You have no idea. Careless waste is endemic to the entire military. I work in a maintenance shop that handles inspecting and reassembling aircraft components, and if I didn't stop them then the other people in my shop would throw away half of the parts that come in with our stuff.

Take for example a rubber ring. A goddamn rubber fucking ring, that's all, no bells or whistles. It costs $100. It's in our technical data that we can inspect them for faults and re-use them if they're good... but standard practice is to immediately throw them away without question as soon as they're removed. You can go through anywhere between one and two dozen in a day. Let's say you throw away an average of 5 per day instead of re-using them. That's **$182,500* a year for one part in one shop on one base. It's considered excusable because you can re-use them, but you don't have to, and you can make the excuse that it's "safer" to just assume they're all bad.

Nobody thinks anything of it. There is no "wasteful spending" oversight. Really, there is no procedural oversight at all. Every shop I go to, every base I go to, we do things that make absolutely no goddamn fucking sense or are actively wasteful, just somebody in a position of power wants to and there's no rule against it. I suspect THIS is why the military budget is so absurdly over-inflated. How many dollars a year are we spending on the equivalent of goddamn rubber rings?

On top of that, any time there's money left over in a budget, we're forced to burn through it somehow so we can continue to justify receiving the money. This practice actively encourages excessive spending and an ever-expanding budget.

And people flip the fuck out when you cut the military budget by a quarter of a percent. You have no fucking idea how much of our military budget is bloat.