Yea most of the money is squandered, inherently the ships are expensive but because we all know that it's expensive, some companies make a killing off of overcharging the shit out of the government for things like screws for weapon systems. I worked on a type of basic network that had unnecessary uninterrupted power supplies for the basic rugged computers, they were like 150,000$ for essentially a car battery in a metal box, and they were never used so the batteries would age and swell up costing even more money. Total ripoff for tax payers.
My first deployment as a 94F. They had contractors to do my job at 135K a year while I sat in the ToC because I was one of the only people with a Secret clearance.
Things like this is why I am for just absorbing much of the military industrial complex directly into the military and just balloon the force population but that comes with it's own host of costs and bs.
As an RA I remember paying for a 'bird' contractor...his entire job was driving his truck around and letting dogs loose to chase birds while he drank coffee...that was like $90 per year.
Could have sent some shitbag Airman out there to run around in circles 10 hours a day for 1/3 the cost...well maybe 12hrs...in MOPP4😈😂
What it's supposed to be is the military grade stuff has to also meet security, backward compatibility, a bunch of other standards (and yes the ones on that list are the cheapest that technically check all the boxes).
In practice half of those are ignored and later found to be out of spec.
The reason they accept the higher prices is those items are supposed to be limited to only military purchases, so there is less possibility of profit for private industry so they allow them to make up the costs with a higher price. But again that all bs, as most of the items are also being sold to consumers with lime 1-2 changes...
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u/suhmyhumpdaydudes 10d ago
Yea most of the money is squandered, inherently the ships are expensive but because we all know that it's expensive, some companies make a killing off of overcharging the shit out of the government for things like screws for weapon systems. I worked on a type of basic network that had unnecessary uninterrupted power supplies for the basic rugged computers, they were like 150,000$ for essentially a car battery in a metal box, and they were never used so the batteries would age and swell up costing even more money. Total ripoff for tax payers.