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From contracting with the Air Force, I can tell you that they have a love affair with spending money. Most of the projects I seen revolved around making sure ev

by Pigo 9y ago

From contracting with the Air Force, I can tell you that they have a love affair with spending money. Most of the projects I seen revolved around making sure everyone spent as much as possible, so that they could get more.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
unit91 9y ago
Well, there's a huge difference in the mindset of deployed grunts vs stateside red-tape laden behemoths. When you're deployed and something important breaks, you have a BIG problem. The impact is usually somewhere between you being absolutely miserable for weeks to costing you your life. When you're stateside and something important breaks, you have a reason to expand your empire at next year's budget meeting.
- Pigo 9y ago
  It's just a shame most people don't know that there is such a difference. I wouldn't feel so bad if all that money was going to important things. But I witnessed so much waste, and so many people who do literally nothing but wait for retirement. It's upsetting that that money doesn't go to the soldiers who need it.
mikerice 9y ago
This is common with every large organization.
- masklinn 9y ago
  It is also in part a factor of the way procurement works, many beancounters still can't grasp that needs vary and problems happen, so you get a budget, if you come up below budget you lose the extra and may get your next budget lowered to match, and getting more budget is a hard fight. As a result, departments want to have a budget as close as possible to a worst-case scenario, spend the entire year thrifting in case something major occurs and then have to blow it all up right before EOY.
smacktoward 9y ago
This comment gives me the opportunity to tell a joke I learned while working on an Air Force base. One of the things most civilians don't understand about the U.S. military is that the various branches all speak different languages. The same words can mean very different things, depending on the branch of service of the person you are saying them to. Take, for example, the simple order "secure the building." If you ask a Marine to "secure the building," they will hand-pick a team of a dozen Marines, who will chopper onto the roof of the building at midnight with knives clenched in their teeth. They will then work their way down floor to floor, slitting the throats of everyone they meet along the way, including the cleaning staff, because why not. When they reach the lobby, they will form up in neat ranks and scream at the top of their lungs that the building has been secured. If you ask someone from the Army to "secure the building," they will put in a request for an artillery strike, which will pummel the building as well as most of the surrounding block into a pile of rubble. When the artillery fire stops, the highest-ranking officer available will run up to the top of the pile, plant an American flag, and tell anyone who happens to be standing around that the building has been secured. If you ask someone from the Navy to "secure the building," they will send an encrypted message via satellite to a submarine 900 miles away. The submarine will then fire a Tomahawk cruise missile, which will fly at 500 miles per hour 100 feet off the ground into the building's HVAC exhaust. The explosion of the warhead will cause the building to collapse in on itself. The Navy will then issue a press release stating that the building has been secured. If you ask someone from the Air Force to "secure the building," they will get you a seven-year lease with an option to buy.
- lightbyte 9y ago
  >If you ask someone from the Air Force to "secure the building," they will get you a seven-year lease with an option to buy. Can you explain this? All the other ones made sense, but I don't understand what this is implying.
  - NickNameNick 9y ago
    The other forces would seize the building by force. The Air Force would secure the right to occupy the building, by buying it.
kevin_b_er 9y ago
I've heard this is common in business world too. Due to management & bean counters not comprehending organizational needs and leading-without-understanding they just cut your budget to what you last used. Nevermind if something made the spending leaner last year because some expenditure happens on a greater cycle than the 10-K form can handle. This gives better quarterly numbers while crippling the flexibility of that department. So the lower ranks compensate for such an incompetence by spending all the budget they can if there's any left. When you see it you immediately look to the top and question their actual leadership capability. In this instance, it is politicians arguing about budget, but we all knew they didn't know squat about the consequences of cutting a budget.

by Pigo 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

unit91 9y ago

Well, there's a huge difference in the mindset of deployed grunts vs stateside red-tape laden behemoths. When you're deployed and something important breaks, you have a BIG problem. The impact is usually somewhere between you being absolutely miserable for weeks to costing you your life. When you're stateside and something important breaks, you have a reason to expand your empire at next year's budget meeting.

Pigo 9y ago
It's just a shame most people don't know that there is such a difference. I wouldn't feel so bad if all that money was going to important things. But I witnessed so much waste, and so many people who do literally nothing but wait for retirement. It's upsetting that that money doesn't go to the soldiers who need it.

mikerice 9y ago

This is common with every large organization.

masklinn 9y ago
It is also in part a factor of the way procurement works, many beancounters still can't grasp that needs vary and problems happen, so you get a budget, if you come up below budget you lose the extra and may get your next budget lowered to match, and getting more budget is a hard fight. As a result, departments want to have a budget as close as possible to a worst-case scenario, spend the entire year thrifting in case something major occurs and then have to blow it all up right before EOY.

smacktoward 9y ago

This comment gives me the opportunity to tell a joke I learned while working on an Air Force base. One of the things most civilians don't understand about the U.S. military is that the various branches all speak different languages. The same words can mean very different things, depending on the branch of service of the person you are saying them to. Take, for example, the simple order "secure the building." If you ask a Marine to "secure the building," they will hand-pick a team of a dozen Marines, who will chopper onto the roof of the building at midnight with knives clenched in their teeth. They will then work their way down floor to floor, slitting the throats of everyone they meet along the way, including the cleaning staff, because why not. When they reach the lobby, they will form up in neat ranks and scream at the top of their lungs that the building has been secured. If you ask someone from the Army to "secure the building," they will put in a request for an artillery strike, which will pummel the building as well as most of the surrounding block into a pile of rubble. When the artillery fire stops, the highest-ranking officer available will run up to the top of the pile, plant an American flag, and tell anyone who happens to be standing around that the building has been secured. If you ask someone from the Navy to "secure the building," they will send an encrypted message via satellite to a submarine 900 miles away. The submarine will then fire a Tomahawk cruise missile, which will fly at 500 miles per hour 100 feet off the ground into the building's HVAC exhaust. The explosion of the warhead will cause the building to collapse in on itself. The Navy will then issue a press release stating that the building has been secured. If you ask someone from the Air Force to "secure the building," they will get you a seven-year lease with an option to buy.

lightbyte 9y ago
>If you ask someone from the Air Force to "secure the building," they will get you a seven-year lease with an option to buy. Can you explain this? All the other ones made sense, but I don't understand what this is implying.
- NickNameNick 9y ago
  The other forces would seize the building by force. The Air Force would secure the right to occupy the building, by buying it.

kevin_b_er 9y ago

I've heard this is common in business world too. Due to management & bean counters not comprehending organizational needs and leading-without-understanding they just cut your budget to what you last used. Nevermind if something made the spending leaner last year because some expenditure happens on a greater cycle than the 10-K form can handle. This gives better quarterly numbers while crippling the flexibility of that department. So the lower ranks compensate for such an incompetence by spending all the budget they can if there's any left. When you see it you immediately look to the top and question their actual leadership capability. In this instance, it is politicians arguing about budget, but we all knew they didn't know squat about the consequences of cutting a budget.