When I was 19 I went through the Air Force nuclear missile technician school, they cram 2 years worth of electronics into their 8 month program. Part of what goes with that job is a Top Secret clearance. This clearance takes about 8 months to get, people were having their clearances come through toward the end of the 8 months, and some were taking longer to where they had to wait around the base doing nothing until they were cleared and could go on to their first duty station.
I ended up as an illustrator on a SAC base that has B-52’s and nukes as part of the base mission. I was the only one in the shop that had a clearance so I ended up being the liason on occasion because I could enter secure areas to get work. The work wasn’t classified so it could be brought back to the shop where I gave instructions and interfaced. It was more about inadvertent exposure than handling classified material.
Years later I had a civilian illustration job for a company that did work for all of the defense contractors in Silicon Valley. All of them had weapons programs, and I had access to all of their installations and their mainstream shops. At times in order to draw something you had to be able to see it. Because of this contractor facility exposure and the people I was dealing with I had a very good inside track on ongoing projects. The missiles, tanks, rockets and weapons would typically be the mainstream projects that had gotten funding approvals and were well covered in defense trade magazines, there was nothing really classified about them in terms of military national security, except for one aspect of them….
Their funding was always hideously out of control, projects were always trying to fight for override approval for more funds than the contract was bid at. The behind the scenes look at what went on that drove up costs was extremely sensitive to both the corporations that get the projects, and the Pentagon that authorizes and signs off on congressional overrides. This has nothing to do with hurting national security, but everything with damaging public opinion on military defense spending.
The how and why of ludicrously overspending on projects would freak people out. It’s bad enough when over spending has to be reported, but if what went on were to open up the sheer raw incompetence and neglect of oversight on how the money being spent is applied (or not) as is often the case, would put a major wrinkle in defense budgetary spending. It would be apparent to everyone very quickly that the military could do with half of it’s budget and actually have better equipment if there was comprehensive oversight.
I’ll give an example of one element of a project such as a tank. These projects have phases of funding. The first starts with the development/prototype phase, the pentagon pays for the development and this is often not counted in the cost of the cost per unit to manufacture them. Say a tank is ordered in numbers of several hundred or even a thousand or more, and the price is bid at $25 million each. During development stage tooling is needed, and the military pays all costs including tooling necessary for manufacturing prototypes.
So the contract is awarded, the military likes it. Part of the inflated bid price includes all of the massively inflated prototype costs. In fact the reason these companies inflate these costs 10 times or more than they cost is because these costs are also going to be built into the cost per unit, multiplied by several times of course.
Now sharp oversight auditing would catch this in a heartbeat, and say hey, wait a minute, we already paid for the development costs, not to mention tooling. Why are we getting charged for it again? Catching this “little” accounting slight of hand could easily equate to $5 million or even a $10 million per unit savings, because hundreds of millions or more would be involved in the development. This can be billions in over charges.
So if this weren’t bad enough, every single piece of the project is nickel and dimed with added charges beyond bid price. Take the repair manual, every piece of equipment that is sold to the military needs one. There are accepted standards of what these are quoted at as part of the bid, back in the 70’s a tank manual would be figured at as much as $250 million dollars or more. I worked on just such a manual, it’s quite involved. As the project goes on every hour spent by illustrators, tech writers, and mechanics who have to break down the equipment so parts can be measured and drawn. They had several ongoing projects because this company was building several types of tanks and vehicles. When they would run out of money for a given project they would tell illustrators to use another manual’s number, and they would get another $180 million to complete the project. “Normally” they would go back for two overrides on the manual alone.
So having had experience managing tech manual production, I was asked to bid the art aspect of a manual. They gave me the better part of two weeks to look in depth at what was involved so I could figure how many people I needed and how long it would take. I broke production down to hard hours. I came up with $2.5 million, figuring I could do it with about 10 of the best illustrators I could get my hands on. So at the meeting I told them that I figured $5 million, and that gave me a lot of room if I had miscalculated something. I joked and told them that I was going to have a nice house with a Ferrari and a Porsche Turbo in the garage.
Some people will find this hard to believe, but this is what their response was. There were a lot of worried looks, it was apparent that I didn’t understand how this works. They said that they felt it made more sense to go with $15 million, and that was way under what they had had in mind. I was one stunned puppy.
As it turned out, my original quote put them in an incredibly delicate and uncomfortable position. They weren’t sure what to do with me or how to get rid of me. I had several years of experience supervising and producing tech manual projects, so I had to be taken seriously. Had I known what I was doing I’d have opened with asking what they had in mind. When they said they were thinking somewhere between fifteen and twenty five million, I’d have looked very serious and agreed that they were right in the ballpark.
Oversight on any military project would save hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. Take the Raptor airplane project that was bid at a staggering $60 billion or so, and is now far in excess of a Trillion dollars. An audit of what went on there would have a whole lot of heads rolling, I can assure you. Do you think that this project is seriously classified even though it has been well publicized? I can assure you that the financial and development details sure as hell are. The fraud and deception involved in this project would fill a prison with those involved.
What I found out later on my manual bid was that they were looking at me doing a project that was $180 million in the hole before they even started on it. They were to have me do it for far less, and get another hundred million to cover my part of it, leaving them with an extra 3/4ths to cover the rest.
The way fraud runs with government projects tends to exist in most projects. The government could save an easy 40% by implementing effective oversight controls. Our government should have hundreds of thousands of oversight auditors, every project that has a few million involved should automatically have oversight management.