All This For The Low, Low Price of .....

[MIflyer]

Back around 1980 I was the USAF Program Manager for the Thor space booster. At the time we had ten Thors left in the inventory and no payloads for them to launch. The last payload that was planned to fly on the Thor had outgrown it and moved to Atlas and a national decision had been made ten years before to phase out all expendable launch vehicles and use the Space Shuttle, so no suitable payloads would be forthcoming. We were planning on shutting down the program and I had to contend with people asserting that there were payloads out there, somewhere, and we just had no looked hard enough.

One possible use for some of the Thors arose, testing to determine the vulnerability of ballistic missiles to high power lasers. Five of the Thors were still in essentially the IRBM configuration and had been among those that had been stationed in the UK back around 1960. Those Thors would be suitable targets for the USAF Airborne Laser Lab, but had earlier model engines than the rest of the fleet and used different igniters. So MDAC got a quote to manufacture some of the old igniters and then asked me to look over the response to their quote and see if any of the material substitutions were a problem; some items available in the late 50's could no longer be purchased.

I looked at the materials list and something caught my eye right away, 1 pound of solder was $250. Okay, so that was special space/missile solder, right? Uh, no, I recognized the spec; QQ-S-571 was what you got if you went to Radio Shack.

I started looking at the rest of the items. Some epoxy was specified and an expert told me that product was what you got if you went to the hardware store. Then I saw another couple of items, "Opener, Can" with a military specification, Quantity: 2.

The igniters were stored in cans and the original specification called for a couple of can openers to be included in the box. After all, it would be very embarrassing to miss participating in WWIII because you could not find a can opener. So these were special anti-sparking explosive qualified military grade can openers, right?

Looking up the milspec, I found that these were modern versions of the legendary WWII C-Ration can opener, called the "P-38" (by the way there was a larger version called the P-51, too).

Those two P-38 can openers were only going to cost us $3000.

I realized what had occurred. The igniter manufacturer sent out its own quote and got back a response from the can opener maker. The minimum order quantity probably was several thousand and they would take the two them needed out of the shipment and surplus the rest. I suddenly understood why so much brand new material ended up on the surplus market.

I went to K-Mart and bought a couple of similar can openers for less than $2.00, to illustrate to our three star general how procurements can go wrong.

 

[manta22]

Back around 1980 I was the USAF Program Manager for the Thor space booster. At the time we had ten Thors left in the inventory and no payloads for them to launch. The last payload that was planned to fly on the Thor had outgrown it and moved to Atlas and a national decision had been made ten years before to phase out all expendable launch vehicles and use the Space Shuttle, so no suitable payloads would be forthcoming. We were planning on shutting down the program and I had to contend with people asserting that there were payloads out there, somewhere, and we just had no looked hard enough.

One possible use for some of the Thors arose, testing to determine the vulnerability of ballistic missiles to high power lasers. Five of the Thors were still in essentially the IRBM configuration and had been among those that had been stationed in the UK back around 1960. Those Thors would be suitable targets for the USAF Airborne Laser Lab, but had earlier model engines than the rest of the fleet and used different igniters. So MDAC got a quote to manufacture some of the old igniters and then asked me to look over the response to their quote and see if any of the material substitutions were a problem; some items available in the late 50's could no longer be purchased.

I looked at the materials list and something caught my eye right away, 1 pound of solder was $250. Okay, so that was special space/missile solder, right? Uh, no, I recognized the spec; QQ-S-571 was what you got if you went to Radio Shack.

I started looking at the rest of the items. Some epoxy was specified and an expert told me that product was what you got if you went to the hardware store. Then I saw another couple of items, "Opener, Can" with a military specification, Quantity: 2.

The igniters were stored in cans and the original specification called for a couple of can openers to be included in the box. After all, it would be very embarrassing to miss participating in WWIII because you could not find a can opener. So these were special anti-sparking explosive qualified military grade can openers, right?

Looking up the milspec, I found that these were modern versions of the legendary WWII C-Ration can opener, called the "P-38" (by the way there was a larger version called the P-51, too).

Those two P-38 can openers were only going to cost us $3000.

I realized what had occurred. The igniter manufacturer sent out its own quote and got back a response from the can opener maker. The minimum order quantity probably was several thousand and they would take the two them needed out of the shipment and surplus the rest. I suddenly understood why so much brand new material ended up on the surplus market.

I went to K-Mart and bought a couple of similar can openers for less than $2.00, to illustrate to our three star general how procurements can go wrong.

Much of the costs can be traced to the required certifications and paperwork. I remember being required to fill out forms certifying that our products were not produced by prison labor, etc, etc etc. Piles of paperwork such as that- all needing to be reviewed by an attorney.

 

[Capt. Vick]

I worked for a company that cut material with lasers and the markup on cutting the new C-5 Galaxy wing skins was quite substantial...just because they could I imagine.

 

[Thumpalumpacus]

No doubt you'll be telling us about $500 hammers and $3000 toilets seats as well.

 

[Capt. Vick]

Nope, just the wing skins. It was cool to see these large loftings of the skins on flexible fiberglass to use as patterns. I had only heard of such things before that time. Maybe the markups were only large by comparison to the other work we did because the margins had to be tighter to even get the work. Another interesting customer was Factory 5, who made Shelby Cobra kit cars and the like.

 

[MIflyer]

The infamous "$300 toilet seat" was in fact the whole top of a C-5A toilet. In that same time frame I paid $200 for two flat pieces of plastic for my shower stall walls.

A instructor in my Masters program at USC described one reason why Government pays so much. A small airline named Republic was contacted by the FAA and asked to participate in a study. The FAA had noted that Republic had the lowest overhead of any airline and wanted to see if there were any lessons learned applicable to the airline industry as a whole. Republic agreed and the FAA said that since they could not ask the airline to provide services for free they had to sign a contract that would pay them a nominal fee, like $100, to make it all legal. The FAA did the study and departed. Soon thereafter Republic was contacted by a Federal Govt audit agency and informed that they were invoking the clause in that $100 contract to perform a complete audit of the airline's books. This was a major impact to Republic, since a reason they had a low overhead was they did not maintain a bloated HQ staff.

Now, let's say you own a hardware store and the Federal Govt comes and wants to buy a $10 hammer. How much will you charge for that hammer if selling it makes you liable for a complete audit of your entire business entirely at the descretion of an agency that is not even associated with the one you sold the hammer to? And odds are, they will find something wrong in order to justify not only their immediate work but their entire existence. $400 sounds too cheap to me for that hammer.

 

[SaparotRob]

I read this in Car and Driver magazine years ago. Remember the stories of pilots somehow mounting off the shelf radar detectors in military aircraft? The government wanted to buy them from the manufacturer. "Cool!" thought this company. Then the necessary paperwork to be filled out arrived. I don't remember how it turned out but the guy sent all the paperwork back saying "If you want, I'll stencil "NO STEP" on the boxes but that's it."

 

[MIflyer]

Remember the stories of pilots somehow mounting off the shelf radar detectors in military aircraft?

Yes, that legendary story came from Red Flag, where they found one Aggressor F-5 pilot was unkillable and finally sat down with him and asked what he was doing that made him so much better. He replied that he had installed a Fuzzbuster.

In fact the first radar warning receivers used in jet fighters were hand held devices designed for use by CIA agents for snooping around and IDing hostile radars.

Back when you used to see ashtrays in govt buildings, there was a commonly used one that was round, black, had a cone in the middle to use to knock the ashes off, and three indents around the rim for placing cigarettes. Somebody in the Fedl Govt decided they needed to revise the specification for that item, and added a specification to the drawing that the three indents were to be placed at 60 degree intervals, plus or minus one degree. The quoted price for the next buy of the ashtrays went up by about an order of magnitude. Asked why, the manufacturer replied, "What do you expect if I have to measure each one of them to an accuracy of 1 degree? Eliminate that requirement and the price will go back to $5 instead of $50."

I recall that my Mom was upset that she had got a letter from the USPS saying all rural mailboxes had to be 39 inches high. She had measured hers and it was 37 inches high. But the USPS gave no instructions on where to take the measurement or any tolerances. If I as a USAF engineer had specified something 39 inches long to the then-current limits of measurement accuracy for no good reason I could expect to get fired. I told Mom her mailbox was fine, since it was pretty obvious that it could vary in height by at least 12 inches before the guy in the USPS Jeep would have trouble reaching it. But we ended up putting up a new mailbox.

 

[special ed]

The amount of waste in military units can also be excessive, due to inspections and inventory audits. The USAFR unit I was in, 1963-1965 had what I considered waste of resources. Once, just before a major inspection and inventory, the shops were encouraged to requisition spray cans of O.D. paint, as there was too much in supply, but if issued to the shops, it was no longer in supply's inventory. It was commercial Krylon in a white government wrapper. The fellow airman, who rode to drills with me, and I would often leave drill by the back gate as we would have to pass the base dump. The airman at the gate guard post would almost never search leaving vehicles because most people went home through main gate as it allowed entry to a main highway. The visits to the dump were revealing as much serviceable stuff was in the dump. Once, an F-104 canopy, although we were a Troop Carrier Sq and 104s had never been at this station. It wouldn't fit in the car. The old gate guardian F7F-3 was in the dump. We contacted USN Museum as they had none, and were told they had one. I have the 20mm ammo guide which fed the lip gun openings. Decades later, Pensacola got an F7U-3 from Washington state and trucked it cross country. One dump stop yielded three dozen extensions for 1/2 inch drive socket hand tools. They were all either Snap-on or Proto brands. About once every few months, a bulldozer covered everything.

 

[manta22]

The amount of waste in military units can also be excessive, due to inspections and inventory audits. The USAFR unit I was in, 1963-1965 had what I considered waste of resources. Once, just before a major inspection and inventory, the shops were encouraged to requisition spray cans of O.D. paint, as there was too much in supply, but if issued to the shops, it was no longer in supply's inventory. It was commercial Krylon in a white government wrapper. The fellow airman, who rode to drills with me, and I would often leave drill by the back gate as we would have to pass the base dump. The airman at the gate guard post would almost never search leaving vehicles because most people went home through main gate as it allowed entry to a main highway. The visits to the dump were revealing as much serviceable stuff was in the dump. Once, an F-104 canopy, although we were a Troop Carrier Sq and 104s had never been at this station. It wouldn't fit in the car. The old gate guardian F7F-3 was in the dump. We contacted USN Museum as they had none, and were told they had one. I have the 20mm ammo guide which fed the lip gun openings. Decades later, Pensacola got an F7U-3 from Washington state and trucked it cross country. One dump stop yielded three dozen extensions for 1/2 inch drive socket hand tools. They were all either Snap-on or Proto brands. About once every few months, a bulldozer covered everything.

Another driver of waste is the policy of spending ALL of your allocated funds... if you don't, the next budget period will result in your funding being reduced. This penalizes those organizations who are economical.

 

[MIflyer]

Another driver of waste is the policy of spending ALL of your allocated funds... if you don't, the next budget period will result in your funding being reduced. This penalizes those organizations who are economical.

You can say that again! And the stuff they pull in the Pentagon relative to that would astonish you.

 

[MIflyer]

The old gate guardian F7F-3 was in the dump. We contacted USN Museum as they had none, and were told they had one.

The CAF were looking for a B-29 and the USAF told them they had none to give. They found several of them being used as targets at NAS China Lake, asked the USN for one and were told "Those belong to the USAF." They then told the USAF they had found several that still belonged to them and that was where FiFi came from.

 

[special ed]

The high ups don't want to be bothered with trivia/museum pieces until a General/Admiral is interested. As I pointed out, in the 1970s the CAF restored to flying condition the F-82 left in Harlingen for atmosphere along with a C-124 and others. Then the USAF wanted it back.

 

[MIflyer]

The high ups don't want to be bothered with trivia/museum pieces until a General/Admiral is interested.

Yes, I was told that back in the late 70's a USAF General officer declared that all bases under his command would have museums. Then they started looking for airplanes to put in the museums. They even found a still intact B-47 at Davis Monthan, dug out the manuals and mamaged to get it flying for a ferry trip to Castle AFB, I think it was. Imagine that! Flying the only B-47 left for one last time. It would have been tempting to ask for a touch and go at some base along the way.

 

[Zipper730]

I read this in Car and Driver magazine years ago. Remember the stories of pilots somehow mounting off the shelf radar detectors in military aircraft?

If I recall, this had to do with the fact that the F-5 aggressors were simulating a MiG-21 variant that had a RWR, so they kluged a low-cost device that did the job.

 

[SaparotRob]

Close to what I read. The story, if I remember correctly, was the powers that be wondered why this guy was doing so well against better aircraft. The Air Force then started some sort of program with off the shelf detectors. A supplier was initially thrilled with the order. When he got the required paperwork, he sent it all back to the government. He said "If you want, I'll stencil "no step" on the boxes " but I ain't doing that paperwork". Source: a long ago read article in Car and Driver.
Please feel free to correct as necessary.

 

[drgondog]

From my perspective the introduction and mandate of of DoD 7000.1 for contract tracking and accounting purposes down to CLI and WBS completion on unit basis was the deathknell to common sense. The paperwork requirements to track % completion for invoicing was horrendous.

Later, when I escaped the airframe business, I was Program Manager for GE on the USAF AFCAM project looing into manufacturing processes and costing practices for capital equipment, and uses of CAD/CAM - for all the 'biggies'.

One of the anecdotal sharings includes discovering that different manufacturers 'costed' 5-Axis NC the same as another group might charge for a jeweler's lathe - all about competitive pricing or 'costing' depending on your specialty. GD-San Diego was making among other things, the very complex hogged out back planes for the Phalanx. A comptitive edge was costing the 5-Axis NC hourly rate very low. You would have to dig into actual unit inventory and depreciation scheduleto catch the anomaly.

One of the goals of AFCAM was to capture and regulate 'bandwidths' for costing/de[reciation for types of machines, but I left for the greenpastures of EDS before I saw the conclusion of the project.

 

[drgondog]

Back around 1980 I was the USAF Program Manager for the Thor space booster. At the time we had ten Thors left in the inventory and no payloads for them to launch. The last payload that was planned to fly on the Thor had outgrown it and moved to Atlas and a national decision had been made ten years before to phase out all expendable launch vehicles and use the Space Shuttle, so no suitable payloads would be forthcoming. We were planning on shutting down the program and I had to contend with people asserting that there were payloads out there, somewhere, and we just had no looked hard enough.

One possible use for some of the Thors arose, testing to determine the vulnerability of ballistic missiles to high power lasers. Five of the Thors were still in essentially the IRBM configuration and had been among those that had been stationed in the UK back around 1960. Those Thors would be suitable targets for the USAF Airborne Laser Lab, but had earlier model engines than the rest of the fleet and used different igniters. So MDAC got a quote to manufacture some of the old igniters and then asked me to look over the response to their quote and see if any of the material substitutions were a problem; some items available in the late 50's could no longer be purchased.

Interesting, I was a part owner/founder of a company named Geo Optics and begged a visit to Los Alamos to look into nuclear magnetic resonance technologies fo rsubsurface well-bore hydrocarbon detection. My 'host' managed to slip me out to see a very large hole bored into the side of basement rock - circa 81-82 that was made by a megawatt laser IIRC.

As an aside, For those pilots/passengers not acquainted with the airfield there - not for the faint of heart worrying about losing a fan on take off.

 

[Greg Boeser]

I remember the annual division command inspections. You had to have exactly what was listed on the MTOE. No more, no less. Dumpsters would be overflowing with "excess" equipment, and orders placed for full boxes of replacement gear.
My uncle talked about a similar inspection when he was in the navy. He claimed the carrier gained 3 feet of freeboard.

 

[MIflyer]

I was told that many years ago they were setting up a new engineering office at Tinker AFB. The Section chief told one of his guys that he wanted each engineer to have desk calendar blotters on their desk so they could make notes on when projects were started and completed and to go to supply and get twelve of them. The engineer returned with twelve blotters- for the previous year and explained that the supply people said they had been told to "exhaust the old ones before issuing the new ones." The chief told the guy to go find out how many supply had left. He called back a little later and said they still had ten old ones in stock. The chief replied, "Then tell them we need twenty two." They threw the 22 old blotters away and used the 12 new ones.

On another occasion the technical order called for the use of surgical grade cotton in the sumps of aircraft cooling turbines. Those turbines spin at around 60,000 to 75,000 RPM and small particles getting into the bearings could cause a disaster. But the regs said that all medical grade supplies had to be ordered through the base hospital and the hospital said we were not medical personnel and had no business with medical supplies. After looking at the Federal specification for non-medical cotton and calling the very surprised President of the Acme Cotton Company of Valley Stream NY, (imagine that: "Mr. Grosclose, the Air Force is on Line 1 for you." we decided to stick with the medical grade cotton.