Right, or nowadays it could mean the latest software update hasn’t been installed yet.
One silver lining is this shows that our military is capable of carrying out a fairly honest accounting even when it’s bad news. I’m sure in many militaries it would be the norm to bury a bad seeming number this or make sure it didn’t get generated in the first place.
LOL. I wish I could share your optimism. The more likely scenario in a country as institutionally corrupt as the U.S. today is that this “fairly honest accounting” is nothing more than a tool for defense contractors to get more taxpayer money — to fix things that weren’t built correctly in the first place.
It’s just like incompetent teachers and crappy school administrators citing the poor test scores of their students to justify their demands for more money for schools.
Back in the olden days of Conestoga wagons and F-4 Phantoms, I worked on the latter. It was peacetime...drat that Ronald Reagan...and some smart logisticians devised a scheme called Supply Oriented Maintenance (as opposed to Combat Oriented Maintenance ) which would allegedly streamline training of flight crews and maintenance folks. It worked as well as anything bureaucrats and preening office-type military minds can devise, I suppose. It led to stupid stuff like scheduling regular complete radar system calibrations being followed by complete airframe inspections, which resulted in aircraft sitting idle (in hangars) for a period of time while that phase of maintainence was done. During that time, aircraft that were flying would naturally have issues arise. When they did, the supply chain would be used to provide parts, and aircraft would be returned to mission capable status. Hiccups in supply logistics would arise, and time constraints would sometimes dictate that someone’s ass might be in a sling if Aircraft X wasn’t ready for training missions PDQ. In these incidents, it would be noted by the smart folks whose asses were involved that there were perfectly good parts sitting in the hangars, not doing much of anything. Cannibalization of those aircraft would be the result. In the case of the radar I worked on, it meant taking one part from a well calibrated system and slapping it into another system. The results weren’t always as good as a fine-tuned system, but it worked well enough. Extend that concept to the myriad systems that make up military sircraft...hydraulics, weapons control/ delivery, comm/nav, autopilot, egress, fuel/ engines. and you start to get an idea of what’s involved in keeping a fleet flying.