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Army's $900 Million in Warehouses Full of Useless Vehicle Parts
Written by Gary North on April 2, 2013
The Pentagon got caught by the Defense Department's Inspector General's office. Again. This time it was for a military vehicle called the Stryker. It has $900 million in spare parts in just one warehouse.
It keeps thousands of these vehicles in warehouses around the nation. It has so many Strykers that it lost track of them.
The gear is outdated. Example: $57 million in outdated infrared equipment.
The Inspector General's Office submitted a report. No one in the media read it until a small-town newspaper in Tacoma, Washington ran a story over the weekend. Then there was this. "Or, the 9,179 small replacement gears called pinions the Army bought as a temporary fix for a Stryker suspension problem that surfaced between 2007 and 2009. The Army took care of the root malfunction in 2010, but kept buying pinions." What did the Army need? "It needed only 15 of the gears. The 9,164 extra pinions are worth $572,000, the Inspector General reported."
The article quoted the local Congressman, Adam Smith. "This is very concerning. The military must ensure that it is spending every taxpayer dollar as wisely and effectively as possible. The Army claims to have taken steps to start addressing the mismanagement highlighted in the IG report, but Congress will need to do aggressive oversight to make sure this same problem doesn't happen again."
Never again! Anyone this naive should not be re-elected. He lives in a fantasy world.
This is business as usual. This is how the Pentagon has worked for as long as there have been bad records, which means back to approximately 1776.
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13 thoughts on "Army's $900 Million in Warehouses Full of Useless Vehicle Parts"
FedUpToHere says:
How tragically typical of our dear lawmakers. We bust our asses to pay for their extravagant lifestyles, and they have the cajones to ask for more!!! Time to pull the plug, we are on life support……. IMPEACH THE IMPOSTER NOW AND THROW OUT ALL HIS MINIONS
The Duck says:
This is very minor considering the Obama administrations misuse of tax payer money with czars, Gun Running Fast and Furious, and allowing illegal immigrants slated for deportation, go free in Arizona and Texas. Those things cost are costing us tax payers millions of dollars every month. $500,000+ for usless military spare parts is not good but at least it was for the defense four country. Something BO doesn't care about. Even so there does need be some accountability here so over spending is minimised. It will happen anyway due to human mentality and poor disicions. The biggest problem with this is there is no accountability for poor actions of individuals. Accountability would create and atmosphere in the offices where pride would make it an aim of each employee. Doesn't appear to exist too many times in reallife any more.
Nomen Nescio says:
A pinion gear is found in a vehicle's differential. If a tooth, or teeth break off, that's it for the vehicle. Being a critical drive component in a high-stress part of a drive train makes it a candidate for a single-point failure that incapacitates the entire vehicle. So it behooves the military to have a lot of them to have on hand wherever the Stryker is used.
The BAE Systems Thermal Imaging System, being an uncooled system, offers inherently inferior performance to almost any other Thermal Imager, but it is better than no night vision. The term 'uncooled' tends to mislead because one would tend to think that something which is uncooled can overheat, like a car radiator. Not so. A thermal Imager must be cooled because such a camera detects heat and having the innards of the camera at room temperature, would be like having a camera made out of glass. The light coming through the camera wall would completely flood out any imagery coming in through the lens system. Before my company was purchased by BAE systems, I was one of the designers who designed what was probably the best thermal imager in the world. It could detect temperature differences less than 1/10th of a degree centigrade. It could 'see' the thermal shadow, on the ground, of a car that had been parked in a parking lot 5 hours previously. Infortunately, it's imager array (which was in many ways the same as the imager in a digital camera) had to be held at the temperature of liquid nitrogen, either with liquid nitrogen or a mechanical cryogenic cooler, both of which presented logistical supply problems when operated in the field. In the end, the inferior imager was deployed, which was something like sending out a one-eyed man who forgot his glasses, instead of someone with perfect vision. Intra-company politics, between competing divisions, were also involved, rather than ruggedised cooling systems. My system could see the thermal footprints of geese walking across grass, or those of a man in sneakers. Again, we short-change our warriors. As for the Stryker vehicles left in inventory, they were fine for their time, but the tools of war are an ever-evolving parade of more capable things. We must accept that. I still wouldn't want to go up against one here.
Thomas Bylund says:
Thank you, That was a thorough,simple explanation by someone who knows what they are talking about. Had I not bothered to read your post I would have repeated a false story, again thank you, an ex Ranger from the 80's.
Bob Marshall says:
Remember when on Sept. 10, 2001 Donald Rumsfeld announced to the congress the Pentagon could not account for $2.3 trillion. A few months later the Inspecting general of the Pentagon said the military cannot account for 25% of what it spends annually.
carlwk3c says:
I'm sure they're keeping them in reserve for Obama's DHS Gestapo.
The tyrants are getting ready for the collapse that they've deliberately created as an excuse to try to grab total control. It won't work. There is a growing push towards resistance, and it is not constrained to the fringes – the first mistake the tyrants in DC make is to assume that.
Practically every militarily significant weapon made in the last 100 years has sold. 4.6 million weapon sales in 30 days and empty ammo shelves is not a panic – it's battlespace preparation.
The second mistake they make is to try to assert that this trend is about racism because Obama is half-black. That's a cop-out used to demonize – It's an easy excuse to ignore another person's points, and justify doing bad things to them; it's an attempt to convince people that those who oppose the regime's policies and actions are evil or deranged.
Their final mistake is to assume that the military and law enforcement agencies will follow orders to disarm their fellow Americans. The military and police are a sub-section of the total population, and will break along the same ideological lines.
Some police and military members will follow orders. Many, probably most, will disobey, desert, and rebel against orders to attack, imprison, or murder their families, neighbors, and fellow patriots to prop up a corrupt and tyrannical regime.
This has been played out time and time again in human history.
Statist politicians should not assume an insurrection will end easily, nor that those they've demonized will go quietly into the dark night, nor that they personally will not suffer if it blows up.
Never let your government disarm you and render you defenseless against their excesses.
Magnum says:
I worked for a company that was an "authorized" vendor to a number of local government agencies, both civil and military. Nearing the end of the fiscal year, any which had not spent their budget allocations would contact us and buy anything they could, using their government credit-issued credit cards. They referred to the unspent funds as "fall out" money. I was told by a couple of buyers that if they they had unspent funds, the following year's appropriations could be reduced. As a result, their panic buying resulted in the purchase of items for which they had no practical use in their respective areas of responsibility.
The manner in which many government entities write bidding specifications also causes a great deal of unnecessary costs in the long run. Instead of buying the best quality item, and paying a slightly higher cost per unit, they buy "on price" alone, unless the buyers has enough clout to get what they really should buy. For example, if a car tire costs $20.00 ans lasts 20,000 miles, it isn't as good a buy as a $25.00 tire that will last 40,000 miles. If the bid only specifies a size, foe example, they will always buy the $20,00 tire, and replace them twice as often as they would a $25.00 tire. But the buyer gets points for getting "the best deal" and saving the government money on that specific contract.
Public_Citizen says:
"Or, the 9,179 small replacement gears called pinions the Army bought as a temporary fix for a Stryker suspension problem that surfaced between 2007 and 2009. The Army took care of the root malfunction in 2010, but kept buying pinions." What did the Army need? "It needed only 15 of the gears. The 9,164 extra pinions are worth $572,000, the Inspector General reported"
In actuality the parts are ~worth~ their net weight as scrap metal. The quoted fact that the Inspector General reported them as ~worth~ $572.000 illuminates one of the fatal flaws of the thinking and cultural mindset of publicly paid bureaucrats.
If a private auditor reported this information in this fashion they would be in serious trouble with their employer for causing a possible red flag with the oversight and regulatory agencies they are accountable to.
If the IG had stated that the items had a ~book value~ of $572,000 then there would be less problems with the reporting.
As it is the reporter is falling into the government mindthink trap and pulling the majority of the readers in with him.
The best example of this occurred during my active duty Navy service from 1969 to 1975. I was an avionics ground maintenance technician for the F-4 stationed at one of the largest refit and training squadrons, many miles from the nearest significant body of salt water.
One day a flat bed toting semi rolled in with a single long crate as the load. What was been delivered was a ~driveshaft for a destroyer~, sent because of a transposition of two digits in the original order. It took nearly a year to get the damned thing removed from our squadron spaces. Your government in action.
Something else that needs to be considered. The government "money" will run out very quickly when the foreign bondholders call in their loans and stop buying the new paper. When that happens the Federal Reserve Notes that all the government minions accept as wages will no longer be negotiable for goods and services. When the stores won't sell them food, the utilities get cut off, and the bank sends their ~now privately contracted~ eviction squad in to take possession of their cars and homes the support for the "government" will evaporate like mist in the sunlight.
Vote for McCain says:
The Pentagon has only been around since the middle of WWII. Bad records for a long time, but not the Pentagon. Bad research throws doubt on the whole story.
Wayne L Zinter says:
The article quoted the local Congressman, Adam Smith. "This is very concerning. The military must ensure that it is spending every taxpayer dollar as wisely and effectively as possible.
Is this some sort of April Fools joke. A Democrat in Washington DC is concerned about wasteful spending? For the past five years they have been spending borrowed Chinese money more wastefully than any administration before them. Look at this guy's voting record. He has almost never voted against waste and now he feigns indignation and surprise. You get what you vote for folks. Vote for big spending Liberals and don't be surprised when they spend big. He is on the Congressional Oversight Committee for the military. What has he been doing for the money he receives? He didn't find the waste, a news reporter did, but he couldn't, yet the fools continue to vote for him and his ilk.