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

[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.