Military Procurement, Contracts & Contractors Quotes
The Pentagon has the largest budget of any operational government department and makes the most procurements of government agencies. So even if their proportional share of waste were the same as all the other agencies, it would appear, there would be more examples for people to see from the Pentagon. Unfortunately the proportion is very different with a much higher proportion of no bid (sole source contracts). a much higher proporton of moneys spent for which they could not even account. far fewer checks on the procurement officials. The armed services are not all alike howevever. The Army was generally much better than the other services except during the Iraq War reconstruction. The Navy however was by far the worst of the armed services in terms of waste and avoiding the checks and balances of procurement reviews and procedures.
Allen had expressed the concern of the United States that Egypt had purchased Russian arms and was falling into the Russian camp in the Cold War. The United States could not sell arms to Egypt because they wanted to use them to attack Israel.
The production of military equipment and supplies during WWII was little short of miraculous. The military procurement and contractor delivery was one of the major factors in our winning the war. However there were mistakes and one of the worst was the engines of the B-29 heavy bombers. Many American airmen died or were injured as a result of these defects. One of the worst was that to save weight so more bombs could be loaded, many of the parts of the B-29 engines were made of magnesium. The unanticipated consequence was that if the engines caught on fire, there was no way to put the fire out—in the air or on the ground. The magnesium was very flammable and burned at such a high temperature that there was no remedy for the fire which spread faster than fires in engines without magnesium. However, in the midst of the war, those planes had to fly with the risky engines. Fortunately the atom bomb was detonated ending the war and the B-29s could then be retrofitted.
There has been no war in US history where we ever knew who was getting the contracts during the war.
This included even the contracts that had nothing to do with the war, like the contractor who provided transportation for returning veterans or services to soldiers families when they were overseas. Individual contracts come into the open but the government has never supplied a list of the contracts to the public could see who was making money from the war and determine if the administration in power was selected the best and least expensive contractors or just rewarding donors and cronies.
The Congress wants to keep control of exactly what the Pentagon buys so that each member can try to get more than his fair share of the Federal dollar. But the Congressional budget process is usually slow, and with the recent Congresses they can hardly get anything done. The President nor the Secretary of Defense cannot stop or slow down procurements that are not needed or can be deferred and spend the already appropriated funds on emergency needs for the troops fighting in the field.
What was remarkable was that all the Defense Department and military witnesses agreed with Lynch on this point.
