Pentagon contracts have become increasingly fuzzy in recent years, with descriptions of just what it is we’re getting for our money tough to discern. The latest example was at the top of the list of contracts announced by the Pentagon late Tuesday. It’s paying four companies as much as $281.7 million each (where do they come up with these precise numbers, especially when spread across four firms?) for an “indefinite-delivery/indefinite quantity contract to provide advisory and assistance services” to the U.S. military’s Missile Defense Agency. That fuzzy enough for you? If you need more “clarity” — check this out.
The four lucky winners — Booz Allen Hamilton of McLean, Va.; MacAulay-Brown, Inc. of Dayton, Ohio; Science Applications International Corp. of Arlington, Va.; and TASC of Andover, Mass. — “will assist the acquisition directorate in providing agency advisory analytical support for subject matter expertise throughout the agency for engineering, test, finance, acquisition, readiness and strategic activities in support of the Ballistic Missile Defense System.” A quick review of contracting data shows such deals to be annual events, even though this one runs through 2016.
So we’re spending more than $1 billion for ill-defined contracts against ill-defined threats as our nation drowns in debt? Hey — been there, done that. As a young kid in the 1950s, I heard about the (non-existent) missile and bomber gaps that threatened the U.S. After my church burned down in the 1960s, I attended Mass for awhile in a building at an abandoned Nike missile site that had been built to protect me from attacking Soviet bombers. In the 1990s, I toured the junked Safeguard anti-missile system in Nekoma, N.D., the nation’s only operational missile-killer prior to the system now in place in Alaska and California. That system cost us about $25 billion and “defended” us, or at least a handful of our nuclear missiles, for about six months in 1975-76. Such defenses are the ultimate military-industrial complex con job — so long as we’re not attacked, we can declare that they’re working.