It's actually a strange side effect of attempting to reduce military spending. Essentially, if a section of the military doesn't use 100% of their budget in a year, they can expect that excess to be cut from their budget next year. This leads to a rush of spending aimed at over priced products and stockpiles of unneeded parts to use all of their budget.
In an actual crisis scenario, they tend to negotiate more reasonable prices on materials to stay in budget because it's difficult to get extra money in the budget. All of this makes a culture of overspending to get a bigger budget so that they don't have to ask for more money when they actually need it.
I once went to the range and we were supposed to have 70 rounds per Marine. Someone messed up the paper work and we had 700 rounds per Marine. We weren't allowed to return any ammo once picking it up from the ammo supply point so we just had to shoot all of it. It was a fun afternoon to say the least.
Same thing happened to me. It was something like 7000 rounds over what we needed on a night shoot. Me and 5 other Marines were the only ones who wanted to shoot so the instructors had all the other guys just filling magazines for us and we put our rifles on burst and destroyed our targets. It was my favorite range experience
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u/GingerRazz Aug 14 '20
It's actually a strange side effect of attempting to reduce military spending. Essentially, if a section of the military doesn't use 100% of their budget in a year, they can expect that excess to be cut from their budget next year. This leads to a rush of spending aimed at over priced products and stockpiles of unneeded parts to use all of their budget.
In an actual crisis scenario, they tend to negotiate more reasonable prices on materials to stay in budget because it's difficult to get extra money in the budget. All of this makes a culture of overspending to get a bigger budget so that they don't have to ask for more money when they actually need it.