Originally Posted by
GreenKnight121
During my time as one of Uncle Sam's Misguided Children, we frequently made trips to the local DRDO (Defense Re-utilization and Disposal Office) warehouse "to see what we could see".
As Active and Reserve Military (and National Guard) units have priority over the sale of items, if we found anything we could use (and we regularly did), we placed a "hold" on it, went back and got our Div.Off.'s signature on a "Still required for Government Use" form, and the item was ours. Of course it had to immediately be added to our Squadron's equipment listing, but was where it was going anyway.
We regularly used this method to acquire items we needed, but for which the requisition had been denied, either on the grounds that "you don't really need that" or "you have exceeded your budget for this Fiscal Year".
And the Civilians thought the Military wasted their tax dollars... see... we saved money by taking items we had purchased, and rather than issue them directly where they were needed, transferred them from here to there, forced our personnel to use up their time to go look around to find them, and paid all the expenses to run this operation... just to "save tax dollars by selling excess items" (that we over-bought in the first place, and then refused to issue when a need for it did appear years later).
GreenKnight
I think you meant
Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service...
Originally established in 1972 to consolidate the different military services' disposal operations, the Defense Property Disposal Service (DPDS) was renamed the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service (DRMS) in 1985. DRMS is part of the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), based in Fort Belvoir, Va.
At the base level, it was always known as the Reutilization and Marketing
Office (DRMO).
A great source of
official US military surplus, especially for those of us still on active duty at the time...
Cheers! M2