{"id":142129,"date":"2023-06-03T07:00:26","date_gmt":"2023-06-03T11:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=142129"},"modified":"2023-06-02T11:36:12","modified_gmt":"2023-06-02T15:36:12","slug":"what-are-we-paying-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=142129","title":{"rendered":"What are we paying for?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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News on two related fronts says we, the taxpayers, are getting screwed.<\/p>\n

First up: Over a million F-35 parts are unaccountable. Meaning they are lost, in the wrong place, not\u00a0 \u00a0 in the right inventory, something – $85,000,000 worth of wheredaheckisit.<\/p>\n

Auditors said that because the government doesn\u2019t have its own system tracking those parts, officials may not truly know how many spare parts are actually in the global spares pool, where they are, or their total value.<\/p>\n

As a result, \u201cthe full quantity and value of these [lost] spare parts may be significantly higher\u201d than the 1 million tally determined by the main contractor, Lockheed Martin, the document reads.<\/p>\n

And disagreements between Defense Department offices and the main F-35 contractor, Lockheed Martin, over how to categorize missing parts are holding up the government\u2019s effort to create its own reliable system to keep track of the parts, the GAO report states.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Defense News<\/a><\/p>\n

Now, I’m just a country boy, but have dealt with a variety of multinationals and manufacturing contracts on most of the major continents, and I can tell you how it works: We made spares parts for the customer and told them we had them. They audited us, and we came up short on some of those parts. They told us to replace those parts most rikki-tik, at our expense, so they would be able to access them as the contract stated. Period, end of sentence, end of conversation.<\/p>\n

Our budget is nuts, we piss money away like a beer drunk on diuretics, and no one we deal with seems to have any accountability (see: F-35 program cost over-runs. You will need LOTS of time.) How about we let Lockheed Martin make all those parts available as they are supposed to – and don’t even think of billing us for them? Bet they would get some accountability in their system with 85 million incentives on the line.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Now, on the second front: We preposition stocks at multiple locations worldwide in case a war pops up somewhere, and have done so for decades. When we started pulling inventory from Kuwait to send to Ukraine:<\/p>\n

All six of the M777 howitzers and 25 of 29 M1167 High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles were not \u201cmission ready\u201d and required repairs before U.S. European Command could send the equipment to Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Army pre-positioned stock, or APS, is meant to be kept at the highest level of readiness so that it can be used immediately in case of an emergency.<\/p>\n

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The inspector general issued the report mid-audit out of concern that \u201cissues with poor maintenance and lax oversight of the [APS] equipment could result in future delays for equipment support provided to the Ukrainian Armed Forces,\u201d the report read. \u201cIn addition, if U.S. forces needed this equipment, they would have encountered the same challenges.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Defense News II<\/a><\/p>\n

According to the article, 401st Army Field Support Battalion in Kuwait is responsible for overseeing contractor maintenance work by the contractor Amentum, which is based in Chantilly, Virginia. Now, there is another side to this: squabbles over how much of the mandated dollars are there. APS says they had only received $27M of the $91M they were\u00a0 allotted – the IG says they received over $1B from 2016-2023 (which divides out to $120+ million annually). The command says the contractor is not obligated or funded to maintain to IG standards (the IG disagrees).<\/p>\n

Me, I think I would consider relieving the CoC at the 401st and have someone take a serious look at Amentum’s contract to determine who does what.\u00a0 If they are supposed to maintain to the levels the IG states…well, they need to get the vehicles up to snuff. Free.\u00a0 One has to wonder what the military-retirement-to-cushy-Amentun-gig pipeline looks like… my money says there is probably a robust, direct link there.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

H\/t to Jeff LPH<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

News on two related fronts says we, the taxpayers, are getting screwed. First up: Over a million F-35 parts are unaccountable. Meaning they are lost, in the wrong place, not\u00a0 \u00a0 in the right inventory, something – $85,000,000 worth of wheredaheckisit. Auditors said that because the government doesn\u2019t have its own system tracking those parts, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":668,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[213,359,238],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-your-tax-dollars-at-work","category-army","category-government-incompetence"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4ozh1-AYp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/668"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=142129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=142129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=142129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=142129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}