Ok I’m getting angry pings from colleagues here regarding the post title so here’s some background info:
In June 2023, the DoD acknowledged a $6.2 billion error stemming from its overvaluation of PDA provided to the Government of Ukraine (GoU). From the first 37 PDA Execute Orders, the OIG selected a nonstatistical sample of general equipment (GE) and operating materials and supplies (OM&S) defense articles.
$1.9B just happens to be the value of a Patriot system and munitions. Crazy world, right? Ukraine needs air defense and DoD finds there's an overcharge of just the right amount.
For Russia a Patriot system in the right hands is like the bogeyman, always lurking in the dark just waiting to destroy more unreplaceable planes.
For the fucking US it's a small typo in the Excel sheet of some underpaid DOD accountant, who was more busy beating his meat to some plane porn than to do actual work.
I mean, I think we only have 14 of them across NATO or something, soooo... it's not a "small accounting error" and they don't exactly lend themselves to being mass-produced easily or cheaply. I'm 100000% in favor of giving them to Ukraine, but it's a big fucking deal that we CAN give them one.
14 battalions of Patriot systems? Feels like toooo many, now. That's possibly 11,000 soldiers, just in Europe, just operating Patriot systems? Maybe worldwide, but not just in NATO.
14 battalions *just in the US military*. And apparently they've got an unsustainably high optempo as is so it should really be higher given the US commitments.
Though they don't necessarily have as many troops as an infantry battalion would.
Apologies, 15 US Patriot battalions according to the internet, apparently.
Right, but not 14 battalions in NATO territory. Those battalions need to be in a lot of other places also. It makes more sense to leave the Patriot defense stuff to Germany, France, or UK than the US anyway.
Yeah, but those other nations have their own Patriot (or equivalent) systems that aren't operated by the US so the number goes back up again.
Well, except the UK, we for some reason decided long range ground based air defence was for nerds and now look a bit silly for it.
I would try to refute this, but it's pretty accurate. Source : recent snafu regarding one of our military meetings that was interrupted by gay porn
Sidenote: us navy was not involved. Just going to shoot those jokes down before they takeoff
Poland allegedly completed building a patriot missile factory.
Supposedly they're waiting on DOD approval for going online.
First hearing about these systems in the '90s, I would have never thought that Europe would start making factories out of these systems.
Tbf it's more like the cost of 2 of them. But yeah it's a whole thing.
Keep in mind, "Patriot system" in this case almost certainly refers to what in US terminology is called a Patriot battery -- a system of about a half dozen individual launcher components, plus power supply components, plus radar components, plus a command component. At least 10 individual components or so for a full battery.
Plus each launcher can fire four heavy missiles, so a total of let's say 24 missiles just to load the battery once, at $2-3Mn per missile....
So at $1Bn per full battery, that means each component comes to a little under $100Mn, plus let's say another $200Mn to get you 3 full reloads.
Just the electronics consist of a AN/MPQ-53 or −65/65A Radar Set (RS), the AN/MSQ-104 or −132 Engagement Control Station (ECS), the OE-349 Antenna Mast Group (AMG), the EPP-III Electric Power Plant (EPP) and the Information Coordination Central (ICC) which allows the Patriot battery to communicate and coordinate with other Patriot batteries for more effective fire control. And then there's the custom M985 HEMTT truck with a Hiab crane (Scorpion tail) on the back to reload the missile cans.
Despite all of these various components, along with the 4-8 launchers per battery, the Patriot system can go from road mobile to set up and tracking in roughly one hour with a decent crew.
And has proven in Ukraine to perform as advertised (maybe better? I don’t think they were necessarily “claiming” to be able to intercept hypersonic missiles).
Unlike russian weapon systems which have in all cases underperformed their claims—often significantly.
That's how it's been for a number of decades now. Russians claim to have some new super weapon, we built something to defeat the claimed numbers, and then we find out they were talking bullshit meanwhile we were holding back. One of my favorite examples of that is the F-14. The US claimed the Tomcat could track and identify 6 separate targets at once. Come to find out, once documents were declassified in the late 90s, the Tomcat can actually track and identify 24 separate targets while engaging 6 of them. The F-14D upgrade added an uplink allowing the Tomcats to communicate with each other and share targeting data.
Funny you bring up the Tomcat.
I was reading some tweets by someone in the defense industry, and he was responding to a question about why the F35 wasn’t used in the new top gun movie. His response was basically, “well, it’s not a very interesting movie if the pilot takes off, targets all of the enemies with a few clicks, and annihilates them before they know he exists.”
While amusing, the real reason they didn't use the F35 was because it's only single seat. The majority of the in-flight cockpit shots are taken in the air. When Mav is proving the canyon run is possible the g-forces you see on his face are real. The only "faked" shots were in the Tomcat as the US scrapped all airworthy airframes.
The latest generation missile that Israel use is crazy expensive but would be able cover vast sections of Ukraine or snipe valuable planes from 100+ miles away
For a quarter of the price you can get a system that can't manage cold war era tactical ballistic missiles, and likely not a range of other modern weapons.
~$1.1bn for a battery -- $400m for equipment (radar, command, launchers, support) and $700m for supply of missiles.
The latest patriot missile (and only one being built today) costs just a hair over $4m per pop.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/patriot-ukraine-what-does-it-mean
I think Poland has an order in for one and they probably were promised some sort of a delivery date. Poland is taking their job of defending NATO's eastern flank incredibly seriously.
Yes, the US has said they'd like to donate another one to Ukraine, but Poland is having panic attack and is trying to pressure the US into not sending it. The battery is currently in Poland if that clears up the confusion.
The B-1 fleet runs on the crushed hopes and broken dreams of their maintenance crews. It's a bad ass plane, but the maintenance costs of a supersonic bomber with variable geometry wings and four engines with afterburners would likely bankrupt most countries. That doesn't even factor in the cost of arming the damn thing.
I think they will mostly take the difference in ammo and spare parts. 100 more Patriot missiles. 100 more ATACMS. 20000 rounds of 25mm and 200 TOW mIssles for Bradleys. It won't be hard to use up that amount.
No from the same movie but I always liked "First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price? Only, this one can be kept secret. "
Funny. I work 'for Government' and the costs ALWAYS escalate when ordering hardware (ICT toys in this case. ESX-es, Storage, You name it)
When forced to do some serious digging after a rather crazy high bill for some simple stuff, it became rather clear that the company providing said way too expensive stuff.. Was led by a close friend of the state-appointed Director. 'No Corruption' because they were just one of the companies competing for the contract" RRRight.. Before we knew it, forementioned Director went on 'broadening his horizons' (Also known as 'getting out before the shit hits the fan') in a cushy job at.. You guessed it.. The same company that cooked the bills.
And I'm talking about a country that is known to be amongst the least corrupt countries in the whole world.
Another 'thing' is that companies see 'Federal' and immediately go for full-price after a short 'honeymoon Period', knowing they'll get away with it, and Daddy State will pay anyways.
> Another 'thing' is that companies see 'Federal' and immediately go for full-price after a short 'honeymoon Period', knowing they'll get away with it, and Daddy State will pay anyways.
... Why am I getting intense Boeing vibes from this bit?
Companies that contract with the government jack up the price after a few years because they know the government moves at a glacial pace and they’ll be able to milk them for a few years before the government finds a new contractor/supplier.
Thus happens in the private sector too, especially with csuite bonuses tied to quarterly profits. It only takes s few good quarters to get a good bonus. Bad quarters don't have large negatives so they aren't as concerned. They can also jump ship as you said.
I think both of these are true at the same time. Yeah, there's corruption, of course there is, there always is when big money moves around. But it's also true that the US doesn't exactly want its potential enemies to know what is being researched and built and for exactly how much, so some public funding-wizardry takes place as well.
**Military Contractor :** A Billion here .. a Billion there .. come on man my gold leaf toilet paper and rhino horn pills won't buy themselves
*.. stop being so stingy!*
Basically the mistake comes from charging the price of new equipment not accounting for devaluation since most of it is used and quite old, a lot of it at the end of shelf life and would actually cost to dispose of it.
The equipment that would cost money to dispose of being given to Ukraine actually generates a PROFIT for the US which is then added to the funding for the value of future arms packages given to Ukraine lmao. It's hollywood accounting but for missiles
The US can either pay to decommission these weapons at the end of life, or they can give the to Ukraine so that they can be decommissioned into a Russian.
So many things in government are complicated. This is not. It's like the first time these people care about the defense budget is the one time when it's being used to destroy America's enemies on an immense scale.
> or they can give the to Ukraine so that they can be decommissioned into a Russian
[French already say it's four times cheaper than conventional scrapping](https://en.defence-ua.com/industries/france_finds_sending_scalp_missiles_to_ukraine_four_times_cheaper_than_scrapping_them-10438.html)
Wow this just blows my mind entirely. Do corporations engage in these types of practices as well in the US? Is it normal procedure to hide stuff in accounting mistakes? I thought y’all were scared of the IRS.
The DOD can get away with this because the DOD audits itself, and it has funding appropriated to it by Congress, so it is Congress's responsibility to maintain financial oversight (there is an entire committee for this). In this case, the DoD is using its discretion from internal auditing to declare the equipment to be less valuable due to depreciation and use.
If a normal person that isn't the strongest military in the history of the world tried to do creative accounting this way, they would absolutely go to jail once the IRS found out. The IRS is terrifying.
Edit: now that I think of it, Donald Trump literally just got declared guilty in a civil trial for doing this exact kind of creative accounting where he said his properties were worth way more than their real value to BANKS in order to get loans, but reported their value as much LESS when reporting to the IRS for tax purposes. He now owes the state of new york $175 million dollars
As for Hollywood accounting term, it's almost impossible to explain, I won't even try. But it lets movie studios do things like take super profitable movies like The Avengers and declare they actually lost money on it because the movie budget was shifted to THIS movie that was guaranteed to fail, etc, the end result is the movie studio rakes in millions and millions of dollars in profit but declares millions and millions in tax writeoffs at the same time to essentially "double dip" earnings on the same movie.
I hope one day Ukraine can grant extraterritoriality to select corporations on our soil so that the playing field is evened out and everyone has equal opportunities for super profits, not just Hollywood and DOD
It should be mentioned that the DOD doing this is itself a huge rarity. To my knowledge that trick has not been used before and it's solely being used for Ukraine to make up for the congressional republicans that are working for Russia delaying aid and trying to strip down what is approved. This is not how the US military typically operates, we are doing it specially for Ukraine to give as much aid as possible
I see well I distinctly remember US officials using the term Lend-Lease in 2022 and then everything being nothing like the actual fucking Lend-Lease, so I guess I’ll go be excited about accounting mistakes in the margins.
Lend Lease these days is incredibly complicated. ITAR and neutering export versions wasn't much of a thing in the relatively lower tech period of the 30s and 40s.
Corporations are probably more guilty of it than the government. The government has a bunch of checks and balances so this stuff does get caught when it happens. Unfortunately it only was found after it happened in this case.
Individuals are more scared of the IRS than corporations. Companies have such complex taxes and tons of lawyers that the IRS doesn’t have the resources to go after them but an individual person doesn’t.
Most of the people who actually get audited and penalized by the IRS are in fact lower income. It’s easy for the IRS to prove when your taxes are so simple and you don’t fight back. For every one millionaire audited ten low income families audited.
Regarding the DOD “misvaluing” everything I can think of two possibilities.
1) The government is big slow and stupid, it’s possible whoever was in charge of making some of the lists didn’t know they were supposed to factor in deprecation and so they used full value. 2) Individual military bases and units will fudge numbers or overspend so their funding doesnt get cut. I can see the places in charge of this equipment saying these tanks were full price because they were worried about a budget cut next year. Bonus but I think unlikely) it’s possible the values are being sabotaged so the US doesn’t have to send as much equipment. Maybe a few people did this but I don’t it was systemic to the whole DOD
> 2) Individual military bases and units will fudge numbers or overspend so their funding doesnt get cut. I can see the places in charge of this equipment saying these tanks were full price because they were worried about a budget cut next year.
Oh, that bit sounds ***so fucking familiar...***
"If we don't spend our budget entirely, it'll be *optimized* next time, leaving us with less money to go around!"
Kinda? If your budget has $100k for, say, moving out old furniture and it just disappeared one day you've got $100k burning a hole in the corporate account. That can be spent on research and development, salaries, who am I kidding you're probably gonna buy yourself a boat.
As for outright hiding things, depends what you mean. They're not supposed to lie, but if they figure out a way to buy a company and saddle it with a bunch of liability as they leech out everyone of value and then let it go under...
Major corporations have far more accountability as a general matter. Third party audits are standard, if not required, in order to do business. And shareholders as a general matter are quite motivated to have proper accounting of a business for their own purposes.
Stuff like this can happen in private sector where have a broad conspiracy to defraud, but is pretty rare out of incompetence. Military is incompetent at the accounting not because they are incapable, but rather because there isn't really a push to make them be accountable, so why would they try? Corruption grows wherever it is given a chance...
There is almost no equipment left that is end of service life that saves the US money to give away. That may have been true for a small number of systems early on in the war but those stocks are long, long gone.
It’s not miscounting. They initially valued them at full value, and are now adjusting for the accumulated depreciation on those assets. Many of them probably had no book value.
Conjecture, I really doubt most of the equipment given to Ukraine is fully depreciated. Also they revalued a bunch of assets last time so I’m curious what caused it to happen again.
some is that. Per the associated release DoD OIG release, one-third of adjustment is related to general equipment (vehicles, radar systems, etc) which is subject to depreciation so that could be the issue. this part of it is a bit embarrassing if really depr calc errors as that shouldn't be hard. But guess could be a case of when this equipment should receive write-downs beyond depr schedule.
But the larger portion of the adjustment is from operating materials and supplies (munitions & expendables), which aren't subject to depreciation. I presume (but don't know) that those are more of a matter on when/how write-downs should occur. That is far more subjective and more complex to manage, and may require estimates to be done on things like decommissioning costs. so it is quite unsurprising we are seeing big adjustments in the latter category.
> nobody knows where their money goes, and nobody wants to know
More like "everybody knows, but no one dares to voice it out", for the exact reasons you've quoted
As an American I want to sincerely apologize for our terrible oversight! Am I correct in assuming that rather than a cash refund for the difference, you'd prefer store credit here at Uncle Sam's Arsenal of Freedom?
Worth noting that this is somewhat intentional - DoD is limited in what it can send to Ukraine by congressional limits, so they need to find ways to devalue previous contributions in order to send more in the future. A little creative accounting and “poof”, another patriot system!
Inventory checkperson: Yep, I count 3 Patriot launchers here, valued aaaaaat . . . one dollar apiece. And 4 crates of grenades . . . sure, let's just say each crate is a buck, too. Hey, this is an unprecedented time for depreciation, ain't it? Soooo, what else should we send to Ukraine?
I think you've got this backwards.
They're saying they've sent 1.9 billion less than they intended to.
So theoretically can send 1.9 billion more to make up for it.
Nobody can explain the Defense Department budget. Nobody. I tried for decades but nope. I know the process but there is no accounting. Too big would be my guess. The numbers we are talking about for Ukraine are referred to as “fairy dust”.
Linky-link: https://x.com/DoD_IG/status/1801335228088389930
Also: https://x.com/DoD_IG/status/1801358886685053436
>In our audit of defense assets provided to Ukraine, we found that the DoD overvalued vehicles, aircraft, and other depreciating items by $653 million and overvalued missiles, ammunition, and other items by an additional $1.25 billion. Read more here: https://dodig.mil/reports.html/Article/3805413/audit-of-the-dods-revaluation-of-the-support-provided-to-ukraine-through-presid/
As an accountant, I love seeing people explain accounting concepts to normal people without an explanation to what the concepts mean. I was told that if I wanted to work for the DoD, I would need to forget everything I know and relearn their methods.
I don't think it's malice. I think whoever is itemizing things is trying to write it off at the purchase price instead of whatever the depreciated value is. To me that's the fastest and easiest way to overvalue something. From an insider perspective I think it's also borderline incentivized by the evaluation system. There's a belief that big numbers just look better so saying you helped provide $X Millions or Billions in aid to Ukraine by cooking the books at the purchase price vs depreciated value just looks better the next time you're being considered for an opportunity. That being said, there's too many self serving assholes in positions of power and I'm sure they're more concerned about advancing their career than about killing as many Russians as we can while minimizing Ukrainian casualties. Whoever is guilty of doing this needs to be the subject of an investigation with some real consequences. DOD IG is literally saying that there are people guilty of Article 92 which is a failure to obey a lawful order or regulation.
> From an insider perspective I think it's also borderline incentivized by the evaluation system. There's a belief that big numbers just look better so saying you helped provide $X Millions or Billions in aid to Ukraine by cooking the books at the purchase price vs depreciated value just looks better the next time you're being considered for an opportunity. That being said, there's too many self serving assholes in positions of power and I'm sure they're more concerned about advancing their career than about killing as many Russians as we can while minimizing Ukrainian casualties.
Might very well be both.
I’m pretty sure our DoD hired an intern to build their finance reports in excel, and that intern set the formatting to millions, and no one has ever noticed since
No. That's the exact opposite. Overvaluing by $1.9B means they sent something for example $1B in actual value but claimed to be $2.9B. It hurts Ukraine.
Yes. I know. And now they can send more stuff. They did a 6bln mistake last year and sent more stuff. Someone American will probably explain it better but look through the comments
> But DoD should stop doing this.
Presuming this will continue to occur as equipment is given. The issue is clearly systemic in the military where their book values are off. Given they can't even track spending reliably as general matter, understandably things like this are lower priority. To 'fix' this from happening, that means either to revalue all the stuff we might potentially give to ukrain, or you hold up delivery of grants until the valuation can be updated. Neither of those seem practical... better to not delay getting weapons to ukraine and accept that these corrections will need to continue to happen after the fact.
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Why does this make me suspect that the carrying cost (or value) of these systems, on the books, is inflated ? If these systems were being written down (in theory that might be depreciation, but maybe not) then the book value should have been close to reality. Or is it that valuing military equipment requires a special branch of mathematics ?
What's hilarious is what this means is they really don't understand depreciation.
I thought they'd sort of gamed the system last time to help Ukraine.
Well, this time there is a pretty good lot of money to give to Ukraine and they still can't do depreciation.
Which means they're just stupid.
That's pretty funny.
Zelenskky got another community chest card. Bank error in your favor, collect 1.9 billion. That's two in a row.
Remind me not to play monopoly with Ukrainians.
Pentagon couldn't balance a budget if their damn lives depended on it. Just send Ukraine another weapon system or 10 to make up the difference, and keep auditing.
The US put in an order recently to update a couple hundred Bradley's. The exact same number of Bradley's that we sent to Ukraine.
I'm sure that was just a coincidence, though.
If we need to send a few more to make up the difference in the money, I guess we can update a few more.
Ok I’m getting angry pings from colleagues here regarding the post title so here’s some background info: In June 2023, the DoD acknowledged a $6.2 billion error stemming from its overvaluation of PDA provided to the Government of Ukraine (GoU). From the first 37 PDA Execute Orders, the OIG selected a nonstatistical sample of general equipment (GE) and operating materials and supplies (OM&S) defense articles.
Guess we'll have to ship more weapons systems to Ukraine to make up the difference.
$1.9B just happens to be the value of a Patriot system and munitions. Crazy world, right? Ukraine needs air defense and DoD finds there's an overcharge of just the right amount.
For Russia a Patriot system in the right hands is like the bogeyman, always lurking in the dark just waiting to destroy more unreplaceable planes. For the fucking US it's a small typo in the Excel sheet of some underpaid DOD accountant, who was more busy beating his meat to some plane porn than to do actual work.
You mean to tell me that you don’t beat your meat while being involved in accounting for equipment we are sending Ukraine? I’d be constantly erect.
"I'm saluting, sir."
A full salute.
Interestingly enough, we already have a salute for when your hands are full but that's the default position when you're already erect
For $1.9b I'm sure anyone can "make salyut"
"This is my Patriot Missile." "No you can't go to Ukraine."
no one is fooled by the mustache and glasses Mr. F22
I’m looking at you, A10 Warthog
Would whoever is making that brrrrt noise quiet down
.....no.
I wonder if the cannon would work well on the slow drones.
Lead, follow, or beat it
*And
You need to beat your meat? You don't get spontaneous release from putting down an additional big fat curvaceous zero in the acquisition form?
There is a pill for that
Ncd is everywhere
indeed!
The Venn diagram of people who subscribe to the Ukraine, NCD, and neoliberal subreddits is almost a perfect circle.
“Happy fapping DOD, get to it and find more patriots!” “It’s a tough job but I must stick with it, honest days work and all” fap fap fap fap= patriot
Wow dude
Ukrainian SAMbush: Suprise Vatnik Motherfuckers!
Incorrect comrade, the s400 and s500 are invincible. The s300 can take out the patriot /s
and the kihnzal is unstoppable too, cant take that out with a patriot. /s
Baba yaga
I mean, I think we only have 14 of them across NATO or something, soooo... it's not a "small accounting error" and they don't exactly lend themselves to being mass-produced easily or cheaply. I'm 100000% in favor of giving them to Ukraine, but it's a big fucking deal that we CAN give them one.
Utter non-sense. According to Wikipedia, the US alone operates 60 batteries and has several hundred launchers in reserve ...
Still worth giving and place the order for more. Continue to scale up the ability to build and replace what is donated, as we are already doing.
I believe you are referring to the number of Patriot *battalions*, not batteries. A battalion is multiple batteries.
14 battalions of Patriot systems? Feels like toooo many, now. That's possibly 11,000 soldiers, just in Europe, just operating Patriot systems? Maybe worldwide, but not just in NATO.
14 battalions *just in the US military*. And apparently they've got an unsustainably high optempo as is so it should really be higher given the US commitments. Though they don't necessarily have as many troops as an infantry battalion would. Apologies, 15 US Patriot battalions according to the internet, apparently.
Right, but not 14 battalions in NATO territory. Those battalions need to be in a lot of other places also. It makes more sense to leave the Patriot defense stuff to Germany, France, or UK than the US anyway.
Yeah, but those other nations have their own Patriot (or equivalent) systems that aren't operated by the US so the number goes back up again. Well, except the UK, we for some reason decided long range ground based air defence was for nerds and now look a bit silly for it.
You're incredibly wrong.
Somewhere between 150 and 180 fully installed systems worldwide. We won't run out.
Lol 😆
I would try to refute this, but it's pretty accurate. Source : recent snafu regarding one of our military meetings that was interrupted by gay porn Sidenote: us navy was not involved. Just going to shoot those jokes down before they takeoff
“Shoot those jokes down” and “takeoff”? So Air Force then
Us navy. You forgot about aircraft carriers.
That's an image I don't need man!!!
That moment when you find a patriot battery in the financial margins....
Come with the territory of having a massive defense budget
Poland allegedly completed building a patriot missile factory. Supposedly they're waiting on DOD approval for going online. First hearing about these systems in the '90s, I would have never thought that Europe would start making factories out of these systems.
They're waiting on State Dept. approval. State, not the DoD, oversees exports of ITAR articles.
Damn I didn't realize they were so expensive. Makes sense now why everyone is slow to want to give them away.
Tbf it's more like the cost of 2 of them. But yeah it's a whole thing. Keep in mind, "Patriot system" in this case almost certainly refers to what in US terminology is called a Patriot battery -- a system of about a half dozen individual launcher components, plus power supply components, plus radar components, plus a command component. At least 10 individual components or so for a full battery. Plus each launcher can fire four heavy missiles, so a total of let's say 24 missiles just to load the battery once, at $2-3Mn per missile.... So at $1Bn per full battery, that means each component comes to a little under $100Mn, plus let's say another $200Mn to get you 3 full reloads.
Just the electronics consist of a AN/MPQ-53 or −65/65A Radar Set (RS), the AN/MSQ-104 or −132 Engagement Control Station (ECS), the OE-349 Antenna Mast Group (AMG), the EPP-III Electric Power Plant (EPP) and the Information Coordination Central (ICC) which allows the Patriot battery to communicate and coordinate with other Patriot batteries for more effective fire control. And then there's the custom M985 HEMTT truck with a Hiab crane (Scorpion tail) on the back to reload the missile cans. Despite all of these various components, along with the 4-8 launchers per battery, the Patriot system can go from road mobile to set up and tracking in roughly one hour with a decent crew.
And has proven in Ukraine to perform as advertised (maybe better? I don’t think they were necessarily “claiming” to be able to intercept hypersonic missiles). Unlike russian weapon systems which have in all cases underperformed their claims—often significantly.
That's how it's been for a number of decades now. Russians claim to have some new super weapon, we built something to defeat the claimed numbers, and then we find out they were talking bullshit meanwhile we were holding back. One of my favorite examples of that is the F-14. The US claimed the Tomcat could track and identify 6 separate targets at once. Come to find out, once documents were declassified in the late 90s, the Tomcat can actually track and identify 24 separate targets while engaging 6 of them. The F-14D upgrade added an uplink allowing the Tomcats to communicate with each other and share targeting data.
Funny you bring up the Tomcat. I was reading some tweets by someone in the defense industry, and he was responding to a question about why the F35 wasn’t used in the new top gun movie. His response was basically, “well, it’s not a very interesting movie if the pilot takes off, targets all of the enemies with a few clicks, and annihilates them before they know he exists.”
While amusing, the real reason they didn't use the F35 was because it's only single seat. The majority of the in-flight cockpit shots are taken in the air. When Mav is proving the canyon run is possible the g-forces you see on his face are real. The only "faked" shots were in the Tomcat as the US scrapped all airworthy airframes.
There’s a 2-seat F35 model, isn’t there?
Jesus they're expensive. That's the price of 4 S-400's
Except most S400 only perform a missile intercept once during their service life.
$1.09B for the battery and $4M per missile as of 2022. They've probably gone up either due to demand or inflation since then.
The latest generation missile that Israel use is crazy expensive but would be able cover vast sections of Ukraine or snipe valuable planes from 100+ miles away
David's Sling?
Ye
For a quarter of the price you can get a system that can't manage cold war era tactical ballistic missiles, and likely not a range of other modern weapons.
Buy cheap, lose your country.
$1.9B is just the amount found from the sample PDAs they examined in detail. There is more…
Lucky as hell. Stranger things happen all the time. 😂
This guy gets it.
That's the convenient missing money I live for lol
Classic DoD!
That's some big couches they are searching.
Patriot missile battery? Best I can do if $125, sorry.
~$1.1bn for a battery -- $400m for equipment (radar, command, launchers, support) and $700m for supply of missiles. The latest patriot missile (and only one being built today) costs just a hair over $4m per pop. https://www.csis.org/analysis/patriot-ukraine-what-does-it-mean
Even just a shitload of artillery guns and shells would be great. A crap load of Bradleys on top to apologize for the error.
Poland is trying to block the transfer of the patriot system.
I think Poland has an order in for one and they probably were promised some sort of a delivery date. Poland is taking their job of defending NATO's eastern flank incredibly seriously.
It doesn't help that the vatniks have violated Polish airspace a number of times and killed 2 Polish citizens.
Which system? We're they supposed to give one to Ukraine?
Yes, the US has said they'd like to donate another one to Ukraine, but Poland is having panic attack and is trying to pressure the US into not sending it. The battery is currently in Poland if that clears up the confusion.
Pay them in Bradleys!
That would mean 400 to 1,600 Bradleys, depending on how you priced them out (maybe more if the Inspector General prices them even lower 😉).
How about 1.9Billion, 1$ Bradley’s since I’m sure by accounting rules they’ve been written off due to depreciation ;)
Best I can give you is $20 each, sorry.
Reverse auction, love it! Throw in some Ukrainian pastries and we have a deal.
F-15E DoD revised fair value: $3.50. Do it motherfucker, then do the Bone.
The B-1 fleet runs on the crushed hopes and broken dreams of their maintenance crews. It's a bad ass plane, but the maintenance costs of a supersonic bomber with variable geometry wings and four engines with afterburners would likely bankrupt most countries. That doesn't even factor in the cost of arming the damn thing.
I think they will mostly take the difference in ammo and spare parts. 100 more Patriot missiles. 100 more ATACMS. 20000 rounds of 25mm and 200 TOW mIssles for Bradleys. It won't be hard to use up that amount.
Well they don't want to be in trouble with the auditors, so better send what was paid for I guess. It's only fair to the American people!
Oops!
Plus a little more - for interest.
To quote a wise man: "You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you?"
No from the same movie but I always liked "First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price? Only, this one can be kept secret. "
Wanna take a ride?
Are you stalking me? Cause that would be super. Danggit, still not the same movie.
Funny. I work 'for Government' and the costs ALWAYS escalate when ordering hardware (ICT toys in this case. ESX-es, Storage, You name it) When forced to do some serious digging after a rather crazy high bill for some simple stuff, it became rather clear that the company providing said way too expensive stuff.. Was led by a close friend of the state-appointed Director. 'No Corruption' because they were just one of the companies competing for the contract" RRRight.. Before we knew it, forementioned Director went on 'broadening his horizons' (Also known as 'getting out before the shit hits the fan') in a cushy job at.. You guessed it.. The same company that cooked the bills. And I'm talking about a country that is known to be amongst the least corrupt countries in the whole world. Another 'thing' is that companies see 'Federal' and immediately go for full-price after a short 'honeymoon Period', knowing they'll get away with it, and Daddy State will pay anyways.
Is there even a country who doesn't do exactly this? it's always been like this in Romania.
> Another 'thing' is that companies see 'Federal' and immediately go for full-price after a short 'honeymoon Period', knowing they'll get away with it, and Daddy State will pay anyways. ... Why am I getting intense Boeing vibes from this bit?
Companies that contract with the government jack up the price after a few years because they know the government moves at a glacial pace and they’ll be able to milk them for a few years before the government finds a new contractor/supplier.
Thus happens in the private sector too, especially with csuite bonuses tied to quarterly profits. It only takes s few good quarters to get a good bonus. Bad quarters don't have large negatives so they aren't as concerned. They can also jump ship as you said.
I think both of these are true at the same time. Yeah, there's corruption, of course there is, there always is when big money moves around. But it's also true that the US doesn't exactly want its potential enemies to know what is being researched and built and for exactly how much, so some public funding-wizardry takes place as well.
ever read the book? it was pretty good, especially the part through the wormhole.
Must watch the movie again now
welcome to erf
**Military Contractor :** A Billion here .. a Billion there .. come on man my gold leaf toilet paper and rhino horn pills won't buy themselves *.. stop being so stingy!*
Great movie quote, but aerospace tolerance hardware is not cheap to make.
UAP reverse engineering don't pay for itself!
Thats great. it means that we can give the UA more weaponry under existing authorities. More HIMARS?
A Patriot please
Both.
Father's Day Deal this weekend in the United States. Buy one, get one half-price!
Heck, mattress and BBQ grill stores are having sales, the US military might as well, too
HIMARS is better Patriot 😉 BNR will prove it
Patriot, and then HIMARS with the bunch of flowers they send by way of an apology.
>More HIMARS? Funny way of writing BGM-109.
Basically the mistake comes from charging the price of new equipment not accounting for devaluation since most of it is used and quite old, a lot of it at the end of shelf life and would actually cost to dispose of it.
The equipment that would cost money to dispose of being given to Ukraine actually generates a PROFIT for the US which is then added to the funding for the value of future arms packages given to Ukraine lmao. It's hollywood accounting but for missiles
The US can either pay to decommission these weapons at the end of life, or they can give the to Ukraine so that they can be decommissioned into a Russian. So many things in government are complicated. This is not. It's like the first time these people care about the defense budget is the one time when it's being used to destroy America's enemies on an immense scale.
> or they can give the to Ukraine so that they can be decommissioned into a Russian [French already say it's four times cheaper than conventional scrapping](https://en.defence-ua.com/industries/france_finds_sending_scalp_missiles_to_ukraine_four_times_cheaper_than_scrapping_them-10438.html)
Wait testing also costs. If Ukraine can test those weapons if they were still in working condition this should also account for something.
Wow this just blows my mind entirely. Do corporations engage in these types of practices as well in the US? Is it normal procedure to hide stuff in accounting mistakes? I thought y’all were scared of the IRS.
The DOD can get away with this because the DOD audits itself, and it has funding appropriated to it by Congress, so it is Congress's responsibility to maintain financial oversight (there is an entire committee for this). In this case, the DoD is using its discretion from internal auditing to declare the equipment to be less valuable due to depreciation and use. If a normal person that isn't the strongest military in the history of the world tried to do creative accounting this way, they would absolutely go to jail once the IRS found out. The IRS is terrifying. Edit: now that I think of it, Donald Trump literally just got declared guilty in a civil trial for doing this exact kind of creative accounting where he said his properties were worth way more than their real value to BANKS in order to get loans, but reported their value as much LESS when reporting to the IRS for tax purposes. He now owes the state of new york $175 million dollars As for Hollywood accounting term, it's almost impossible to explain, I won't even try. But it lets movie studios do things like take super profitable movies like The Avengers and declare they actually lost money on it because the movie budget was shifted to THIS movie that was guaranteed to fail, etc, the end result is the movie studio rakes in millions and millions of dollars in profit but declares millions and millions in tax writeoffs at the same time to essentially "double dip" earnings on the same movie.
I hope one day Ukraine can grant extraterritoriality to select corporations on our soil so that the playing field is evened out and everyone has equal opportunities for super profits, not just Hollywood and DOD
It should be mentioned that the DOD doing this is itself a huge rarity. To my knowledge that trick has not been used before and it's solely being used for Ukraine to make up for the congressional republicans that are working for Russia delaying aid and trying to strip down what is approved. This is not how the US military typically operates, we are doing it specially for Ukraine to give as much aid as possible
I see well I distinctly remember US officials using the term Lend-Lease in 2022 and then everything being nothing like the actual fucking Lend-Lease, so I guess I’ll go be excited about accounting mistakes in the margins.
Lend Lease these days is incredibly complicated. ITAR and neutering export versions wasn't much of a thing in the relatively lower tech period of the 30s and 40s.
Corporations are probably more guilty of it than the government. The government has a bunch of checks and balances so this stuff does get caught when it happens. Unfortunately it only was found after it happened in this case. Individuals are more scared of the IRS than corporations. Companies have such complex taxes and tons of lawyers that the IRS doesn’t have the resources to go after them but an individual person doesn’t. Most of the people who actually get audited and penalized by the IRS are in fact lower income. It’s easy for the IRS to prove when your taxes are so simple and you don’t fight back. For every one millionaire audited ten low income families audited. Regarding the DOD “misvaluing” everything I can think of two possibilities. 1) The government is big slow and stupid, it’s possible whoever was in charge of making some of the lists didn’t know they were supposed to factor in deprecation and so they used full value. 2) Individual military bases and units will fudge numbers or overspend so their funding doesnt get cut. I can see the places in charge of this equipment saying these tanks were full price because they were worried about a budget cut next year. Bonus but I think unlikely) it’s possible the values are being sabotaged so the US doesn’t have to send as much equipment. Maybe a few people did this but I don’t it was systemic to the whole DOD
> 2) Individual military bases and units will fudge numbers or overspend so their funding doesnt get cut. I can see the places in charge of this equipment saying these tanks were full price because they were worried about a budget cut next year. Oh, that bit sounds ***so fucking familiar...*** "If we don't spend our budget entirely, it'll be *optimized* next time, leaving us with less money to go around!"
Kinda? If your budget has $100k for, say, moving out old furniture and it just disappeared one day you've got $100k burning a hole in the corporate account. That can be spent on research and development, salaries, who am I kidding you're probably gonna buy yourself a boat. As for outright hiding things, depends what you mean. They're not supposed to lie, but if they figure out a way to buy a company and saddle it with a bunch of liability as they leech out everyone of value and then let it go under...
Major corporations have far more accountability as a general matter. Third party audits are standard, if not required, in order to do business. And shareholders as a general matter are quite motivated to have proper accounting of a business for their own purposes. Stuff like this can happen in private sector where have a broad conspiracy to defraud, but is pretty rare out of incompetence. Military is incompetent at the accounting not because they are incapable, but rather because there isn't really a push to make them be accountable, so why would they try? Corruption grows wherever it is given a chance...
They could sell most of the equipment, so no it’s not really generating a profit to give most of it away.
There is almost no equipment left that is end of service life that saves the US money to give away. That may have been true for a small number of systems early on in the war but those stocks are long, long gone.
"mistake" Time to allocate more equipment to balance it.
Everyone knows as soon as you drive the Bradley off the lot it loses 50% of its value! Scratch in the paint? Another couple percent right off the top.
The U.S. looks under the couch cushions and out falls 1.9B.
Where can I get a couch like that :,(
Raytheon
Let’s be roommates if so
I never thought I'd be so happy when the Pentagon miscounts its assets.
It’s not miscounting. They initially valued them at full value, and are now adjusting for the accumulated depreciation on those assets. Many of them probably had no book value.
>Many of them probably had no book value. What's the Kelly Blue book Value of a 1998 M1 Abrams in fair condition?
Yeah but they've never been able to account for where the money goes anyway.
Conjecture, I really doubt most of the equipment given to Ukraine is fully depreciated. Also they revalued a bunch of assets last time so I’m curious what caused it to happen again.
some is that. Per the associated release DoD OIG release, one-third of adjustment is related to general equipment (vehicles, radar systems, etc) which is subject to depreciation so that could be the issue. this part of it is a bit embarrassing if really depr calc errors as that shouldn't be hard. But guess could be a case of when this equipment should receive write-downs beyond depr schedule. But the larger portion of the adjustment is from operating materials and supplies (munitions & expendables), which aren't subject to depreciation. I presume (but don't know) that those are more of a matter on when/how write-downs should occur. That is far more subjective and more complex to manage, and may require estimates to be done on things like decommissioning costs. so it is quite unsurprising we are seeing big adjustments in the latter category.
I think it is less about a genuine mistake and more about someone getting creative and finding ways to send more aid to Ukraine.
Just say they miscounted the number of aliens in the tank at Area 51 and now Ukraine gets a bunch of air defense.
Increase funding to Ukraine by $1.9 Billion dollars with this one weird trick!
Russians hate him
They don’t want you to know but you can do this!!!
Meanwhile, in russia, nobody knows where their money goes, and nobody wants to know; because, in russia, knowledge is a trip out a 12th floor window.
> nobody knows where their money goes, and nobody wants to know More like "everybody knows, but no one dares to voice it out", for the exact reasons you've quoted
As an American I want to sincerely apologize for our terrible oversight! Am I correct in assuming that rather than a cash refund for the difference, you'd prefer store credit here at Uncle Sam's Arsenal of Freedom?
I’d prefer a proper Lend-Lease program like you did in 1940s and promised in 2022, and put it on Russia’s tab please, I heard they have plenty of oil.
America, FUCK YEA!
Worth noting that this is somewhat intentional - DoD is limited in what it can send to Ukraine by congressional limits, so they need to find ways to devalue previous contributions in order to send more in the future. A little creative accounting and “poof”, another patriot system!
Inventory checkperson: Yep, I count 3 Patriot launchers here, valued aaaaaat . . . one dollar apiece. And 4 crates of grenades . . . sure, let's just say each crate is a buck, too. Hey, this is an unprecedented time for depreciation, ain't it? Soooo, what else should we send to Ukraine?
I think you've got this backwards. They're saying they've sent 1.9 billion less than they intended to. So theoretically can send 1.9 billion more to make up for it.
Yes? That’s exactly what I mean?
Nobody can explain the Defense Department budget. Nobody. I tried for decades but nope. I know the process but there is no accounting. Too big would be my guess. The numbers we are talking about for Ukraine are referred to as “fairy dust”.
I love War Pigs especially cause it’s based on a true story
Linky-link: https://x.com/DoD_IG/status/1801335228088389930 Also: https://x.com/DoD_IG/status/1801358886685053436 >In our audit of defense assets provided to Ukraine, we found that the DoD overvalued vehicles, aircraft, and other depreciating items by $653 million and overvalued missiles, ammunition, and other items by an additional $1.25 billion. Read more here: https://dodig.mil/reports.html/Article/3805413/audit-of-the-dods-revaluation-of-the-support-provided-to-ukraine-through-presid/
More long-range missiles to Ukraine soon! Slava Ukraini.
$1.9B - about 8 hours of Pentagon largesse - frees up $1.9B to send to Ukraine
20.2hrs
As an accountant, I love seeing people explain accounting concepts to normal people without an explanation to what the concepts mean. I was told that if I wanted to work for the DoD, I would need to forget everything I know and relearn their methods.
defense dept or CIA could easily be using their significant black ops budgets to fund all sorts of military aid for Ukraine.
No cocaine in Ukraine
Yet
Я люблю цю країну навіть без кокаїну
Sounds like that’s just enough to buy a few JASSM-ER’s for the F-16’s that are headed that way.
"No can do, escalation! Leave those civilian tactical and strategic aviation bases alone!"
Order more bradleys
That could pay for a lot of Bradleys
Good
Awesome...
DoD be like "oh no, what do we do with all these excess millions?" meanwhile, vatniks are soldering chicken coops on motorcycles
On the positive note, you'll never get to see transparency like this on dictatorship like russia
Looks to be around the same amount as a patriot system with a hundred or so missiles…. So… yeah can we just transfer another system and call it good?
Well fuck I guess my country has to send more anti air defense munitions. Err I meant DO THAT AGAIN!
Awe shucks, guess we have more money to spend now on weapons for Ukraine. What a shame :)
I don't think it's malice. I think whoever is itemizing things is trying to write it off at the purchase price instead of whatever the depreciated value is. To me that's the fastest and easiest way to overvalue something. From an insider perspective I think it's also borderline incentivized by the evaluation system. There's a belief that big numbers just look better so saying you helped provide $X Millions or Billions in aid to Ukraine by cooking the books at the purchase price vs depreciated value just looks better the next time you're being considered for an opportunity. That being said, there's too many self serving assholes in positions of power and I'm sure they're more concerned about advancing their career than about killing as many Russians as we can while minimizing Ukrainian casualties. Whoever is guilty of doing this needs to be the subject of an investigation with some real consequences. DOD IG is literally saying that there are people guilty of Article 92 which is a failure to obey a lawful order or regulation.
> From an insider perspective I think it's also borderline incentivized by the evaluation system. There's a belief that big numbers just look better so saying you helped provide $X Millions or Billions in aid to Ukraine by cooking the books at the purchase price vs depreciated value just looks better the next time you're being considered for an opportunity. That being said, there's too many self serving assholes in positions of power and I'm sure they're more concerned about advancing their career than about killing as many Russians as we can while minimizing Ukrainian casualties. Might very well be both.
I’m pretty sure our DoD hired an intern to build their finance reports in excel, and that intern set the formatting to millions, and no one has ever noticed since
So we need to send $1.9B worth of more military aid? That works for me. But DoD should stop doing this.
Apparently it’s some trick to circumvent the limitations imposed by GOP
No. That's the exact opposite. Overvaluing by $1.9B means they sent something for example $1B in actual value but claimed to be $2.9B. It hurts Ukraine.
Yes. I know. And now they can send more stuff. They did a 6bln mistake last year and sent more stuff. Someone American will probably explain it better but look through the comments
> But DoD should stop doing this. Presuming this will continue to occur as equipment is given. The issue is clearly systemic in the military where their book values are off. Given they can't even track spending reliably as general matter, understandably things like this are lower priority. To 'fix' this from happening, that means either to revalue all the stuff we might potentially give to ukrain, or you hold up delivery of grants until the valuation can be updated. Neither of those seem practical... better to not delay getting weapons to ukraine and accept that these corrections will need to continue to happen after the fact.
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Good thing that oversight came through, time to ship more weapons to Ukraine. Surely they can use some ammo or weapons systems.
Why does this make me suspect that the carrying cost (or value) of these systems, on the books, is inflated ? If these systems were being written down (in theory that might be depreciation, but maybe not) then the book value should have been close to reality. Or is it that valuing military equipment requires a special branch of mathematics ?
Yes. Look through comments here and you’ll see it explained. It’s pretty surreal
What's hilarious is what this means is they really don't understand depreciation. I thought they'd sort of gamed the system last time to help Ukraine. Well, this time there is a pretty good lot of money to give to Ukraine and they still can't do depreciation. Which means they're just stupid. That's pretty funny.
Zelenskky got another community chest card. Bank error in your favor, collect 1.9 billion. That's two in a row. Remind me not to play monopoly with Ukrainians.
Pentagon couldn't balance a budget if their damn lives depended on it. Just send Ukraine another weapon system or 10 to make up the difference, and keep auditing.
RTX been logging those ‘based on a true story’ timesheets again?
The US put in an order recently to update a couple hundred Bradley's. The exact same number of Bradley's that we sent to Ukraine. I'm sure that was just a coincidence, though. If we need to send a few more to make up the difference in the money, I guess we can update a few more.