Among the ongoing news of various scandals and missteps and outright immoral acts of our current administration, this week brought news of how the Pentagon spent hundreds of millions in September. Unspoken was the annual truth that underlies this revelation: it happens each year.
Whether it is some official rule or not, the practice has been for many decades that the military must spend all its allocation of funding by the end of the fiscal year (Oct. 1). To spend less is to send a message that funding might be reduced in the future.
And, crucially, unspent funds cannot be rolled over into future budgets.
So, the system flips what most would call common sense -- that being budget-conscious is to be valued -- and forces each piece of the giant military establishment to spend, spend, spend.
How do I know this has been ongoing for decades, you ask? Turns out I contributed to just such an effort to spend allocated funds in my renowned tenure as base funds manager at RAF Lakenheath. It was September of 1972, and young Airman First Class Kennedy had been elevated to the funds manager role after the Master Sergeant who had occupied the position retired.
The base was between aircraft deployments (our F100s had been shipped to Turkey and the F4s were not yet coming to us from Vietnam), which likely has something to do with the supply company just telling me I was in charge of ordering basic supplies and equipment for the base. And, after all, it's not like I didn't have numerous officers sending me orders, all approved by the colonel in charge.
I was, essentially, an office drone.
Back to a mid-September morning when I was called to the company commander and told to scour inventories and find whatever means was necessary to spend what I recall as at least $500,000 in allocated funds, and to do it within two weeks.
Unlike what happened last September, I did not consider ordering millions of dollars of fancy food for military mess halls -- that sort of choice likely required Hegseth-level approval. But after buying as many office supplies and annual needs as I could find figures for (essentially covering the 1972-73 fiscal year's major expenses that did not involve actual fighter jets and fuel, etc.), I finally came up with a somewhat audacious plan.
We had several empty aircraft hangers on base, just aching to be filled. I suggested to the company commander that toilet paper and other various paper products had very long shelf lives, so to speak, and that we could store large quantities on the base for, well, some time... at least until planes arrived from southeast Asia.
In retrospect, it all seems short-sighted. The planes really would arrive, though not until after I rotated back to the States a year later, and those hangers would be operational again. The next fiscal year's budget would not be stocking up on toilet paper, so that next budget would need to find a new solution to any excess funds. But, orders are orders, and the captain in charge mostly just wanted to report that our excess money had been spent.
Bottom line: I placed a mammoth order for paper products, mostly TP, and some grunts from base supply really did fill a hanger with those essential products. In fact, they were flown in by a military transport plane to nearby RAF Mildenhall.
That was my first, and pretty much ONLY experience, spending a whole lot of money that was not mine. It was like a game.
I assume that the September, 2025, purchases felt like a game to today's supply specialists. I felt like a winner in 1972. I had done my job and everyone seemed pleased.
Also pleased were at least four years of Air Force personnel, blessed with a seemingly endless supply of generic toilet paper. What, you thought I could order Charmin?
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