Pentagon Struggles With Cost Overruns and Delays

...“We have been living in a rich man’s world for the last five years,” said Jacques Gansler, Pentagon under secretary for acquisition from 1997 to 2001 and vice president for research at the University of Maryland. “The defense budget has been growing so rapidly that we are less likely to put in many cost-sensitive reforms.”
...
“It’s a perfect storm,” said Lawrence J. Korb, a former Pentagon assistant secretary, who served in the Reagan administration and is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “You had this big buildup in military spending. That took a bubbling problem and made it worse. It made it more difficult to audit and keep track of what was going on. It’s always been bad, but I’ve never seen it this bad.”
...
A number of Pentagon improvement efforts — Mr. Rumsfeld’s best known is called the Business Management Modernization Program — have been tried in the last five years, to little effect. This shortcoming has not gone unnoticed in business circles.

A group called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, which includes 600 executives from companies like Bell Industries, the Pacific Stock Exchange and the Stride Rite Corporation, issued a report on Pentagon financial practices last May called “No One Is Accountable.”

It concluded: “The Defense Department’s financial management practices would put any civilian company out of business.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/business/11overruns.html?ei=5094&en=2015de495ae3414c&hp=&ex=1152590400&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print

Fabulous SecDef

Maybe you should get out of the murdering for oil business. Doesn't suit you.

er, I mean, borrow some more money. No problem. :sarcasm:

...and 'Scientific Study Proves Bears Defecate in Heavily-Wooded Areas.'

For your delectation, and with sincere apologies to Tom Paxton if I'm remembering this wrong:

"Sold a hammer, to the Pentagon
To the bing-bang, to the Pentagon,
And now I live in Florida
'Cause they made me a millionaire!

So you sell some nails
To the yahoo, to the Pentagon,
So you sell some nails
And they'll make you a millionaire!"

And so on, and so on, and so on.

Or, as my dear old French-Canuck Great-Gran used to say: "Plus ca change, plus ca la meme chose."

wearily,
Bright