Pentagon wasting millions to save unneeded vehicles

There are thousands of vehicles currently in Afghanistan, from Humvees to MRAPs. It costs approximately $5,000 a vehicle to ship something like a Humvee back from Afghanistan, and over $100,000 for an MRAP. The Army and Marines have a complex formula used to determine whether to ship a vehicle back or not, including cost to repair it, potential future needs for the vehicle type, and other bases needs. Oddly enough, what they DON'T consider is the cost to ship it back from the region.

The services are supposed to get a waiver to ship equipment back, but it's been found that neither the Army or the Marines aren't keeping records. Between October 2012 and October 2013, the services spent between $5 and $100M sending back vehicles that it didn't need. That was at least 1,000 vehicles that could have been sold or destroyed in place.

A total of 14,464 vehicles were shipped or destroyed in 2013. According to the Pentagon that will increase in 2015, and with shipping costs having gone up recently, that means another untold millions wasted bringing back vehicles that will sit rusting away somewhere.

The U.S. military has tens of thousands of vehicles in Afghanistan. As they depart, the troops can’t just leave all that equipment behind. The Pentagon sells some vehicles to governments in the region … and simply destroys others.

The military sends the rest back to its bases in the U.S. But that ain’t cheap—and might not even be worth it. Now a new report from the Government Accountability Office details the incredible cost of bringing surplus vehicles home.

The GAO looked at vehicles—including Humvees and bomb-deflecting MRAPs—that the Army and Marines returned to the U.S. between October 2012 and October 2013.

medium.com...

Geez for that kind of money you think we could buy one of those big boats and ship them back ourselves.

And I like

Between October 2012 and October 2013, the services spent between $5 and $100M sending back vehicles that it didn't need

yeah its somewhere in there... Trying telling your wife that when she asks how much money you spent at the game, or the bar. Minus about 5 zeroes though lol

Cost of a humvee versus 5000 dollars in shipping fees.
old humvee cost 70,000.
savings to ship back, 65,000 dollars right?

Nope.
The army plans on spending 350,000 on the replacements for humvees.

There's no logic here.

It's pork barrel politics.

By the way, "don't need" is political speak for "we've decided to spend billions on new crap we "won't need" until we destroy the "stuff we already have."

a reply to: tinner07

The problem is that it's hard as hell to tell just how many they're going to actually need. So if they need fewer of them, then it's closer to $100M. If they need more of them, it's closer to $5M.

It is a shame to have to blow some of that stuff up. I actually put some nice welds on some of those vehicles. Maybe one of the ones "over there".

Be interesting to see how they hold up to being blown up since they were all welded and ground into bomb deflecting.

a reply to: tinner07

As John Ringo put it in Last Centurion (HIGHLY recommend that book), it's a lot easier to get a boom when you put the bomb INSIDE the vehicle.

Typical ATS. One thread complains about how the US is getting not enough scrap value for planes it doesn't want anymore, while another complains about how much they're spending to bring things back instead of scrapping them.

My grandpa tells stories about chopping brand new P-38s in half and pushing them over a cliff into the ocean when he was deployed on the Pacific front. Apparently at that time they realized it made more sense to throw the stuff out.

Apparently a lot of returning soldiers saw fit to take toolkits and the like back with them rather than destroy them. A story he likes to tell is that once in the middle of the night, the ship stopped on the way back to the US. It was announced over hte loudspeaker that a search was going to happen, and that anyone found with contraband would be sent back for another 6 months. Apparently, you could hear from inside the ship the "plop plop plop" of things being cast overboard. After a few minutes, the ship got back underway without a search actually happening.

a reply to: TheBlackTiger

The thread about the C-27s was NOT that they didn't get enough value out of the scrap, it's that they could have found other uses for them that did NOT include scrapping them, and wasting hundreds of millions.

Oh they will need them alright.

There are many a war to be fought.

besides, why should we destroy perfectly capable vehicles that are already paid for? I mean how do you save money by purchasing new ones? Most of these platforms can be upgraded, or sold to ally nations.

a reply to: Zaphod58

The military is just being ignorant and wasteful. Its never too much to ship back a vehicle if its Humvee or better. They sent back Humvee's that were blown up over there, fixed them and sent them right back to the military. All they need to do is rent one of Toyotas car moving ships and it would be cheap, but no they want to make our military even more pathetic by thinking Congress is going to give them new toys. That will be a huge mistake.

This thread is sort of ironic, in that less than a month ago everyone was outraged by this thread.

Depending on what sort of shape they're in, it may or may not make sense to ship them back. Sort of surprised they don't store them under a prepositioning plan. In lieu of that, again depending on their condition, I suppose it'd be better to scrap them in place.

a reply to: Zaphod58

A lot of that equipment is being sent to/back to national guard units. The one up the road from me is being stuffed with equipment. Not merely gun platforms either, but Skidsteers dozers, dump trucks, etc. Your remember a few years ago when those machines were stripped from the NG because procurements could not be obtained fast enough from the industries that build that stuff? Now it's coming back to be held in the ready.

Ordinary civilian vehicles last for a long time, much of the equipment of the military is operational even longer. By all means, ship that stuff back here. What if Elba goes wild in areas south of our border and there is a gigantic, overwhelming rush of humanity up to that border? What then, a-bomb them or rush every piece of wheeled equipment we can muster down there for more humane management of that 1200-mile stretch?

Stocks of available hardware are a vital part of contingency plans that the military makes for every possible situation. I would not venture to say that the returning of any of that hardware is because of some manner of possible civil uprising on this continent, but do we wanna rule that possibility out?

I'm not that worried about the MRAPs being scrapped. They fulfilled a function that was needed at the time, though really not that well. Soldiers survived, yea, and I am all about that. But they were 70's-'80's tech. To big, to tall, to heavy, didn't carry that many troops. sucked fuel like no tomorrow and really wasn't any better armed than a Stryker or HUMVEE.

On top of all that, they weren't very maneuverable and had a tendency to get bogged down in the countryside when it rained. I could go on.

Lessons learned and all that though...I do want to see a replacement for both the MRAP and HUMVEE that is viable.

Then again, if we remove the HUMVEE from frontline service and all the vehicles that our UCAVs see are HUMVEES...well, there you go. FOX1 away!

How about the Pentagon wasting millions on wars that never needed to happen?

originally posted by: tinkortwim
How about the Pentagon wasting millions on wars that never needed to happen?

The Pentagon went to those wars based upon the elected officials that the civilians voted for. Have you thought about that?

Oh...and those same civilians voted to increase those millions as well.

Whodathunk!

Some are going to be shipped to the ready force in Diego Garcia.

I will bet we will need all the vehicles we can get in a couple years to fight ISIS or what ever they call themselves by then.

If not sell them to Israel for when they fight ISIS. If not Israel will use Nukes on ISIS.

For many years I have seen all the waffle and bluster on military spending, accounting and tracking. There have been projects to design and implement new software systems, that always go massively over budget, are years late and then scrapped as deemed not being up to the job. So, here we are today, with fuzzy figures and a complete bloody mess, not only in US spending though, it's the same here in the UK.

What I find incomprehensible, is the idea every time that they need to hire some big firm of consultants to build an accounting and database system from the ground up. WTF?

Such systems are already available "off the shelf", allowing full customization and tailoring for the particular needs of the customer. Lets face it, we are talking about simple accounting and stock control systems at it's most basic.
The idea that the massively funded military machine cannot get even this simple task done beggars belief. Well it would do if it wasn't for all the corruption and kickbacks, theft and downright criminality. Of course, that's why the figures are always fudged, incomplete and vague, it's by design, to hide the waste, corruption and complete lack of high level accountability.

Remember ol' Dov Zackheim and Donald Rumsfeld just before the 9/11 attacks, admitting a $2.3 Trillion black hole in accounting by the Pentagon? Well damned lucky for them all the data got blown up and they had other more urgent things to deal with post-event. To this day, that black hole and where all the money went is still not resolved.

At work, I have to account for every penny spent and control my departmental budget. Not doing so would get me sacked and investigated for any "irregularities" that may come to light. Shame our elected representatives and their appointees get a free ride, at our expense every time!

a reply to: Britguy

Actually, you might want to update your research on the 2.3 trillion. It was public knowledge long before 9/11...and was not forgotten AFTER 9/11.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Great book!!!!

a reply to: JIMC5499

That's the book that got my wife completely hooked on both John Ringo, and military fiction. She wouldn't touch the stuff prior to that, and she's read that book like five times now.