That’s “Diseases, Sexually Transmitted, Mother-in-law” to you, Private!
It was started under Pres. Reagan - govt. deregulation and all. Give the manufacturers some leeway and they take all available liberties. We got here-to-for unimaginable interpretations of quality standards, measurement tolerances (:eek::eek::eek:), packaging, and performance. Got lots of, “We don’t have to follow the standard and specifications any more; they are advisory.” Not for ammo and explosives. We shut down acceptance at our minion level and got backing at DOD level. “Yes, the pointy end has to go downrange.” :rolleyes:
Not so. What we got was just a throwback to the quality, performance, etc., in the days of the Robber Barons (late 19th - early 20th century), when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle. Canned beef was often packed in formaldehyde. It was a new thing for the troops in the Spanish American War to have canned food in their rations. The canned beef was colloquially called “embalmed beef”. It was said that more American soldiers were killed by the food than by bullets.
You missed my interpretation of “unimaginable”. Things did indeed go back to historic lows.
Yes, there are the shells or outer hulls of the wheat (the bran is the inside part). They were waste products, thrown away or fed to animals until about 1900, when a North Dakota miller discovered a way to turn them into an edible product … producing Cream of Wheat. About 20 years later, an Owatonna, Minnesota miller figured out a way to do this with malted wheat, which he said gave the cereal a better flavor. That’s called Malt-O-Meal.
Both still sell well today, about a century later.
I wonder how much the Army paid for MIL-SPEC cookies, instead of a supermarket type. probably significantly more.
I seem to remember mrAru reading some sort of ‘newspaper’ of odd military crap like a recruiting office that ordered the wrong size of anchor to be used as ‘lawn decoration’ and ended up with a carrier anchor instead of like a 5 foot long one … or the guy who transposed numbers and ended up being investigated for ordering an armored corvette instead of some auto replacement part [or whatever].
I know mrAru ended up with a bolt of roofing flannel that was close to a quarter inch thick instead of the thin type of flannel for something when he was in RadCon.
I always liked the days before a DRMO auction on the sub base in Groton, walking around looking at what was for sale. We bought several triwalls of clothing - he has utes and BDUs for life out in the barn, a triwall of scraps of gasket material, teflon sheets, insulite sheets and such from NSSF - very handy for assorted repairs around the place. I remember when they sold off the equipment from the molding department - there was a triwall of wooden tools to make the molds of and wooden parts to be molded for replacement on old steam engines and ship parts. Very cool.
No, probably not.
I used to work for a large grocery wholesaler, and we sometimes supplied the military, especially PX’s at bases in the USA. Everything was done thru negotiation and they negotiated really, really hard. And your competitors were also bidding, too. They ended up as written bids, lasting quite a while, and you were required to meet those very strictly. And each part of the bid was separate, and you might get some but not other parts.
(One of our competitors once tried a trick of bidding quite low on the food items, but making it up on the shipping & delivery charges. Thinking nobody would pay much attention to that bid. They eventually got notified that they had won the bid for the food, but that military trucks would be picking it up from their warehouse – no delivery charges paid at all. We were pretty sure they lost money by ‘winning’ that bid.)
Speaking of MIL-SPEC stuff, can anyone get me two NSN 1410-01-491-7386? They’d look great on the top of my Jeep! 
The life support shop in one of my old squadrons ordered a couple boxes of D-cell batteries for our flashlights. The order didn’t get past Base-level Supply because it would have more than exhausted our annual budget. Since this was only November (i.e. 1st month of the new fiscal year) and batteries are cheap, that surprise led to some double-checking.
What do you know: the NSN for a box of 24 D-cells was one digit off the NSN for a boxcar-load of D-cells. Good thing we didn’t have the money for the two boxcars as we’d have had nowhere to store them and no practical way to return them.
There’s goofs, and then there’s Government-scale goofs.
I once did something vaguely similar at a commercial company. I was ordering a pack of 100 nylon cable ties, but screwed up the order and received 100 packs of 100 cable ties. So it’s not just the government that’s capable of such mistakes.
Not too long ago I thought I order three limes from a grocer in Shanghai. I receive three bags of 1 kg each of limes. :smack:
When I was in PH, there was a (possibly apocryphal) tale of a routine part request that went out with an NSN with transposed digits. The result was that a submarine returned from weekly ops to find a crane beside the dock, standing ready to complete delivery of a reactor vessel pressure head.
I would have thought that these part numbers would include some sort of checksum to account for common errors like missing or transposed digits. I mean, if it’s a bunch of digits to begin with, what’s one more?
I think the formaldehyde/embalming fluid was a myth. basically, the army kept meat that had been canned decades before. While unwholesome and nasty, it was never dosed with formaldehyde-that would have been fatal to ingest.
What was funnier was the US troops wearing wool uniforms (in the heat of Cuba); of course, the war was hastily planned , and a near-disaster to boot.
Had the Spanish had a bit more strength, Roosevelt may well have had a defeat.
Sorry, US Army has it coded as Obsolete and Discontinued…
Great stories from everyone, but the all-time leader for something like this is the SF Short story Allamagoosa… http://projectavalon.net/Allamagoosa.pdf …and the mysterious case of the missing offog.