Pentagon's failed audits: A trillion here, a trillion there, soon you are talking real money

Politics
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The Pentagon can’t account for over $2 trillion in assets, but that is no big deal according to the comptroller after the fifth failed audit:

“I would not say that we flunked,” said DoD Comptroller Mike McCord, although his office did note that the Pentagon only managed to account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets. “The process is important for us to do, and it is making us get better. It is not making us get better as fast as we want.”
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/11/22/why-cant-the-dod-get-its-financial-house-in-order/

US spends more on its military than the next nine countries combined.

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In spite of the enormous spending, the US is scrounging for weapons and ammunition for the proxy war in Ukraine, and many soldiers are on food stamps.

Has the Pentagon been running a multi-trillion-dollar scam?

For background, John Stewart asked similar questions of the DoD Deputy Secretary, Kathleen Hicks:
(language warning)

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When FDR first saw the plans for the Pentagon he said he really liked them but to lose the giant toilet handle on the north facade because it would be too much honestly in architecture.

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Didn’t we have a 9/11 the last time someone (looking at you, Rummy) publicly spoke about a few trillion missing dollars missing from the Pentagram? :rofl:

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If you were a conservator for a wealthy elderly relative and could not find 60% of the assets, you would be facing lawsuits and possible criminal investigations.

Likewise, a private corporation that failed multiple audits would not be allowed to continue to operate.

There are good reasons that Eisenhower warned about the corrosive effects the growing power of the military-industrial complex.

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Lovely

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The government has assured us that any suggestion of involvement of the US or its allies in the 9-11 attack is a baseless conspiracy theory.

Nothing to see here move on . . .

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The Pentagon conducted and failed its first audit in 2018. There was some reporting about the failed audits during the Trump administration, but now the story seems to have fallen off the radar even though the problems have not been fixed.

What is going on?

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the prices of the platinum toilet seats aren’t much better…

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Our corrupt politicians “label” their spending so that it’s hard to object to. The military is something that all of us know is important…so it’s their black hole of financial corruption. The other word that when you hear it, there’s a high probability this is a black hole of corrupt, political spending is…infrastructure.

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How silly.

It’s the gold American Standard or nothing.

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My observation is that a free-competitive market is more efficient than government ownership, but government ownership is more efficient than government-regulated monopolies. That is true for electric utilities:

EIA data examined by the American Public Power Association showed public utility rates are on average about 13% lower than those of investor-owned utilities.
Publicly owned utilities ‘not a panacea’ but can produce customer benefits | Energy News Network

With electric utilities, the product is well-defined, and components like generators and transformers are available from a competitive market. The differences between state-owned enterprise and regulated monopoly are not that large. For the military, most of the weapons and major components are custom-made, so the possibilities for corruption and inefficiencies are far greater.

In contrast to the American defense industry that is dominated by a hand-full of privately owned contractors, the Russian defense industry is predominately government-owned. The exception would be for components with a large civilian usage with a competitive market.

In the Russian system, the military has direct control over weapons’ production and has incentives to maximize bang for the buck / firepower per ruble. In the US system, contractors have incentives for producing small quantities of super-complex weaponry while gaming and corrupting the oversight system to maximize their profits.

If you doubt that consider the $1.5 trillion spent on the F-35 fighter. The US has spent more on this one weapon than Russia has spent for its entire military for decades, but Pentagon simulations show that Russia could easily defeat the F-35 in a serious war:

“In every case I know of,” said Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense with decades of wargaming experience, “the F-35 rules the sky when it’s in the sky, but it gets killed on the ground in large numbers.”
US 'Gets Its Ass Handed To It' In Wargames: Here's A $24 Billion Fix - Breaking Defense

From what I see, the Russian model for military procurement works far better than the American model, but there are huge vested interests in keeping what we have in the US.

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