PENTAGON BUDGET GOES BLACK

It’s like the Cold War all over again. The Defense Department is now spend­ing more of its money on “black,” or clas­si­fied, pro­grams than at any time since 1988.
19 per­cent of the Pentagon’s acquis­tion bud­get — the money to research and buy things — is being devoted to super-​​secret items, accord­ing to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. That comes out to about 28 bil­lion dol­lars, almost dou­ble what was spent in 1995.
“The record for clas­si­fied acqui­si­tion pro­grams has been mixed,” CSBA’s Steven Kosiak argues.
Some suc­cess­ful and effec­tive weapon sys­tems were devel­oped and even pro­duced as black pro­grams. These include the F-​​117 stealth fighter and the B-​​2 stealth bomber. On the other hand, some clas­si­fied pro­grams have had trou­bled his­to­ries. Restrictions placed on access to clas­si­fied fund­ing have meant that DoD and Congress typ­i­cally exer­cise less over­sight over clas­si­fied pro­grams than unclas­si­fied ones. This lower level of scrutiny, cou­pled with the com­part­men­tal­iza­tion of infor­ma­tion gen­er­ally asso­ci­ated with clas­si­fied efforts has con­tributed to per­for­mance prob­lems and cost growth in a num­ber of pro­grams, such as the Navys ill-​​fated A-​​12 attack air­craft pro­gram. (via Secrecy News)
THERE’S MORE: “The Defense Department is unable to track how it spent tens of mil­lions of dol­lars in Iraq, Afghanistan and else­where in the U.S. war on ter­ror­ism, Congress’s top inves­ti­ga­tor said on Wednesday.” (Thanks to RC for the tip.)

April 14th, 2005 | Cloak and Dagger | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.