General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: War is 60% of our budget. That's the ONLY place cuts need to come from. [View all]jmowreader
(50,546 posts)My favorite Proxmire shitstorm is the Worcestershire sauce specification.
There is a military specification for this product. There is a MILSPEC for nearly everything the military buys...because without one, the government is required to buy strictly on price. If you can put "must comply with MIL-C-11796 (the specification for axle grease, which only applies here because the french fries at the 1/3 Air Defense Artillery's mess hall tasted like they were cooked in it)" you are far more likely to get compliant grease than doing a bid solicitation for 40,000 pounds of "wheel bearing grease, not otherwise specified."
Proxmire's "award" talks about how the government has a 15-page document telling them how to buy a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. The Army doesn't buy a bottle of it, they buy a 53-foot trailer full of it and without a document that contains absolutely no wiggle room there is almost nothing stopping someone from buying 50 barrels of it, cutting it 1:1 with water, hiring illegals to bottle it with funnels, and being the low bidder every time. People used to pull that shit regularly. You're probably like "so what? It's just a condiment." Which it is, but if the cooks need to use two bottles of Army issue sauce to do what one of French's will and we pay 80 percent of French's prices for Army issue...all of a sudden it's just gotten expensive.
Back to the subject: the golf courses, riding stables, auto shops (every base has a place troops can go to work on their cars), movie theaters, bowling alleys, Walmart-size department stores, liquor stores, bars, ceramics workshops, day care centers and hundreds of other things for soldiers to do off-duty are required to fund themselves through user fees and retail sales. Google Fort Bragg MWR or Nonappropriated Fund activities.
To put the $14 million in perspective, it will pay a year's hazardous duty pay for 778 paratroopers. Fourteen mil to the Army is a rounding error. The military has a very bad habit of reinventing wheels, a practice that must be stopped.