MSNBC reports that the Pentagon are breaking the law and penalizing troops under fire.
Nearly a year after Congress demanded action, the Pentagon has still failed to figure out a way to reimburse soldiers for body armor and equipment they purchased to better protect themselves while serving in Iraq.
Soldiers and their parents are still spending hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for armor they say the military won’t provide. One U.S. senator said Wednesday he will try again to force the Pentagon to obey the reimbursement law it opposed from the outset and has so far not implemented.
Typical Bush administration tactic - promise the Earth and then wait to see if anyone notices that you haven't delivered even a shovelful of grit.
Pentagon officials have repeatedly stalled on reimbursement. First it was going to be February 25th as required by Congress, then in late April it was going to be done "within 60 days" and now Pentagon spokeswoman Air Force Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke said the department "is in the final stages of putting a reimbursement program together and it is expected to be operating soon." But defense officials would not discuss the reason for the delay.
The whole lot of them, everyone who is culpable for this delay, should be charged.
Meanwhile, the same incompetents prove themselves the masters at turning government pork into corporate profits for no material result whatsoever. Case in point, the Future Combat Systems program. As DefenseTech notes:
As recently as last year, the program was slated to cost $92 billion. Then, suddenly, that estimate ballooned -- first to $127 billion, and next to $145 billion. Finally, we were told that this gargantuan sum would only pay for transforming a third or less of the Army.
And what would be so different, after all that cash was spent? When the program first got started, the armored vehicles were not only going to be light -- they were going to be electric-powered. And they were going to fire laser weapons. Now, all of that has been dropped, understandably.
But even the more basic changes have seemed near-impossible to pull off. The effort to get all soldiers on a common radio, for example, is facing massive restructuring, after the project's main contractor, Boeing, seems to have flushed $5 billion and three years worth of work down the toilet.
"The government has not seen sufficient evidence of the contractor teams’ understanding of the scale of integration required… to ultimately achieve the program requirements," the Army told Boeing in an April letter. "Nor has the industry team displayed sufficient ability to estimate a cost and schedule baseline and rigorously manage to that baseline."
In other words, the radio project has become slow and bloated. Just like the rest of FCS.
Stick that in your Porkbusters website, Mr. Reynolds. Go on, I dare you!
Cancelling the huge portions of FCS that simply don't work and aren't going to work would save billions, not paltry millions. The US does not need a new battletank at the present time. There are maybe 4 other nations capable of building a comparative vehicle to the current Abrams and they are all allies! It would cost a fraction of the current development budget to up-armor the Abrams with spaced applique such as the Brits have used to render it invulnerable to shoulder-fired missiles and everything except a cataclysmically huge IED. If you want to talk about postponing spending until the aftermath of Katrina and Rita is paid for, then you should be looking here.
related Newshog Posts
The GOP Hates Our Troops
OpTruth Lists Senators Who Hate The Troops
Let's Talk About Armor, Mr. Rumsfield
No comments:
Post a Comment