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[–] 9 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Also, (and I'm no kind of expert) it seems there's a lot of graft involved in the spending, such as $67 charged for a screw, and that kind of thing. A good bit of it due to a kickback-type arrangement between the politicians involved (think Dick Cheney) and the defense contractors who get awarded the deals.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Some of those "$50 screw" numbers come from cancelling projects with high total cost. A contract might be paid to produce a thousand of something and get cancelled after making 10 of them, inflating the per unit cost by a ton

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    The Army manual says that screw must meet X, Y, and Z specs. If you don't have the tooling for those exact specs, you're going to charge more to make up the cost of retooling.

    Of course there's grift and plain foolishness. Local base Commander paid a painter I knew to stop work for two weeks and screw around waiting for his commander to visit. Wanted the boss to see the painters in action, look busy.

    Speaking of specs, there are old rules that never changed. Worked at a print shop where a standard 24x36" blueprint was $.63. Nope. Navy had to have the final set of plans printed on plastic media, $3/page. Now multiply by 150 for a modest set of prints.

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