Tuesday, October 1, 2019

The Pentagon fired the man in charge of saving money

Shay Assad was in charge of negotiating contracts with defense industry corporations, and a couple of years after Trump came into office saying he would save us billions in defense costs, Assad was fired.

With Boeing, Raytheon and Textron executives occupying some of the top civil service positions at the Pentagon, is it any wonder that we have such a massive defense budget? I don't have any ill will against those companies, as I've ridden in their planes and used some of their gear, but I'm not inclined to believe that those companies should have their people working inside the Pentagon. That is a big conflict of interest.

Seems Shay Assad was (and had been for over a decade) getting in the way of the cash flow to these companies and others. Ellen Lord was hired in the middle of 2017 as the Pentagon's head "weapons buyer", and had been the CEO of Textron Systems. She is the one who eventually pushed Assad out of the Pentagon and into retirement.

I myself have witnessed military wasteful spending on a scale smaller than this, but then again, I'm a nobody. I've seen shipping containers filled with military gear that had little to no chance of ever seeing the light of day outside of the "conex yard", unless you want to count the inventory done by the XO every six months. Those inventories will usually result in "discovering" some minor missing gear that absolutely MUST be replaced with taxpayer money. Those missing pieces would be stored in the conex to be inventoried again later, where inevitably some other piece of gear would be missing.

Rinse and repeat.

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