As the federal and state governments continue to shutdown or curtail core educational, environmental, and scientific programs due to lack of money, the disclosures of unspeakable waste continue to mount in Afghanistan and Iraq with no appearance of accountability or abatement. Indeed, for years, the media has reported billions of lost or wasted funds, including money disappearing into the corrupt government circles of leaders in the countries. Yet, Congress would prefer to debate Planned Parenthood or global warming grants. Consider the latest outrage. The U.S. military spent $34 million to build a huge headquarters for the Marines in Afghanistan with a theater, special operations rooms and other amenities. The problem that various people including the Marine commander were saying that it was not needed and would not be used. Now it is likely to be demolished, unused and unoccupied. There was the bridge to nowhere and now we have the building for no one.
The building is larger than a football field and has state-of-the-art air conditioning and equipment. As usual, contractors made a mint on the building and people in the military made sure that its lack of need or likely use would not stop the money flowing to willing hands.
John F. Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, wrote about the building in a recent letter. The 64,000-square-foot facility in Camp Leatherneck has everyone, as usual, pointing fingers in every direction with the result that no one will be punished. Sopko wrote “The building will probably be demolished.”
The building continued despite a letter sent by the top commander at the base that the building would not be used and should not be built. Contract officers simply ignored the letter and kept the money and construction going.
Of course, the building is the perfect metaphor for our recent wars — throwing billions at operations and programs that showed little evidence of long-term impact. No one wanted to take responsibility to pull out of the wars so we just kept spending hundreds of billions and killing or wounding thousands of our personnel. The importance was the appearance that we remain firm and victorious like an empty building in the middle of the desert.
Yet the war was a tremendous success for contractors who have made these billions.
Source: Washington Post
As of the middle of 2012 there were roughly 425,000 internally displaced Afghans.
Why not allow internally displaced Afghans to make use of Camp Boondoggle?
The mess hall, medical facilities, barracks (etal) would be very helpful for a great many people.
Reference: http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/page?page=49e486eb6
“Yet the war was a tremendous success for contractors who have made these billions.”
Isn’t that the purpose of (pseudo) “war” . We haven’t had a true war since WW II. I am pretty sure the Constitution is clear on this point. Congress declares ware, the President prosecutes said war. I guess the quote above is the reason Congress would rather sit on their laurels and collect kickbacks in “campaign contributions”, rather tan debate real issues.
Sickening, and among the reason my to Senators will never get my vote again.
Gene:
I agree with what you are writing. And I would go a step further and say the comparative advantage in economic weaponry actually is presently with the terrorists.
If you look at the cost of creating a terrorist act within the United States it is low. But the reaction by the US gov’t will be millions to one spent in addressing the action or in attempt to prevent it from happening again. When the US is already in a precarious position with regard to its debt, market forces might cause more damage to the gov’t’s ability to continue the status quo more than the terrorist ever could have.
The tunnel vision is an accurate description. Old habits that worked well under certain conditions in the past often guide planning for today even when the situation is not the same.
Indigo, Amen. You’re “preachin’ to the choir!”
Darren,
Your comment made me think of something else: strategic tunnelvision.
I wonder how much of the “spend ’em if you got ’em” mentality from the military/intelligence sector is rooted in the idea that any opponent can be “spent into submission” like the Soviets during the Cold War? While Ronnie Raygun gets a lot of (undeserved) credit for the fall of the Soviet Union, the truth of the matter is that was a victory by happenstance. The Soviets had plenty of resources (still do in the “Formers”) but their economy simply wasn’t robust enough to allow for the kind of gratuitous spending we engaged in and had engaged in for many many years prior to the Reagan administration. I suspect the Soviets knew they were in trouble when we beat them to the Moon. That they collapsed under Reagan’s watch was simply good political fortune for him. It could have just as easily happened on Carter’s watch or on some subsequent President’s watch.
Unfortunately, the “new enemy” isn’t driven by the economic constraints of operating within a state bound framework. They don’t have to worry about balancing priorities in trying to create a stable and viable economy like job creation and the like. They are decentralized and fund themselves by illegal operations and donations from wealthy like-minded ideologues. That very flexibility makes the radicalists harder to fight with not only traditional military tactics but with economic tactics as well.
Just a thought.
This is a frequent event. The military states the building/aircraft/system is not needed or wanted and the powers to be arrange for it to be made anyway.
I am beginning to believe this is more of a war of attrition, and the gov’t’s enemy is the savings of the American Public.
@bron, nick
If voting for third-party candidates is wasting your vote because they don’t win, it follows that anybody who votes for a losing candidate wastes their vote. That’s half of voters every season!
That logic also doesn’t take into account the fact that a third-party candidacy can raise important issues that major party candidates won’t touch.
Bron, Way to go! You know the mantra, “You’re wasting your vote.” My suggested response should be a substantive, but I would suggest, “Go shit in your hat!”
Indigo:
I am voting for Robert Sarvis for governor here in Virginia. He is the libertarian candidate and looks like he has the intellectual capacity to do it. Law degree, masters in economics and a math degree. This is a smart man.
“He has earned degrees in mathematics from Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, a J.D. from N.Y.U. School of Law, and a Master’s in economics from George Mason University. He has a diverse professional background, with experience as an entrepreneur and small-business owner, a software engineer and mobile-app developer, a math teacher, and a lawyer.”
Theater room?? There must be a local warlord in need of a new home!
Said “contract officers” and the contractors involved should be having their finances gone over with a fine tooth comb.
The spending JT writes about (war profiteering) is the method that the epigovernmen uses to move money from The People’s Treasury to their own offshore bank accounts (War is the Highway 61 of the 1% – 2).
@bron
I usually vote “no confidence” by voting for Mickey Mouse.
It’s really unfortunate how unwilling others are to change their voting behavior, even in such a modest way.
Clearly, the two-party system isn’t working. Nobody is willing to change their voting behavior because they’re afraid of giving “the other side” an advantage. If “polarization” is a problem in American politics, buckling down and voting for more polarization is unlikely to help.
If our elections are settled by such close margins — margins so slight they are within the statistical margin of error — they might as well be settled by chance, meaning, voting doesn’t reflect voter preference anyway.
Follow the money.
Why not use the facility as a food pantry, education & career center, and/or homeless shelter?
“contract officers work for the federal government.
This was probably one of those “the money is allocated and we will lose it if we dont spend it.””
Yes, they work for the Federal Government, but they are controlled by politicians and political appointees. As we all know, very little oversight was allowed for expenditure in the War on Terror. And by ‘oversight’, I mean supervision by civil servants who don’t and can’t accept payment or donations from contractors.
As we also know, more and more civil servants have been replaced by contractors. In the DoD there have been reports of contractors being put in charge of contracting. An investigation (none will be held, naturally) into this scandal may reveal that no civil servant was involved at all.
Indigo Jones:
Amen and vote for none of the above.
The bigger the government, the bigger the waste of OUR money. It occurs in all branches of government. The military has always been the worst, but don’t kid yourself into thinking other branches are much better. It systemic, pernicious, and growing every day.
So much about our present military and surveillance expenditures are more about maintaining Cold War subsidies to industry than anything else. Even the general mood of paranoia is the same.
With empty bases like this, China’s ghost cities come to mind. They keep building empty cities to boost their GDP stats:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/other-side-chinas-8-gdp-growth-ghost-cities
For all the Cold War duck-and-cover drills, the only radioactivity Americans were ever exposed to came from our own government’s atmospheric testing. And now we have a War on Terror with a surveillance apparatus built atop financially compensated, complicit commercial telecommunications carriers, that seems to mostly just target Americans…
contract officers work for the federal government.
This was probably one of those “the money is allocated and we will lose it if we dont spend it.”
They ought to change that and offer some small compensation to people who actually dont spend all of the allocated funds.
Once the war is over we should be able to cut government spending by a hefty amount. But we wont and more money will be wasted on more stupid crap.