This comment gives me the opportunity to tell a joke I learned while working on an Air Force base.

One of the things most civilians don't understand about the U.S. military is that the various branches all speak different languages. The same words can mean very different things, depending on the branch of service of the person you are saying them to.

Take, for example, the simple order "secure the building."

If you ask a Marine to "secure the building," they will hand-pick a team of a dozen Marines, who will chopper onto the roof of the building at midnight with knives clenched in their teeth. They will then work their way down floor to floor, slitting the throats of everyone they meet along the way, including the cleaning staff, because why not. When they reach the lobby, they will form up in neat ranks and scream at the top of their lungs that the building has been secured.

If you ask someone from the Army to "secure the building," they will put in a request for an artillery strike, which will pummel the building as well as most of the surrounding block into a pile of rubble. When the artillery fire stops, the highest-ranking officer available will run up to the top of the pile, plant an American flag, and tell anyone who happens to be standing around that the building has been secured.

If you ask someone from the Navy to "secure the building," they will send an encrypted message via satellite to a submarine 900 miles away. The submarine will then fire a Tomahawk cruise missile, which will fly at 500 miles per hour 100 feet off the ground into the building's HVAC exhaust. The explosion of the warhead will cause the building to collapse in on itself. The Navy will then issue a press release stating that the building has been secured.

If you ask someone from the Air Force to "secure the building," they will get you a seven-year lease with an option to buy.

The marine who told me that story says the Army will surround the building with guards and call it secured while those left inside take pot-shots at the guards outside.

(Remember the above is the Marines point of view)

So I have to nitpick a little on the difference between army and Marines in this joke. Marines have artillery also, and army soldiers have instructions to “secure” the building that is basically like what you said the Marines do. The difference in the use cases seem to be one where you know there are no non-combatants in the building and the building itself is not of any value (shell it to the ground), vs having to be more surgical and sweep every single floor (which poses more harm to the service members executing that mission)

Navy "secure the building" means to lash it to the deck.

>If you ask someone from the Air Force to "secure the building," they will get you a seven-year lease with an option to buy.

Can you explain this? All the other ones made sense, but I don't understand what this is implying.

The other forces would seize the building by force.

The Air Force would secure the right to occupy the building, by buying it.

It may be, in part, a pay and benefits joke. I have heard the Air Force pays better.

Generally, pay is the same across all the branches and is public information. Although, I've heard the AF will give additional "substandard housing" pay if they require you to stay on an Army base.

It is usually joked that AF members are more office workers than soldiers, which is kind of what this joke is implying. My recruiter for the AF embraced that, telling potential recruits the AF has more college degree holders than all the other branches combined (not sure how true it was).

I was an army wife. I was friends at one time with a former air force wife. She told me that where army personnel generally get a pay cut during field time, the air force gets extra pay during field time. Edit: She specifically told me that where army wives were stressing about money during field exercises, she was out shopping.

A high percentage of compensation in the military is in the form of benefits, making it incredibly challenging to quantify or compare to a normal pay package.

Ask anyone else, they will lock the doors.

Well, there's a huge difference in the mindset of deployed grunts vs stateside red-tape laden behemoths.

When you're deployed and something important breaks, you have a BIG problem. The impact is usually somewhere between you being absolutely miserable for weeks to costing you your life. When you're stateside and something important breaks, you have a reason to expand your empire at next year's budget meeting.

It's just a shame most people don't know that there is such a difference. I wouldn't feel so bad if all that money was going to important things. But I witnessed so much waste, and so many people who do literally nothing but wait for retirement. It's upsetting that that money doesn't go to the soldiers who need it.

I've heard this is common in business world too. Due to management & bean counters not comprehending organizational needs and leading-without-understanding they just cut your budget to what you last used. Nevermind if something made the spending leaner last year because some expenditure happens on a greater cycle than the 10-K form can handle. This gives better quarterly numbers while crippling the flexibility of that department. So the lower ranks compensate for such an incompetence by spending all the budget they can if there's any left.

When you see it you immediately look to the top and question their actual leadership capability. In this instance, it is politicians arguing about budget, but we all knew they didn't know squat about the consequences of cutting a budget.

This is common with every large organization.

It is also in part a factor of the way procurement works, many beancounters still can't grasp that needs vary and problems happen, so you get a budget, if you come up below budget you lose the extra and may get your next budget lowered to match, and getting more budget is a hard fight.

As a result, departments want to have a budget as close as possible to a worst-case scenario, spend the entire year thrifting in case something major occurs and then have to blow it all up right before EOY.