[randomnumber314]

In my experience, this will cause anger and outrage, someone high up will be sacrificed--but that's it.

The military is an absolute money burning machine. In my seven years of experience the following were in-the-open examples:

* End of year spending binges on equipment no one wanted or needed to max out budgets, to justify the next budget year's sum

* Pre-inspection trashing of inventory to mitigate write ups for discrepancies between on-hand and on-book items.

* I met a team of inspectors in Iraq who were tasked with finding some number of billions worth of equipment that was paid for, but no one was able to locate.

* Getting rank often involves pushing through big expensive projects, no matter the need, in exchange for bullet points on personnel review files.

* My favorite: an enormous dining facility was built on a base in Iraq, but it was too close to the exterior fence, which presented a situation where there would potentially be slow-moving line of hundreds of military, closely grouped together, within "throwing distance" of the perimeter fence. Thus, the contractors were required to complete the building, to make-good on the contract, to force the military to pay them in full, for a facility that was unusable due to above.

[analogmemory]

> * End of year spending binges on equipment no one wanted or needed to max out budgets, to justify the next budget year's sum

This seems pretty standard in any large corporation. The best times to ask for new "shit" is during the holiday season. Thanks corporate Santa! :/

[toddmorey]

I will NEVER forget working as a student in the college bookstore during EOY spending. I watched department chairs throw anything and everything into shopping carts, as if they were gameshow contestants trying to beat the clock.

"What is this Mathematica software? What does it do? I'll take 4 copies."

The idea of course was insanity to me: if you didn't spend your department budget, you were in danger of having it reduced next year. So you were punished for leaving money on the table.

[kentosi]

"... punished for leaving money on the table"

Are there any alternative strategies to this?

I find this concept insane whereby spending more and more is good but spending less is bad.

[marme]

allow them to rollover leftover budget to the next year and never lower their budget. If you do this departments will just carry huge surpluses over every year and not spend money then when something big comes along they will just use their surplus for it rather than ask for their budget to be increased. If you allocate money to a department and they never spend that money it can be kept in the bank earning interest rather than be wasted on things that are not needed. If you really micromanage it you can create shadow budgets where you over promise knowing they are not going to spend their full budget but this is really dangerous and only work in small orgs

[vibrato]

force ROI reports on all expenditures? sure you will get a lot of BS, but there is a disincentive to recklessly spend

[shostack]

There's a lot of stuff you can't put an ROI on. So instead people waste time trying to come up with a poor model.

[dogma1138]

Yes it's use it or lose it, and worse if you close a year 20% under budget they'll cut the next year's one by 40% because if you did it once surely you can repeat it again.

[Bedon292]

Reminds me a lot of Afghanistan where I watched a massive multi-story headquarters building be built. Draw downs were starting, and no one was ever going to occupy it, and they knew that before they even broke ground. But it was cheaper for the government to finish the construction than cancel the contract.

[null_and_void]

Camp Dwyer built a massive barracks/billeting project that never got utilized due to the drawdown. It was an astronomical waste of money.

[ryanmarsh]

I'm curious, which FOB and which DFAC? Kind of reminds me of the really big one on Victory.