To have spares ready to replace non-serviceable items immediately seems kind of sensible to me.
Used to be policy. Then they introduced "Not in Time". Overnight (on 13.1.88) it became policy to wait, as a minimum, the production lead time. This was later changed to the much maligned, but not quite as stupid, "Just in Time".
But in the interim many valuable and much needed stores were scrapped. The first such instruction was on Hercules Cloud and Clunk radar spares - over £3M worth were ordered to be binned and the contracted turn round time went from 7 days to 18 months. Multiply that by hundreds of avionic equipments and the waste was astronomical; and of course the spares had to be replaced but the Treasury refused funding as it had already been used, so had to be stripped from other parts of the defence budget. And infamously, as part of that "savings", our War Reserves were ordered to be scrapped just as we were gearing up for GW1.
The 3 Star chappie under whose leadership the policy was developed in 1987 used to post here.........