Inverse
David Grossman
02/11/2020
Between 2010 and 2016, the Air Force took over $17 million from what’s known as the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund, which is ostensibly for wartime projects only. The nonprofit National Priorities Project refers to the OCO as a “slush fund for the military” with very little oversight. The Inspector General’s report found that funding should rather come from research, development, test and evaluation funds.
Where the funding comes from matters: the standard funding request approach could have forced the Air Force to examine their requests with greater rigor, the report notes, since it was later determined that were “not...needed.” The sensor that the Air Force had spent millions building would not have solved any of the problems that had crashed the previous Reapers, according to the report, and was never even able to deliver on what it had promised. The older Predators were retired in 2018.
“As a result,” it says, “the Air Force wasted $17.7 million dollars in OCO funding developing a capability that was never delivered.”
