American taxpayers deserve to know exactly how and where their money is spent. We need to know when we spend dollars; we need to know where they’re going and why.
Secretary of Defence Hegseth – 9 Feb 2025
So it’s official…the newly confirmed Secretary of Defence is wasting no time going after wasteful spending at the Pentagon which would be very welcome indeed to those of us who know anything about military procurement and just how wasteful it can be.
And his first move on that front is to spaff another mountain of money up a wall to rename Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg!
First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
S R Hadden — “Contact” (1997)
I’ll confess, I wasn’t a big fan of the massively expensive endeavour to change Fort Bragg’s name the first time.
I really wasn’t a fan of the equivalent to Fort Meh that was ultimately chosen when you had a really awesome choice in Gen Roscoe Robinson Jr who had at one point commanded the 82nd Airborne which is kind of a noticeable unit round the old home town.
But eventually I got over it though I will confess to a deliciously subversive feeling every time I’d drive home and think of Fort Bragg as many times as possible when I’d see a Fort Liberty sign.
I know, I know…it’d make a hell of a drinking game to drink every time you see the name but a) drink driving is really, really bad…m’kay and b) you’d be completely wasted within five minutes driving anywhere in the Fayetteville area.
But what really pisses me off is that a fantastic sum of money was expended on the original base renaming endeavour two years ago. Depending on whose numbers you believe, estimates of the total cost for all nine bases that were renamed were estimated at $21M by the Naming Commission but I’ve seen references from $40M to $62M all-inclusive in the third part of their report.
Fort Bragg’s slice of that pie is by far the largest of the lot where the officially acknowledged number is $6.3M with most of those costs ascribed to changing signage and IT support to make changes in computer systems and databases that use the base name as part of their dataset. It’s very likely the real number is much higher than that when you factor in all of the road signs that were changed on NC DOT’s dime as well as all of the another costs borne by the Fayetteville community at large for items that also had Fort Bragg as part of them.
Keep in mind, that’s just the Naming Commission’s estimates which almost certainly didn’t come close to the actual amounts expended when you factor in all of the other costs such as the Naming Commission itself and costs of legislative action as well as costs they couldn’t possibly estimate paid by non-Federal stakeholders.
I think if we’re conservative, the real cost of renaming Fort Bragg to Fort Liberty was probably much closer to $20-30M when you factor in all sources of costs and now we’re going to go through that same exercise to reverse the changes and it almost certainly will be even more costly due to inflation alone…maybe on the order of $25-30M.
So let’s say the total cost to rename Fort Bragg to Fort Liberty and back again is $50M (the real number is probably significantly higher but I’ve no idea who I’d put in the FOIA request to as the Naming Commission is long since dissolved).
All that money jizzed up the wall with nothing to show for it to support our brave men and women serving in combat zones!
What could that money have been used on instead?
Looking in the Army’s Christmas JC Penney or Sears Wish List catalog (that’ll show who is kind of old and who isn’t amongst my readers!)…that princely sum is the list price for two M1A2 SEPv3 Abrams tanks.
Want something a bit more sporty and price-effective?
That $50M will get you 200 Joint Light Tactical Vehicles (JLTV which is basically the Humvee replacement) at $250K per vehicle or 285 Infantry Squad Vehicle (a militarised Chevy Colorado pickup at $175,000 per example).
If you’d like a little more protection for the troops…the Armoured Multi Purpose Vehicle (APMV, the replacement for the M113 Armoured Personnel Carrier) goes for $1.8M on the showroom floor so you can have 27 of those for $50M (excluding the ever-present cost-overruns!).
And let’s not forget the poster child of Pentagon procurement gone completely mad which was lampooned mercilessly in the must-see movie “The Pentagon Wars” staring Cary Elwes and Kelsey Grammer…the M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle. If you’ve not seen it and you’ve got Max…I do believe it is currently available for streaming!
The Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV) is currently being procured from at least five candidate suppliers but these almost certainly won’t be produced at the $2M price per Bradley but assuming that the abomination of a vehicle that had poor Omar Bradley’s name slapped on it was still happening, you could get 25 Bradleys for the price of renaming the renaming of Fort Bragg.
It was stupidity of the highest magnitude to waste so much money on renaming these bases and defence assets when a simple placard or some sort of visible exhibit explaining the history of the name and that a very unpleasant war and the 13th Amendment pretty much put to rest the idea that human beings should own other human beings as property that was in vogue in the context of the time would have done.
But having done something dumb…did we really need to double down on it and do it *AGAIN*?!?
I’ll give whoever came up with this idea credit for being somewhat clever in likely successfully bypassing having Congressional approval by choosing a different soldier named Bragg as the new namesake as opposed to the poster child of craptacular Confederate general staff Braxton Bragg (who was so despised for his incompetence that he was ordered relieved of his command to literally stand at Jefferson Davis’ side for a large part of the Civil War so he’d stop killing Confederate soldiers due to his own stupidity).
But I’d suggest to SecDef Hegseth that his proclamation isn’t exactly the victory lap on dealing with wasteful Pentagon spending he thinks it is. 🙁