Posted by David Sherman on Saturday, February 11, 2006 at 12:14PM :
In Reply to: Re: OT and but value of a M35A2 w/winch? posted by apb (in NY) on Saturday, February 11, 2006 at 12:02PM :
I've heard way too many stories of fraud and deception for them to all be false. When the government did the sales directly, I never heard a story of fraud on the sales end (in screening, it's a different story). Sure they did things in an inefficient bureaucratic way sometimes, but after "privatization", there was flat-out criminal activity, or so I heard. I can't say I have first-hand knowledge of it.
I always watch the automotive/vehicular lots at Ft Lewis, and have not seen one lot with any M35 stuff come through since G/L took over. Part of the problem, which is not quite exactly criminal, is that naiive people bid on this stuff based on pictures on the internet and lists of NSNs accompanied by extremely high government costs, without checking out what they're really getting. For example, they sold a lot of 5-ton transfer cases a while back, and showed a picture of a bunch of closed steel shipping containers. When I lifted the covers on a couple of them, what was inside was stripped castings, assorted gears and bearings, and a large amount of rusty water. Nevertheless, they sold for what I thought was a pretty high price. I always wondered what the guy that bought them thought when he saw his "transfer cases".
The only way to deal with G/L is to look the stuff over, bid only what you would have paid in the old sealed-bid days, and if you don't get it, forget about it, even if that means you never "win" anything. I had to buy a couple batch boxes of completely useless junk before I learned that, unlike when the DRMOs sold stuff directly, G/L cherry-picks the good stuff out of the batch boxes so all that's left is the dregs -- scrap metal, broken stuff, and very expensive parts for machines that nobody has.