“The Marine Corps, in turn, spent 15 years and $3 billion on its Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle before canceling the program in 2012–another $3 billion down the drain”, said Senator McCain.
On May 5, 2014 Senator John McCain of Arizona asked for and was granted permission to address the United States Senate regarding waste in the military.
Here is some of what he had to say:
“Madam President, as consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2015 proceeds in earnest, and with the recent release and annual assessments of the Department of Defense major procurement programs by the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Testing and Evaluation, we are, once again, reminded of the DOD’s chronic inability to rein in costs associated with its largest and most expensive weapon and information technology systems.
This is, of course, a problem the DOD–the Department of Defense–has struggled with for years. During every one of these years, I brought this problem to the attention of the American people, both in the Senate Armed Services Committee and here on the floor of the Senate.
So I need not go over again the frustrating litany of costly procurement failures at the Department of Defense. At this point we are all aware of the future combat system, the Army’s “transformational” vehicle and communications modernization program, in which the military and the U.S. Army wasted almost $20 billion developing 18 vehicles and drones, only one of which actually went into production. In other words, they blew $19 billion. As had been done on other programs, on the Future Combat Systems, the Army held a “paper competition” to select contractors far in advance of fielding any actual prototypes. But it awarded control to two separate companies and let them, not the government, hold their own internal competitions to determine who would test and build the vehicles and systems–encumbering the program with a dizzying array of conflicts of interest and preferred-supplier preferences that chipped away at the program from the inside out.
As for the Air Force, its Expeditionary Combat Support System–the ECSS program–wasted over 1 billion taxpayer dollars attempting to procure and integrate a “commercial off-the-shelf” logistics IT system. That effort resulted in no usable capability for the Air Force, and taxpayers were forced to pay an additional $8 million in severance costs to the company that failed in its mission. The Marine Corps, in turn, spent 15 years and $3 billion on its Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle before canceling the program in 2012–another $3 billion down the drain”, said Senator McCain (source: Congressional Record http://thomas.loc.gov/).
See related video: US frets over wasted billions (ignores wasted trillions) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFKl4RDbu-A and Waste surge Pentagon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JiHrkJG14E
Senator McCain is the senior United States Senator from Arizona. He was the Republican presidential nominee in the 2008 United States presidential election. He is a powerful member of teh Senate’s Armed Service Committee.