Defense Spending
The Pentagon’s Bottomless Money Pit (including a personal experience)
$21 trillion of Pentagon financial transactions between 1998 and 2015 could not be traced, documented, or explained.
The long-awaited, Congressionally mandated Department of Defense audit concluded. Read the resulting synopsis from “The Nation”:
Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed (Post with downloadable PDF file, 787 Kb) As reported at https://www.thenation.com/article/pentagon-audit-budget-fraud/ And a shorter synopsis HERE.
Quotes from “The Nation”:
“In all, at least a mind-boggling $21 trillion of Pentagon financial transactions between 1998 and 2015 could not be traced, documented, or explained, concluded Skidmore. To convey the vastness of that sum, $21 trillion is roughly five times more than the entire federal government spends in a year. It is greater than the US Gross National Product, the world’s largest at an estimated $18.8 trillion.” (Underlining is mine ~ Don)
“The Pentagon’s accounting fraud diverts many billions of dollars that could be devoted to other national needs: health care, education, job creation, climate action, infrastructure modernization, and more. Indeed, the Pentagon’s accounting fraud amounts to theft on a grand scale—theft not only from America’s taxpayers, but also from the nation’s well-being and its future.”
And such theft goes into the pockets of this country’s 1%ers!
Check out these recently added subtopics:
Repositioning the Military Budget
FINALLY, there may be some action on repositioning the military budget! The priorities of the U.S. government have been wildly out of touch with both morality and public opinion for decades, and have been moving in the wrong direction even as awareness of the crises...
Time to Reinvest in People and Cut Weapons of War
“At a time when families across the country are struggling to pay the bills—including more than 16,000 military families on food stamps—we need to take a hard look at every dollar and reinvest in people. It’s time to cut weapons of war and prioritize the well-being of our troops, anti- poverty programs, public health initiatives, and diplomacy.”
The Military-Industrial Complex Gets Away With Murder in Contract After Contract
The misadventures of the military/industrial complex simply keep getting more and more brazen from even the ones I witnessed from inside the system in the ‘60s thru ’70s!
Counting the Cost of US Military Bases
Since 9/11, American taxpayers have spent $6.4 trillion on wars and military action in the Middle East and Asia, according to the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. And according to US central command, there are between 60,000 and 70,000 US troops in the Middle East.
Contending with Overmatch
In the abysmal failure of the DOD audit, the military-industrial complex had to come up with SOMETHING that might stand a chance of instilling sufficient FEAR in U.S. citizenry to gain support for ever-increasing and totally unnecessary over-blown budgets
Confidential documents reveal U.S. officials lied about the war in Afghanistan
A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.
Aging B-1 Bomber May Soon Have to Restrict the Way it Flies (More Wasted $)
Aging B-1 Bomber May Soon Have to Restrict the Way it Flies – More taxpayer $$ wasted on the Defense Department…and poor engineering by Rockwell
A Personal Experience with DoD “Cost Control”
A Personal Experience with DoD “Cost Control” Don Chapin The US government basically does very little hands-on cost accounting...since virtually everything is done by contract, commercial/civilian program managers are central to cost tracking and control. When I was...
We need a MASSIVE National Budget Re-alignment!
We need a MASSIVE National Budget Re-alignment! This video (at prepareforchange.net ) ranks the top countries in the world by military spending per year from 1962 to 2018. Spending is calculated in US dollars and is not adjusted for inflation. It shows the US...
Area 51 & Area 52: Secret Underground Levels?
Nick Redfern’s article delves into the question of how much larger Area 51 & 52 may be than previously known, and begs an additional question: How much have these two massive installations cost us?
End Wasteful Military Spending – actionnetwork.org campaign action
Presidential Candidates Must Support Dramatic Pentagon Spending Cuts
Presidential Candidates Must Support Dramatic Pentagon Spending Cuts, Funding of Human Needs Instead, Coalition Says. Agreed, but in our opinion, this article’s proposed $200B cut in the DoD budget is FAR too little!
Senior Republican Slams Pentagon Spending Habits w/ Intro by Don Chapin
Senior Republican Slams Pentagon Spending Habits James Kidd, May 22, 2019 | J, Reading Time: 3 minutes https://whowhatwhy.org/2019/05/22/senior-republican-slams-pentagons-spending-habits/ In a rare rebuke of the Pentagon by a Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley (IA)...
Elizabeth Warren Unveils Plan to Radically Reform the Pentagon
Elizabeth Warren Unveils Plan to Radically Reform the Pentagon May 16, 2019 https://www.truthdig.com/articles/elizabeth-warren-unveils-plan-to-radically-reform-pentagon/ Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. (Charlie Neibergall / AP) Elizabeth Warren has likely heard the...
It’s Time to Reduce Corporate Influence at the Pentagon
The coziness between defense lobbyists, Congress, and the Pentagon — what former President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex — tilts countless decisions, big and small, away from legitimate national security interests and toward the desires of giant corporations that thrive off taxpayer dollars.
The Pentagon’s Bottomless Money Pit (including a personal experience)
The Pentagon’s Bottomless Money Pit (including a personal experience) When the Defense Department flunked its first-ever fiscal review, one of our government’s greatest mysteries was exposed: Where does the DoD’s $700 billion annual budget go? By Matt Taibbi March 17,...
Graft in the Military
Graft in the Military While in Officer Training School I applied for a position as an Ethics Review Officer. Considering recent revelations, it’s probably a good thing I didn’t get that post. ~ Don Chapin • The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed As reported...
Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed
On November 15, Ernst & Young and other private firms that were hired to audit the Pentagon announced that they could not complete the job. Congress had ordered an independent audit of the Department of Defense, the government’s largest discretionary cost center—the Pentagon receives 54 cents out of every dollar in federal appropriations—after the Pentagon failed for decades to audit itself. The firms concluded, however, that the DoD’s financial records were riddled with so many bookkeeping deficiencies, irregularities, and errors that a reliable audit was simply impossible.
Failed Pentagon Audit Reveals $21 Trillion Scandal
Vox “journalist” Matthew Yglesias tried to push this idiotic justification: “The Pentagon’s accounting errors are genuinely enormous, but they’re also just accounting errors—they don’t represent actual money that can be spent on something else.”
Sorry, but no. These are not “accounting errors.” It’s impossible to have trillions of dollars of “accounting errors.” … I’ll let Laurence Kotlikoff at Forbes answer this:
“Let’s recall that this is not simply a matter of boring accounting. Trillions in unaccounted outlays, if that’s what’s involved here, is trillions of our tax dollars being spent without our knowledge. If that’s the case, we’re talking about the biggest government financial deception in the history of the country.”
Costs of War – Estimates through FY 2019
Costs of War United States Budgetary Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars Through FY2019: $5.9 Trillion Spent and Obligated Neta C. Crawford, Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Boston University and Co-Director of the Costs of War Project at Brown...