Mission WD-40
Posted: Thursday, August 04, 2011
by Jesse Mobley
EconomistNow
WD-40 has a passionate fan club which has recently published a listing of 2000 uses for the magical spray. This key household spray can be used for such functions as cleaning piano keys, prohibiting your glue gun trigger from sticking, and removing gum from flag poles, but oddly enough I did not see cleaning military vehicles and planes on that list. And yet, the Pentagon spends $22.9 billion (yes, billion with a B) a year to ward off rust and other deterioration problems. It’s so bad that back in 2003, Congress mandated the creation of the Corrosion Policy and Oversight Office. My first thought when reading about this was, “Wow this is intense.”
Marines on the other hand have found a way to cut down on the costs by using basic economic thought: let the private sector duke it out for the best pricing. Honestly, I think there are other important things Marines should be doing rather than scrubbing and chipping away rust. From 2005 to 2008 the Marines have lowered their costs by $100 million all due to the fact that they outsourced their maintenance of the vehicles.
The problem has even developed college-level courses to offset and research the problem at hand. With funding from the Defense Department, The University of Akron has now started to enroll students under the program called Corrosion and Reliability Engineering. Demand for research on corrosion is now high both in public and private sectors which points to why this study is said to become fairly popular around the United States. Mission WD-40 is definitely a top priority for government budget managers, but even economic analysts say it’s a huge problem for households as well as firms. In 2005, a study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) showed that corrosion costs the U.S. economy more than $270 billion annually.
Mission WD-40 is no longer just a military operation, but rather a mission for both public and private sectors.
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