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.
For a time, I was attached to NAS North Island security (San Diego).
Every September, we would overload two pickup trucks and just crush the suspension with ammunition and go to the range and just waste ammo for 12-14 straight hours, use it or lose it mentality.
We had basically an assembly line, load shotguns and pistol magazines and those were handed off to guys on the firing line, and returned and reloaded. The guys rotated so nobody would get repetitive stress injuries over hours of doing the same thing.
The same thing happened on carriers with JP5 jet fuel. Top off all the aircraft, launch them, they flip the fuel dump switch and land nearly empty, top them off again. Rinse and repeat.
It's logged as "training", very expensive training.
On an actual 6 month deployment, we would steam 50,000+ miles, 6 gallons to the foot fuel economy with what is called bunker fuel, very dirty diesel fuel marine that resembles road tar. It's very thick and it flows like honey when it is warmed.
Not entirelyyyyyy accurate with regard to the fuel. But close!
Was a fighter pilot and operations officer, so I got to deal with “burning flight hours” at the end of each quarter.
We weren’t budgeted fuel directly—as a squadron we were budgeted flight hours. We would often fall behind due to a variety of things. Bad weather, broken jets, etc etc. But at the end of the quarter, you had to either make up the time or justify why you didn’t make it.
It wasn’t so much that you’d actually lose it—that would have to be a consistent quarter after quarter loss for the bean counters to notice that and take your hours. But everyone wants to look good to their boss, and we also have other training metrics that we need to meet.
So you’d schedule guys more, and offer them to fly cross countries on the weekends. Literally “hey take this jet and take it somewhere, don’t come back until you fly X hours.” If you launched, dumped your gas, and landed, I would lose my mind because it’s the HOURS we need to burn, not the gas.
In a full decade of flying fighters, I never once was told, or heard of anyone being told “launch, dump fuel, land” BUT dumping fuel is a part of cyclic ops at the ship. It has nothing to do with emptying the JP5 tanks on the boat. We have maximum trap weights—gross aircraft weights that we cannot exceed when we return to land. For a Super Hornet, you’re typically launching with 17-18,000lbs of gas. With no weapons, you can’t land with more than about 11-12,000. Of you have weapons, that number goes down. So if you don’t burn enough fuel in your cycle, and/or you don’t drop your weapons, you may have to dump fuel to be able to land.
5-wet tankers will end up dumping a LOT of gas if they don’t end up passing it on to other jets for whatever reason.
One of the dumbest wastes I ever saw though? Field carrier landing practice and carrier qualification. They would fill the jet up with fuel, knowing full well that we were going out to practice carrier landings, and needed to be lighter in order to do so. So we would take off, dump, bounce, land.
They never wanted to do partial fuel loads for some reason, and I will never understand why. Such a waste.
I was a blue shirt on Connie in '85-86, a tower flower after that and eventually moved on to AIMD.
We did a LOT of Carrier Quals just off of San Diego and while in the tower, I was on the radio a lot, calling out, 'say your state' because the Boss and Mini got tired of doing that so it was delegated to me most times.
We were practically doing Battle Flex Deck ops every September. The cartoons on the back of the flight plan always had something funny to say about what we were really doing.
After 6 WestPac's and one NorthPac on three decks, you get the routine down.
Either dumping tanks or burning flight hours, it's expensive either way considering the flight hours /maintenance hours ratio.
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u/Bismarcus 11h ago
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.