Failed Weapons Systems Cost Pentagon $58 bn over 2 Decades

Local Editor

The Pentagon loves to throw good money after bad ‒ to the tune of nearly $60 billion on failed big-ticket weapons systems over the last two decades, according to a new internal Department of War review.

From the Army's Future Combat Systems [FCS] that focused on fighting the last war to its RAH-66 Comanche stealth helicopters that never quite got off the ground, between 1997 and October 2016, the Pentagon invested $58 billion on weapons technology it never received. That doesn't include the boondoggle that is the F-35 jet, which was finally declared "ready for combat" at the beginning of August.

The FCS [$20 billion] and the Comanche [$9.8 billion] are just two of 23 major weapons programs that were canceled before they were finished, and together the two Army projects made up more than 50 percent of the "sunk costs" outlined in the Pentagon's annual internal acquisitions performance review. The 224-page report by Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall was published earlier this week.

The report noted how much money was spent on each canceled program, how far along in the process they were before they were killed, and if any of the technology was rolled up into new programs.

For example, although the FCS was canceled, parts of it ‒ including many of the manned ground vehicles and the Intelligent Munitions System ‒ were swept up into a current program called the Army Brigade Combat Team Modernization Program.

Most of the programs were killed before they blew through their budgets, but eight of them spent all the money allotted to them before the Pentagon canceled them, the report found.

In this regard, the Government Accountability Office, a Congressional watchdog, conducted an audit of Pentagon spending in 2011 and found $70 billion in waste, the New York Times reported at the time.

Much of the overspending happened because the DOD started building weapons systems before the designs were fully tested, the auditors said.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team