The Pentagon’s $52k trash can
responsiblestatecraft.org
responsiblestatecraft.org
Prior to this, I had no idea why defense projects were so expensive and slow. You have to understand, there are so many levels of negotiation, over the smallest changes imaginable. There's no such thing as "open source code" in these projects, everything is either modified off-the-shelf, or completely boutique stuff, and of course implemented in such a way that the clients (that would be us) can't just access the code themselves, or that clients can just build upon or make wrappers.
The contractor will send you their own techs or engineers - even if it's across the world - to fix the most trivial bugs. And it will take months or planning, budgeting, and what not.
In once instance, one contractor tech spotted a bug in the code, which some user had reported about - it was a one character fix, just a typo, really. So he fixed it on the spot, along with the rest of the stuff he came for.
A couple of weeks later he comes back, and reverses the bug. He had told his manager about the bug fix, and was berated for fixing in. In order to fix that bug, it had to be reported correctly, go through software update meetings, go through budgets, and the whole nine yards.
The bug was reported the correct way, and many months later he came back to fix it (again).
The whole process of specs and updates was like pulling teeth.
What do you mean you went and just fixed it!?
We need all of middle management to charge for the fix!
What isn’t a security risk? A closed source vendor supplied application that has its headquarters in the US.
You can sometimes find pockets of innovation in the defense sector, but it’s mostly filled with bureaucrats with engineer in their title.
Reliable even down to the bug behaviors...
IMO it makes more sense to communicate the expected impact of the changes, so that downstream can read a patch bump as unlikely to cause issues.
I'm sure it's important to have a stable technology to train on in the military; at the same time, I remember one of their open-days they were showing off a civilian in-flight entertainment system that was so clearly overpriced for what it was that I knew even as I saw it that I could've done better for lower unit-cost. This isn't to show off, even despite my having not yet finished secondary school at the time — my solution would've been little more than "glue laptop to chair/wall in front", as tablets weren't something people discussed much around me in the 90s — it's just that the business solution was really unimpressive.
I assume there's secret military equivalents to that public project.
[0] if you exclude the job interview at Lockheed Martin for the year in industry paid work experience part of my degree, which didn't go further than an interview
Theres a reason there's so many steps to accept hardware.
I have an old account with a bank that has hardly changed its website design in well over a decade. It's great! The information is clearly laid out in tables and everything loads super fast. Every other financial web app I'm familiar with has a much more "modern" design and is categorically worse to use. One site literally takes over a dozen clicks to get to basic information and evey single page load is slooooow.
The adversarial nature that defense companies treat our military is appalling. I'm convinced that refactoring a lot of this BS could get us way more with less $
So the only profitable way to win these contracts is offer the cheapest bid by delivering as little as possible while being in spec, and then pillaging on the change orders.
It's a method for transferring billions of dollars from public tax revenues to private companies which are cozy with the state. It has nothing to do with safety or reliability.
All other methods of stealing tax money are illegal.
ain't no one talking about tax cuts, or getting after the rich, cuz of that.
HOWEVER when your acquisition system is designed to ensure that a nuclear detonator and a LAMP application go through the same process, these kinds of “overkill” or “nonsense” requirement responses happen.
We’re long overdue for fixing the FAR and federal acquisition process, which is the root problem. The legal system and processes built over the last 50 years, and as a result the people inside it, doesn’t allow for simple and efficient differentiation between projects legally so you end up with the same hammer meets mail approach.
They mean well, and I understand how hard it can be for government agents to hold massive contractors accountable, but the purpose of a system is what it does... so we wind up with entrenched bureaucracy, and the players who don't subscribe to these approaches wind up getting outcompeted because their on-paper performance doesn't measure up. Even if they're in fact a million times easier to work with and do a great job.
Our software was part of the stack that our regulated customers were using to document their compliance. Every year or two, they would audit our development process to insure that untoward code wasn’t slipping into the release. Getting the fix into a release would have required that the bug be prioritized, fixed and qa’ed. Never became important enough. It burned me at first, but I’m not sure it was the wrong outcome.
Yeah, sure, it's a trash can, there's no reason it should cost $50k. We're all agreed that's an absurd amount to pay for a trash container.
The government isn't just paying for the trash can.
They're paying for people to design, tool, and maintain that design. It's economic investment in people and skills, not necessarily just the finished product.
The reason you can buy an OXO trash can for $30 on Amazon are the scale and volume at which they're produced. Development costs for that can are probably not dissimilar from those in this example, as far as paying for human time and effort to make the thing reality.
The problematic element of it is when companies charge these sorts of absurd fees for a design that was produced decades ago (the E-3 is not a new aircraft by any means) and not adding meaningful value on top of it.
It's a pretty interesting tradeoff. Should we pay outrageous amounts of money for stuff like this? It keeps people employed, which generates other positive economic effects, like buying houses and groceries. It also creates handy design and manufacturing know how, which is a useful thing to have if our current cold war with China ever heats up in the South China Sea. It's a lot harder to buy war materiel from your adversary when lead is flying.
It’s a bit like doing a custom PCB design and fabrication run for personal reasons. It’ll be $10 worth of components, but a half dozen might cost you $1k if you want someone else to set up a run on their machines to make ‘em.
The Stinger missile example further down seems more egregious. edit: Maybe less egregious than I thought; its original microprocessor is now obselete. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIM-92_Stinger#Replacement
Edit:
Yes obviously they are concerned about targeted attacks.
And where do you live that hardware store sells trashcans that verifiably comply with all requirements to be put on a custom military Boeing 707 and not f things up in some costly way? By definition any such trashcan is ripe for targeted attack because no one except US defence would have a use for it.
If you are concerned about targeted attacks, head down to your local hardware store and buy one of the thousands they have in stock.
Funny, HN was up in arms over Titan's use of a logitech controller just a few days ago. But somehow using something from best buy on a freaking expensive plane like an E-3 is a good idea. Well, folks, that way of thinking actually sank the Titan and cost five lives.
I guess the equivalent is putting the flimsy $1.25 trash can from Dollar Store in your spacecraft, instead of a $8 trash can.
Good example with pillows causing a (still!) missing nuclear weapon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash
Are pillows essential to the plane's operation? No, but them not catching fire is.
It's for a highly specialized 707 airliner. It'll be metal, rated for fire resistance if someone sneaks a smouldering cigarette into it, wheeled for servicing, lock into place during flight, etc. You can't buy it at Home Depot, and intelligence agencies are constantly making smaller and harder to detect devices for bugging items.
If US gov bought cheap plastic stuff from another country instead there can well still be corruption expressed in their choice of suppliers etc.
Naive or not, this turns out to be true surprisingly frequently.
> When the 707 fell out of use in the United States, the trash can was no longer a “commercial” item, meaning that Boeing was not obligated to keep its price at previous levels
So now one can look why it cost "mere" $300 before, unless Boeing losing money back then the price hike may be shady behavior and then someone should change supplier asap.
https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...
Because what I think is not what you claim.
You defending corruption and fraud is just so far fetched it's hard to take your OP seriously.
Edit: Since the article mentions circuits and such: The alternative to paying through the nose for spares for obsolete systems and parts is a new development. In which case price, and lead times, increase even more. And now contractors are obviously abusong that situation, but parts of those high prices can be explained by the fact that a lot of current, top notch, military hear is running on old, commercially sometimes even obsolete tech.
"As the Government Accountability Office recently reported, nearly 20,000 small businesses have bowed out of military contracting in the past decade, creating further opportunities for price hikes."
Why did 43% of the small businesses that used to do business with the government stop? And what has happened since 2020?
I know multiple small manufacturing businesses that would never consider accepting a government contract. One of the many reasons is the way the government force its contractors all the way down to the lowest levels (contractors of contractors of the big 5 gov contractors) to follow a million nonsense Covid rules. I suspect the number of small businesses willing to work for the government has dropped even more in the last three years.
Just look at the myriad failed Kickstarter projects that tried to make consumer stuff. Even getting something normal made in China can be serious work. And far more if you actually want to do a good job of it. Linus Tech Tips put a surprising amount of work into making a screwdriver.
Then consider that the military probably has a bunch of requirements like "this can't break into sharp shards" and "it can't emit toxic smoke if it burns", and they'll want that to be proven. Certifying all those things is a whole job on its own.
Making real, physical goods is very, very challenging, and I don't think a lot of the denizens of this site (as SWEs) appreciate that.
....coz they are making 50k of a thing. Not four a year.
Doing advanced, completely unprofitable basic research, for one thing. These are the sorts of projects that spawned GPS, the Internet, and IC manufacturing. Wasn't super profitable at the time of conception, but the military doesn't care. They need capability, irrespective of price. All of these technologies are now keystones of numerous gigantic American companies with billion dollar plus valuations.
Building up US based scientific and manufacturing know-how, for another. Plenty of people take the skills they learn at Raytheon or an FFRDC and use them to start profitable small businesses, which in turn employ more people and generate more tax revenue.
Not that I expect many people reading this to care about that. "Military spending bad" is too easy and convenient a slogan.
It doesn't solve every problem - there are a shitload of people in America receiving inadequate education, nutrition, and healthcare, for example. But it certainly helps keep a lot of Americans employed and paying their mortgages, which is a non-trivial benefit.
Spending $50k on a trash can is unlikely to lead to the sort of benefits that are required. Better than unemployment benefits for nothing, maybe. The opportunity costs and time wasted on bureaucracy put even that optimistic spin in doubt. Basic research doesn't need 3% of GDP spent on overinflated contracts. It can't be helping the situation.
That's not how it works. As long as the trade deficit exists, and the reserve currency is the dollar, there will be huge demand for treasuries.
“Do more with less” during the Obama administration / Afghan war was a test of this and the things that got cut were the innovative programs while inefficient tent poles remained.
We should reform now while we have the budget so we get more good public innovation and can actually cut effectively and have that muscle memory in leaner years.
What is hard to measure is what could have been done with the money to make the US military stronger but was wasted instead.
The worst part is all these inefficiencies are going to add up over the coming decades when we have to keep up with the PLA/China.
A PLA colonel makes less than a private first class marine and manufacturing anything is an order of magnitude difference.
What fraction of that $50k landed in the hands of the workers, do you think?
I'll direct all the righteously indignant folks claiming "corruption" to you from now on. XD
I'd wager most of the money spent on this venture went to the people designing and making the trashcan, not executive bonuses or admin fees.
Is the opposite of this:
> being bored not doing anything productive
I'm not sure why you claimed to agree with the latter being how government contracts work.
Smart cookies working on tough problems.
Also probably the best radar designers in the whole goddamn world.
I am proud to be even tangentially associated with them.
especially considering the comment was referring to Boeing, a company notorious for their lobbying to get contracts they don't deserve
$50K for a crash can is absurd, but $200K to spin up a production facility and get the output certified to whatever aviation safety standards apply to trash cans sounds about right.
Alternative: Those trash cans set in stock somewhere, the 300 buck price guarantee ran out, and the alternative was to not fly or develop new cans. Well, that wpupd also justify 50k per can if said E-3s are actually needed right now.
Maybe contacting to a custom shop was an option but would take an extra week, and they needed those E3s in the air ASAP. I don't know what specific circumstances were at play, and neither does anyone in this thread.
But keep in mind, those same rules apply to safety critical parts, e.g. engines and wings. And overall, it is easier to just apply the same high standards to everything.
You should probably consider that these cans have to be tested to some minimal standard to make sure parts don't shear off under the stresses they encounter during their service life. These stresses are probably more significant for parts inside of a military aircraft, as it may be required to take evasive action or perform higher-stress maneuvers even though this is basically a 707 fitted with expensive electronics. It sounds dumb in isolation because it's a trash can, but if you want predictability and low failure rates you really do have to test everything.
I personally lack the imagination to consider all the failure modes of the can but that lack of imagination doesn't mean that the failure modes aren't real risks.
It would really suck to lose an air crew because a trash can of all things made by some rando in their garage flew out of its mount in a wing over maneuver on a training exercise.
How about your welds? One guy, so yours saying he inspected his own work and no sign-off?!
You gonna retain those records? ASA-100, Distributor Quality System Standard, paragraph 12: “The distributor shall maintain documentation of traceability for at least 7 years…
Here is a small non-exhaustive list I found of what you need:
Did your shipment meet all the customer’s requirements? Note that this extends to more than just PN, QTY and ship-to. Failure to read and heed those pesky T&Cs (the Terms and Conditions on a typical PO or RO) is a frequent NCR.
Who signed your C of C/Material Cert? Are they authorized to do so (cross checked to the Roster)?
Where was the part obtained from? Are they on the Approved Suppliers List?
Did you send the part to a repair station/AMO? Are they on the Approved Suppliers List?
Whomever you claim to have trace to, is the chain of custody acceptably documented?
Are part numbers, serial numbers, and condition in harmony?
If there were any deviations from what the customer required, was there reasonable documentation in the record showing the customer’s acceptance of the deviation?
Anyway, good luck with your metal shop business and running parts through the folder-thingy. Please bear in mind that the link I provided is just a small look at the regulations that govern Civil Aircraft and that Mil-Spec is an entirely different beast, but I am sure you know that already!
If it still costed them tens of thousands to produce a trash can, I'd argue they're doing their job really inefficiently. Not really what you'd call an economy of scale.
For parts likely not manufactured in decades? No. They likely didn't have current paperwork for that. Boeing wasn't sitting around just waiting to replace some trash cans just in case the Pentagon was going to order some.
Trash cans for a plane whose commercial counterpart has been out of service for decades is literally not an economy of scale. An order for replacement trash cans at this point is a specialty boutique order.
If the process changes, you have to go back and re-certify. If the technology changes, you have to go back and re-certify. In some places, if you change the machine the part is run on, you have to go back and re-certify.
So if you take a part that was stick welded, move it to a tig welder and then move it to an automated spot welder, you have to certify 3 times.
Not to mention, a tig weld may behave differently under stress than a stick weld so make sure that you do a part analysis too!
Last but not least, the regulations have changed from the last time this aircraft was produced. Are your parts governed by the new regulations or the old?
This is what got Boeing in so much trouble with the MAX, they didn't want to re-certify the aircraft so they kept making changes to the design. Do you think they are getting more or less scrutiny now when they say "It's an old design, everything is cool!"
The FAA got beat up, badly, justifiably so over their handling of that. Congress mandated them to regulate more strictly: https://www.reuters.com/article/boeing-737max-congress-idAFL...
Up-thread, comment was to farm it our to a local machine shop with one guy. Here is the FAA on Counterfeit parts: >Counterfeit Parts: These are unapproved parts manufactured and sold without FAA >approval. You should report them to the FAA as a SUP. There may be obvious, or >not so obvious, visual clues to help you spot these parts. The FAA aggressively >investigates these cases and works closely with the Office of Inspector General >(OIG) and law enforcement officials to ensure proper adjudication. There are >cases of this nature that have resulted in significant civil penalties and/or >jail time for those involved. https://iflyamerica.org/safety_suspected_unapproved_parts.as...
Adding: I have found an older(2022) AMCOM Spares SAR Guidance Document. This will show you what you need to do in order to apply to manufacture parts for American Military Aircraft. https://www.avmc.army.mil/Portals/51/Documents/SAR%20Guidanc...
I think the problem is that they're so disconnected from the value of money that they are willing to pay that much.
Imagine you have four multimillion dollar aircraft that can't fly because some small part that is out of production broke. You need those planes to fly missions. How much would you pay to put them back into service?
I think in many societies we’ve lost the wiggle room that allows for pragmatic solutions in the name of safety.
Maybe the risk reduction was worth it? Maybe not. But arguments for risk averse behavior tend to win more than 50% of the time in democratic societies which accumulates a kind of “risk-avoidance-debt”.
I'd much rather fly on a plane that's regulated and certified out the nose than one that's not.
I'd rather live in a country that invests in people's skills and knowledge than one th t doesn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_corrosion
Mercury versus aluminum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrdYueB9pY4
In an earlier life, I shipped items requiring this particular hazmat label on packaging: https://www.safetyemporium.com/12332
Fun fact, if parts are around 30k they can be treated as not worthy of repair. Instead, discard them and nuy a new one.
Presumably all the sunk costs were already sunk
The amount of paperwork/documentation that has to change, logistics and inventory tracking, plus the battery of tests to check that a new item maintains the same mil standard qualifications as the old.
It's absolutely possible to apply some level of basic human reason and common sense to such situations. A different accounting convention is probably in order.
The alternative is to find a less costly supplier that can meet that specification. Now you've (a) held up the missions and (b) more than likely used up any cost savings in your procurement & supplier evaluation process.
At some point, the intelligent thing to do is shrug, grumble under your breath, and write the check so you can get on with life.
The issue in government contracting is very simple. You need competitive procurement to ensure reasonableness of price. Period. In the 90s, we allowed major defense contractors to consolidate at the prime level and diversify at the subcontractor level.
So Lockheed Martin has some component of every system in 300 congressional districts - some little company is fabricating magical bolts to get congressional support.
So now these giant companies are all sole source vendors. Guess what happened to price?
That's the 2nd paragraph of the article that you apparently didn't read.
Looks like we both read it, but not all of us understood the implications of it.
This isn’t some specialized part that the plane requires to fly. It’s just a trash can.
Hell, just go to Target and buy one that’s similarly sized. It would be cheaper to fly across the country to find one at this point.
It is a trash can that must not fly around the E-3's cabin if they're making evasive maneuvers.
It is a trash can that must fit in a specific spot in a plane first made in 1957 and ended production in the 1970s.
It must have been confirmed via a vigorous process to fulfill all these requirements and approved for aviation use.
You can not buy one of these at Target. They are not putting little plastic bins by the workstations in an AWACS plane.
You do realize there are multiple trash cans available, right? Some that are metal. Of many different sizes.
It would take less time to go store to store across the country and source 4 trash cans than it would to do this ludicrous process.
Certified for use on 707s? Again, this is not the sort of trash can you have in your office. It'll be rated for fire, it'll be in a special cart that fits into a special locking spot in the plane, it will have been tested to stay in that special locking spot if the plane crashes, etc.
It's like trying to buy Commodore 64 parts at Best Buy. Not going to happen.
Apparently you could buy one for $300 though. I own a bin that isn't far off that price, and I'm sure many people on the site have much fancier ones.
Yes, when they were being commercially manufactured for many users.
Now that 707s are no longer in service outside the military, they're not running production lines for parts except when needed; that $200k includes all the paperwork to win the contract, the lawyers who review it, un-mothballing whatever tooling they use, etc.; the fixed costs far outweigh the costs to make each individual trash can. For similar reasons, I can buy a part for my Corolla much cheaper than I can for a Model T.
This is a site apparently populated by fairly bright people. I'm struggling to understand why no one seems to get this.
Not to say the average user here is an idiot, but it's pretty clear that cribbing together code in extremely low-risk environments doesn't impart any understanding of how designing, manufacturing, and supporting critical products over a 5+ decade lifespan is actually done.
There used to be economies of scale. It's a 707; they stopped being made in 1979. If you want 707 parts now, there's a good chance they're gonna be produced on a very small scale custom job for you.
(It's also a very special 707, inside and out. Cabin designs can vary significantly from airline to airline, let alone civilian to military.)
The reading of the article implies the contract set prices for commercial items and Boeing simply started charging the army whatever as soon as it technically wasn't 'commercial'.
There's also some foresight involved here. I used to work for a company that delivered computers for industrial applications such as ASML and FEI (lithography machines and electron microscopes). They had very precise requirements: "we want Intel Xeon 5119 Rev 3 CPUs for the next 4 years, not Rev 2, not Rev 4, the revision shall be 3 and 3 shall be the number of the revision. Revision 5 is right out". The same applied with mainboards, memory, etc. There was also an entire testing procedure involved for many of these things and not all components passed.
So, we charged them more for this then $random_person buying a component, obviously, but we also talked to them beforehand and knew roughly how many units they expected to sell, overbought components in bulk beforehand before they were EOL, and sold the rest afterwards fairly cheaply (because by then they were pretty old components). The volumes for these kind of machines is low (on the order of dozens or hundreds a year) so this was all practical. We made a fair but far from exuberant profit from this.
I see no reason why this couldn't have happened here: "oh, your trash cans are going EOL; we expect to need 40 of them in the next 30 years, please produce them before you EOL them".
I don't know which party failed on this part, but someone did. Possibly both. Even ordering two new-price trash cans leaves you with 250 of them at the old price. Storage isn't free either so let's assume 150 of them.
Congress. The big stink would go from "we bought four $52k trash cans" to "we bought hundreds of trash cans we won't need for a decade, if ever!"
Examples:
Rand Paul complaining about things like $8M in unused solar panels: https://www.paul.senate.gov/news-sen-rand-paul-highlights-18...
Bobby Jindal saying "Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.": https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/bobby-jindal-...
Unfortunately, both of those things frequently happen simultaneously.
4 extra =/= hundreds extra
---
And why did the government spend $8M(!!) in unused solar panels? I could have gotten 26,000+ trash cans at $300 each!
> And why did the government spend $8M(!!) in unused solar panels?
Spares? A lower than expected defect rate? Who knows? Paul doesn't provide useful specifics, just the politically sexy top-level numbers.
In an organization with a multi-trillion dollar annual budget, $8M in unused solar panels is a bit like you throwing away a ream of paper that got some water damage.
> In an organization with a multi-trillion dollar annual budget, $8M in unused solar panels is a bit like you throwing away a ream of paper that got some water damage.
And yet a fraction of that amount is front page HN.
Clearly a lot of other people believe differently.
A lot of people believe incorrect things about stuff they don't understand, yes. HN most certainly isn't immune.
Outrage bait is hardly a new phenomenon. The unit cost looks insane because it's a side effect of the fact that a defense contractor won't get out of bed without a minimum of a couple hundred grand in the contract to cover the program.
> The investigation also revealed that Raytheon Technologies had raised the price of Stinger missiles from $25,000 to more than $400,000 per unit. “Even accounting for inflation and some improvements, that’s a seven-fold increase,” Shay Assad, a former Pentagon acquisitions official, told 60 Minutes.
The US ramped UP how many stinger missiles it bought so how could your explanation lead to an increase in price? Especially one so dramatic?
Nonsense. You fell into the Broken Window Fallacy.
>They're paying for people to design, tool, and maintain that design. It's economic investment in people and skills, not necessarily just the finished product.
I call bullshit on that. There is no "maintenance" on that design, it was already done and paid for. It's a trashcan, it doesn't require specialized tooling to the cost of $50k. That's far above "make the tools to make it from scratch" price. There is no "economic investment" needed here to keep the tech of making trash cans alive.
> It's a pretty interesting tradeoff. Should we pay outrageous amounts of money for stuff like this? It keeps people employed, which generates other positive economic effects, like buying houses and groceries.
"It's keeping people employed" is terrible excuse to spend tax dollars. Any other kind of social service is far more positive to the society than throwing more money at military contractor
> It also creates handy design and manufacturing know how, which is a useful thing to have if our current cold war with China ever heats up in the South China Sea. It's a lot harder to buy war materiel from your adversary when lead is flying.
Or just make government-funded stuff the property of the government. Government paid for development, government should get detailed plans and all of the documentation of it, and any inventions made along the way should be put into public domain, as the public paid for it.
And if government then turn to other company "hey, can you make these at reasonable price", well, that's just glorious free market at work.
Pentagon: "Oh hey, I need special bolt X"
FreeMarket: "Sorry, was too expensive to make that here so we're making special bolt X in China"
Pentagon: "Um, but we are shooting China right now"
FreeMarket: "Don't worry I can get a production line setup in 3 months for 100 million dollars"
Pentagon: "But I need special bolt X TODAY!"
now all of them make silicon valley money off their skills just because of how bloated military contracting is*
The first initial public offering from Silicon Valley was in 1956 for a company called Varian, that sold microwave tubes for military applications.
https://diginomica.com/who-are-we-kidding-silicon-valley-was...
There's nothing inherent or ontological about tech that demands the money it does. It's needed, and the money is available, so that happens. If you know how to work a lathe, and the money is available, you deserve to be able to get it.
So the design may not need to be maintained, but if the company supplying the material goes out of business, someone needs to confirm the new material specs will work on the tool.
I was really annoyed by this at my shop and asked S-4 (supply) why this was. What it comes down to is that when military vendors sell a plane, radio, tank, etc to the military they aren't selling one product. They're selling a product list (called an SL-3). Each product on that list must be specified, routinely tested (eg: certain amount each batch), and then manufactured. As time goes on, the screw is used in less things that are in production so the batch sizes for production are reduced, which inflates the overhead test cost. A lot of products have pretty interesting test standards; for instance we had a truck that after every significant change had to be blown up a minimum of four times. The base truck was $400k and then the equipment inside - which was the actual configuration that was being tested - cost millions per vehicle.
I think the military could benefit from part standardization and longer lifetimes on component production.
Years ago in a history class it was asserted that in WWII, because the US had a greater degree of part standardization (I think they were talking about stuff that could be used across multiple tanks and truck models) than the Germans, the US supply lines for keeping everything running could be more effective. A German vehicle was more likely to be out of commission for want of a part.
I'm not sure if that's true, or how difficult part standardization is in complex modern equipment. But when the Russians are possibly harvesting chips from home appliances, and when we're all acutely aware of how tangled global supply chains are, I wonder if there will be a push for greater standardization from a strategic motivation rather than a cost one?
Part standardization isn't just bolts and major assemblies but also things like test stands, jigs, and everything else needed to repair something.
Every repair bay needs for example a shop crane. Every division will have X number of shop cranes all their maintenance units. If there's a particular model shop crane that works with every engine for every vehicle in the division that's awesome. They just need X shop cranes.
But then they get assigned a new type of truck. Its engine is bigger and better than the old model. Unfortunately the existing shop cranes are too small to handle lifting this new engine. Now the division needs a mix of shop cranes and enough where every motor pool has every shop crane necessary to fix any vehicle that comes in.
To understand this you have to appreciate a few things. First, these are military-grade trashcans. That sounds ridiculous, but there are a whole range of MILSPEC standards that must be followed to deliver anything to the military. Certain materials cannot be used, certain vendors can't be.
Second, there's always design maintenance. C'mon, this is a site of programmers. People here understand the reason you'd maintain software: redoing your old, working C code in Rust; upgrading applications designed for XP to run on Windows 10, etc. TFA quotes the E-3 Sentry, a design based on the 707 from late 1960's. The trashcan design needs to be updated! Certainly material sizes and quality are substantially different, rivet part numbers have changed, coatings have changed. Dealing with changes means substantial time qualifying the new parts.
Third is the issue of scale. If you're making a million cell phones you can sell them at the low price of $1k each; but if you make just one it might cost $1B. Here, we're talking trashcans. If you build a thousand, you hire an engineer to oversee the design requirements and master machinist, and then a small army of machinists and assemblers to make the parts, and a quality guy to inspect them, and some other guy to do the documentation. How many of those guys do you need if you make just one or two? Well, not as many, just the most expensive ones.
Hand waving here: we're going to make 10 trashcans. I'll bid 40 hours of engineering time, 80 hours of machinist, and 40 hours of quality/paperwork guy time. Assuming realistic numbers for those guys, you're talking about maybe $30k (don't forget to include overhead costs, which are more than you think they are). I'd guess a couple $k of parts, but just realized I forgot machine time, paint shop time, incoming material quality inspection, etc., etc. Amazingly, though, if you only bought one trashcan, the price doesn't change all that much. Most of that machinist time is setting up.
So, gosh, I mean, there's a lot here. And Boeing is more expensive than I am, and has more processes and procedures. And they know how to make these trashcans in a way that fits the aircraft.
These aren't COTS parts, and they'll never be, because in general, COTS parts have short lifetimes. The B-52, for example, has been flying since forever and it's still being upgraded. There aren't a lot of mainstream items with service lives like that. You know where the military gets great prices? Where there's a substantial dual-use application: guns, bullets, computers, office desks, building HVAC units, etc. They can buy from the mass market. As long as they don't want excessive service lives out of them, they'll pay the same price as you. It's when they want something special that costs extra, same as you or me.
For example: as other more level headed folks with actual knowledge of contract fulfillment have mentioned, this might have been a T&M or cost plus procurement. In which case, there's very little opportunity for the profiteering that most of my replies have stridently claimed is obviously occurring - with zero evidence beyond "There's NO WAY it could be that expensive!!"
I get that I'm trying to argue with the emotions of a bunch of people with a lot of antipathy towards the US government, and that's ultimately a losing battle.
End of the day, you can be mad about this if you want, but this is the way it is, and it evolved that way for reasons, and some of those reasons are to encourage second order effects - beyond merely procuring plane trash cans.
I also think the excuses made here are dishonest. It doesn't keep people employed, it doesn't fund innovation. It goes into some billionaire's bank account, gets invested in whatever and pushes them up some list of top 100 richest people in the US.
The profits don't go to employees, they don't cause more hires. They don't create jobs. The trash cans are already designed, they're probably already manufactured as well. They're not going to hire anyone for this, they're just jacking up the price because they can so why the hell wouldn't they? Just like they jacked up the price of insulin not to mention general healthcare and medicine and everything else recently.
The rich have one objective, it is to get richer. They will hide research that goes against that interest. Oil companies knew CO2 was bad nearly 100 years ago. Teflon producers knew teflon was bad decades ago. Until someone makes them stop, they will not stop. Because money.
Corporations literally do not give a single ounce of fuck about anything except money. If they do something that seems selfless it's because seeming selfless is in their interest (money). Like how Patagonia made record sales of their "Don't buy this jacket".
If you ever fins yourself thinking a corporation is giving a shit about something that doesn't make them more money it's because you're not seeing their angle.
https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Napoleon-say-If-you-want-to-ta...
So they are either paying for someone to keep it in a warehouse for at least thirty years, paying to keep a trashcan factory around for seventy years, or paying someone to essentially reinvent the wheel and hand-build the damn thing. One-off items are expensive, and one-off aviation items doubly so.
The government doesn't spec "a trashcan." They create size specs, water-tightness ratings, material durability, etc. The exact spec they provide may be met in 90% of areas by an existing trash can, but that won't do. If there are requirements for some level of waterproofing, you can't just seal it or even mold it from a single piece of material, you have to PROOVE it. It has to be tested and usually adhere to an existing standard so you're going to design several trash can, submit them for approval and use the best one that passes.
It's mind-numbingly tedious to build anything for the government.
Wrong - almost all of the profits go to the shareholders of those contractors. The people who are actually doing thew work do not get paid more.
Shit like this is the tip of the iceberg. [1]
[1] https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/11/22/why-cant-the-do...
Yeah, Russia has a defence budget 12 times smaller compared to the US, but that means that Russia can now afford to only pay ~$4100 dollars for a trashcan and still be America's equal in terms of "PPP" defence expenses.
I could make 1 plastic trashcan at home for less than $50,000. And probably less than $30.
I even gave it a fancy pattern.
I used FreeCAD.
It took 5 minutes to make the trashcan, and 2 nights to learn the pattern tool.
Total cost was 1.50 for my fancy color changing filament.
Can you guarantee a fire started in it won't spread to the rest of the aircraft and fill it with noxious fumes?
It is becoming so frustrating to read all those tech bro comments, believing that doing some messy 3D printing is the same thing as manufacturing. Ignoring that the whole field of mechanical engineering exists.
Thinking like that, a bunch of millions, get you the Titan and five dead people. Add some billions and it gets you FSD and a bunch of dead people.
Oh, and accounting and cost calculation seems to be a black art as well...
By the way I'm a (real) engineer and I did design mechanical engineering for 5 years and electrical design engineering for 3 years. (and other fields of engineering for 4 years total as well)
Yes, you get your specs and you design to them.
I got real engineering parts certified and I believe the total cost, including tooling was under 600k. Heck, back when I made airbags, I don't think we spent anywhere close to 1 million dollars between design, tooling, testing, and manufacturing.
Aerospace is different from automotive, just how different is only apparent by actually suffering through it. And as I said elsewhere, 200k to keep four highly specialized military planes in the air is, as stupid as it sounds, almost a no brainer.
That implies that the trashcan designed for less would cause failures.
Also the cost of the program was 1.3M or something.
Now we come to a peculiarity of aerospace, so excuse the tangent. All aircraft have to be airworthy to be allowed to fly. Those airworthiness criteria are set during initial Type Certification, and more or less set in stone. Changing them requires various amounts of testing, re-certification and abton of paper work nobody in their right minds does voluntarily. One reason one does it is obsolescence of parts or technology.
One of things I insist on, for that very reason, is in being smart in defining begnin things like BoMs and maintenance plans. Because deviating from those grounds a plane.
So, if (I have no idea of the E-3 specifics as those arw most likely classified to a certain degree) said trash bins are part of the airworthiness requirements, not having them (and them being up to spec) grounds the plane. Because the absence of said trash bin is a defect in itself.
Whether or not the trash bins are a signigicant safety problem is, decades after the E-3 got certified, no longer relevant.
Aerospace is fun sometimes.
$12,000 in perfectly working hardware that had to be scrapped because someone didn't fill out the proper paperwork. Luckily, we (software dev) intercepted them and found other uses for them.
Lucky for you so being able to reuse that hardware!
That's not what he said was making it expensive though, was it? He said it was economies of scale. Furthermore, if an ISO 9100 certification is taking a $10 trashcan and making it $50,000 then we shouldn't insist on an ISO9100 certification.
At least it's then clear and people can decide on whether that grant is value for money or not.
The thing appears ludicrous.
It's certainly true that much of the US military industrial complex is a publicly funded jobs program, and that tightening the purse strings would cause widespread economic distress. But that isn't better than a UBI - in fact, a modest UBI plus a market that needs a better trash can would probably lead to much better trash cans than a contract of this nature.
But I think it doesn't really stop at being a jobs program - US military spending also seems like an important part of how the sausage is made at the congressional level. Arbitrary sums can be assigned to different districts, which makes it a convenient method to broker deals between high ranking politicians. I suspect that's the real reason it can't be reformed.
Keeping people employed for no positive economic benefit is literally tantamount to lightning money on fire. You are paying people who would otherwise be creating value elsewhere _not_ to create that value and instead play a useless role intermediating in garbage can manufacture. They would still be buying groceries and burning gas in that productive job, but the difference is that they would also be creating something useful for society.
If the navigation station on the plane had to be shrunk by 1/4 inch due to some 3rd party not being able to meet their required tolerances after manufacturing had begun how does that get paid for?
The award is fixed but now the requirements have changed. The TLA is not going back to Congress to get $200k in additional design funding. That phase of the project is done. However, the TLA potentially has a large budget for maintenance and replacement of parts.
The navigation station gets an emergency redesign and it is paid for by no-bid 50K trash cans. There is no corruption here just the realities of working with fixed bid contracts, hundreds of third parties from every state in the nation and a political appropriations process.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/22/san-francisc...
Let's be honest here. With that $50,000 trashcan we're paying mid-level managers $30, downstream suppliers $1, and $49,967 in stock buybacks that drive income inequality just so we can pay a factory worker $2 of that $50k. We are literally just shoveling tax dollars into the pockets of the already wealthy.
https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...
"we didn't ACTUALLY spend that much on a hammer, we just averaged it out across a bulk purchase! See, we aren't terrible with money."
Framing something as 'the myth of the $600 hammer' is implicitly pointing to external sources (congress, journalists) and messaging that they 'invented a myth' that the military spent $600 on a hammer. They didn't invent anything. They worked with the information that was provided to them by the military.
If you wanted to discuss the same issue, but under a framing that wasn't disingenuous, you could title it something like 'the reality of abysmal and misleading accounting throughout the military and their contractors'.
Given the hammer was actually $15, there's presumably a corresponding item that's also listed at $600 for ease of accounting that normally costs something like $1,200. "Pentagon gets 50% off computer monitor" is a less exciting headline, though.
This is a repeating pattern. See also the $10k toilet seat:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-...
Even from this article we see a pattern:
> In 2020, the Pentagon paid Boeing over $200,000 for four of the trash cans, translating to roughly $51,606 per unit. In a 2021 contract, the company charged $36,640 each for 11 trash containers, resulting in a total cost of more than $400,000. The apparent overcharge cost taxpayers an extra $600,000 between the two contracts.
> In another case, Lockheed Martin hiked the price of an electrical conduit for the P-3 plane as much as 14 fold, costing the Pentagon an additional $133,000 between 2008 and 2015.
> Jamaica Bearings — a company that distributes parts manufactured by other firms — sold the Department of Defense 13 radio filters that had once cost $350 each for nearly $49,000 per unit in 2022. The apparent markup cost taxpayers more than $600,000 in extra fees.
> The investigation also revealed that Raytheon Technologies had raised the price of Stinger missiles from $25,000 to more than $400,000 per unit. “Even accounting for inflation and some improvements, that’s a seven-fold increase,” Shay Assad, a former Pentagon acquisitions official, told 60 Minutes.
See also,
> Experts say much of that contractor price gouging has worsened over the past few decades as the military sector has experienced dramatic consolidation. In the 1990s, there were more than 50 “prime” DoD contractors capable of competing for major contracts. Now, there are only five.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIM-92_Stinger#Replacement
> The original Stinger's reprogrammable microprocessor has become obsolete in 2023, and a service life extension will keep the Block I in service until 2030... Raytheon Chief Executive Greg Hayes said on 26 April: "Some of the components are no longer commercially available, and so we’re going to have to go out and redesign some of the electronics in the missile of the seeker head. That’s going to take us a little bit of time".
(I'd imagine that process comes with a whole big round of destructive testing, certifications, tooling changes, acceptance testing, etc.)
I wonder how much of this is due to the US’s unique ability to essentially endlessly deficit spend. If the supply of governmental funding is effectively infinite, there is absolutely nothing controlling costs.
This is not unique to the US, nor even unique to countries. Almost all countries deficit spend endlessly, which is fine as long as it's offset by economic growth. And that deficit spending can speed up that economic growth.
The US's uniqueness is being massively wealthy, so its deficits are bigger.
The US is unique in that (thus far) its massive deficit spending has been offset by growth, although it remains to be seen how long that’s sustainable.
https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/interest-payments-...
If you had gone to the primary source of the data in your link you would have seen the prominent limitation, to wit: "Because budgetary accounts may not include all central government units (such as social security funds), they usually provide an incomplete picture. In federal states the central government accounts provide an incomplete view of total public finance."
That's not unique either. The UK had massive debts in its history but outgrew them. Or were you not considering history?
We have a federal structure and use a common law framework so the interaction of law, precedent, and agency rules create a confusing thicket of regulation that's hard to deal with.
Finally, outsourcing of planning to consultants means frequent shifts in direction and makes it harder to exercise control over costs.
Since the Pentagon doesn't give a damn about passing an audit, and the revolving door between defense companies, industry lobbyists, and the Pentagon is so huge, they can just get away with it.
Spare me the bullshit about jobs and readiness, it's not good for the economy to continually employ people to utilize 30 year old tech to prepare for a battle that will never happen. Look at Abrams tanks - some senator couldn't face the prospect of not being re-elected, so they continually pushed for Abrams to receive billions to continually produce tanks, which went out of style after Desert Storm....which was in 1993. The Pentagon didn't want more tanks, and said as much many times, yet nothing happened. Those tanks were produced for years and had no use and sat in a massive warehouse. All so that senator could enjoy their cushy benefits, nice lobbying kickbacks, and not having to actually run a competitive re-election campaign, much less do the hard work of saying "look folks, your jobs are irrelevant now, here's some money to go re-train in a different industry".
Now, is spending on military tech inherently bad, even on unprofitable or pie-in-the-sky ideas? No. Is it a bad thing to invest in the engineering sectors? No. Should it be done? Yes. Is it good to invest in technology and in education? Yes. Should companies that are completely reliant on Pentagon funding be allowed to be "private" entities who need to adhere to the whims of wall street bankers above all else? Absolutely not. Should they be allowed to lobby? No. Should they be allowed to hire tons of former military officials to effectively just be "relationship" people so the money keeps coming in? Absolutely not.
The root cause here is that there's a revolving door between the Pentagon and private industry, and we're turning a blind eye to it.
I actually do sell software to the military now so I do know what it’s like. Part of it is the customers fault, they make it so expensive to do business with them that you lose money in overhead if you’re not ripping them off somewhere else. I wish I could put a line item that shows them just how expensive their stupid paperwork is. But part of the reason the customer is like that is because they’re routinely getting ripped off. Maybe if people in the military were smarter they could figure things out but in my experience it seems that McNamara’s Project 100K never ended and the military serves as an alternate welfare program for people who would be unable to get a job anywhere else. I’m not even sure I’m mad about it, the US still loves war too much despite how ruinously expensive it is. I worry if it was cheaper the US would do even more of it. Unfortunately it’s becoming cheaper anyway with all this drone warfare so we still have that dystopia to look forward to.
As another top comment describes, they can afford 9 months to fix a minor bug in military software but they can't afford spending a little more time with proper itemization? I don't buy it.
How do you allocate the e.g. design and testing and molding one-time costs when you have no idea if you'll ultimately manufacture 5 for a prototype or 5,000 if Congress places a big order?
There are many obvious reasons for this. For example, avoiding fraud and record-keeping (we need 4 more trash cans; how much did we pay last time?).
If we paid $300/can last year, and now Boeing wants $52000/can, we should say "no" and demand Boeing bring down their price or else we will entertain other bidders, to which we can provide exact specifications and retired examples of the required product.
It'll be something like:
Paperwork / contract negotiation: $50k
Legal review of paperwork: $20k
Project management: $50k
Activating mothballed production line: $39,400
Trash cans (4): $1200
Mothballing production line: $39,400
Here are two models of production:
1. You mostly make the thing yourself and pay the R&D + production costs in-house (i.e. public sector). There is little to no profit-waste. You need the thing, and so you created the thing. In this case, you are aware of the personnel, R&D, production costs. AFAIK this was mostly the state of play during WW2, or at least a lot more common.
2. You notify the market that you want a thing, and pay a profit-seeking vendor for the finished thing. You need the thing, so you bought it. The price breakdown beyond the product itself is opaque. You should not need to be aware of the personnel, R&D, production costs of BigContractor Inc. Does it actually cost $40K to produce a trash can? Fine, then that+profit will be the lowest bid.
You are describing a corrupted third model, where you essentially manage the entire production process, but also give extra money (profit) to a third-party. To say nothing of the massive waste of involving unnecessary middlemen.
This third model may or may not be how the government actually procures stuff, but again, it does not improve the picture of enormous government waste here.
I would love to see the US return to this in a variety of realms, but I doubt that's coming anytime soon. It would still involve paperwork, lawyers, production lines, etc.; making four very specialized trash cans every few years will always be costly.
> 2. You notify the market that you want a thing, and pay a profit-seeking vendor for the finished thing.
They will need to charge you for all the same things, and they don't have a mothballed production line to start with, either.
But the big historical problem with (2) is that if you give people discretion they can just choose to award the contract to their cousin Joe and end up paying $600 for a $300 trash can.
What kept graft in check under the old system was fear of being found out and fear of being fired after embarrassing an elected official who might fear the voters getting angry.
In the current system everybody is following the letter of the rules. Boeing has really managed to structure their costs so that they can charge $52k. They really did win the bid according to the rules. The bureaucrats who awarded the contract to Boeing followed the rules. And while elected officials might bitch and moan there's nothing they can do to disrupt the careers of officials who follow the rules - by very intentional design.
If you have $100,000 of design costs for something made of three components, and each component is equally difficult to design but they're all designed together, and the manufacturing cost of each component is $500,000, $10,000, and $100... then how do you itemize the design costs?
Further: if they have the budget allocated, they will spend it. It’s that simple. Doesn’t matter what it is on, and going over budget in this political climate is a plus because they can justify more money for next year’s program request.
In this article’s case, expensive items are often novel and have some weird context or specific change attached (Stinger missiles, for example could have a lot of reasons to be expensive now) and the trash can is probably a metal galley can that is not cheap to produce and deliver to site, but it makes a good argument about price gouging generally due to lack of controls across a number of products.
Like most things the answer is not that this is completely unreasonable but rather that it could be better if we did something about it.
This is why modern USA subs use Xbox controllers for joysticks. You can walk out and expense them. The same, if subject to the program, would be a $1k unit cost based on the twin reasoning of adherence cost, and more importantly contractors charging what the market is willing to pay (when the market is incredibly inefficient).
https://slate.com/business/2022/10/san-francisco-toilet-mill...
The F-117 so did canabalize quite some "spares" bought for the F-16 and F-15 fleets.
... holding a small collection of waste is that intense eh?
So they are probably weirdly shaped.
Plus obligatory surcharge for being aerospace, plus obligatory surcharge for being military.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash
It's a procurement project to purchase four very specific aviation trash cans for an aircraft that's no longer made.
The cans themselves aren't the cost. The project manager, the paperwork expert who does the thousands of pages of documents, etc. all cost before they even think about setting up a production line (for an hour's run!) to actually make the things. They're also factoring in the cost of keeping the 707 trash can making machinery sitting around for the next time they need a few more of them.
Four trash cans cost $52k. Forty probably would've cost $53k. The military should probably buy four hundred so they never have to buy another one for the remaining few years the E3 exists, but then Congress calls that wasteful spending too.
This is obviously not a problem since you can charge literally whatever you want after the initial purchase.
If the fact that they will have to provide them for a long time is the reason for a high cost, then that is why they charged $300 per trash can back in the day. That cannot also be the justification for $56k per trash can today. It's a circular argument.
Yes, it may be that the trash can or plastic had to be certified against breaking in a weird way since it’s a military plane and you don’t want plastic shrapnel in your soldiers (or whatever).
It _could_ be that Boeing made 100 trash cans, threw away the mold, and had to re-make the mold in order to fulfill the order for 4 more trash cans.
If not Boeing, potentially _their_ trash can supplier threw away the mold and you end up with the same price.
So there MAY be a reasonable explanation, but it seems very egregious that the “before” and “after” prices are so dramatically different.
If it catches fire on the $330M plane it's made for, potentially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash involved a ~$80M (adjusting for inflation) lost B-52, another $80M in cleanup costs, and a still missing 1.1 megaton nuclear weapon, over a couple pillows that caught fire.
Boeing shouldn't be exploiting the system and the government shouldn't be buying at those prices.
But alas, here we are with an inflated military budget that has leeches and mismanagement at every corner. Just to make number go up in bank account...
Moreover the 707, which is basically what these trash cans were made for, entered service in _1957_.
Sometimes a spade is just a spade, greed is just greed and you don't need to bend over backwards to find an excuse for bigcorp.
Getting small quatities for obsolete aircraft parts, even in the civilian world, costs fortunes.
And yes, if it was (speculation) a new production run, all the manufacturing most likely needed re-certification: new production site, new production tech and so on. Maybe even certification to whatever standard was used for the original 707 / E-3, which might even be impossible (surface treatment that is now illegal due to EHS reasons, material norms being obsolete requiring new certification of the part using e.g. plastics with another norm...).
Plus the obligatory surcharge for the endless pockets of the litteral Pentagon.
So when they’re approached to make some more, what are they going to do? The easy answer is turn down the request, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did. Then they’d have said something like “the person who made these retired three years ago, the machinery is now scrap metal, the software for that machinery is on a floppy disk in a recycling centre somewhere, I don’t even know how who sold us the materials, and whatever we can do to replicate it would be considered a new product that has to go through testing again. So if you want this it’d take a lot of resources, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
To which the response would have been: “get it done.”
I’m sure there was some added on to sweeten the deal, mind, but that isn’t the outrageous thing, nor would it be as dramatic as it sounds. The outrageous thing is that Boeing would have specifically outlined the end of production of components years in advance, and that would have been opportunity to buy and stockpile while the price was reasonable. Of course, some middle manager would have said “lol no it’s just a bin, we will just get one from Walmart”, and the complications would have only been realised when it was too late.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_AEW%26C
Cricket cricket.
Fun fact: An E-3 takes around 3 times as long to get off the ground as a typical modern airliner. It's a bit disconcerting the first time you experience it. The 707 is really, really old. And as I recall, it's somewhat normal for an E-3 to be loaded to over max takeoff weight during normal operation. But my experience is 25 years out of date, so maybe that's changed.
Isn't the USAF just about the only organization still operating 707 in any capacity? KC-135 (sorta), E-3, what else? I think the KC-135 at least got re-engined, that probably helps a bunch.
the air force has machinists and qualified people who can repair their old planes, so presumably if this was just something you could bang together out of sheet metal they would have.
It’s so frustrating.
If anyone wants to see a proper non bullshit breakdown explanation of this topic from professionals I would highly recommend this video:
How Procurement Destroys Armies - Requirements, Risks & Development gone wrong https://youtu.be/bBQVR4epfBQ
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/11/1175403633/truman-committee-b...
> Until 2010, Boeing charged an average of $300 for a trash container used in the E-3 Sentry, a surveillance and radar plane based on the 707 civilian airliner. When the 707 fell out of use in the United States, the trash can was no longer a “commercial” item, meaning that Boeing was not obligated to keep its price at previous levels, according to a weapons industry source who spoke to RS.
> In 2020, the Pentagon paid Boeing over $200,000 for four of the trash cans, translating to roughly $51,606 per unit. In a 2021 contract, the company charged $36,640 each for 11 trash containers, resulting in a total cost of more than $400,000. The apparent overcharge cost taxpayers an extra $600,000 between the two contracts.
> In another case, Lockheed Martin hiked the price of an electrical conduit for the P-3 plane as much as 14 fold, costing the Pentagon an additional $133,000 between 2008 and 2015.
> Jamaica Bearings — a company that distributes parts manufactured by other firms — sold the Department of Defense 13 radio filters that had once cost $350 each for nearly $49,000 per unit in 2022. The apparent markup cost taxpayers more than $600,000 in extra fees.
other than massive corruption and unaccountable-for assets - the actual delivery of this budget is military intervention, occupation and war-mongering all over the world. Not to mention the danger of nuclear holocaust.
And - almost all members of the congress vote for these monstrosities. Here are the Senate results:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/12/16/moral-and-polit...
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...
very few righteous people in Soddom, and even those - who knows how they would vote if their Nay actually had a chance to block the bill.
Cities can literally be made or break by the Military (and other Gov functions) moving there or leaving.
A vote against the military is a vote for more unemployment in your district.
Just don't delude yourself that "the right" is the Republican parties. Both large political parties in the US are staunchly right-wing parties by most criteria.
> Conservatives and liberals alike agree on job creation programs
No, they do not. I mean, they agree on funding large corporations and the military as though that's a job creation program.
Also jobs are not really transferable. So all the military people need to be less mad at you than the infrastructure people are now happy with you; otherwise you lose at re-election.
Like you need to figure out what the transition is from using military as an employment welfare to construction as an employment welfare and why the US will stick to that transition at each phase. That's a lot of work; much easier as a politician to not rock that boat.
If your district has a bunch of window factories; it's probably in your best interest to keep crime high.
Boeing is mass producing parts for 737s. They are no longer doing so for 707s.
I think they sailed too close to the wind, but there's always going to be an element of risk in some things. Saving thousands of dollars by using a PlayStation controller might be smart, and even make the sub safer (if you put savings towards a hull that won't implode). Some people might say that you should never cut a corner if lives are on the line, and if that's the case they can't complain about a $52,000 trash can, or that 5 major contractors are now the only ones able to compete for contracts.
All of which is to say that while it's absurd for a trash can to have a price of $50,000, we can't be sure that this doesn't actually reflect changes in the actual cost structure of providing it. The rules are different for providing commercial off the shelf (COTS) goods versus specially procured goods. There are a lot of rules and regulations that would apply to the later but not the former. What if the old version was made in Mexico, for instance? Then you might have to go to a US company and get them to analyze the old version to figure out what composition the plastic is, create new molds to the exact specifications as the old shape, and have your new parts certified as identical to the old parts while being produced 100% in the US by US people.
Which isn't to say that defense or other contractors can't be huge sleazeballs who try to gouge the government sometimes. And sometimes this is outright corruption like the time that one guy in the DoD who was leaving for a job at LabView soon said another group where I worked was going to have to redo our work in LabView and we should get in bed with a corporation too. But this was on a recorded meeting so we were able to get that decision reversed. But often the way it works is that defense contractors working on cost-plus contracts do their best to interpret regulations in such a way as to maximize their costs so that they maximize their profits.
Preventing outright corruption like with the LabView guy is really important but the complicated rules we write to try to prevent that sometimes end up producing requirements documents that let a defense contractor claim with a straight face that the $47,000 they spent producing the trash was all legally mandated expenses and then they get to sell it to the government for $52,000 and pocket the standard 10% of the $5,000 difference.
I don't have a good solution for how to fix this in defense specifically, but Alon Levy's work on why transit costs are ten times larger in the US than in Spain or Italy seems like a good starting point. Or I'm currently reading ReCoding America which promises to give some insight on government software porcurement.
The difference commonly comes up every now and then when the Gov threatens to shutdown because congress decided to spend more than they decided to tax and eventually that difference catches up to them as that already approved spending is dispersed but there wasn't money to pay for it.
> About half of the Biden administration’s $842 billion Pentagon budget request goes to contractors. In 2022, roughly 30 percent of military spending went to the “big five” weapons makers, which include Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman.
Also-- as Hunter Biden, John Kerry, Bruce Springsteen, etc. ad naseum-- have demonstrated, nobody really likes to pay taxes. Not even the very wealthy.
> In 2020, the Pentagon paid Boeing over $200,000 for four of the trash cans, translating to roughly $51,606 per unit. In a 2021 contract, the company charged $36,640 each for 11 trash containers, resulting in a total cost of more than $400,000. The apparent overcharge cost taxpayers an extra $600,000 between the two contracts.
> In another case, Lockheed Martin hiked the price of an electrical conduit for the P-3 plane as much as 14 fold, costing the Pentagon an additional $133,000 between 2008 and 2015.
> Jamaica Bearings — a company that distributes parts manufactured by other firms — sold the Department of Defense 13 radio filters that had once cost $350 each for nearly $49,000 per unit in 2022. The apparent markup cost taxpayers more than $600,000 in extra fees.
(2018) $10k toilet seat: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-...
> U.S. Air Force paid about $10,000 each to replace toilet seat covers on the C-5 Galaxy, a Vietnam-era military cargo plane that is still in service, at least three times and as recently as last year.
(1985) $34,560 for 54 toilet covers ($640 each) by Lockheed: https://web.archive.org/web/20081017195946/http://www.time.c...
> President Ronald Reagan held a televised news conference in 1987, where he held up one of these shrouds and stated: "We didn't buy any $600 toilet seat. We bought a $600 molded plastic cover for the entire toilet system."
(1983) $435 hammer (supposedly an accounting error): https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/41635361
> Questioning the $435 cost, the chief petty officer made agency inquiries. This led to several agency investigations and an audit conducted by the Naval Audit Service, which determined that the Gould contract contained "excess costs of about $729,000." The Pentagon responded by issuing a public announcement that Gould had overcharged the Navy and that not only was the DoD seeking immediate repayment from Gould, but also that the DoD needed to make "major changes" in the way it procured spare parts. Although Gould believed that the Navy's audit was flawed, it agreed to make a good faith repayment of $84,000 in August 1983 to appease the DoD.