Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/18/officer-in-charge-of-lost-gren.html
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This is sooooo not shocking. I just quite working my civilian job for the Department of Defense. I quite because my boss at the time had a big issue with trans people. I learned she also had an issue with black people, and any other race than white people. She had one lawsuit against her pending, with several other payouts behind her based on her harassment. My case saw her not reprimanded, but given a promotion to a non-supervisory position. She basically got a pay raise after systematically using her position to harass employees under her.
I quite because they gave her a promotion. In my sub agency it happens all the time. Total incompetence got promoted to get them off the floor and away from real work.
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I think that this has always been an issue.
No boss wants one of their management minions to be fired, as it will reflect badly on the department. Firing non-management minions shows you are playing hardball, and management types love to be seen to be ball-breakers.
The only solution to an incompetent management minion is to off load them on to someone-else, and promote them too. That way, if the their new manager fires them, the new boss look like they failed to correctly handle a go-getter who has a string of promotions to show their stellar quality.
By the way, I think that eating such people might be entirely ethical.
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Ha ha! I think you have the whole issue, but here is an added good 'ol boy network with the DoD. They will go out of their way to help each other even if one of them is a dirtbag. It’s very insular in some areas.
Eating such people would actually make them useful. 
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$5000.00 for those grenades? The 4th of July is right around the corner, so probably not .
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God, if losing a box of grenades and an M240 gets people’s dander up this much, they should probably never join the military or work for the government in any capacity. This is absolutely nothing. The whole of the military is rife with theft, fraud and appalling waste.
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This. I used to work at a company (ok, it was ComputerLand Headquarters, they are defunct and can’t sue me) where there were several management types who were totally incompetent, though they had years with the company. We wondered why they were still employed, and agreed that if their bosses fired them for incompetence, they would have to explain to THEIR bosses why they had kept them around for so long. Since the company was sucking at that point, it was safer to keep them around, since few people outside their department noticed the suck, amidst all the other suck. It would have been like looking for suck in a suckstack.
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But distasteful, nonetheless. Bitter, sour and stringy, I suspect.
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Nah, if you want to get rid of someone incompetent, you can almost always find a reason very easily. If nothing else, just give them a difficult job to do and then fire them after they inevitably fuck it up.
Usually in these cases, the incompetent boss has some dirt on a higher up, or else they’re part of an internal fraud ring and/or are paying someone off to stay in their position.
An old coworker used to be pretty high up in a military anti-waste, fraud & abuse program, and he said that these kinds of arrangements are shockingly common, at least in dysfunctional workplaces.
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When Brass fuck up it’s lower ranks who suffer.
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We did used to joke that Carl, the incompetent low-level boss, must have pictures of his superior with a goat.
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I’ve written before on the Boing Boing forums about my tenure as a software developer at a weapons laboratory in New Mexico. I hung out with Navy and Air Force veterans who all had “close call” stories about explosive weaponry (conventional and nuclear) in the hands of incompetents that thankfully for whatever reasons didn’t blow up.
My takeaway is I’m surprised we haven’t had a nuclear accident yet.
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I was thinking about that when I was writing it. It could’ve been MUCH worse. To be fair, the failsafes on those missiles are pretty well designed. One of the stories going around the AFB where I was working was about a nuke falling out of transport aircraft on landing south of Albuquerque. The primary charge detonated but the fail safe kept the fissionable material from going critical.
What did you expect to happen? It takes more than this level of fuck up to get an officer dismissed from the service. He’s not going to command anything again. He’s in charge of a program, but that doesn’t mean he’s got anybody reporting to him. And he’s probably never going to again.
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