The Pentagon makes Medicare look like skinflints. Our budget woes are far larger than wasted money, but when the Pentagon pays $80 for a $1 pipe, there are bound to be some savings there. If we could only get federal bureaucrats to think of the dollars they were spending as their own, rather than other people’s money, we’d make some progress.
I usually scoff at the “we’ll save money by cutting fraud and waste ” argument but …
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For What It's Worth 
This is where the rubber meets the roads for the Tea Party crowd. Will they apply the same level of scrutiny to Pentagon spending as they do to social spending and the rest of the federal budget, or will they give a pass to spending on endless wars and the wasteful military-industrial complex? I’m not too hopeful, CF, as Tea Partiers are instinctively right-wing authoritarians who love dressing up in military outfits, tin foil hats, and worship guns, so they probably won’t be phased in the least by these kinds of stories of overspending, since overspending on the military is just fine by their account, as opposed to spending on yukky “liberal” programs. Overspending on Pentagon contracts and expensive military wars fits right in with their aggressive John Birch-ite beliefs about battling commies and godless liberals (wasn’t Ayn Rand godless? My head is about to explode from the internal contradictions), despite the fact that as all sensible people know billions and billions of waste resides (as even Ron Paul has acknowledged) in the Pentagon. Cognitive dissonance reins supreme, I’m afraid. when it comes to the Tea Party and Pentagon spending. I haven’t heard one prominent Tea Party person (save Ron Paul) call for taking an axe to the Pentagon, have you?
Dollar Bill is right on target, I would only add every aspect of the whole homeland security bullshit.
What is a rational, reasonably open-minded, right leaning independent (who voted for Obama and will not do so again) supposed to do? I totally oppose the Democrats’ refusal to even discuss cutting entitlements and am greatly discouraged by the Republicans’ (so far) refusal to confront the military-industrial complex. I was also disheartened to see a “man in the street” survey yesterday (probably in midtown NYC) during which only one person could vaguely recognize a picture of John Boehner, and the rest were completely clueless about the debt crisis. What debt crisis? OY!!!
Yeah reforming Pentagon procurement would be a very worthwhile task, read: Thankless and likely to get everyone to hate you.
Seriously, the problem with procurement is everytime someone screws up, some one is corrupt, etc… a new regulation and way to procuring is promulgated to “solve” the issue. ( This ain’t just the pentagon.)
Also, the CONGRESS gets involved too at a level that just scary, and the projects get interfered with why government dweeds too..
(Read oversight, aka make sure the kickbacks happen right)
I’m firmly of the opinion that most of these issue would be cured by using much less bureaucracy and greater speed.
And much more direct accountability.
The b17 famously went from back of napkin to production in under 90days in WWII. Warships were built in months.
Things are different now, but the main difference is many more bureaucrats and quality checking and politicians uniformed and be-suited making the process hateful slow and $$$.