By Dave Lindorff
That’s what should have been the biggest news of 2021.
Instead, the story, which broke on November 17, was largely ignored or buried. The nation’s two main newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, have simply ignored it. Other news organizations stenographically quoted Pentagon officials as admitting that they “failed again” but saw “progress,” and as promising that they would achieve a “clean” audit by… get this … 2027.
The Pentagon, with some $3 trillion (give or take a trillion but who’s counting?) in assets and a record current 2021 budget of $738 billion, has for the third year in a row failed its audit. An army of 1400 auditors hired by us taxpayers for $230 million and borrowed from some of the biggest auditing firms in the country, spent the past year poring through the books and visiting hundreds of operations of the government’s largest and geographically vastest single agency, and came back with word that they couldn’t give it a pass.
They couldn’t even figure it out.
Think about that a minute. The US military, which each year sucks up close to half of the nation’s now $1.6-trillion discretionary budget, is a financial black hole! Nobody in the White House Budget Office, the Congressional Armed Services or Budget Committees, the General Accounting Office, or in the Pentagon itself, can say with a straight face how much the Pentagon spends of all the funds it is allocated by Congress each year, where that money gets spent, of even where all the equipment it buys — planes, ammunition, bombs, ships, etc. — are currently.
Perhaps more important in the long term, nobody anywhere in the government can honestly say how much the Pentagon actually needs each year, even according to the trumped up claims made in each year’s proposed Pentagon budget.
That in itself explains why the Pentagon budget just keeps growing. Look at this year, for example, where Congress actually handed an extra $53 billion to the nation’s military, over and beyond the $715 billion that the Pentagon and the Biden Administration asked for. The just adopted FY 2022 budget, called he National Defense Appropriations Act (NDAA) is, incredibly, larger in constant dollars than any year since World War II. That is to say, it is greater adjusted for inflation than it has been for any year during the Korean War, the entire Cold War, or the Vietnam War (when the US at one point had over 500,000 troops in battle, a huge US Navy Pacific fleet in he South China Sea and half the US Air Force, including a large portion of the Strategic Air Command’s B-52s, busy with carpet bombing and napalming attacks halfway around the globe). Meanwhile, the US at present is not, in any significant way, involved in an actual war anywhere…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/flash-pentagon-fails-audit-again/