Heads Up, Supercommittee: Here's How to Cut Billions From Overpriced Weapons

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Part 1: The tools have been available for decades, but implementing the change won't be easy.


Heads Up, Supercommittee: Here's How to Cut Billions From Overpriced Weapons
Wednesday 02 November 2011
by: Dina Rasor, Truthout | News Analysis

Now that the supercommittee is coming down to its last few weeks, there is a scramble of lobbyists and members of Congress to stop any cuts to the Department of Defense (DoD) budget, either the already promised cuts or the larger cuts that will be triggered if the supercommittee does not reach a deal.

Each weapons system has a constituency that claims that the free world will be over as we know it if a dime is removed from their "vital" program. The Congress could, if they had the political will, enact a law that could cut each weapons program 30 percent or more by paying what a weapon "should cost," and not, as they have for years, what a weapon "will cost."

This isn't new to the Pentagon. They have been fighting any attempts to do this for decades. There was a push to price weapons this way from the 1960s through to the 1980s, when the Congress did pass a bill to require that weapons be priced and monitored on how much they "should cost." However, the Pentagon bureaucracy has done everything to kill this method, and by the mid-1990s, the requirements to use "should cost" as a method of pricing weapons had been obliterated.

Now the civilian leaders have supposedly revived "should cost" and, under their new director of defense pricing, Shay Assad, they have claimed to have finished a should-cost pricing review of the troubled Lockheed Martin's F-35 on Halloween and are briefing the company on the results. But what the DoD leadership has called "should cost" and "will cost" don't match what traditionally have been important industrial engineering tools to measure efficiency. They have pulled out these terms that, in the past, stood for truly measuring and holding DoD contractors accountable, and now they are using the results to make them look like they are holding the contractors' feet to the fire. Some in the DoD leadership may not even realize the bastardization of these terms because they don't know the real history of cost accounting in the Pentagon.

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1. The military industrial complex is the new third rail