This is getting beyond small wars and into "the bureaucracy of a large government: why it sucks," but literally the day before 9/11, on September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld announced that since the mid 70s, I believe, the Pentagon had lost (not put into black programs, LOST) $2.3 BILLION dollars. On a yearly basis, the Pentagon can't keep track of somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of it's budget.
It's been said over and over, and there's a tendency to ignore it, but if proper accounting practices and defense contract discipline were put in place at DoD (and throughout the government as a whole) they could spend enough to make even the Air Force happy and still cut the current budget.
The dilemma facing the United States is that we do have security needs that require a massive military. But historically, nations that spend large chunks of their national fortune on the military do not long maintain their economies.
The unfortunate tenures of Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld as SecDef could have been remarkable successess if they had not been forced into managing wars, which they did poorly. Both had the knowledge and the rough personalities to ramrod more efficiency into the Pentagon's spending process, which is EXACTLY what is needed.
Just like granite state said, so much of it is domestic politics and makes no economic sense. If any corporation, responsible to its stockholders, was run the way our government (and especially the Pentagon) is, the CEO and Board of Directors would have been fired and probably defenestrated.
And theoretically, the stockholders of the US government are US citizens. Accountability is simply a fiscal necessity.
Matt
Bookmarks