Turkeys

You would not think that turkeys come home to roost. They are flightless birds, for the most part, though in the wild are capable of limited vertical maneuvers. Ben Franklin had proposed we adopt the Turkey , rather than the bald eagle as the national bird, on several quite practical grounds.

The eagle, while majestic, is bad eating.

The turkeys that come from the freezer chest to our kitchens on this glorious day were never very agile, and it is better to consider their wiry comrades in the wild, than their constricted lives en route the table. But no matter. They are so much a part of the fabric of the day that we actually incorporate them into ourselves.

It is a snow-dusted holiday in Washington , a little colder than normal. Breezy. I have set out the ingredients for the green-bean casserole and the festive holiday salads, and the fresh rolls and creamery butter. I have turkey to cook, though it is just a breast, and a ham, just because.

I am carefully considering what to be thankful for this day. The small things are the largest. Being able to rise at all tops the list, followed shortly by not being in fear for my life, as they are in Harbin , China , where a toxic slick is flowing down the Songhua River toward the city after an explosion at a chemical plant far upstream.

The slick is composed of benzene, a carcinogen used in the manufacture of plastics, detergents, pesticides and other chemicals. Some sections of the river contained benzene levels more than a 100 times higher than national safety levels.

The toxic horror has been coming down the river for more than a week, so there has been plenty of time for panic. Everyone that could book an air ticket or get on a train has gone, and the bottled water is long sold.

Harbin is a new city , or rather a city that is the product of the introduction of new technology to an ancient country. The invention was the railroad, and Harbin is a city in the context of an industrial capability as much as Shanghai reflects a place on a navigable river.

There is a brand new Chinese city in Guangdong province, quite a large one, that is the global center for the production of sweatsox.

The Russians were given the right to construct the tracks to link China to the Siberian railway network, and with the rails came foreigners, Russians and Jews and Germans, and Harbin became an international metropolis. Harbin Beer, first produced by the brewmeisters at the Harbin Brewery, was the earliest beer brewed in China , and the Anheuser-Busch company has a major facility there. The company released a statement that although the city water was shut down to guard against the toxins, their water was derived from deep wells, and there would be no effect from the poisons in the river.

It will take years for the heavy metals to sink down that far, and meet the depleting aquifer. But already there is talk of the environmental disaster that is already accompanying the break-neck pace of Chinese industrial development. They are unquestionably right, but those birds are not coming to roost just yet.

But we have our own turkeys, I was leafing through a list of recipes for my own little truncated bird when I saw a list of Department of Defense turkeys that have been simmering for some time. 

The list was not about waste, exactly, but rather about prospective bill-payers. The combination of Hurricane disaster relief and the war in Iraq has forced the department to look for funds to divert to emerging requirements.

Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England has directed the military Departments to find $32.1 billion in budget savings over the next five years. That is a lot of money, even in the gigantic defense accounts. Areas certain to be protected reductions are the operational and maintenance expenses (O&M) and salaries. That magnifies the impact on reductions, since the easiest target is the largesse spent for weapons acquisition. It is a river perhaps not as vast as the Mississippi , but certainly the Songhua .

Research and Development will be hit hard, too, since that is an area where investment does not show up for years. That is going to hurt my line of business, but I am a patriot, and understand that times are hard. I am thankful I have a job at the moment, though the sales forecast makes me a little nervous. But when an enterprise stops investing in the future, it begins to die.

A more rational area in which to search for resources would be in the big-ticket acquisition programs. There are some turkeys in there, like the Air Force’s next generation air superiority fighter, the F-22 Raptor, and the one after that, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

In 1986, the Air Force originally planned to acquire 750 F-22s, at around $35 million a pop. Nineteen years later, we have purchased fifty aircraft at a unit cost of around $340 million per plane. There are another few dozen in the pipeline, and the Air Force claims they will stop buying them in 2008, which is right around the corner. Much of the technology is over a decade old already.

The Joint Strike Fighter is at least a partnership enterprise between the Air Force, Navy and Marines, with Britain ‘s Royal Air Force and Navy along to help share the costs. In 1996, the consortium planned to acquire almost 3,000 aircraft at $43 million a copy. By 2001, when production began, the cost had soared to $81 million a copy, and the current estimates are that the actual end-cost will be a nice egg-shaped number of $100 million per jet.

I used to be in the program and budget business, so the numbers resonate with me. Big numbers, in particular, the ones that mean there are missed assumptions and flawed management. I am particularly thankful on this day that I am not in that line of work anymore.

In late November the budget submissions for 2008 are due to the Office of Management and Budget, where hardy bureaucrats are not watching the football games, and have probably been at work, glancing at their watches to see it they can make one more rack-and-stack on the budget before they are late for dinner and someone yells at them.

December will be worse. They will have to generate the “pass back” instructions to adjust for inflation, pay for wars and hurricanes, and make the deficit not seem so big. That will cause another layer of the Government to work around the clock to make hard choices while everyone else gathers at the wassail bowl. The week between Christmas and New Years was always the worst.

So, as I slip the casserole in the oven, and check what probably would have been the National Bird, I say a brief prayer of thanks for small favors. In general order, they are that I have my health, I am not in a city on the Songhua River , I have quit the budget business and that I have nothing whatsoever to do with the procurement of tactical jet aircraft.

I had to snort when I read the numbers. I bet they will be perfectly fine machines, and keep the industrial base alive, and jobs flowing to the Congressional districts where they are made. I am confident that the F-22 is built in little parts in all fifty states. but there won’t be many of them. As programs, though, they are certainly turkeys.

The only difference is that they fly a little better.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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