{"id":196506,"date":"2008-04-21T20:58:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-22T01:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/04\/21\/classics-in-congressional-oversight-of-defense-procurement\/"},"modified":"2008-04-21T20:58:00","modified_gmt":"2008-04-22T01:58:00","slug":"classics-in-congressional-oversight-of-defense-procurement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/04\/21\/classics-in-congressional-oversight-of-defense-procurement\/","title":{"rendered":"Classics in Congressional Oversight of Defense Procurement"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have no clue why I missed this the first time, but I came across Steve Trimble’s Flight International<\/span> blog post<\/a>, and I realized that this is a classic of its kind.<\/p>\n

Truth be told, Congressional oversight of defense procurement is not a particularly broad category, but this classic. Keith Olbermann should be notified.<\/p>\n

The background: the USAF and Army aviation are both purchasing same cargo aircraft to do transport to austere airfields, the Joint Cargo Aircraft<\/a> (JCA), and the aircraft selected was the Alenia C-27J.<\/p>\n

It’s basically to serve the role as the C-130’s little brother, see pic:
<\/p>\n

The problem is that their budgets Army is saying that it will cost $30 million a pop, and the USAF is claiming that it will cost $60 million<\/span> a pop.<\/p>\n

Obviously something is very very<\/span> wrong here. While differences in cost between services can result from differences in how life cycle costs are viewed, with one service looking to assign more of the lifetime costs to the initial purchase price than the other, a difference of 100% simply does not pass the smell test.<\/p>\n

There are two obvious reasons that this might happen:<\/p>\n