Littoral combat ships were supposed to launch the Navy into the future. Instead they broke down across the globe and many of their weapons never worked. Now the Navy is getting rid of them. One is less than five years old.
The saga of the littoral combat ships is a vivid illustration of how Congress, the Pentagon and defense contractors can work in concert and often against the good of the taxpayers and America’s security to spawn the “military industrial complex.”
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It s quite the impressive shopping list.
On May 28, the Department of Defense released its $752.9 billion defense budget request for 2022 a document which will almost certainly be subject to the extensive back-and-forth in Congress before being signed into law.
Though the budget will certainly be revised, it nonetheless serves as a guide to the Biden-era Department of Defense’s priorities, with a record $112 billion devoted to research and development of future technologies at the expense of reducing forces in the near term. This seemingly is based on the premise that there is a limited short-term risk of major conflict, but that there is a need to secure technological overmatch versus the maturing military capabilities of China in the next decade.