Pentagon's Missing Trillions: Cui Bono/Malo?

cui bono/malo? Who will gain/lose?Show more

The Real Story of the Pentagon’s $21 Trillion Con Game
The Pentagon has for years been on the GAO’s list of agencies with a high risk for fraud, waste, and abuse, because of their horrible budgeting and accounting. That should… People should just be outraged.
Lindorff’s investigation reveals not only why the Pentagon failed the audit, but why it resisted for so long. He explains how $21 trillion of Pentagon financial transactions, on both sides of the ledger, between 1998 and 2015 could not be traced, documented, or explained.

In this conversation, Lindorff details how the fraud worked to inflate an already huge budget,
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/the-real-story-of-the-pentagons-21-trillion-con-game/

Since the end of the cold war U.S. has sold more weapons than the rest of the world Combined -

During the Cold War half century the United States spent around $13 trillion (at 1996 prices) on defence
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/war_and_economy/13_cold_war_costs.pdf

Global arms trade hits highest level since end of Cold War
2017
U.S. is by far the world's biggest arms exporter, accounting for 33% of all weapons exports in the five years through 2016
https://money.cnn.com/2017/02/19/news/arms-sales-soaring/index.html

U.S. Arms Sales since 9/11: Assessing the Risk from Arms Sales
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was America’s biggest client, purchasing $25.8 billion worth of weapons
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/risky-business-role-arms-sales-us-foreign-policy#u-s-arms-sales-since-9-11-assessing-the-risk-from-arms-sales

United States is the world’s top arms exporter, with 2020 sales from leading U.S. producers reaching $285 billion
https://www.cfr.org/podcasts/cost-us-arms-trade

Power, Profit, or Prudence?
US Arms Sales since 9/11
https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/SSQ/documents/Volume-14_Issue-2/Thrall.pdf

On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated in a Congressional hearing that
the Department of Defense had lost track of $2.3 trillion in transacZons. Mr. Rumsfeld made the
following statement:
According to some esZmates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transacZons. We cannot share
informaZon from floor to floor in this building because it's stored on dozens of technological
systems that are inaccessible or incompaZble."1
-­‐Remarks as Delivered by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, The Pentagon,
Monday, September 10, 2001
Since that Zme, numerous documents produced by the Office of the Inspector General have reported
trillions of dollars as “unsupported journal voucher adjustments”.
https://missingmoney.solari.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Unsupported_Adjustments_Report_Final_3.pdf

According to Bloomberg’s Anthony Carpaccio, the Department of Defense made $35 trillion in “accounting adjustments”
in 2019, easily surpassing the $30.7 trillion in such adjustments recorded in 2018.

So what are these accounting adjustments? Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies says they represent “a lot of double, triple,
and quadruple counting of the same money as it got moved between accounts” within the Pentagon. “A lot” may be an understatement: According to
government data, there were 562,568 adjustments made in the Pentagon’s books in 2018.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pentagon-35-trillion-accounting-black-231154593.html

The Pentagon – the U.S. “Defense” Department – was just audited for the fifth time. And they just announced they failed for the fifth time. If that’s not accountability, I don’t know what is!

When I say they “failed” their audit, I don’t mean they put a 9 instead of a 7 on one of the balance sheets, causing two soldiers to get accidentally left in
Antarctica freezing their asses off. I mean, they really failed their audit. As The Hill put it, “The Defense Department has failed its fifth-ever audit,
unable to account for more than half of its assets, but the—” Hold up. Hold up. Did ya catch that? They can’t account for over half their assets!
This is the largest murder machine on the planet – nearly a trillion dollars spent
every year – and they don’t know where half their shit is?! How is this not criminal?
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/12/16/the-pentagon-audit-assets-gone-missing/

The issue received additional attention in the media when incoming Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to the $21 trillion in a Tweet:

$21 TRILLION of Pentagon financial transactions “could not be traced, documented, or explained.” $21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T. That means %66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon. And that’s before premiums.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kotlikoff/2019/01/09/holding-u-s-treasuries-beware-uncle-sam-cant-account-for-21-trillion/

The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed
How US military spending keeps rising even as the Pentagon flunks its audit.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/pentagon-audit-budget-fraud/