Word: 5a
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...military establishment into the noisiest disesteem since before World War II. Wisconsin's Senator William Proxmire, a liberal Democrat-but no doctrinaire foe of the armed services -has won national attention with his disclosures about military overspending beyond original estimates for weapons procurement, notably on the giant C-5A cargo plane...
...billion cost overrun for the Minuteman II ICBM; a quadrupling of the original estimated price for the nuclear carrier Nimitz; hundreds of millions misspent on the bug-infested Sheridan and MBT-70 tanks; the $2 billion jump-to more than $5 billion-in the cost of C-5A Galaxy cargo planes...
...Galaxy case is particularly revealing. The C-5A, the world's largest aircraft, was intended to help the U.S. cut down on overseas based troops and supplies by providing speedy, capacious, emergency airlift from the U.S. to trouble spots abroad. A. Ernest Fitzgerald, a civilian cost analyst for the Air Force, was fired after testifying to the $2 billion C-5A cost overrun. Fitzgerald reported that an Air Force officer who raised questions about the cost of C-5A "was found to have unique qualifications to be the air attaché in Addis Ababa." Had the Air Force stopped...
...billion wasted on C-5A, Proxmire observes, could have supported more than ten combat divisions for a year. It could also have paid for all the foreign economic aid in the fiscal 1970 budget. Two billion dollars is nearly twice the amount of federal funds set aside this year for low-and moderate-income housing; it is almost 20 times the 1970 federal budget for urban mass transit and high-speed ground transportation...
...part because of publishing delays, Proxmire's book is slightly out of date. After studying the C-5A case, the Nixon Administration decided that the Air Force can get along with only 81 air craft instead of the 115 originally planned and so, belatedly, saved about $600 million. The Pentagon budget has been trimmed by $10 billion to meet the scrutiny of a Congress alerted by Proxmire's probing. Proxmire gives too little credit to honorable men within the Administration, both in and out of uniform, who are as earnestly devoted to keeping down costs as any congressional...