Pentagon can't account for 8.5trillion in the last decade and a half....

[Lobo27]

Talks about how they waste, like building vehicles they don't need, companies like Haliburton charging 100 dollars for a soda etc... And of how they cover their wastes...

[JeffHead]

1. Start looking in the couch cushions.......

of all those multi million $ mansions just across the Potomac River. Owned by the CEOs of the defense contactors. They've been ripping off the Pentagon for decades. That's where I would start.

[PoliticAverse]

2. Look here's some of it!...

And the maddening story: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

[Th1onein]

13. It wasn't America's money, but what about Iraqi oil paying for the war?

Last edited Sat Nov 30, 2013, 02:35 AM - Edit history (1)

I'm so tired of the lies.

[awoke_in_2003]

15. Iraqi oil...

made Shell and BP richer

[mattvermont]

3. roughly 500+ Billion/yr

AYFKM?

[Treant]

6. No we're not FKY.

Let's see, that's over $1,500 per American per year for the last decade. Over fifteen thousand dollars just gone and "nobody knows where."

Per tax payer over that period, it's considerably higher. I'm too depressed to do the math, however.

Putting just that into perspective, the American government could have sent every single American a friggin' check for $1,500 to spend as we saw fit, providing a gigantic boost to the economy every single year for the last decade.

And that's just what was "lost." Scare quotes because I'm sure there are plenty of people who know exactly where it went and made a great living either on it or getting it there.

[Lobo27]

9. And yet they want the Defense Department to spend more...

[truedelphi]

4. Off to the Greatest Pages with ya. n/t

[blkmusclmachine]

5. They stacked 100 dollar bills on pallets and shipped them to our enemies, trying to buy "friends."

[blkmusclmachine]

7. And they're trying to steal it out of your Social Security Net, via the "Grand Bargain."

[sakabatou]

8. It's been LONG overdue for an audit

[maindawg]

10. I have been screaming about this on every forum I can for years

The MIC has drained our wealth. No one cares. While they walk into our house and take everything we sit there and say nothing. They then ask for our children and we relent.
.............We knew they were out of control in 1970. We already heard about 1500 dollar toilet seats. Thousand dollar hammers. We heard it and we did nothing. We just gave them our young men and they sent them off to die.
It was business as usual.
Every penny we can collect as a tax in America, goes to the MIC. every penny.Then we borrow money from China, to run our government. Thats how we do it.
We bully everyone else in the world. We are the bully of the world. Our war machine will consume us.

[Major Nikon]

11. A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money

[SheilaT]

12. There's a reason

for the term "Beltway Bandits".

[Fridays Child]

14. I'm really bad at math. Can anyone help me out here?

That amount of money could provide high-quality, comprehensive health care for how many Americans, for how many years? Or, maybe it could help with education, or safe places to stay, or improved public transportation.

Well, if they ever find it, I want my share to help out with all of the above.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

17. Here ya go...

http://server4.whiterosesociety.org/content/malloy/MalloyMemories/Money_matters.mp3

[Fridays Child]

23. Malloy is amazing.

Thanks for the great link!

[Spitfire of ATJ]

30. He should be on every station in the country.

[bhikkhu]

20. It's not that its lost, but rather that the accounting methods are flawed

there's a good article on it here: http://www.publicintegrity.org/2011/10/13/7063/pentagons-accounting-shambles-may-cost-additional-1-billion

I know its easy to revert to the "waste, fraud, incompetence, corruption" meme, but its more about using a uniform accounting system, with verifiable paper trails. That's easier said than done; first, how many here keep a general journal for all of their household transactions, and reconcile that every month with accounts in a set of ledger books? I have from time to time, but if you do just that, you still fail an audit if you don't have verifiable paper trails for each and every transaction. Consistent verifiable paper trails is where the military has always had problems, and it doesn't imply theft or corruption so much as lack of institutional awareness of accounting standards. Pretty much every other government agency has met the standards now, just the DOD is left...

[Fridays Child]

22. That's right, of course. But, whenever I see DoD figures, I remember that Robert Fulghum quote.

"It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need, and our air force has to have a bake-sale to buy a bomber."

[ThoughtCriminal]

32. Those would have to be some damn good cookies.

[GoneFishin]

28. Maybe. But if they wanted to account for it accurately they could do it.

The technology and funding they have access to is surpassed by none. That includes computers and software. If they can't account for the funds then it is by design, or at best, apathy (which I don't believe).

How convenient it must be to have access to unlimited trillions of taxpayers' dollars, and a mind-bogglingly complex web of accounting procedures, complete with foreign contractors in all corners of the globe.

Some of the funds are bound to "slip through the cracks".

[Major Nikon]

29. If you can't account for it, then it fits perfectly under the meme, which includes incompetence

I have no sympathy for the argument that posits that it wasn't really wasted but we just can't tell you where it went. If they can't tell us where it went, then it might as well have been wasted because there's no way to prove otherwise and it absolutely subverts our entire budgetary process which relies on knowing where it went. If they can't tell us where it went, then those responsible should be fired at the very least or go to jail. When that starts happening I can guarantee things will change. You can't compare this with how anyone else accounts for their own personal bank account. If I account poorly for my money, that falls back on me. If the government accounts poorly for the money they are given, that still falls back on me. The military actually kept better track of their money when they were doing on ledger books. In the computer age there's even less of an excuse because productivity increases and it takes less manpower to do it.

[bhikkhu]

31. They can say where it went, they just can't prove it sufficiently

the standard of evidence is pretty high for the audit they are unable to pass. Again, one way to think about is to try keeping a general journal for all of your own financial transactions, then balance it all out in a set of general ledger accounts. Even for a household, that involves a great deal of work and self-discipline.

But - even if its all thorough and balances perfectly, you still fail an audit. Unless you have built into your accounting system a method of proving every transaction with a paper trail, which usually requires verifiable signatures and cross-verification with other auditable accounting systems, you fail. And unless you have built into it a system of financial controls limiting access to funds and requiring multiple authorizations before an expense, you also fail. In a household it can't be done, in a large hierarchical structure it is possible, but to do it perfectly its a ground-up effort. They will get it done, but the level of effort should at least be respected. There are cross-purposes involved, as the military was developed to be efficient and absolutely reliable at one thing, and it wasn't accounting.

[Major Nikon]

33. Which means they can't say where it went

It's not as if the standards for audits are hidden in some secret tome and locked away for only independent auditors. DoD should have been doing their own internal audits to the same standards. If they couldn't manage that task they should have been contracting with one of any number of professional auditing firms that could have shown them how to do it or done it for them. If they weren't the only logical explanation is incompetence.

I don't care how much work or discipline it takes. You're talking about an organization that is founded on the principles of work and disciple with a tradition of exactly that which stretches all the way back to the Romans and Greeks. They teach it to every member of the military enlisted or officer during introductory training. They teach it in every single one of their leadership development courses. They teach it in staff college to military and civilian leaders. Furthermore it's not as if we aren't giving them 4.7% of our entire GDP. Any work required would have cost an infinitesimally small amount relative to everything else.

I don't buy the excuses and I have no tolerance for them. Even if they don't do anything else right, they should get their budget and accounting right. It should be their first priority. Anything else is counterproductive to whatever other mission they may have.

[Samantha]

16. And that is exactly why we must cut Social Security and Medicare

and phase out food stamps....

Sam

[freshwest]

18. How? It's called privatization. The information is proprietary and not public for all intents. Small

government shills push the mantra 'government should be run like a business because it's more efficient.'

First, government and its budges are moral agents to protect equality and help everyone, not just the profiteer. Businesses are about distributing the wealth created by their employees to their boss. It is not about rights or equality or human needs or anything else. It's about profits. Period.

The efficiency they claim to be able to create, is done by a profit and loss sheet way of accounting. In that way of thinking, the elderly, poor, disabled or otherwise vulnerable are not profitable. They should be eliminated from the ledger. If they have to die to get off the books, fine. A person's value or the value of any living thing, or the world that supports us all, is measured in terms of profit.

A book by a sheep herder, called 'A Shepherd Looks At The 23rd Psalm' has a comparison that may ring true here. He describes what he did a sheep herder who kept his flock healthy in order to gather their fleece. It entailed a lot more work than I imagined, keeping after their daily activities so they did not accidentally kill themselves, had the right food to keep them healthy, and protected them from predators.

Think about that analogy in terms of government for a moment. He only wanted the fleece and let the sheep do what they pleased. They were allowed to 'rest in green pastures and lay beside the still waters,' to enjoy their lives.

In contrast, he described his neighbor, who raised sheep for meat, that is slaughter.Those sheep had lousy pasture and said he saw them gather at the fence, looking with longing at the pasture he grew for his flock.

They were not given any of the healthy feed or the medical care he gave his sheep, relieving them of parasites, and their fur was matted and filthy, their forage just enough to keep them alive. If they died from lack of care, they would still satisfy his intent, as they were all to end up as mutton anyway.

The sheep herder being of a religious bent, saw this in terms of a parable. The Good Shepherd is the name for Jesus. Whether he was telling the truth about all this, IDK. But by the terms he used for the man who raised mutton were not generous, saying that he was into weighing the their flesh for profit.

This is the difference in forms of government, as well. As far as the GOP is concerned, many people in this nation and world do not yield them profit, thus they should be put off the Earth, essentially. All of their philosophy points to this.

And back to the defense industry. It claims that they are hired by the people to protect them from this or that, which since WW2 has not been the case. And they are killing the public with their greed. No efficiency of any kind is being done by them, unless Reagan's plan of running up the bill for defense to END social spending is called efficiency. Of the worst kind, because it will kill people they consider to be of no worth.

It's not really any different than what the Nazis did in terms of efficiency. They worked people to death, literally. No health care, minimum housing, clothing and food, no respect for the condition, and most certainly no plan for retirement or a pension, huh?

They push privatization because it's better for them and not because it's a good deal for the tax payer. And we cannot forget that the private sector has made fortunes off the defense industry. They always have. Even Lincoln warned us of this.

The largesse these firms get from the tax payer is a also bribery, a form of pay for votes from the workers who they hire, who will vote for more wars, more defense spending, and also they will vote to cut social spending on all other groups in society but their own.

The hypocrisy of the GOP going to protest the shut down of the WW2 park was emblematic of their priorities. The cuts to vets and active duty service people, the disabled vets, they did not protest. They protested what to them was a method of getting public support due to those who died, to keep up the myth they are in the business of defending the USA. They aren't. Rather complex, but in the end, disgusting and self serving. A joke on all of us.

JMHO.

[DallasNE]

19. What's The Story Here

The headline states the Pentagon "can't account" for $8.5 trillion, which is exactly half of our current debt, yet the story focuses on "waste" for things like vehicles they don't need. The latter says they can account for all kinds of waste making the headline factually wrong. These kind of stories have important things to say then the presentation undermines all credibility in the report. DU needs to be more careful when presenting such articles. I would love to see a good report on Pentagon waste. Not one that kills its own credibility with wild, unsupported claims $8.5 trillion the DOD can't account for.

[bhikkhu]

21. The story is rather more careless with its claims than the DoD is with its accounting

which is normal. When you have a people entirely used to accepting "fraud, waste, corruption, and government" as synonyms, the media doesn't need to work very hard.

[jmowreader]

25. That's also over 15 years - $550 billion per year

If I may hazard a guess, the lion's share of that probably occurred between the 2001 start of the Afghanistan War and now. A shitload of that money "can't be accounted for" because it went for things our warfighters ate, slept in, poured in gas tanks, fired at people, dropped on them, got blown up or had used on them at the hospital.

And ya know something? Without that great Bushian invention the $85,000 Per Year Private, that number would be at least a third lower. I remember reading the pre-DADT repeal right-wing editorials which claimed not continuing to Chapter 15 gays out of the service would destroy morale, and wondering if knowing the guy who slept in the bunk next to you was gay or knowing the cook in the mess hall makes more money than the colonel would be worse. A few minutes of googling will display that Halliburton was charging $200 per case of cola, $99 to wash a bag of laundry badly, destroying-in-place and replacing on the taxpayer's dollar $100,000 supply trucks after they got one flat tire (and as anyone who drives in the desert can attest, flat tires are pretty common) and on and on and on ad infinitum.

If Congress wants to solve a lot of the military's overspending problem, simply require that anyone who goes to a war zone with the US military, with the exception of members of the civilian press, be a member of the US military. We did it before and can do it again.

[jmowreader]

24. If you went back to the Reagan administration it would be worse than that

True war story: We the People used to pay $64 for a military specification gasoline lantern. In the days before President Clinton issued every supply sergeant a Visa card (it's called an IMPAC card - International Merchant Purchase Authorization Card) and allowed him or her to buy their hammers and axle grease and toilet paper on the open market where those things were less expensive, you had to go to the Self Service Supply Center on post and get the shit there. And SSSC was outrageously expensive - a case of ass wipe of Communist-shit-paper quality was more expensive than a case of Charmin at the restaurant supply store two miles from post. We know that because my supply sergeant actually went to the restaurant supply store in Clarksville and priced toilet paper. The very finest bun wad he could have laid his hands on was cheaper than the bad stuff he was buying from the army. And lanterns that you took out of the box and immediately disassembled because they wouldn't work the way they came were four times the price of Coleman lanterns - that only needed gasoline added to get them to work - at Grandpa's out on Fort Campbell Boulevard.

Note to all: Do not use jet fuel in a gasoline lantern. Just don't. Trust me on this.

Now as to the control arm story he tells: A control arm on a Humvee is a triangular framework in the vehicle's suspension system. A Humvee contains eight, four each of two different National Stock Numbers. They are bolted to the frame through bushings so they'll move up and down, and the assembly that holds the wheel on is bolted between the upper and lower control arms. They had to order more because, as you will recall, beginning in 2001 our dictator took us to war against people whose idea of a good time was going out and using command-detonated mines to blow the control arms off American Humvees. In other words, we had to order more because We Ran The Fuck Out.

A better story was one from the 1970s. Once upon a time the Sperry Univac Corporation (now called Unisys) designed for the Navy a computer called the AN/UYK-7. The Navy ordered a thousand of them.



While Univac was working on this machine, they came to the realization that this was a Really Great Computer that the Navy would want to use for everything, so they called the Navy before they started making the production machines and told them they actually needed two thousand machines to meet demands they hadn't thought of yet and they could get the 2000 computers at a lower per-unit cost because the R&D expenses would be spread out over more units. No, no, Univac was told, one thousand will be more than fine. So they shrugged their shoulders, went into the other room and made a thousand computers.

Six months later Univac's prediction turned out accurate and the Navy ordered a thousand more machines. Univac quoted a lower price because the R&D was already paid for, only to learn it was illegal at the time to pay less for something than you did the first time. Hence, the US Government paid for the R&D on this computer twice. The president of Univac personally lobbied the government to get this law changed, and it was.

That problem wasn't repeated on the replacement for the UYK-7, which is called the UYK-43. The Shah of Iran paid for development of that machine, and when the Shah was overthrown the president of Unisys called the Navy: "The Shah paid for a much-improved version of the UYK-7, and now we can't sell Iran any of them. How many do you want?" They used this computer to run the Aegis Automatic Seagull Fryer, so the answer eventually became "a hell of a lot!"

[another_liberal]

27. "Seagull Fryer?"

That doesn't sound very tasty at all.

[jmowreader]

35. Each AN/SPY-1A radar antenna puts out 1.5 million watts of microwave energy

This is a Ticonderoga-class cruiser:



They're a bit hard to pick out, but the six-sided things mounted high up on the superstructure are the Aegis antennas. There are four on each ship, mounted to give 360-degree coverage. Every time they activate the system, sea birds flying too close to the antennas are killed by the radar energy.

[Lobo27]

37. Holy Crap!!!!

Are the energy waves, Radio waves? Just crazy stuff....

[jmowreader]

38. It's radio waves

The system has an effective range of 200 miles, and it puts out a LOT of frequencies at one time; each frequency can track one target as is the case with any radar (except air traffic control radars which respond to transponders in the target aircraft, which the enemy refuses to install), so if you want to track lots of targets you need lots of frequencies. It's also a phased-array radar, which introduces a whole new set of issues. Phased array radar builders take a shitload of little radar transceivers and assemble them into matrices like the one that comprises the screen on your computer. They then sweep across them, again like the screen on your computer, to produce the radar image. If there are 15,000 transceivers in the array - I don't know how many there are because it's one of those things You Don't Need To Know - each one is only putting out 100 watts...the flip side is, because the system is tracking so many targets there are modes in which the whole array is emitting.

The seagulls and albatrosses don't care about that; they do care that if they fly too close to one of these antennas when it's on, they die instantly.

[AtheistCrusader]

39. If they turned these on full power in port, the damage would be incredible.

[jmowreader]

40. Exactly. Imagine being berthed next to an aircraft carrier and turning this on

Or some other class of ship that had personnel at the same height as the SPY-1 arrays. Some poor commander would be knocking on a lot of sailors' doors...

[another_liberal]

26. The money they can account for . . .

The real hell of it is that the expenditures they can account for have generally done our country more harm than good anyway.

Of the rest, half a trillion is probably hidden in a bunker on Dick Cheney's ranch.

[iandhr]

34. Congress often forces the Pentagon to buy stuff they don't need.

The Pentagon has told the armed services committee that they have too many tanks and they don't want any more. Congress is forcing the spending anyway.

[jmowreader]

41. Newtie was a huge advocate of doing that

Every year Newt Gingrich was in Congress he put ten C-130H Hercules transports in the defense budget. The Air Force doesn't necessarily want the C-130s they have now; they'd rather have larger planes. But Newt, being the stalwart defender of air transport that also happened to have the C-130 final assembly plant in his district, always managed to get the USAF the planes he knew they really needed.

The worst part of the whole Pentagon budget: if the Pentagon wrote the thing, Congress passed it as the Pentagon wrote it, and the President signed it exactly as Congress passed it, it would probably be 15 to 20 percent smaller than it is.

[ReRe]

36. K&R

for exposure!

I can't find my effing keys and the Pentagon can't find $8.5 trillion.

[QuestForSense]

42. Well, they can't defend this!

But of course no one is asking them to. $8.5 trillion would solve a lot of problems, by the way.