I agree that the money system gets a little out of whack and is incredibly wasteful. It'd be nice if you could call your ISIC/TYCOM and say "hey, we don't need more office chairs, but we sure could use some more flight hours."
On the other side, although it's ridiculous, it does allow the squadron level to focus on training/warfighting and leave the budgeting to the OPNAV folks.
True dat. It just seems that just as we declare ourselves so poor that we can't pay attention in one thing, we simultaneously rush to blow money somewhere else in an extravagant and wasteful fashion. I don't exactly know how to fix this, but I wonder if private enterprise ever has it this bad. "No, Pags, your department doesn't have the budget for that software...but, would you mind taking your company car and driving it to Nova Scotia and back? We've got some extra in the gas budget we need to spend."
The thing that brings it home to me is that TAD funding is so painful now I don't even want to go on CCXs. "Yes, we know you're flying all day, but there's a chow hall 10 miles away that's open from 1100-1115, so here's your 8 bucks a day. No, you can't get a car, either." At the same time, when it comes to ops, it's like Christmas in February sometimes.
The military is so incompetent in budgeting that if it had full discretion, they'd try to fund a new hangar or something by initiating a "bring your own toilet paper to work" policy. After all, if you'd adopted a diet per your "Nutrition for Marines" MCI, you wouldn't have to shit at work.