Over a mere two decades,
the Pentagon lost track of a mind-numbing $10 trillion
— that’s trillion, with a fat, taxpayer-funded “T” — and no one, not
even the Department of Defense, really knows where it went or on what it
was spent.
Even though audits of all federal agencies became mandatory in 1996, the Pentagon has apparently
made itself an exception, and — fully 20 years later — stands obstinately orotund in never having complied.
Because, as defense officials insist — summoning their best impudent
adolescent — an audit would take too long and, unironically, cost too
much.
“Over the last 20 years, the Pentagon has broken every promise to Congress about when an audit would be completed,” Rafael DeGennaro, director of
Audit the Pentagon,
told the
Guardian recently.
“Meanwhile, Congress has more than doubled the Pentagon’s budget.”
Worse, President Trump’s newly-proposed budget seeks to toss an
additional $54 billion
into the evidently bottomless pit that is the U.S. military — more for
interventionist policy, more for resource-plundering, more for proxy
fighting, and, of course, more for jets and drones to drop more bombs
suspiciously often on civilians.
Maybe.
Because, without the mandated audit, the DoD could be purchasing damned near
anything, at any cost, and use, or give, it — to anyone, for any reason.
Officials with the Government Accountability Office and Office of the Inspector General have
catalogued egregious financial
disparities
at the Pentagon for years — yet the Defense Department grouses the cost
and energy necessary to perform an audit in compliance with the law
makes it untenable.
Astonishingly, the Pentagon’s own watchdog tacitly approves this
technically-illegal workaround — and the legally-gray and, yes,
literally, on-the-books-corrupt practices in tandem — to what would
incontrovertibly be a most unpleasant audit, indeed.
Take the following of myriad examples, called “plugging,” for which
Pentagon bookkeepers are not only encouraged to conjure figures from
thin air, but, in many cases, they would be physically and
administratively incapable of performing the job without doing so —
without ever having faced consequences for this brazen cooking of books.
To wit,
Reuters reported the results of an investigation into Defense’s magical number-crunching —
well over three years ago, on November 18, 2013 — detailing the illicit tasks of 15-year employee,
“Linda
Woodford [who] spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony
numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense’s accounts.”
Woodford, who has since retired, and others like her, act as
individual pieces in the amassing chewed gum only appearing to plug a
damning mishandling of funds pilfered from the American people to fund
wars overseas for resources in the name of U.S. defense.
“Every month until she retired in 2011,” Scot J. Paltrow
wrote for
Reuters,
“she
says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the
Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service,
the Pentagon’s main accounting agency. Using the data they received,
Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing
monthly reports to square the Navy’s books with the U.S. Treasury’s – a
balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services
and other Pentagon agencies.
“And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were
missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation
of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it
came from. ‘A lot of times there were issues of numbers being
inaccurate,’ Woodford says. ‘We didn’t have the detail … for a lot of
it.’”
Where a number of disparities could be corrected through hurried
communications, a great deal — thousands each month, for each person on
the task — required fictitious figures. Murkily
deemed,
“unsubstantiated change actions” — tersely termed, “plugs” — this
artificial fix forcing records into an unnatural alignment is common
practice at the Pentagon.
Beyond bogus books, the Pentagon likely flushed that $10 trillion in
taxes down the toilet of inanity that is unchecked purchasing by inept
staff who must be devoid of prior experience in the field of defense.
This tax robbery would eclipse the palatability of blood money —
if it weren’t also being
wasted
on items such as the 7,437 extraneous Humvee front suspensions —
purchased in surplus over the inexplicable 14-year supply of 15,000
unnecessary Humvee front suspensions already gathering warehouse-shelf
dust.
And there are three items of note on this particular example, of many:
One, the U.S. Department of Defense
considers inventory surpassing a three-year supply,
“excessive.”
Two, the stupefying additional
seven-thousand-something front suspensions arrived, as ordered, during a
period of demand reduced by half.
Three, scores of additional items — mostly
unaccounted for in inventory — sit untouched and aging in storage,
growing not only incapable of being used, but too dangerous to be
properly disposed of safely.
Worse, contractors greedily sink hands into lucrative contracts — with all the same supply-based waste at every level, from the
abject disaster that is the $1 trillion F-35 fighter program,
to the $8,123.50 shelled out for Bell Helicopter Textron helicopter gears with a price tag of $445.06, to the DoD
settlement with Boeing for overcharges of a whopping $13.7 million.
The latter included a charge to the Pentagon of $2,286 — spent for
an aluminium pin ordinarily costing just $10 — the irony of whose 228.6 percent markup cannot be overstated.
Considering all the cooking of numbers apparently fueled with burning
money stateside, you would think Defense channeled its efforts into
becoming a paragon of economic efficiency when the military defends the
United States.
Overseas. From terrorism. And from terrorists. And
terrorist-supporting nations.
But this is the Pentagon — and a trickle of telling headlines
regularly grace the news, each evincing yet another missing shipment of
weapons, unknown allocation of funds, or
retrieval
of various U.S.-made arms and munitions by some terrorist group deemed
politically less acceptable than others by officials naming pawns.
In fact, so many American
weapons and
supplies
lost by the DoD and CIA become the property of actual terrorists — who
then use them sadistically against civilians and strategically against
our proxies and theirs — it would be negligent not to describe the
phenomenon as pattern, whether or not
intent exists behind it.
Since practically the moment of nationalist President Donald Trump’s
inauguration, the ceaselessly belligerent of the military-industrial
machine have been granted a new head cheerleader with a bullhorn so
powerful as to render calls to apply the brakes effectively, if not
unpatriotically, moot.
Sans any optimistic indication thus far lacking from the Trump
administration it would reverse course and move toward, rather than
against, transparency, the painstaking audit imperative to DoD
accountability remains only a theory — while the Pentagon’s $10 trillion
sits as the world’s largest elephant in apathetic America’s living
room.
For now, we know generally where our money is going: war. Which
aspect of war — compared to the power of your outrage about its callous
and reckless execution in your name — matters little.
