Eisenhower would be irate that his Military Industrial Complex speech is well known but ended up having zero of its intended impact.
Fun fact: We are a militant oligarchy that would rather make up a reason to invest in a war than provide social programs to its citizens.
Imagine if we employed those people to be teachers or artists or scientists etc... Shit that's depressing to think about
If we can print almost $1T every year for defense spending and can't spend a fraction of that on programs like pre-K and healthcare, you can't help but think the pols get some reward/pleasure in not funding those things.
They get re-elected because few districts if any could relocate a base or DoD's workforce to another sector in the area and survive the political downfall for losing thousands of employments opportunities. As soon as you look at the DoD as one ginormous socialized work program, you can feel a little bit better I suppose. That's what I do at least
I don’t think that 3.5 million number even includes contractors, which are the bulk of the workforce. If I go brief something to the “government” customer, there may be one actual fed employee and the rest contractors. I could say a lot here but it’s just kind of depressing. I wouldn’t necessarily call it war hungry or war fueled, it’s more insane than that honestly. Within divisions of the government everyone is fighting for budgets. You get promotions and accolades based on your budget. So within the dod you have entire projects that from the get go make no sense, but some PMO pitched it to get $250 million so we’re going through the development cycle until it gets killed at acquisition. There’s countless examples of this, but the most recent and public in my mind was ARRW, which the Air Force acquisition chief said over and over again publicly that they did not want and had no use for. But DARPA spent a boat load of money and they found some suckers in the armament command to transition it because they wanted a huge budget, and then half a billion later we have a dead program because of course the Air Force doesn’t want to actually buy it. This happens ALL THE TIME.
It goes all the way up and down too. Like uniform changes. EVERYONE was using the good old BDU or Desert Camo pattern with black boots. Then the Marines go to their digital MARPAT design and tan boots, so the Army changes to their 1970s couch cushion digital ACU and tan boots, so the Air Force has to go to their 1970s couch cushion but with tiger stripes ABU (with Sage Green boots) and so the Navy designs their blueberry AND their green digital patters (with black or tan boots). Then everyone realized that the Army, Airforce, and blue Navy uniforms are fucking awful for actual operations, so Army and Air Force have to switch AGAIN to OCPs (which are a rip off of another design we used for a while for deployments), and Navy ditched the blue uniform altogether. They keep talking about switching everyone to OCPs but it hasn’t happened yet. And each one of these uniform changes costs hundreds of millions of dollars.
She should get either 1) a uniform allowance every year if she'd AD or 2) free uniforms every 3 years if she's reserves. But yeah, maintainers go through that every 3 months sometimes (especially boots) and a full uniform set including boots and hat can run $200-300
Prob some higher up in the Pentagon has a buddy who makes them. This whole place is just one big grift
That's exactly why the Air Force had green boots for a decade. The uniform quality is utter shit for something you're paying $50 for trousers and $50 for a jacket, of which you need at least 3 of each. They're literally made by blind people and when you get them you have to spend the first month cutting all the little extra bits of string off of them.
It gets to the point honestly that the only logical conclusion for some decisions is just job security. We’re so bloated in defense it seems like at some point a unit was slow so they’re like fuck let’s stand up a working group to get new uniforms! That’ll keep us busy for a few years. I feel this way about security a lot too. Like why did you put in this policy, that does literally no good and just increased man hours? Oh so you can hire a new team member whose job is it to audit said policy? Got it.
For the military specifically I think it's about promotion. A careerist can't take on a new position, decide everything is fine, and let things ride, because at the end of the year they won't have anything on their annual review to set them apart. So you need "Streamlines acquisition process; cut order time by 69%--enhanced morale for 420 Airmen". So they change things, waste everyone's time and money, and then the next person will just change it back. This also applies to "morale events" like "Elephant Walks" where they just walk all the unit's aircraft down the runway in formation at walking speed for photo ops. Costs hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel, hundreds of hours of maintenance, takes away maintainers from their families, usually on weekends, because now EVERY aircraft has to be checked.
Also why when new hospital command cycles in every couple years they refuse to admit systemic failures and instead say there’s a culture of complaining and laziness because of like a 40% attrition rate. “this place can’t shutdown under my watch, and if I admit there’s huge problems then it’s on me to fix it.”
Happens all the time in the civilian world as well. Have to justify your existence somehow. I have a client that hires new risk management people all the time. They always start adding new reports we need to do but they are asking for the same information as the old reports but they just made it look different to say they're doing something and can pat themselves on the back for the successful implementation of a new system.
A lot of bases have a thrift store run by the MWR and I was always surprised by the amount of folks that don't know they exist. I don't think I ever bought a working uniform. Might be worth checking out.
I often wonder what our country would look like if our federal jobs program was for teachers, social workers, medical professionals, construction trades, and artists instead of global military force projection that makes the world an objectively worse place.
I was just thinking that it’s so odd that people are thing thing we always ask “how we gonna pay for that” and not the bloated military. I guess it shows our true capitalist nature that spending for jets is more important than teaching and feeding kids or keeping people healthy.
The irony is that in the corporate world, making yourself obsolete gets you promoted or better opportunities
But Heres the thing, we can do both! F-35s can still go vroom to Rock Me Like a Hurricane and we could feed kids, pay for healthcare and pay teachers. We just choose not to
Man. The right is going to dump nuclear tier waste in the water to poison the well of discourse around this
This is good. Government doing good. (even if the only avenue to do so is funnel money to private business :/)
The Real UT I’m sure you are seething at the absolute carelessness of these classified documents and recognize that you’re an absolute fucking idiot for ever defending your cheeto dicked dipshit
Ok. He left extremely classified documents sit next to the shitter but did he ever mistreat a certain one Ben Gazi? Checkmate libtards.
Glad to see the police take time out of their busy schedule of harassing black and brown people to film female minors without their consent West Virginia State Police Investigation: 10 more minors, 42 more women in total to sue West Virginia State Police over hidden cameras Wheeling West Virginia Attorney Teresa Toriseva sent a notice of legal action to Interim WVSP Superintendent Colonel Jack Chambers and West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey on April 21 saying 42 women, including 10 minors, plan to file lawsuits against the West Virginia State Police. The minors attended Junior Trooper Academy. According to a letter sent by Cpl. Joseph Comer, a member of the WV State Police, to state lawmakers, Governor Jim Justice, and the office of the Attorney General on February 16, a hidden camera or cameras were placed and operated inside the female locker room at the State Police Academy. Toriseva says her clients and other female Junior Trooper program attendees accessed and used the female locker room at the Academy during the time the anonymous letter states the cameras were in use. Toriseva also says the taping of the females in the Academy did not end until 2020, the same time the Junior Trooper Program was discontinued in 2020. “Our ongoing investigation shows rampant sexual misconduct, including hidden videotaping, toward female cadets and others, while they attended the Academy,” Toriseva told 7News. “Much of the conduct is through witness provided evidence.” Toriseva says these women that were videotaped have experienced varying levels of physical and emotional abuse “All of these women were victims of a civil conspiracy perpetrated by instructors, staff and leadership at the West Virginia State Police Academy,” the letter states. “Accordingly, these women will bring suit seeking all available damages under the law.”