From General MacArthur’s farewell speech, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” If only that were true of some outdated military procurement programs.

It wasn’t so very long ago that the Congress was keeping the decades-old (and we do mean old – the Abrams tank first entered service in 1980, when Jimmy Carter was President) tank program on life support by habitually adding a hundred million dollars here and there for M-1 Abrams tank “upgrades.” We’ve written about that questionable practice in the past.

But when the Pentagon has about $650-700 billion to spend in a fiscal year, they start searching far and wide for ways to spend it. So, the Trump Administration, starting with its Fiscal Year 2017 “Supplemental Request” for the Pentagon, started adding money for “modifications/upgrades” of the Abrams tank.

Starting with that supplemental request, and adding up the FY18 and FY19 planned amounts of spending, the Army proposes to spend about $4.8 billion to upgrade a tank that is close to 40 years old.

And that’s a pretty fancy gold watch for another program that refuses to fade away.

GO TO THE FY19 BUDGET LANDING PAGE.