Military Waste Quotes

Every dollar needlessly spent on our military … diminishes our overall security.

The purchase of unnecessary military hardware is undoubtedly the most wasteful element in American government.

What chiefly governs the military budget is the need to spend enormous sums of money in a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon is simply a receptacle for wasteful expenditure, just as a city dump is the receptacle for the refuse of a city.

I'm very skeptical of the amount of money that goes into military expenditure, not just in the poor countries [but] also in the rich. I think it's one of the most massive wastes in the world, but education is [at the] other end. It's the bearer of the greatest fruits that mankind has ever known.

What I say is, national defense is the most important thing we do in Washington, but there's still waste in the military budget.

The Pentagon doesn’t need more money. What it needs desperately is a functional procurement system …. The result [of not having one] is not just ordinary waste, fraud and abuse … but also deep and lasting damage to the country’s ability to project power and wage war.

Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn't make that in a year at a guy who doesn't make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.

To defend Western Europe we have to let the Pentagon buy all these tanks and guns and things, and the Pentagon is unable to buy any object that that costs less than a condominium in Vail. If the Pentagon needs, say, fruit, it will argue that it must have fruit that can withstand the rigors of combat conditions, and it will wind up purchasing the FX-700 Seedless Tactical Grape, which will cost $160,000 per bunch, and will have an 83 percent failure rate.

If you refuse to acknowledge that there is any waste that can be culled from the military budget, you are a big-government conservative, and you cannot lay claim to balancing the budget.

We need to cut unnecessary weapons programs like the F-35 fighter plane that cost trillions of dollars and don't even work.

Building weapons that we don't need, don't work, and aren't necessary, and have no mission — that's not bad politics, that's robbery.

The F-22 is a shameful, disgraceful boondoggle and it revolts me.

From secrecy and deception in high places, come home, America. From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation, come home, America.

Student debt is structured to be a burden for life. The indebted cannot declare bankruptcy, unlike Donald Trump. Current student debt is estimated to be over $1.45 trillion. There are ample resources for that simply from waste, including the bloated military and the enormous concentrated private wealth that has accumulated in the financial and general corporate sector under neoliberal policies. There is no economic reason why free education cannot flourish from schools through colleges and university. The barriers are not economic but rather political decisions.

I support the troops with every fiber of my being. I don't support them having their lives wasted.

The military is the largest polluter in the country, and so you have a lot of military waste contaminating reservations - as, for example, on the Skull Valley Goshute Reservation, where 5,000 sheep died in some kind of experimental military nerve gas test 10 years ago. Many of our communities are dealing with that kind of waste, and an absence of political will to clean them up.