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Comment by Vexs | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, we could probably support the same sized military with substantally less money, due to all the waste and mismanagement. Honestly though, it's not just the military- massive waste occurs at all levels of govt. All this focus on cutting spending; yet nobody ever seems to seriously look at waste as a better alternative to public spending. I guess because it's harder to investigate than to cut from a spreadsheet.

Small story from reddit: This guy worked in a government office where his boss would order multi-thousand page reports to be rush delivered to the office, which cost anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars depending on the report; and then took a single paper out and trashed the rest- because she didn't know you could just print single pages.

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Having served in the military, I don't think it's possible; the military wastes so much precisely because it's so big. Waste is inherent to large organizations. More administration, less flexible thinking, more room for fraud, waste, and abuse to go unnoticed.

Want less waste? Make it smaller. This will, of course, decrease its capabilities (which might not be a bad thing). If you want it to have the same capabilities as it currently has, the waste is going to stay as an unpleasant side effect.

> Having served in the military, I don't think it's possible; the military wastes so much precisely because it's so big.

Well, a big chunk of what we talk about when it comes to military spending is developing new weapons systems. The nature of the cost problems there is a little different.

The OP makes the mistake of assuming that waste only occurs in Government agencies. As you mentioned - larger organisations tend to create more waste.

While large organizations all have waste, from my personal experience government organizations have extra waste. The biggest issue is in buying things, where there is a system set up in place to try to prevent corruption, but where the system has been so heavily gamed that it is worse than no system at all. For example I've personally seen 4 times the price paid for an inferior piece of tech compared to what was on the consumer market (and this is 4 times the price of the in store individual price of the tech, it would be cheaper in bulk) because the consumer product had not gone through the channels of being approved for use (I actually spoke with the one who purchased it to make sure I wasn't missing anything, and they told me that they did think the cheaper product was better but it wasn't on the approved list). You see quite a few 'value added resellers' whose only value is jumping through the hoops of the approval process.

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