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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.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.
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.Remember the stories of pilots somehow mounting off the shelf radar detectors in military aircraft?
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.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.
You can say that again! And the stuff they pull in the Pentagon relative to that would astonish you.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.
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.The old gate guardian F7F-3 was in the dump. We contacted USN Museum as they had none, and were told they had one.
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.The high ups don't want to be bothered with trivia/museum pieces until a General/Admiral is interested.
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.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?
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.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.