The photo shown below was featured in a DoD-compiled showcase of “military life.” It proudly showcases waste so normalized that it needn’t even attempt to hide anymore.
You might be asking yourself what the hell this has to do with “military life.” You’d be right to ask that question. But you’d also be waiting until a cold day in hell for a response. The Air Force doesn’t explain itself. It only deigns to do so when the peons gain special leverage that makes something political volatile. So far, Congress doesn’t much care about this, because it doesn’t impact jobs or votes in their districts.
You might also ask how the service can justify paying for frills like this when it continually cites budgetary pressure as the excuse du jour behind failure after failure. But Satan will be donning fleece-lined goose down before an answer is given. The Air Force hasn’t passed an audit in 17 years. It doesn’t consider itself accountable for resource stewardship, as this open celebration of waste makes evident.
You might also ask how this stupid band can be justified when the service is, by its own admission, 60,000 people short of what it needs to perform its mission. You’d be right to ask that question, but you’d be made nauseous by the doubletalk you’d receive in return. This is because the Air Force isn’t really trying to fix its manning problem. It’s trying to look genuine about fixing it, which bucks up the troops stuck filling in the gaps. But its policies and budget, which created the shortage in the first place, are doing nothing to address it.
Most likely, the Air Force doesn’t actually want more people. It prefers to believe it can win wars without them so long as it has the latest toys. This is, of course, vacuous. But it’s baked into the service’s DNA and is a notion nigh on impossible to dislodge from the consciousness and judgement of the star-wearing politicrats running the show, especially when they answer to deep state civilian leaders with deep-root connections in the defense profiteering industry.
Here’s an idea. If we’re really 20% short of manpower, put these two NCOs to work. Sell the instruments. Sell the fake uniforms. Hand each of them a wrench and give them some time training from an authentic NCO. Maybe then they can add value. You can also re-purpose the E-4 who took the photo and whoever took the time to promote it to a media outlet.
Boom. There’s four more people to do real jobs. Just 59,996 to go. Given the prolific waste across the service, it’s a reachable number.
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