Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain said he has uncovered $13 billion in wasteful military spending, including $1 million in taxpayer money spent on strip clubs and casinos by personnel misusing their government credit cards.
The vast majority of the waste — $12.4 billion — was spent on 24 littoral combat ships, a new class of small surface vessels, which McCain says lack “proven combat capability.”
The rest ranged from the extravagant to the absurd, such as $1.3 million to research the mating habits of African giant pouched rats and $458 million spent on “inappropriate travel expense reimbursement payments.”
The Arizona Republican has pledged to make reduction in wasteful military spending his top priority while he runs the Senate Amed Services Committee and releases waste reports periodically.
Other wasteful items McCain flagged in the report include $375 million for Missile Defense Agency targets that were never used or didn’t work, $58 million for the Navy’s experiments with alternative fuel sources for its Great Green Fleet and $12 million spent on defective spare parts.
“As our Armed Forces confront the most diverse and complex array of national security challenges since the end of World War II under extraordinarily constrained fiscal resources, we simply cannot afford to waste our precious defense dollars on unnecessary or poorly performing programs,” McCain said. “This oversight report exposes just a few examples of the wasteful spending at the Pentagon that is so detrimental to our national defense. It has never been more important to eliminate unnecessary defense spending and mismanagement so that we can reinvest savings into improving the training and equipment our war fighters need.”
