Direct from a deployed friend's mouth:
"When laser printers would run out of toner on base in Iraq, we wouldn't order more toner (we couldn't) - we'd order another entire printer and use the toner cartridge in the new one, and shoot at the printer on the range."
Your tax dollars at work.
The reason is easy -- capex for new equipment is easier to get and more nebulous. The new printer may have started life on a budget spreadsheet as a truck.
Opex is hard. It usually works like this: Some poor clerk had no fricking idea how many toner cartridges or replacement staplers were needed, so he wrote down a bullshit number. Some upstream beancounter patted himself on the back and zeroed out the supply budget to make his powerpoint look good, because he screwed up and didn't order enough bullets or whatever.
Now you're stuck, and whomever orders stuff orders a printer to get toner, which is ultimately cheaper than getting some sort of special clearance to spend opex money that wasn't budgeted.
1. Toner not in order system.
2. Previous orders of toner found to be incompatible with printer.
etc.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
For instance, "Oops I accidentally forgot my briefcase full of classified documents on the bus" is as old as spycraft itself.
"I'm sorry sir, I kicked in your front door and started looking for cash and valuables because I was drunk and thought it was my house! I made a huge mistake!"
I'm not see'ing it, and a quick google search isn't finding any support for that idea; it seems to me quite reasonable: Given 2 common possible explanations, prefer one. Perhaps the "Never" is at issue, but I doubt anyone ever actually interprets never as never.
In fact it's often wise to act as if one sees stupidity, even when one suspects malice. In that way one may tempt the malicious into overstepping. But HR doesn't say anything about actions, only about attributions.
The reality is that big military bureaucracy is among the dumbest of organizations and is capable of feats of illogic almost impossible to appreciate.
Would it be ok for me to say that Theranos failed because of stupidity because halons razor? All i know is the company failed and i don't have time to read any articles so aren't i justified in saying it was stupidity not malice?
So many people are involved in the decision making process it’s nearly impossible to make a decision about anything. When I hear speculation about a conspiracy involving printer toner in Iraq, that sounds like nonsense without evidence.
Theranos is the opposite. A naive young founder pretending to be the reincarnation of Steve Jobs with a manipulative guru/mentor/lover pulling the strings is like a Petri dish for corruption.