Originally Posted by
Scoop
True, but you are way underestimating the built in idiocy of the "system." If you were a responsible steward of the tax payers dollars you were rewarded with a budget cut the next FY. Oh and your CO probably got eaten alive by the wing commander for "under-executing."
The military was this way for decades and eventually most guys just gave up and just went along. A few years ago the military started showing signs of change - anyone currently flying wish to chime in?
Scoop
About four years ago while I was still in, in an attempt to reduce the amount of fuel being used the Air Staff A3 put out instruction that when you were done with your training you were OK to call the mission complete; you didn't have to fly out your hours for that sortie. On top of that, if your squadron had all its training requirements complete and you were short of your programmed flying hours for the FY, that was said to be OK as well; no need to ramp up the flying to zero our the balance. Keep in mind, most guys got on average two 4.5 to 5.5 hr flights a week. Well, of course the group CC didn't want to hear any of that. When confronted with the memo from A3 (I had my papers in so I had nothing to lose) which he was well aware of his response was, "You told me that's how much flying you needed to get the training done, so your training isn't complete until you fly it out."
In my 20 years, the last thing the military ever took into consideration was stewardship of tax-payer dollars. That's not to say they didn't care about the costs; they didn't want to go over their yearly budgets, but when it came to whether or not something made sense or not, there was never a thought about actually saving the money and not spending it.