Just turned on the eqpt for the first time in a couple months and over the last few days the activity on 11.175 has been minimal to say the least.
There has been a real reduction of HF-GCS activity over the last couple of weeks, the last week particularly. At a guess this activity slowdown has been caused by the end of the federal fiscal year.
The way operational units function, particularly with regards to funding for training, is not all that different from a household. In a very general way, each unit is given a training allowance, or training budget, for the year. This budget pays for things like fuel and materials cost in support of training events. Yes, military units have to pay for things like fuel, even if the funds just get transferred from one military organization to another. They are supposed to try and make that budget last all year long. Ideally they run out of training money on September 30, the last day of the fiscal year. They then receive new funding on October 1. In a perversity of government spending you want to spend all of your training funds, with none left over to send back to the general fund. The reasoning here is that if you build a habit of operating significantly under budget each year, then next year when you submit your proposed annual training budget you stand a real chance of someone remembering that for the last few years you operated under your proposed budget, and they might give you a smaller budget than you submit for.
Regardless, units typically try to be conservative in training spending for the first portion of the year. This is particularly true when operating under a continuing resolution and before the annual budget is signed. This means that near mid-year they start to get a good picture of what the rest of the year will look like financially.
Exercises and training cost money. Increased operational tempo means increased consumables cost and increased wear and tear, causing higher materials cost in repairs. So often training picks up about mid-year. And then training slows down near the end of the fiscal year as units start to run very close to the end of their budget.
As I said, there has been a noticeable reduction in HF-GCS activity for the last week+. I suspect, but don’t know for sure, this is caused by the end of the fiscal year. Now that a CR is in place there may be some pickup in activity, but I would not expect real increase until the military budget is passed for the year, tentatively Dec 11.
T!
