Wow? Okay, I can see how some think that. A waste of government funding that detracts from the primary mission; ABSOLUTELY! As an active military member coming up on 20 years of service, I have witnessed this frivolous spending first hand. The amount of money it takes to pay these nonners (military members getting paid that do not perform their actual jobs they enlisted for), to ship their equipment, plane tickets, per-diem and hotel costs is astronomical. It's hard for me to explain to a junior member that the military doesn't have funding for cold weather gear, gloves or other mission critical gear to include aircraft parts, yet we can spend money on a band?

And yes, each service has a band like this or several bands, so multiply this spending by no less than four and that's a lot of tax dollars, yes your tax dollars, NOT hard at work.
Rant over and hate me if you want!