What is the most ridiculous "cost saving effort" that you deal with in the Army?

No one likes policing up the brass, especially after a FTX where it's scattered all over the training range, but it does make good sense to do so.

1SG, I fully understand that large scale piece of this but spending hours looking for brass in the woods of North Carolina is a waste of man power. The dense vegetation and sand will makes it almost impossible to find brass. Small engagement while moving, good luck trying to go back and remember which tree you were using as cover so you can find the rounds that you fired.

I fully agree that trying to collect brass from a training lane can be a waste of time. If there was a stationary position where a lot of firing took place, that is one thing. But walking through woods to do that is crazy. I used to hate that.

All too often we spend dollars to save pennies. Policing brass on a range makes sense -- probably more for the sake of cleaning up the range than for any value of the brass itself. Trying to retrieve brass over a large field training area where small amounts of brass or even single cases are widely scattered among foliage is a total waste of time.

On many (perhaps most) army posts, policing brass is more about confirming that the ammunition was fired than about either recycling the brass (which is sold as scrap metal) or cleaning up the range. Apparently at some time commanders became concerned that units might not be firing up all the training ammunition they drew, so they established controls checking the amount of brass turned in. This "solved" the "problem" by causing units to shoot up any left over training ammunition, because it was much easier to shoot up ammo and collect the brass than to jump through all the hoops to try to turn in unused ammunition (if it could even be turned in at all).

On the other hand, there are some occasions where wasting time is deliberate -- or at least part of the plan.

I recall one such example from training that was part of one of those recurring programs that the Army keeps trying to adapt from the corporate world (I don't recall what that version of the program was being called at the time, but we have all seen such programs where we are told we need to think up smarter ways to do things). According the the well-documented events covered in our training was the experience of a team at an Army installation in the southern US. On this post, large numbers of soldiers were tasked with picking up pine needles that fell from trees in the cantonment area. The team figured out that the post could save money by hiring a civilian company that already had trucks equipped with vacuums to that would collect the pine needles. The company did a better job of picking up the pine needles and the cost was very low because the company used to pine needles to make mulch that they in turn sold. The project would generate significant savings by freeing up the soldiers who were being tasked to pick up pine needles. The project was reviewed and recommended for approval. It was only when the project was passed to the installation chain of command for implementation that anyone discovered that the reason soldiers were being tasked to pick up pine needles had nothing to do with needing the pine needles removed but was entirely busy work to keep the soldiers occupied! The soldiers who were being tasked to pick up pine needles were from the training units on post and were soldiers who had been removed from training, who were waiting for a course start date, or waiting for reassignment after completing training.

CPL Scott, Do you really think that is feasible to find every piece of brass that is expended during a small arms engagement in the woods of North Carolina. The dense vegetation and sand eats casings like a fat kid on cake. I can understand if you have a large scale exercise. I am referring to a small scale engagement while on the move.

It all depends on how often a certain area is used for these "small scale" exercises.

For one thing, brass cartridges can be used by the bad guys, to make booby-traps (toe poppers, like the that injured General Senseki in Vietnam). For another thing, you don't want civilians risking their lives, or roaming through the battlefield searching for brass, and other things soldiers like to leave behind. Finally, leaving things on the battlefield, like brass, tells the enemy a lot about your unit...discipline, morale, leadership, and how well supplied you are.

MAJ Damajah Arnold - are you for real sir? you would expect soldiers to risk their lives to pick up brass? if civilians want to be stpid and roam through a combat zone looking for brass, thats their own damn problem. i wouldnt risk any of my soldiers to pick up brass outside the wire

Now that's crazy!

I remember training in Korea and we were firing blanks from an M-60 on a HMMWV. There were Korean kids running along side of us catching all the (hot) brass cartridges. Koreans recycled almost everything.

Amen, it seems like every three or four years they want to change the uniform. Sometimes I wonder if some fashion industry people aren't behind all of this. There is big money in changing uniforms. There have been so many changes in combat uniforms over the past twenty years that if you get two former soldiers together and they are talking about the uniforms they wore when they were in you might as well be speaking a foreign language sometimes, is it BDUs DBDU, DCU ACU. What are we calling them this week?!!!! When I first got in way back in the 70's it was OD green fatigues, then permanent press fatigues ( the worst idea ever). Then came BDUs that were supposed to fix everything. Nope we had to have BDUs for the geographic area, woodland, desert, arctic, and urban. And then add in that all of the services have their own special uniforms. A Marine would not be caught dead in an Army combat uniform. Once we got into the ME, I think we went through about four different Desert BDUs. Then came all of the digital patterns. I know at one time you could have so many different uniforms in a formation that you weren't sure if the guy standing next to you belonged to the same army. I'm not even going to get started on the dress uniforms.

To further exacerbate the issue, it happens to all of the branches of the military. Uniforms for the Navy were designed to protect the individual in the event of fire and drowning and were well suited for that purpose. What do you suppose happens to all that synthetic material in a serious fire, and have you ever tried to make a floatation device out of polyester?

Changing uniforms was always more of a cost spending effort for me.

Need to go back to the old Green service uniform bring back Kakhis foe warm weather loved them

I am not sure there is anything comparable between Army and Air Force guest lodging. I was stationed at Fort Greely, AK in the 1990's. We would travel to Fairbanks quite often and would stay at Eielson AFB vs. Fort Wainwright because the quality was better (for the same price).