Sadly, this reminds me of the saga of the M-16. Like NASA, the military can be as stupidly incompetent and politically driven as any other government bureaucracy. Unfortunately, we don’t have much of an alternative.
6 thoughts on “Army Procurement Fiasco”
Comments are closed.
What idiot thinks you look cooler dead?
Well, the only real problem with the M-16 was changing the ammunition spec without testing the changed ammo or updating maintenance procedures immediately – neither the guns nor the ammo were actually unworkable, even in that combination.
So this is worse.
The real scandal was the M14 procurement. hand-built, optimised M14’s vs off-the-rack FN-FAL’s- and FN was not allowed to correct faults, while the M14 crew was doing just that every night. At the end,we adopted the M14- and almost nobody else did. The Free World’s Right Arm? That’s the FN.
So, there are approx. 1,129,275 people serving in the active Army, Army National Guard, and Army Reserves. For 5 billion dollars that works out to about $4427.62 to outfit each soldier with these fatigues of epic fail. And that’s assuming everybody was or is going to get the latest camo print.
Well, they would’ve been outfitting multiple soldiers over those years with multiple uniforms, so the per uniform cost was certainly much lower. But if you figure in the cost of additional casualties and failed missions things might look much, much worse.
Ironically, danger-orange vests they might’ve been more successful because enemy scouts would report (in Arabic) “No Americans around, just some guys out huntin’.”
The screaming will really start when we get a camaflouge pattern uniform so good that nobody in supply can find them.
Don’t forget each suit comes with two pair of pants. (sorry, couldn’t resist…)