The US spends a lot on the military. Obviously that money goes to lots of things, but surely a substantial part of that is spent on “stuff” Vehicles, weapons (whether a howitzer, 5" gun, or rifle), bullets, helmets, etc.
I’m sure the vast majority of that stuff is deployed. But it also seems possible that something like a Jeep or boat might get built and never used in combat before it is retired due to age. Akin to buying a sump pump and then never having a flood. It sits in the basement, plugged in and never used. Eventually it will be old enough to warrant replacement nonetheless.
So hopefully this isn’t too obtuse a question, but do we have any sense of how much stuff the military buys ages out without ever seeing “action?” For instance, a tank that’s deployed to North Dakota, used for training, but eventually gets retired when the next one comes out without ever firing a shot in anger?
I couldn’t give you a percentage but the vast, vast majority of equipment will never be used in anger.
That said it depends on the equipment. Big aircraft carriers and carrier aircraft are probably the most likely to see action in this day and age, while smaller ships may just never venture from the US coastline. Many rifles may never leave the firing range, etc.
Add to that a huge amount of the military budget is for stuff that isn’t weapons. A desk at the Pentagon isn’t likely to see action. Let alone get used in anger, unless something has gone very wrong.
Oh hell no. The amount of stuff absolutely unaccounted for in storage at US bases around the world would boggle your mind. Every time the IG get a bug up their butts and actually DO a serious inspection they uncover tons of stuff that is “in excess of inventory” or such.
As for the OP’s example of the tank - remember that the overwhelming majority of the armed forces never see combat. So, neither does their equipment.
Equipment never used? How about designs for equipment never built? We pay out money for weapons design, and there are times when weapons that have been in the design phase become obsolete before they are ever even built.
A lot of military equipment that is ‘excess’ (old and worn, or old & never used, or new but replaced by newer stuff) is recycled by being passed on to the various state National Guards, or other government agencies like the National Parks Police, the Forest Service, ICE, or even to local police forces.
[There is some controversy about that last one, alleging that providing military armament to local police instead of conflict-reduction training makes them more likely to react to situations with force. Discussion of that would be a Great Debates topic.]
Are you familiar with the concept of a "fleet in being"? Even when military equipment isn’t doing anything, it can still be doing something just by existing.
This describes like 99.99% of military equipment, even if “used in anger” means “used in or around angry situations or angry people.” The lifecycle is generally active duty assignment, then reserve unit assignment, then “loaner” assignments at training centers where DynCorp issues you shitty equipment, blames you for breaking it, and tries to get your unit to eat the cost/labor of repair.
I hope this isn’t too much of a hijack, but can civilians buy some of this used equipment? Say, a humvee or a deuce-and-a-half that never left base a d simply is too old / has too many miles or hours on it? Do they sell them at an auction or…?
Each and every nuclear weapon beyond the two exploded in 1945 is excess military equipment. The budget included large figures for “not using” them. Not using nuclear warheads is very expensive, even if you don’t maintain the equipment for using them that is now obsolete. You can junk the fifty years old missiles, and other delivery systems. But you can’t sell the old nukes to the National Guard, or local Police.
A fair percentage of the equipment used to maintain nuclear weapons is specific to the exact weapons. You still need to maintain those weapons, so you still need that equipment. And, you need trained technicians to use the equipment, and train other technicians to use the antiquated equipment. If you want new equipment so you can stop making vacuum tubes to repair the old equipment, you have to have highly classified contracts to design the new equipment. That’s the cheaper answer, because vacuum tubes are very expensive to make, now that no one else is using them.
In many cases for very good reasons, and in all cases for very strict legal reasons, all the training, planning, engineering, and logistics for these processes must be done by folks with security clearances of at least Secret level. They are all seventy years old now, unless they are younger people trained for a job which is dead end by design. That’s pretty expensive too.
Tris
This blowing them back to the stone age is turning out to be expensive.
A big chunk of DOD’s budget doesn’t get spent on things. It gets spent on people. Personnel costs in our all volunteer military account for about a quarter of the total DOD budget. Pay, allowances for things like food and housing, medical care, retirements…they all add up quickly.
As a comparison the 2014 NATO agreement to spend 2% of GDP also included provisions that are less well known. One was agreeing to spend at least 20% of defense budgets on equipment, including R&D efforts. (Cite) We generally spend about as much or more to field Soldier, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines per year as we do on equipment for them.
The biggest chunk of DOD’s budget is Operations and Maintenance. It includes things like the ammunition you talked about for both training and operations. Spare parts and rotations through depot level rebuild for systems that are effectively past. It costs a lot to keep the stuff you already have operational. It also includes things like fixing the furnaces and buying paint for the National Guard armory in your city.
For the Army and USMC, it’s not. Every US military unit is equipped with all or most of the stuff they are supposed to have to go to war simultaneously. Shortages of major end items and maintenance status of what they do have are important readiness indicators on routine reporting. You can’t go to war without your equipment. You can’t effectively train for war without it either. The Air Force and Navy have smaller numbers of very expensive systems with the ability to self-deploy by flying or sailing. For them the numbers are likely quite a bit different.
For long term operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Sinai, etc DOD tends to base pools of ground equipment forward in theater. It’s more cost effective, and logistically simpler, to fly the troops in while minimizing the amount of shipping. Still the dominant model for ground forces is everyone has the equipment they need for war wherever they are. The combination means massive chunks of our military’s major end items spends most of it’s service life inside the US.
As we were withdrawing from counterinsurrgency operations in Iraq we actually transferred many of the major end items in theater to Iraq for free or very cheap. They had years of continuous use under their belts. The combination of sand getting in everywhere and IEDs had good chunks of the ground fleet nearing the end of their useful lives. The combined costs of shipping and rebuild were so high it was simply more cost effective to buy replacements and let Iraq have them. We used up a minority of the total equipment pool for ground forces since 9-11. The rest stayed far from combat.
I’ll point out that some get retired and replaced with new purchases that are the same. Stuff wears out or is so badly damaged in training it’s not cost effective to repair.
Still we have a model where we dominantly try to field all the stuff needed for war to everyone but also try to minimize shipping costs/headaches. With long enough service lives that can rotate different chunks of the pool for a system through heavy use periods…if we don’t use them up and replace rather than repair. Because of the nature of operations in the last two decades we’ve skewed towards use up and replace.
There’s not many left that are in real good shape, but you can buy what General Patton described as “the finest battle implement ever devised”, in perfectly serviceable condition, as well as ammo.
Yes. A lot of them are pretty used up by that point and need a lot of work. It’s where a lot of the equipment that gets used in movies and TV comes from.
had a friend that almost bought a demilitarized M48 tank. He was a small farmer so he had some hobby time in the winters along with big fields to drive around on. The shipping costs were the big issue for him. It was much more expensive to get the tank shipped to him than it was to buy it.
“Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics.”
Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC (Commandant of the Marine Corps)
The US military is so extensive and the equipment has such a long shelf/service life, that a full and accounting of all the materiel is probably close to impossible. The vast majority of it will never see “active” service, i.e. be used in a war zone. You still need most of it because having redundancies and planning for the worst-case scenario is part of strategy, and of course logistics.
Training and personnel costs for anything, including private business, will nearly always outstrip capital and maintenance costs. People are expensive, and the costs for them are repeating and almost never go down.
Research and development is also, in private or public enterprises, a necessary cost even if nothing tangible is produced. Apple, for example, usually spends between 1–2% of its revenue on R&D (currently about 1.5%; 3.948B on revenues of around $260B). A very small number of its projects ever ship. Apple famously kills or simply never releases products that aren’t up to its standards. The military similarly — even ignoring boondoggles and graft — realistically has to spend billions just keeping equipment current with the state of the art, much less pushing ahead into new stuff.
Hardware products even in fast-moving Silicon Valley have lead-times of years. The iPhones that will be “new” this year are minimum 2, probably 4 generations behind Apple’s R&D models, and that’s with all the advantages of being one of the biggest companies on earth, with one of the best logistics guys ever in charge of one of the most recognized designers ever, working against other fast-moving competitive companies with really smart guys running them to keep them on their toes. Frankly, from what little I do know about military contracting, it’s a bloody miracle anything the Pentagon orders ever ships, or works to spec.
You can actually buy all the used equipment and vehicles you want from this website Looking at the recent Humvee sales you can get a used Humvee anywhere from $5,000 to $30,000 depending on mileage and age.
The biggest hurdle I see though is that they’re not street-legal (certified for off-road use only) and it takes a ton of paper-work to get them street legal, especially if your state has strict emissions tests.
The nuclear bombs and missiles are an interesting case. For 30 years a third of the worlds supply of nuclear power fuel came from de-commissioned weapons. There was some hope that when that ended prices would go up. Of course, other stuff happened.
To those who thought I was getting at something, I really wasn’t Like my sump pump example, the day I need one is probably too late.
I was just wondering how much physical military stuff gets produced and then ultimately not needed. I certainly realize that its impossible to predict today exactly how many tanks will be needed in 15 years. And that the act of owning those tanks may be the thing that keeps you from needing them.
War stocks of ammunition get cycled off the shelves at the end of its planned life and gets scrapped. Only a small portion of it gets used up in training.
It certainly does get used in many cases but there’s some issues. Some examples I can think of with respect to tank main gun ammunition.
Training rounds have a smaller surface danger zone (SDZ). They are designed to fly on a similar ballistic profile for the ranges needed but are lighter and designed with increased drag to slow down faster. Many tank ranges simply can’t support the increased SDZ of service rounds. It’s considered bad form to drop rounds onto roads or into people’s homes.
Training HEAT rounds, despite the name, don’t actually include any high explosive. They are just chunks of aluminum alloy. Firing actual HEAT rounds is going to leave duds in areas where troops maneuver and range crews need to work dismounted. We also use plywood targets with lifters to only present targets for limited times. Assuming the fuse operates on the plywood, that’s going to be really hard on the target array.
US kinetic energy penetrators skew heavily towards being made out of depleted uranium. We try to avoid just spraying that around training ranges.