From contracting with the Air Force, I can tell you that they have a love affair with spending money. Most of the projects I seen revolved around making sure everyone spent as much as possible, so that they could get more.
One of the things most civilians don't understand about the U.S. military is that the various branches all speak different languages. The same words can mean very different things, depending on the branch of service of the person you are saying them to.
Take, for example, the simple order "secure the building."
If you ask a Marine to "secure the building," they will hand-pick a team of a dozen Marines, who will chopper onto the roof of the building at midnight with knives clenched in their teeth. They will then work their way down floor to floor, slitting the throats of everyone they meet along the way, including the cleaning staff, because why not. When they reach the lobby, they will form up in neat ranks and scream at the top of their lungs that the building has been secured.
If you ask someone from the Army to "secure the building," they will put in a request for an artillery strike, which will pummel the building as well as most of the surrounding block into a pile of rubble. When the artillery fire stops, the highest-ranking officer available will run up to the top of the pile, plant an American flag, and tell anyone who happens to be standing around that the building has been secured.
If you ask someone from the Navy to "secure the building," they will send an encrypted message via satellite to a submarine 900 miles away. The submarine will then fire a Tomahawk cruise missile, which will fly at 500 miles per hour 100 feet off the ground into the building's HVAC exhaust. The explosion of the warhead will cause the building to collapse in on itself. The Navy will then issue a press release stating that the building has been secured.
If you ask someone from the Air Force to "secure the building," they will get you a seven-year lease with an option to buy.
Can you explain this? All the other ones made sense, but I don't understand what this is implying.
The Air Force would secure the right to occupy the building, by buying it.
It is usually joked that AF members are more office workers than soldiers, which is kind of what this joke is implying. My recruiter for the AF embraced that, telling potential recruits the AF has more college degree holders than all the other branches combined (not sure how true it was).
A high percentage of compensation in the military is in the form of benefits, making it incredibly challenging to quantify or compare to a normal pay package.
(Remember the above is the Marines point of view)
When you're deployed and something important breaks, you have a BIG problem. The impact is usually somewhere between you being absolutely miserable for weeks to costing you your life. When you're stateside and something important breaks, you have a reason to expand your empire at next year's budget meeting.
When you see it you immediately look to the top and question their actual leadership capability. In this instance, it is politicians arguing about budget, but we all knew they didn't know squat about the consequences of cutting a budget.
As a result, departments want to have a budget as close as possible to a worst-case scenario, spend the entire year thrifting in case something major occurs and then have to blow it all up right before EOY.