The Glade 4.0

Boeing has apparently been ripping off the taxpayer bigtime in a repeat of the 1980s $700 toilet seat incident.

This is a large part of why I so strongly oppose cutting defense spending by looking at big-ticket items and trying to cut numbers or cut programs. There's no reason to when this is going on. If we really went through things with a fine-toothed comb, there's immense savings to be realized just in getting rid of fraud and unnecessary staff and "support activity".



This is $13 million in fraud in just helicopter parts - one tiny aspect of military procurment. How much more is out there?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

For every pin bought there are 47 meetings. I urge the gov to stop paying for all the meetings.

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In time, this too shall pass.

That could be a winner. Think how much electricity could be saved by turning off so many computers used to make PowerPoint slides.

This reminds me of a joke: When NCOs don't know what else to do, they hold a formation. When officers don't know what else to do, they hold a staff meeting.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Sounds like a good plan.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

A lot. It's my hypothesis that the congressional requirement for comm troops in the USAF have to have the Security+ cert is because some congress critters know some guys at Comptia. We can't just take USAF test, we have to get the certification, which requires a test that is paid for by the USAF. As far as I know the cert is only good for getting a job working for the DoD. Not to mention all the MSgts that create GS positions where they are before they retire, then not-so-mysteriously find employment in that position. It's a huge bureaucracy, so there's infinite opportunistic , especially if whatever they are doing can be labeled "classified" and can't even be brought to light without the threat of getting thrown in jail.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The worst part of the whole Sec+ thing for all comm troops (it's completely useless for me as a programmer) is that it's no longer a lifetime certification, but a continuing education requirement, so now there's the layout for the initial class, then the cost of the cert test, then the cost of ongoing education and testing for a cert that NOBODY in the AF really needs...

There is obviously a conflict of interest present for the group in the defense department specifically responsible for awarding contracts. Either that or gross incompetence. I don't find that either would be surprising.

There is a very longstanding attitude for engineers to get hired on with major defense contractors for a reason. The contractors are fattened up with spare people who do nothing while the core groups actually do design and development. It's very lucrative to the point of being ridiculous. There are many jokes about getting paid to sit on your ***, blow some stuff up once in a while and then go out to a 2 hour lunch break.

Maybe the Defense Department should be auditing the purchase orders to see where these supposed costs are coming from. Shame on Boeing for being unscrupulous, but there really isn't a set "price" for anything. It's whatever the Government can negotiate. It can obviously do better.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

I have a Former Marine friend that is working for a government contractor consulting firm, and he was telling me about alternators for some of the marines' trucks. Since they're under contract, they have to be bought from Oshkosh at like $6500. But that same alternator could be bought directly from the supplier for $1200.

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Holy shitsnacks!

This doesn't just happen in government. I know a firewall hardware vendor that charged $1200 for an $89 Toshiba laptop hard drive when it was ordered as a replacement for a hardware failure.

They got away with it because the if the customer installed anything that wasn't provided by the vendor it would violate the support contract.

My father was telling me a while back how large construction firms regularly get involved in lawsuits at the end of a job as all of the contractors try to weasel out of paying for anything.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Part of the problem here is that the procurement of the DoD is simply so labyrinthine that it's easy to hide this sort of nonsense. In the examples from private transactions, chicanery was going on, it just took the form of a lawsuit or some other legal shield like abusing a contract to get away with it. In cases like this, it's a matter of there being so many parts and so many transactions that they simply hide in the weeds.

Think about how many parts a sophisticated aircraft like an AH-64 must have. Then add to that the fact that, as far as I know, there is no point at which a clerk or mechanic actually holds the box with a straight pin in it, and looks at a price and can go "holy ****, this can't be right!" and call the Waste, Fraud, and Abuse hotline (which does exist. I have a little personal image in my head of calling it and hearing "Welcome to the Waste, Fraud, and Abuse Hotline. For Waste, press one, for Fraud, press two, For Abuse, press three. For a combination, or if you are unsure, press nine to speak to a representative")

Then there is the fact that contracting is handled by officers that.. well, aren't really contracting experts. The actual contracting officer is usually pretty senior, an O-5 or above, but he's still most likely not someone who has spent a career on contracting. A contracting officer's representative is a more junior officer, who also is not that well-trained; most likely he's taken a few online courses (like I have) and maybe taken a week-long or so classroom course (which I haven't, thankfully).

Finally there is the byzantine mess that is the Defense Logistics Agency. This is an agency known for keeping war stocks of spare tires for trucks retired back in the Viet Nam era well into the 1990s. Don't ask me how it works; I don't know and strongly suspect that absolutely no one on the face of the earth actually does either. It's a lot like the Imperium in WH40K; it's such a mess of so many different items to keep track of, ship, and stock, and has evolved without real oversight of its internal processes for so long that no one person can really have a grip on what's actually going on.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The computer system in use by the Army in the mid 1990s showed price per unit for every item in its inventory. Clerks at Organizational level could call into question any price that seemed out of line.

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"If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me." - Alice R. Longworth

"Good? Bad? I'm the guy with the gun." - Ash Williams

I remember that system, although I can't remember what its name was. However, I believe it relied on an a database of prices; it wasn't like a receipt for an actual transaction.

However, you point out that I sort of misspoke. There very well be a place where a clerk can look and see what the price the government was supposed to be paying for an object is, but because of the phenomenal complexity of the supply system, the clerk isn't actually looking at the real amount paid.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Is it fraud? I'm not so sure. You have to look at how their contract is set up. If company A and Boeing compete on a contract, company A may charge 3 million for a helicoptor, and 1 million for maintenance, and Boeing offerred 1 million for the chopper and 2 million for maintenance. That makes Boeing the better deal, regardless of the ridiculous maintenance costs.

Furthermore, it may have been a good faith estimate (or close) when the lump sum cost for each part was established. They found a way to make it cheaper. Meanwhile, Boeing could be losing its shirt on propellers.

It looks messed up if you look at one item, but how does it look overall?

Overall it probably looks like much worse fraud

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Holy shitsnacks!

I guarantee if you dig into the morass that is military procurement, that overall defense contractors are doing extremely well.

In many ways, this sort of waste is actually a byproduct of cuts. Who is being really competing with anymore for defense helicopter contracts? For aircraft in general, it's basically Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.. and look at both of those names. When the F-14 was produced, Grumman was an independent company that produced it. The excessive cuts of the 1990s forced too many mergers and reduced competition too much.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Doing extremely well =/ fraud. All I'm saying is that you can't look at one item in a huge contract and make a judgement.

Maybe I was being too subtle. What I meant was "doing extremely well on a line-item basis" as in too well, like this.

No, you cannot look at just one line item in a huge contract, but this is not the first time things like this have happened; it was a rampant problem back in the 80s. Are there other parts where the contractor is not making much profit, or even taking a loss? Yes, but I think you would be hard-pressed to establish that overcharges of this sort are necessary for the net result of the contract to be the amount the contractor agreed to.

Just the magnitude and complexity of the contract, in fact, make for a perfect opportunity to do this sort of thing simply because there are so many line items to hide this in.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."