:rolleyes:
Stranger
What’s wrong?
I recognize that the wall is a white elephant. No one here wants it.
But if we end up building the damn thing then lets build it right and at a reasonable price.
Sometimes you just have to make the best out of a bad situation.
I’m pretty sure he was rolling his eyes at the “30 years.” The crumbling infrastructure mess is here right now.
Here’s one article:
I mentioned the infrastructure problem earlier in the thread. There’s a lot of construction work waiting to be done whenever Congress finally recognizes the problem. It’s going to take a lot of time and money.
I just didn’t want to see a badly built wall added to that long list of things to fix.
Bush’s fence from 2006 is already needing repairs and electronic upgrades.
Or, hey, how about this…not waste billions of dollars and the time of people who are already dedicated to doing useful things to constructing this monument to the ego of an autocratic buffoon?
Your other comments regarding “Private Contractors are the most expensive option,” and “Every thing costs 5 times as much on gov contracts,” (five times the cost as compared to what?) are as meaningless and ill-informed as every other post you’ve made here.
Stranger
Governments build wasteful projects. Remember the highway tp jo where in Alaska? There was some airport, I think Phoenix? that wasn’t needed. A lot of unneeded public works projects have been built.
There’s a political fight to avoid building the wall. It might get built anyway using Title 10 by declaring a National Emergency.
Since that’s a possibility then it’s worth discussing how the DoD will fullfill their orders.
It is quite rare that there are public works projects which are constructed without some manifest need, which is what made the Gravina Island Bridge (which, by the way, was never constructed) so contraversial. But please, provide a list of all of the “unneed public (non-military) works projects that have been built.” You may use as many pages as necessary.
No one, military or private contractor, is going to construct any more than a token section of ‘Wall’ because trying to do so will result in so many legal and diplomatic challenges, notwithstanding that there is not enough money within any Corps of Engineers coffers or elsewhere just waiting to be spent without disrupting any actually useful projects to construct any significant portion of ‘Wall’, and even Border Control has stated that they do not want ‘Wall’ in the proposed form of a solid concrete and steel structure, instead preferring deep penetration bollard fencing which allows them to surveill the other side of the border and is actually more difficult to climb over or burrow under compared to the proposed solid construction of ‘Wall’. And no one is going to give a good whore’s **** about maintaining ‘Wall’ once Trump is out of office, because it’s only purpose is to salve Trump’s delicate and infantile ego.
If we were collectively clever we’d hire a bunch of starving artists to make a 30” high secton of wall out of papier-mâché and then photograph it using perspective distortion to make it look thirty feet tall, complete with little claymation immigrants trying and failing to scale it. Trump wouldn’t be able to spend enough attention on anything beyond himself to discern it as a Potemkin deception, and we could get on with seeing just how he is going to “bring back” all of those manufacturing and coal mining jobs he promised his supporters.
Stranger
Here’s a list of highway boondoggles.
https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/thedrive/news/21863/the-sordid-state-of-highway-boondoggles%3Fsource=dam
It’s no secret that Governments waste money.
I don’t know if the wall will be built or not.
The DoD is making plans just in case this hot potato falls into their lap.
Sounds like someone REALLY wanted to spell “RED HORSE”.
Maybe we could make it out of coal. And built by the coal miners.
Then the Mexicans can light that motherfucker up.
Oh, gee, highway expansion/improvement projects don’t keep up with increases in traffic. Big score, there. You could at least have cited Boston’s “Big Dig” or or the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge (on the thesis that nobody should be coming from or going to Staten Island unless they are hauling trash). Put a little effort into at least trying to bolster your nearly baseless argument next time.
Nobody is making any plans because nobody has tens of billions of dollars sitting around to construct ‘Wall’. You know, the barrier that is supposed to stop all illegal immigration (even those most undocument immigrants entered the country through normal ports of entry using legitimate documents) and that Mexico was supposed to pay for.
“And what does that mean to you?”
It was going to be CHARTREUSE PENGUIN, but it turned out to be really difficult to match up that last “GUIN”.
Stranger
”If we built a large wooden badger…”
Stranger
It was the “bridge to nowhere” and it was never built. Officially called the Gravina Island Bridge, it was supposed to connect the town of Ketchikan to Gravina Island, where the airport is. At present, and for the foreseeable future, a ferry is used to transport people and cars to and from the island, since funding was finally cut in 2015.
I’d be shocked if they weren’t planning. The US fields large staffs and plans for contingencies. It can drive some of our allies with smaller staffs crazy in colation missions. Something like the National Command Authority publicly talking about a potential mission is a pretty good contingency to get in front of. Mattis seemed to intentionally slow play things Trump would talk about but not officially order. He’s gone, though. There’s still a strong reason for a couple early planning tasks ieven if Mattis was still SECDEF, IMO.
Identifying just what funding can be scraped up out of non-specific operational funding is an easy one. Being able to lay out realistic expectations takes data. Cost estimates matter as well.l If you are using troop labor the estimate is different than the civilian contractor estimate. Pay and allowances for active troops don’t come out of those operational funds. It would be useful to put together a list of projected usage of those funds without the wall. Maybe a nice list with several points showing that at X kilometers of wall it means cuts to or completely of programs A, B, and C with specific effects on readiness.
IME one of the best ways to stomp out the good idea fairy early, or at least restrict its effects, is solid contingency planning. “Interesting idea, sir. Let me show you some early mission analysis work I already had my staff do.” Trump basically is the good idea fairy incarnate. He seems to be immune to typical anti-GIF measures. This seems like a really good case to try though. The costs to military readiness hit other things that he’s attached to.
At least 700 miles of the current wall (fence, whatever), was built by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Guard. They built it at $2.8 million per mile in 2007. When contractors were used in 2008, it cost $3.9 million per mile. So yea, the military can build it and they can build it cheaper.
Someone may be developing a rough order of magnitude estimate (or “ROM” in the discourse of government contracting) but I guarantee that no one is developing detailed plans simply on the basis that there is no set of defined requirements. ‘Wall’ is barely an amorphous concept elucidated without even an article to preface it by DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, without enough definition to even outline any plan for construction, which by the way would have to start with an evaluation of property issues and environmental impact even before estimating any material and labor costs of construction. It isn’t clear who would or could be responsible for building ‘Wall’; given its hypothetical location and theoretical function it should fall inder the aegis of the Army Corps of Engineers, but they would have to contract out the actual detsiled planning and construction work to construction contractors, so the first real step in any actual plan adter developing requirements would be issuing a Request For Proposal (RFP). (In theory DHS already did this and got examples of different barrier designs, which was a farce in and of itself because barrier type will differ with the terrain.)
The idea that “the military” e.g. a bunch of soldiers or seamen are going to go throw up a wall next week just because Trump sweeps hiarms and commands it to be so doesn’t represent reality in any form, so unless he has a set of Infinity Stones and a gauntlet custom made to fit his tiny digits, this is all as much of a load of bullshit as Trump “University”.
Stranger
With all due respect unless you’re talking about a wall along the same 700 miles you really can’t make that comparison. For any given stretch of wall there are going to be enormous differences in costs based on terrain and existing infrastructure and the difference may make the military cheaper or the non-military cheaper but you can’t just put one up against the other like that.
Once again, it’s not going to be the military that builds it. It will be the Army Corps of Engineers who will oversee civilian contractors who will build it, so the argument is pointless from the get-go. But before any of that can happen, the whole thing has to be engineered, an environmental impact study done, plans drawn up, an RFP sent out (as mentioned above), bids evaluated, the contract let, material purchased and delivered, and contractor hiring and mobilization. This can all take a year or more.
Ah crap, I see Stranger covered all this.
Quite so. I also believe that the military figure does not include labor costs, as those soldiers would have been paid anyway, and from a different line of accounting.
Trump was asking if it can be started within 45 days.
I’m not saying it’s remotely realistic (I’m in a construction-related field myself) just sayin’ what Trump is asking. No, I don’t know how you do RFPs, give people time to survey the area and put together actual proposals, scope, award, get submittals, etc within a month and a half.