I used to agree with this 100%...until I became the money guy for my squadron.

The laws that govern military spending are ridiculous. For recurring items, like office supplies, gear, and uniform items, you are allowed, by law, no more than three months of purchase in advance. And moving money between the various categories of purchases (uniform items, supplies, TDY/TAD, etc) is not a simple, straight-forward process. Often, it's easier to spend in one category than another. And EOY purchases have to meet certain criteria that other spending doesn't. That's why you saw 'stupid' purchases at the EOY spending spree.

You can't buy more than $3K worth of stuff from one vendor or same item with the GPC without specific approval and never more than $25K. If it's over $25K, it has to go through the contracting & bid process.

The challenge is headquarters' hoarding. They're told every year that they're not getting anymore money so they only divvy out a portion of that money to their subordinate units...and tell them that's all they're getting. This happens at every level from top to bottom. So the units have to build a budget based on this amount. Every quarter, the units have to justify what they've spent and beg for more. They may get a little more, but not much. It usually comes from other units who didn't spend as much as they thought rather than from HQ reserves. For the last quarter, they rack and stack their unfunded requests or wish lists.

Normally, only units with a documented and approved unfunded list get any money to spend and only for those specific items. Occasionally, these items are dictated "top down" too...like plasma screens. But as September closes in, the HQs do this same process and anything they don't spend gets sent down to subordinate units. This cascades from HQ to HQ and eventually to individual units.

Worse, this whole process is managed by a finance officer who knows nothing about ops and units often lose out in the rack & stack process.

I was fortunate to be in a relatively small group with only four squadrons and the group HQ to deal with. I was able to educate our finance officer, find creative ways to justify funding from other sources, and was able to justify things other units couldn't.

At the end of the year, I was eventually given five times the amount other units were because I could spend it. We bought junk we would've bought if money was no object, and we justified stuff that other units wouldn't even attempt to justify. It wasn't necessarily wasteful spending, but it wasn't smart spending and it was done largely $3K at a time.

Like I told them, we could've spent this money far better and more intelligently had we been given this budget at the beginning of the year rather than lump sum with 20 days to spend it.

...but therein lies the problem. It's not necessarily wasteful, it's poor management of the existing budget...at every level. And it's institutionalized by the way the money is given to the military. The "use it or lose it" mantra is more indicative of mismanagement than any perceived surplus or waste.

Yes, there is waste. I'm just trying to shed some light on some of those perceived wastes that aren't really due to waste, but because the system is set up poorly.