Posted on Feb 7, 2014
SFC Randy Purham
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With the growing concern of saving money – especially in the
military – I pose two questions that will help with the thought process behind
wasteful spending. 1.) Do we really need to print EVERYTHING? 2.) Do we really
need to run vehicles and burn fuel EVERY MONDAY? With the growing capacity of
technology, the need to print and have physical copy should be the thing of the
past. Let’s face it, Awards, Counselings, NCOERS, Regulations, APFT cards, etc
are the most common thing that is printed over and over again and for what?
There are digital signatures and email for a reason, why not create folders for
personnel and back them up to disk or hard drives for later use? This would cut
back on paper, ink and other associated costs. 
Maintenance and running vehicles that never go anywhere and if they do,
is it really important for them to been used in that capacity? We spend so much
money in bulk fuel and maintenance parts all because of this very instance alone.
Why not consolidate vehicles at a main draw yard and as vehicles are actually
needed they are prepped and ready to go? Yes, it would require leaders to do
some planning, but that’s life.  I think
with the annual spending within the military alone – it could clear the
national debt in 5 yrs tops. Just my take on it.



Posted in these groups: 654328 bad investment WasteMoney budget Budget
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Responses: 4
SFC Intelligence Analyst
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there you go SSG Purham, trying to bring common sense into the Army

 

Just like for every IG or BN Inspection I need to have on hand every regulation ever printed, even though it takes me less time to find the information digitally

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SFC Randy Purham
SFC Randy Purham
10 y
SFC Dominguez, I feel your pain. When I was a NBC NCO in Germany back in 2001, I had all related regs on a disc and that was good enough for the inspection. Some people need to get a little common sense when it comes to things like that. Thanks for your response.
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PO2 Maxwell Jones
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It goes beyond that too. When the end of the year would get close, I would look at my division's budget, and blow the rest of it on things we didn't really need because I was trained that if we didn't use the budget, we would get it cut the next year. The year that I didn't blow the extra thousands of dollars, our budget was cut by that amount. Putting a budget of x amount of dollars for a 10 year old submarine and a 2 year old submarine for operational costs, with both being the same is ridiculous. Design life of a lot of components is 10 years, so being on a 10 year old boat, we blew WAY past our budget when we quit deferring maintenance/repairs because it was to expensive.
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SSgt George Brown
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Most documentation is on a computer anyway.  In the Real Estate field, most of the signatures I get are electronic, sometimes, in special circumstances we do have to have a wet signature, however, those are copied and placed on computers or servers.  You can even get a signature when you send a PDF file.  
The issue, of course, is what to do in the case of a breach?
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SFC Randy Purham
SFC Randy Purham
10 y

George, I agree that most of the documentation is automated now or will eventually become automated for archival purposes. In the event of a breach, that would be something that would have to be dealt with as it comes. Its almost like planning for a nuke strike from Iran. Security software and passwords are the best bet and backup storage like Google Drive, iClouds and etc. Thanks for your post.

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