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.
Yes, I’ve been involved in the procurement and sustainment of some fairly high dollar defense related instrumentation systems used in the test & evaluation side of things, and I can relate to what you’re saying. It’s easy to underestimate just how hard it is to keep complex equipment operational with all the supply chain and other issues that have to be anticipated and coordinated and all that. There is no ideal way to do this, and every approach has its tradeoffs. Our military industrial complex reminds me of the line about democracy that says it’s bad but it’s the least bad of the available options (or something like that). In my tiny little slice of that world I saw lots of dysfunction but also lots of diligence and overcoming of obstacles to make things work within that imperfect system, often with successful outcomes. Sometimes you just have to accept that an ugly win is still a win and that a system that generally produces wins of any kind given the extreme level of difficulty is a pretty good system in this imperfect world of ours.