Insider Scoop from a MIC Veteran

by Anonymous

I worked in the US Military Industrial Complex for over 17 years before I stopped and thought about the wasteful money being spent on failed weapon systems. Leaving the MIC was the best career move in my life…plus I was very unhappy working in that sweatshop environment. Many of the defense contracts are awarded to the MIC to keep their companies alive in case they were needed in a hot war. So, the US builds many unneeded weapon systems just to spend money.

Bernie Sanders has an eye opening Senate speech on the wasteful US defense budget. You gotta see this. This will open your eyes to the reality of the waste, the inability to account for the money spent, and the allocated money not spent because they just have too much already.

I’ve worked on several systems that were not deployed or eventually became obsolete because technology passed them over when the system was launched too slowly. So I can completely understand how the failed F-35 fighter program cost $1T, yes one trillion dollars, over 25 years (started in 1995). Someone should be in jail for this enormous waste of taxpayer dollars.

As for ship building, there are only a couple, maybe one by now, companies who can build war ships. So with no competition and no fear of the US pulling the plug on the project, the MIC company just takes its time and pads the budget to make even more money. This is the dirty secret of defense systems accounting. No project I ever worked on ever came in on time and within the original budget. Never.

Another thing is that is a well known secret that the MIC engineers are the bottom of the barrel. Many have difficulties getting jobs in the commercial sector. There are still very good engineers there, but I am saying that the majority were subpar. I was recruited there before the Internet explosion of jobs during the high defense spending Reagan years. The company I worked at Lockheed Martin was notoriously called the “Lazy L”.

The defense budget is nothing more than a welfare system for the MIC and its engineers. Yes, it is socialized spending just to support the MIC. With the MIC welfare system, cost overruns, lack of competition, lower tier engineers, and too much complexity, this results in the the deployment of low quality, defective, high cost weapons systems.

For you war hawks out there, I think the time to worry about our US defense weapons spending and procurement process is way past due.