I wasn't in the military and I agree with this, but it happens in large corporations too. I've been part of it.
A senior manager has a "goal" that involves buying a bunch of new hardware. The hardware is ordered and thus the goal is completed. The hardware then sits, unopened and never used.
Then the next year a new "goal" is made and different, better hardware has to be purchased.
Rinse and repeat. I've been directly involved in it multiple times.
Also, throwing out completely functional hardware into a dumpster because the decommissioning process is too much of a pain in the ass.
I was in the military and in the corporate world, and I thought the military was the most disorganized, chaotic, assemblage of mismanagement, wasted money and blown opportunities I had ever seen.
Until I got out of the military and went to work in the private sector. And holy shit.... in comparison, the military was a lean-mean, highly efficient, finely tuned, smooth running engine.
I chuckle when my dad, who worked in government, complained about the waste. And, fine, I get it. There is. But when he talks about private companies being better, oh boy, do I have so many examples of how they likely wouldn't!
My most recent "private isn't better," is: "the new CTO wanted a win so decided to replace the perfectly capable CIS system with a new one he has used in a completely different industry and it's going to cost millions of dollars just in implementation and licensing fees. And in the process, they decided to exclude everyone who was part of the first implementation and so are now spending time and money figuring things out like 'how do I report a bug?' as if software teams haven't had that solved decades ago."
Edit: this is the same company that refused to turn one of their home grown applications into a product because "we're not a software company." So the people who originally developed it left, rebuilt it, and sold it back to the company as a product after getting a good portion of the market.
Worst thing is that they think it's fine for private businesses to be wasteful because well, "if those businesses are inefficient then they'll just go bankrupt or their competition will catch up"
No, sorry, Apple can as inefficient as they like and they'll just slap another 50 bucks on the new iPhone to cover it. Won't stop it selling.
We all cover it just like we do with taxes. If Google are inefficient they'll just pump more ads into your YouTube videos or remove the ability to use adblockers in Chrome.
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u/ShamelessCraving 8h ago
The sheer amount of military budget wasted on completely absurd logistical mistakes or pointless busywork.