Confessions of an Airborne Dedicated Individual Combat Killer (ADICK) - Part 8

I'm Not Signing This Ammo Back, So Just Shoot All of It

On the last installment of ADICK, we talked about how training in the by-God Airborne usually revolved around staring at trees. The usual excuse was there wasn't enough funding for force-on-force training, so we had to just make do with pretend. Well, the flip side to that was, whenever we had extra money, we burned through it like a private fresh out of Basic driving down Bragg Blvd for the first time. Whether it was ammo at the range or a whole bunch of equipment that we never used, if there was money to spend, we spent the hell out of it, and it rarely ever ended up paying for things we actually needed.

I've written elsewhere about the horror show that is defense accounting and acquisitions, so I can't really say I was surprised by it once I started digging into why that was the case. After all, if you hear on the Private News Network that we might not have enough ammo for qualification because the unit's running short of funds, but every time we go to the range we literally just fire off rounds so the officer-in-charge (OIC) doesn't have to sign it back over, you start to wonder. Turns out, this is the name of the game. The way defense funding goes is based on the previous fiscal year. If your unit doesn't spend all of its money allotted for the fiscal year, it won't get the same amount the next year.

So how did the 82nd Airborne deal with that issue? Ordering equipment we weren't going to use and expending rounds instead of saving them for later. I can't tell you how many times I heard the line "make sure you qualify first time through, because we're short on ammo." Apparently we weren't that short on ammo, because almost without exception we had a spend-ex (fancy Army term for shoot all the remaining ammo as quickly as possible) after each range day. Then there was the motor pool.

We never had things we needed. Ever. We could put in an order for a part, such as a mirror bracket or a spare-tire mount, and we'd be lucky if we saw it eight or nine months later. Half the time, it was the wrong part. God forbid that your humvee was actually deadlined and unable to drive for any safety reason (because in the Army, even if the truck can drive just fine, if it doesn't have a black-out lamp, you're wrong), because you'd never get that fixed. We did get a whole shipment of soft-skin doors that we couldn't use on any of our trucks, though, along with a crate of winches that were never mounted to anything.

I don't even necessarily blame the motor pool, really. That decision came from on high, just like that one time Congress ordered tanks no one wanted. Likely some major took a look at the property book, saw that we didn't have any soft-shell doors, noticed the unit had some money left in the fiscal year, and cobbled all of that together into another brilliant idea. The good idea fairy lives for this kind of crap, and staff officers keep indulging it. Oh well, guess I'll get back to cleaning all of these refurbished ASIP radios we just ordered that we're going to be phasing out of service next month.

Because nothing says Army like buying things we don't need with money we don't need to spend. Airborne!