The Pentagon can't account for trillions of dollars? Say it ain't so!

Well, everyone, in a stunning report submitted by the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Defense, it's been discovered that the Pentagon cannot account for $6.5 trillion worth of general Army funding transactions. There's no data associated with any transactions to account for this massive expenditure of tax money. As you can judge from the title of this post, this is literally anything but shocking. This is just another feather in the cap of an organization that regularly pretends that it is not accountable to anyone but itself.

This is an organization who, when the rest of the government was forced to begin filing audits of their accounting practices to Congress in 1996, decided they didn't need to be bothered with it. The Pentagon has never been officially audited, so even this latest $6.5 trillion tomfoolery is just a drop in the bucket compared to what has been regularly misspent, misallocated, misappropriated, and just plain missing. The Department of Defense has simply carried on the way they always have, distributing money taken from people at gunpoint and disbursing it through dozens of archaic and incompatible systems to hundreds of different sub-departments and sections. At the end of the flow, the groups receiving funding are told that it's all they're allocated and there isn't anymore. At the spigot, Congress is assured that the funds being allocated for the Department of Defense are being utilized for maximum efficiency in defense of the nation.

How's that you ask, given that the Department of Defense has no idea where any of this money actually goes? Well, they plug the books with made-up numbers. In a 2013 Reuters report, it was discovered through interviews with Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) accountants that DFAS supervisors regularly had accountants fabricate figures so that the accounting between the various branches and the U.S. Treasury would match. Ostensibly, they did this because accounting summaries from the various branches were not turned in until two days before DFAS had to reconcile accounts between the branches and the Treasury, but even this doesn't explain how whole blocks of accounting data is simply missing. There is no discernable paper trail for billions of dollars that are being spent yearly by the Department of Defense, and the only solution it has is to make up numbers out of whole cloth to at least preserve the thin veil of accountability it tries to parade around. If the Department of Defense was subject to the same rules as private businesses regarding government audits, they would have been shut down and dismantled years ago.

During the time I spent in the U.S. Army, I witnessed some of this ridiculous financing voodoo first-hand. Time and again, requests were denied to engage in constructive training events at different facilities off of Fort Bragg; training events that actually would have aided readiness for the 82nd Airborne Division. Parts for our Humvees seemed to be in a constant state of back order because of lack of funds. However, when it came to range time, we were ordered to expend all ammunition, even if our entire unit had already qualified on the shooting tables we were firing. When I and others asked "why not just save the ammo for later, when we might be short for that training day?" the response was the same: if we don't use it all up blind firing, we won't have an allotment for the same amount next time. Waste. Nothing but utter waste of resources for accounting purposes

This is the problem with government monopoly of defense, among others. There is no accountability. National defense is seen as utterly vital to the well-being of "the People," and any suggestion of cutting defense spending is met with rabid vitriol from a large majority of the people who are being expropriated to fund it. This blind faith in the necessity of the Department of Defense has made it immune to any sort of transparency or even basic accounting. Any tiny reduction in budgets is hailed as a gutting of the military and claims that the nation will be vulnerable to ever-increasing attacks are sounded over and over again until proponents of actual national defense or, God forbid, privatization of defensive services are browbeaten into silence or ridiculed into obscurity. This kind of gross waste, fraud, and abuse is tolerated, in a way that no other organization could possibly get away with, because it's the government's defensive administration, and we all know that they're vital and necessary. We know that because the government tells us it is, and if you question it, you're a traitor and you should move to Somalia.

But worry not, citizen. Your wise, benevolent, purely selfless overlords are here to help you and keep you safe. You don't need to know what your tax dollars are spent on, and you should be grateful to have such superhuman beings watching over you.