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A comment on Navy Returns to Compasses and Pencils to Help Avoid Collisions at Sea. Parent comment

Re:Navy Returns to Compasses and Pencils to Help Avoid Colli... by LeifCarrotson on Monday October 02, 2017 @08:12PM (#15389028) 

    1 500 000 000 000
    ----------------- = 15 000 000
              100 000
That would, in theory, result in 8-figure jobs for every serviceman. Is that right? Where is the excess going?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Navy Returns to Compasses and Pencils to Help Avoid Colli... by jdietrich on Monday October 02, 2017 @09:37PM (#15389420)
I was obliquely referring to the F-35 program, which is forecast to cost ~$1.5tn and is estimated to have created ~100,000 jobs within the services and via contractors, subcontractors and suppliers. The F-35 is a dreadful aircraft that is grounded indefinitely because it keeps trying to suffocate pilots, but it has kept a lot of factories busy and made a lot of senators happy. Lockheed Martin proudly trumpet the fact that there are suppliers for the F-35 project in 46 states - that's a lot of pork to go around.

The US defence budget is lousy with pork-barrel projects. The Army Chief of Staff has repeatedly asked Congress to stop buying new Abrams tanks, but the tanks keep rolling off the production line nonetheless. The services might be facing deep sequestration cuts, but there's been no let-up in the procurement of expensive and unnecessary hardware.

http://www.businessinsider.com/congress-approves-useless-mil... http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tells...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Navy Returns to Compasses and Pencils to Help Avoid Colli... by TeMPOraL on Tuesday October 03, 2017 @08:46AM (#15392004)
> The Army Chief of Staff has repeatedly asked Congress to stop buying new Abrams tanks, but the tanks keep rolling off the production line nonetheless.

Wow. One has to wonder when some of those tanks will eventually reach regular law enforcement, like lots of other military hardware tends to.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Navy Returns to Compasses and Pencils to Help Avoid Colli... by bluedino on Monday October 02, 2017 @08:23PM (#15389070)
The military budget is $600B. There are 1.2M active and 0.8M reserve servicemen.

Like any old organization, they have legacy costs: healthcare and pensions for former and retired servicemen are phenomenal.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Navy Returns to Compasses and Pencils to Help Avoid Colli... by vacri on Monday October 02, 2017 @08:44PM (#15389172)
I thought healthcare and pensions weren't included in that $600B, but farmed out to other parts of the budget?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Navy Returns to Compasses and Pencils to Help Avoid Colli... by torstenvl on Monday October 02, 2017 @10:19PM (#15389623)
Nope. Pensions (technically, retired pay and retainer pay) come out of the MILPERS budget. Military retirees are still military personnel, and generally exist within one of three statuses within the reserve component of the last armed service in which they served. For Navy personnel, for example, they are on the Retired List, the Retired Reserve, or the Fleet Reserve.
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