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The U.S. Navy now has a blue/gray camouflage work uniform - one that hides you in the water very well...
The official reason? It hides oil stains and the like. Now, while that is true - camo can be worn for months before dirt shows (except to drill sergeants, obviously) - I don't for one sec believe it's the reason. Digicam was simply the new hotness for a while.
That is almost endearingly naive. Defense contracts are Pork City, with a most disconcerting number of crossovers between those responsible for procurement and those who manage to get the contracts. The people who believe in their mission are line, not staff, and they get to carry out the fight with what staff thinks they should need.
It is sickeningly common for Lieutenant Colonel so-and-so to go through the grueling work of finding the best shoulder-mounted field fax machine, then - after weighing tons of options - pick the fax machine from WidgetCo, sign the contract, retire from the Armed Forces (with a nice pension) and take up a new civilian job as Vice President of Golf at WidgetCo.
Admittedly, the faxes don't really work, because WidgetCo has never made a fax before, but it is in an influential Senator's district. And the special $75-a-sheet paper is made in another influential Senator's district, making the program impossible to cancel. And a lot of the time, it doesn't matter, because the troops don't want fax machines anyway.
So the only ones that bubble up are when it's actually needed gear. Look at the Air Tanker scandal (exceptional, in that officers actually went to jail) for the classical example. But there are dozens.
haha glad you find me endearing, Dane, after all we are still friends, due to our shared love of Sarah Chang and Hilary Hahn. No doubt there is a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse in military spending. There is in any politically-controlled enterprise. But my point was that there is more character and committment in the military than in other gov't enterprises, for example Fannie Mae or the TSA. A reflection of the fact that the military is a basic funtion of the federal gov't while providing real estate loans and touching our junk is not.
Reminds me of NASA spending Milions to get a pen to work in space in zero G and spent millions trying to perfect it and then later on we later find out Russia solved the problem by using a regular old fashiond 25 cent pencil.. turns out a buch of doller store pencils work better than out multi-milliion doller space pen.
Reminds me of NASA spending Milions to get a pen to work in space in zero G and spent millions trying to perfect it and then later on we later find out Russia solved the problem by using a regular old fashiond 25 cent pencil.. turns out a buch of doller store pencils work better than out multi-milliion doller space pen.
One wishes that NASA's waste was only on that scale. (And while the story illustrates the overall point admirably, it is in fact incorrect. Among other things, you don't want pencil shavings in zero-G.)
Surprisingly, NASA has managed to use off-the-shelf wristwatches for basically all their missions, including Gemini and Apollo.
One wishes that NASA's waste was only on that scale. (And while the story illustrates the overall point admirably, it is in fact incorrect. Among other things, you don't want pencil shavings in zero-G.)
Surprisingly, NASA has managed to use off-the-shelf wristwatches for basically all their missions, including Gemini and Apollo.
yeah but those were the days where but America and Russia pushed each other and the Space Race was a time when we did not have a budget but rather made impossible things happen and now we can't eve print camo or the F-35..
Now that the is yet again F-22 has been plagued with problems and have yet to see battle. The F-22 makes pilots sick due to it's oxygen issues and from it's volatile chemical emissions from it's RAM coating that is still flawed. Lockheed Martin has so failed with the F-22A and F-35 JSF II and we still give billions in funding.
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