The Missile Defense System That Won’t Die

March 26, 2013

The Medium Extended Air Defense System during a test firing at the White Sands Missile Range.

Army brass and the Senate have said they don’t want Lockheed Martin’s latest missile defense system, but the government is going to pay for it anyway, according to an article in DOD Buzz. Despite the Senate passing an amendment 94-5 to cut funding for the program, Congressional appropriators restored $380 million in funding to finish the Medium Extended Air and Missile Defense System, known as MEADS.

From the article:

One influential Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee has come to call MEADS the “missile to nowhere.”

“This is a weapons system that the Pentagon won’t use and Congress doesn’t want to fund. We shouldn’t waste any more money on a ‘missile to nowhere’ that will never reach the battlefield,” said Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H. 

Read more in the full article about why exactly the funding was restored and how the contracting process is causing the government to pay for things it doesn’t want.

Image from the U.S. Army.

Topics: National Security

Related Content: Budget, Defense, Wasteful Defense Spending

Authors: Andre Francisco

Submitted by Dfens at: March 27, 2013

Read the full article and find out that the program shut down costs would be the same as funding the program for its final year. So POGO is saying that the government should have spent the money on penalty fees to Lockheed that would have gone straight to their bottom line profit instead of going to the thousands of engineers and others employed by that program. Really, POGO, are you ever for the little guy?

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