Secretary of Defense Announces How He’ll Waste $582 Billion

February 3rd, 2016

Awake Goy

You hear that? It’s the sound of 582 billion dollar bills falling down an infinitely deep hole, as narrated by your Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter. Yes, his name’s Ash. And yes, he’s going to spend a couple billion defending outer space from ISIS.

In a speech delivered and published today, Carter outlined some of the ways in which our great and war-craving nation will squander over half a trillion dollars in Fiscal Year 2017. It ain’t good:

Thanks, David. Appreciate it. And good morning, everyone. Appreciate you being here. It’s a pleasure for me to be — what I understand, David, to be the first secretary of defense to address the Economic Club of Washington.

What? What kind of polite, tippy-toe shit is this? The guy in charge of war shouldn’t be saying please and thank you so much—you’re the war man. And you’re also a war man at a time when we have to fight those scary guys in the cool black masks; this $582 billion is going to include tools to obliterate ISIS, right?

And challenge number five is our ongoing fight to defeat terrorism and especially ISIL, most immediately in its parent tumor in Iraq and Syria, and also, where it is metastasizing in Afghanistan, Africa and elsewhere.

Great—with an effectively infinite supply of money, our armed forces should be able to defeat ISIL, just like we did with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Carter highlighted projects inside the “Strategic Capabilities Office, or SCO for short,” a murky and extremely wasteful corner of the Pentagon where some of our dumbest, most-likely-to-fail projects are born (and often die, at great expense):

Another project uses swarming autonomous vehicles in all sorts of ways and in multiple domains. In the air, they develop micro-drones that are really fast, really resistant. They can fly through heavy winds and be kicked out the back of a fighter jet moving at Mach 0.9, like they did during an operational exercise in Alaska last year, or they can be thrown into the air by a soldier in the middle of the Iraqi desert. And for the water, they’ve developed self-driving boats which can network together to do all kinds of missions, from fleet defense to close-in surveillance, without putting sailors at risk. Each one of these leverages the wider world of technology. For example, the microdrones, I mentioned a moment ago, use a lot of commercial components and are actually 3-D printed and the boats build on some of the same artificial intelligence algorithms that long-ago and in a much more primitive form were on the Mars lander.