If you are sure that you know the circumstances and the reasoning ...
My friend is prone to hyperbole and would usually start the story with "GD F$%^£* criminals" but he's a pitbull for finding out the details before he calls them criminals.
I see the same mentality at this base. The commander knows what the head of troop morale would try to get away with. And the head of troop morale knows that the commander knows. So it's a cat and mouse game.
Military people are constantly moving around and whether it's Logistics, Training, or "Troop Morale" they each have annual conferences and share ideas, tricks and "what I got away with and how I did it." If you see a characteristic at one base, you can feel reasonably confident that it's endemic.
People are people. They fairly well get evenly distributed in society. 1/3 of the population has hemorroids, whether it's the Congress, White House Staff, or military or GE. There's a certain % of people who live by "not my job", they manage to get evenly distributed.
I think what many people fail to appreciate about a large government is how little any Congress, Cabinet, or Administration knows [or can know] about the government they are in charge of. They are people in power with little power. No one in Congress knows that a building under the State Department is going to get [or replace] a uninterruptable power supply. Congress and the Administration see summaries of summaries of summaries. How much real power can you exert with that kind of knowledge.
So this years budget is largely like last years budget which is what the prior years budget looked like. They pretend they are doing great things by adding a program or deleting a program, but there are hundreds' of thousands [if not millions] of individual expenditures within each department. SDI will easily create 10,000 line items [at the lowest level. No one in Congress or the Administration is going to have any idea what's really being spent on SDI.
99.9%+ of the programs that were in the Clinton Administration are in the Bush Administration. Anyone that has worked five-year plans knows that. The people way on top can just tweak; it's all they can really do. Admittedly, when they tweak, it's large dollar tweaks. Add SDI, increase Americorps by 50%. Kill program xyz. But I've also seen xyz get killed and if the lower organizational units/offices wants it to happen, it'll be reborn under a new name.
Virtually, the entire plus-up in Defense is going to military pay raises, the purchase of precision weaponary [replacing the ones spent], and SDI. That means that virtually everything else is the same as it was, with a small adjustment for inflation.
jttmab |
