"Ghost Rider" rises from the Boneyard

[scooter]

As one of my commanders explained once, operations and maintenance money is routine and is easy to program into the budget. New money for individual projects has to be approved by everybody including congress. Everyone can agree it's a good idea but it takes an act on God to accomplish it.

Yes it is, and yes it does.  Especially when you start out as a new unit, you get next to unlimited funding for 3 years.  After that, you better hope you got everything you needed, because your budget is gonna suck.  Especially if you haven't spent it all by the end of the fiscal year

[rickshaw]

We could have saved billions by now....  

Billions which would have been squandered where?  Do you really think this would make taxes less or something?  Why?

[sandiego89]

We could have saved billions by now....  

Billions which would have been squandered where?  Do you really think this would make taxes less or something?  Why?

I'm not naive, and I'm not going to get into the politics of it, and opine on what is well spent and what is squandered, but it is tough to justify 50 year old, poor fuel efficiency engines in this day and age.  That is indeed money burned. Reduced fuel burn alone would have paid for the engines upgrades, propsed years ago, by now.  Yes new engines would have cost money up front, but would have reduced fuel burn substantially, reduced maintainence (less wrench turners and contractors), likely eliminated an entire engine product line and perhaps allowed the early retirement of more KC-135's (no real fuel sipper either, even with the upgraded engines).  That is the kind of savings I was commenting on.

How this savings would be "squandered", in your words, I have no idea.  Maybe a few more F-22's, maybe a few more bowling alleys and golf courses, or maybe even some real capability improvements for the BUFF or other programs.   

[rickshaw]

I wasn't intending to get into a politics debate.  I was just intending to make you think about where this money would have ended up going if it hadn't been spent on fuel for the B-52s' old engines.  In part I agree, it annoys me to think there are B-52s flying around with bad engines but as I realise that if they saved on the fuel, they'd end up wasting the money on some project that someone wouldn't agree with.  They might have built playgrounds for kids or they might have decided to buy nuclear weapons or biological weapons or chemical weapons for all we know.  All too often someone suggests "Hey we could save squillions if we just..." they don't think about where that money would end up being spent, if it wasn't spent on what they were trying to save squillions on.