Sequestration spotlights real defense abuses

[Geee]

Washington Times:

Apanel of defense-industry executives complained last week to a National Press Club audience about the defense budget cuts known as sequestration. Calling those reductions “irresponsible,” TASC CEO David Langstaff said sequestration would shatter “our ability to execute U.S. national security strategy.” That may well be the case.

Yet on the same day, the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester harshly criticized the Army’s costly data-mining system known as the Defense Common Ground System (DCGS). Rather than smoothly producing battlefield intelligence to hunt insurgents, even the new and theoretically improved version of DCGS was “not operationally effective, not operationally suitable and not operationally survivable against cyberthreats,” he said.

Despite its ineffectiveness, the American taxpayer has spent $2.5 billion on DCGS.

From a $900 toilet seat to DCGS, waste in Pentagon acquisition is a canonical and oft-told tale. It is as if we granted the Soviets a consolation prize for losing the Cold War by preserving their procurement system intact: five-year plans, Byzantine regulations and an elephantine development system from gleam in the eye to gestation. This doesn’t seem to be a problem — until you run out of other people’s money. Will sequestration finally force us to revisit an enduring American political dilemma?