It costs the government several hundred dollars in pay and benefits to have each one of us standing around for a day, yet they were pinching pennies on ammo that cost maybe 10 cents a round.
This is pretty standard everywhere, not just in the military. To an accountant payroll is a fixed expense they have no control over (hiring and firing decisions are made by a different department). So they save on what they can control.
Also, there’s often value to having people available to work, over and above the value of having them working right this moment. Firing people the first day there’s no work for them to do (or even the first week, or the first month) isn’t necessarily optimal.
So even if they had control over hiring and firing, they wouldn’t necessarily want to change anything. In other words, it might be a legitimate fixed cost, not just something being treated as one by a bureaucratic mind.
Of course, it would be still better to use people maximally efficiently once they’re hired.
Agreed, and to expand i would say that the level of capital devoted to a task is how much it actually needs to be done. Cheap, basic supplies are for tasks which are really not important and if they were, they could be done by people other than military personnel more cheaply. A few token mops just shows that you need something to give the E-2s or their morale goes in the shitter. Mission-essential bases have janitorial contractors.
I’m not sure it would be better to use people maximally efficiently once they’re hired! That is an interesting question. Personally i would rather have them idle and available to be tasked with important missions that may come up than ‘busy’ all the time for the sake of busyness, which is how ‘use people maximally efficiently because we have them’ tend to play out.
This is pretty standard everywhere, not just in the military. To an accountant payroll is a fixed expense they have no control over (hiring and firing decisions are made by a different department). So they save on what they can control.
Also, there’s often value to having people available to work, over and above the value of having them working right this moment. Firing people the first day there’s no work for them to do (or even the first week, or the first month) isn’t necessarily optimal.
So even if they had control over hiring and firing, they wouldn’t necessarily want to change anything. In other words, it might be a legitimate fixed cost, not just something being treated as one by a bureaucratic mind.
Of course, it would be still better to use people maximally efficiently once they’re hired.
Agreed, and to expand i would say that the level of capital devoted to a task is how much it actually needs to be done. Cheap, basic supplies are for tasks which are really not important and if they were, they could be done by people other than military personnel more cheaply. A few token mops just shows that you need something to give the E-2s or their morale goes in the shitter. Mission-essential bases have janitorial contractors.
I’m not sure it would be better to use people maximally efficiently once they’re hired! That is an interesting question. Personally i would rather have them idle and available to be tasked with important missions that may come up than ‘busy’ all the time for the sake of busyness, which is how ‘use people maximally efficiently because we have them’ tend to play out.
Availability for tasks is a valuable task, but it needs subtle thinking to evaluate (option pricing for one).
The difference between efficient and effective is relevant here.
If there are no useful things (“important missions”) for people to do, filling their time with busywork might be efficient but is hardly effective.