US Government still cannot do this. This Israelis solved the problem for themselves in the 1960's, using trained dogs that were expendable. The US Government learned of this solution in 1988, but refused to take it seriously (dogs are not an expensive enough solution). As General Robert Scales has pointed out, 4% of the force (infantry) takes 80% of the casualties, but receives less than 1% of the funding. This is, in one word, corruption. The Department of Defense lacks integrity in every sense of the word.
A remarkable talk by Wesley Clark–4-Star General in the U.S. military: he reveals his reaction to informaton that the U.S.was going to attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in 5 years–Iraq, Syria,Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran. He goes on to say, “These people [from the Project for a New American Century] took control of the policy of the United States” and recalls a 1991 meeting he had with Paul Wolfowitz who at that time held the number three position at the Pentagon. Pay close attention to what Wolfowitz told him. This talk by Wesley Clark made my jaw drop.
Elaborate, expensive sting operations by the FBI are based on the premise that true terrorists will take the bait. This is not the same thing as preventing an actual attack.
By Petra BartosiewiczLos Angeles Times, September 18, 2011
Shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, FBI Director Robert Mueller issued a memo to his field offices detailing “one set of priorities” for the agency: Stop the next terrorist attack. This directive marked a new “preemptive” style of law enforcement that has since become the hallmark of our domestic front in the war against terrorism.
Under this system, catching an actual terrorist would constitute a failure because the perpetrators would have committed the act. Instead, we are in effect seeking “pre-terrorists” — individuals whose intentions, more than their actions, constitute the primary threat.
Taking stock of the major “terrorist” prosecutions that this approach has yielded, however, it's not at all clear we're safer from another attack.
After weeks of interrogation, Glenn Carle concluded that the man in front of him was not the al-Qaida terrorist the CIA accused him of being. In a candid new book, he asks what happens when a government allows it fears to compromise its values.
Phi Beta Iota: This is not about fears. No one in the US Government actually believes the greatest threat to America is terrorism (which is a traffic accident at best). This is about keeping the corruption going. It is about the complete loss of both intelligence and integrity across the entire US Government, but particularly the national security bureacracy, the Congressional boosters, the White House Goldman Sachs mafia, and the mindless media. All of this is a betrayal of the public trust richly deserving of public scorn and vengeance.
