The Defense Department, in a recent audit, could not account for some 61% of its assets. Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord said “we failed to get an ‘A'” and called it “a teachable moment” that should help the department get better. Bill Whittle thinks heads should roll.
SOURCE: Defense Department fails another audit, but makes progress [TheHill.com, 11/17/2022]
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30 replies on “Audit Shows Pentagon ‘Lost’ 61% of Its Assets: Chief Accountant Calls It ‘Teachable Moment’”
I wonder how many of those missing service personnel voted for Demonrats.
https://youtu.be/2gOGHdZDmEk
I came across this video a few weeks ago. It challenges some of the statements that you’ve made in the past about the development and testing of the Bradly Fighting Vehicle.
You have always said that you were on the side of truth. I’d love for you to watch the Video and see if it changes your opinions about anything. If your opinions change or remain the same I love to hear the reasoning behind either why your opinions changed or why they stay the same.
At least they’re getting better – between 1998 and 2018 the DOD and HUD lost a combined $21 Trillion. https://missingmoney.solari.com/dod-and-hud-missing-money-supporting-documentation/
I really liked Scott’s idea about a come-to-Jesus meeting. The problem with that is that there is so much compartmentalization in that organization that I doubt anybody would be able to tell anybody else (at least in public) what each of them is actually doing. And yes, that is also part of the problem.
Ultimately, Bill is right- nothing changes until the guilty are actually punished. Too much lack of punishment in our society in general has led to lackadaisical performance overall.
It sounds bad, but once you hear the details, it becomes clear that the headline does not match the situation. 19,000 aircraft? That’s practically the entirety of the USAF and Naval Aviation. I can assure you, if you call up CNAF and ask “where is BUNO 166154?” they’ll be able to answer “VFA-151 has that – it was reported on the AMSRR this morning aboard the USS John C. Stennis.” (BUNO, Squadron, and Ship pulled straight out of my backside, so don’t get on me about OPSEC). Likewise, how many ships? That sounds like the entire fleet. I’m pretty sure, if you walk down the piers at Naval Station Norfolk, you’ll be able to account for a good number of them.
Based solely on those two items, I can confidently say that this inventory isn’t “lost” in any way shape or form. It may be that our APSRs (Accountable Property Systems of Record) don’t match what Ernst & Young or Booze Allen Hamilton want so they gave us no credit, but that’s not the same as it being lost.
I dealt with this issue when I worked at a Budget Submitting Office for the Navy. Our systems worked well, but our Independent Public Auditor didn’t like how they worked. That DOESN’T mean they didn’t work… just that they’re not favored by people who are paid to find problems.
I’m going to say the headline that 61% of assets were “lost” is complete and total hogwash and the data cited within the story makes that clear.
Additionally, Defense Acquisition is not determined by the Pentagon, but by Congress.
Well, the nice thing about being non-accountable for over 2 Trillion allows you the overhead to hide the hundreds of billions you actually cannot account for. It’s kind of like hiding that $100 umbrella you bought in a $1000 lost expense report. And that includes a lot of graft, and corruption that goes on at those levels.
My point is that the Pentagon is being accused of “losing” the umbrella while the CNO is holding it. Look at the numbers. We “lost” the entire Navy and Air Force fleet of aircraft? Really? We lost the entire US fleet? Really?
I’m more than willing to see the DoD held accountable, but holding someone accountable also means making sure the accusations are accurate… or at least believable. These are not. Once you look at the data, you’re left wondering who thought it was ready for release.
It’s kind of like when Biden (or was it Pelosi) said that 500 million Americans had died from COVID – an impressive feat for a population of 330 million.
Part of the problem is that the system has to be secret to a huge extent so the system uses obscure serial numbers, cryptic QR codes and all the boxes look the same. There are no glossy brand labels on the missiles. No easy signage on the shelves and storerooms. Its all easily miss recorded numbers systems. All this is so the enemy can’t count and track your weapons or hack your defense database and work out where too target, which units are deployed where and how much ammo you have ready.
Charging someone will not solve the systems problem. Secrecy and accountability are in some cases mutually exclusive.
Loosing roads, aircraft and navy vessels (the odds are most are lifeboats, launches and inflatable assaults craft) are harder to explain but not impossible.
This is universal; Britain and Australia has billions of dollars of “missing” equipment. We are not that rich. All this makes auditing impossible but it may in hindsight save lives. In a crisis soldiers will find and use half those weapons. In a fight they won’t waste time filling out the paper work.
In WW2 the government of Norway escaped Oslo because one navy base in the middle of the fiord had obsolete torpedo’s that no-one remembered to scrap. Those torpedo’s sank the pride of the Nazi fleet.
Yes lots of small stuff, infantry gear, gets pilfered. Tons of stuff are sold online and in army “surplus” stores worldwide. I was on an army exercise where we loaded 12 air freight containers full of military gear onto an aircraft. There was secure communication equipment in one container, guns and ammo in another, so it and the aircraft was under armed guard. 11 containers came off. They did not get the secure technology or the guns they got the one with 30 odd full backpacks in it, including mine. Some of us were training in civilian clothes for two weeks until supplies were replaced. The crime has never been solved. The same thing happens in the USA weekly.
Not to mention those labels and QR codes are FOD. Guess what I’m not putting on my aircraft parts…
They have missed the Stargate program. Lol. Actually jokes aside there are probably a lot of stuff that’s been secretly shipped to Ukraine by Trump on the sly. I also can think of a few other countries that the US supports that are probably not paying for it. There is some very big covert technology transfer on both sides of politics.
I attended an army exercise where there were US marines, Humvees, etc I know the troops went home with one exception but the Humvees are still here because there’s no record of them being shipped back to Hawaii. At the Brisbane barracks they reportedly found a store room full of US flags. They had lots of flags because every time a US delegation came they brought their own flag because until 1995 no one could find the storeroom that dates from WW2. needles to say there was a lot of other stuff in the storeroom.
The one that did not go back ignored a “no swimming” sign in crock country.
If there was an actual investigation (as should happen) the dilution of those responsible will be so extensive that no one will be held responsible. Just watch.
It’s not at all surprising that there would be major discrepancies in inventory. The very nature of military applications is hugely conducive to losing things. Not only that, it’s also hugely conducive to losing RECORDS of things. It’s the scale of those discrepancies that is at issue. Losing hundreds of ships is just not the same thing as losing a few hundred cases of paperclips.
If a few hundred staff cars and utility pickup trucks were missing from the inventory that’s a big yawn. They’re out there somewhere, people are using them mostly for official purposes or at least the same proportion of official purposes as properly inventoried vehicles. Odds are good whoever is using those vehicles has no idea they’re not properly inventoried.
I’ve worked for both major corporate operations and government. There’s always lots of stuff that gets lost but isn’t really lost, it just doesn’t cast the paperwork shadow that it’s supposed to have. That’s not what concerns me with this Pentagon audit.
What concerns me is that if you need to use something and you don’t know where it is, then you can’t use it. You cannot ship something that has no point of origin because you don’t have a record of its original location.
If that particular something is crucial radar components, a wing of fighter jets, a shipping container of cruise missiles or a ship loaded with tanks and artillery then we’ve got a problem.
To put this more simply, I have a sister that is a bit of an acquisition nut. If she needs a tool or an appliance or a roll of a certain kind of tape she will buy a new one. When she’s done using it, it may end up in a place where it can be easily located again … Or not.
We usually check with each other (we live right next door to each other) if we need something we don’t have rather than buy something either of us could borrow from the other. But …
When I ask her something like “Do you have any duct tape?” She’ll usually say “Yes, I do”. THEN my next question is “Do you know where it is? Is it where you can lay your hands on it in 5 minutes?”
Very often the answer to both or either question is “No”.
You may possess a thing but if you can’t lay your hands on it when you need it you don’t really own it. It’s a Schroedinger’s Cat and it’s existence can only be verified by producing it. If you can’t lay your hands on it when it’s needed you may as well not own it.
That’s the problem with this Pentagon inventory. If the U.S. Military owns something and it needs it but can’t produce it, it may as well not own it at all.
Now, all of that said … I don’t want to see America’s fighting forces stymied by bean counters, shelf stockers, box checkers and accountable accounting down to the last decimal place. The military cannot operate correctly without some slack and some slop in the procurement and inventory operations.
But losing a ship, let alone over 100 ships, is inexcusable. Not because of graft, grift, theft, and shady deals that line deep dark pockets. That’s not good either but that’s not as bad as running out of ammo in the middle of a firefight because some bean counter was terrified his inventory spreadsheets wouldn’t balance.
In this regard the Pentagon is exactly like my sister. If you can’t lay your hands on it, if you don’t know where it is, then it does you no good at all.
If the materials needed to do their jobs is not available to the people who need them when they need them it doesn’t matter if it got lost in inventory or some clerk somewhere just won’t release it because he is afraid of what will happen if his inventory is off. Either side of that coin is a big, bad failure.
Lastly I see a lot of people commenting on this who have never put on a uniform and while everyone is entitled to an opinion I don’t give those opinions much weight. It’s easy as hell to demand ‘accountability’ but have no idea what that demand might entail.
Even so, losing a significant quantity of large ticket items like ships, planes and etc. is inexcusable and that needs to be remedied. As far as paperclips and staff cars go, there are very few things in military inventory I could care less about because they’re out there, they’re just not squared with the paperwork.
We had a scandal where the army did a beach assault and inland raid. One officer was tasked with retrieving the ribs from the beach afterwards. He found the beach empty. One soldier remembers seeing a surfer in the waves. He was quick. This was pre cell phones. 4 Ribs gone. Rigid inflatable boats with a paint job sell very well.
With all due respect, I shouldn’t have to put on a uniform to speak about or be able to comprehend that 2 trilllion dollars of missing Penta-GONE supplies can’t be found. I do appreciate your information, however. We don’t have answers and there probably won’t be any answers forthcoming.. Were 2 trillion dollars used to do covert work or used in some other untraceable way on purpose? With the Deep State sending billions of our taxed dollars to Ukraine, this revelation casts a very bad shadow.
Just reading that at least 2 or 3 billion dollars of government aid money was reported stolen from Covid relief funds by fraud (!) doesn’t sit well on one’s mind.
I wish we could have Sundance’s Suspicious Cat video here on Bill Whittle’s site. That picture is worth 2 thousand billion dollars.
Bill referencing P.R. Spray as a reliable source was something slightly vexing since both Spray and his compatriot James G. Burton are widely known across the military enthusiast net as lying fools. In fact, I even linked Bill to several videos about how Burton’s account of the Bradley IFV’s development is inaccurate, and while he said he’d get around to looking into things it looks like he never did.
The point about how awful it is that the DOD can’t account for 61% of itself is absolutely valid, but when you bring stuff like the Pentagon Wars account of the Bradley’s development it risks undercutting the whole point to new viewers who might be coming to this company from the military enthusiast side of the internet.
The Pentagon is an anachronistic dinosaur that needs to be put to rest. The approval process for the creation of the Pentagon precedes our involvement in WWII so basically it’s WWI technology and applied concept. The building itself was completed September 11th (coincidence?), 1941.
We didn’t enter WWII until two months later.
The Pentagon therefore was conceived, designed and constructed in the era before intercontinental ballistic thermonuclear multiple warhead systems. It was even conceived and constructed well before the much weaker atomic bombs were any sort of reality.
When the Pentagon was conceived it was a good idea to have military command and control in close proximity to civilian leadership. During WWII for instance there was a steady stream of armed and secure human couriers going back and forth between the White House and the Pentagon. The generals in the Pentagon were only a short ride in an automobile from the White House if anything needed done where couriers were not the optimal application. It was a good system way back then.
It’s a terrible system today when one small nuke can decapitate the entire U.S. military command and control structure. This was proven to be so when an airliner was hijacked and flown into the Pentagon on purpose September 11th, 2001.
The Pentagon no longer serves its original purpose well. It should be converted to a National Military Museum and the entirety of the U.S. military command and control structures broken up and move to widely dispersed locations in the deep interior of the United States.
Gents, I must be impolite and recommend another website, which I am willing to bet you already view regularly. The fellow calls himself Perun, he is, I believe, a military economist (pardon the internal contradiction) for Australia; and he delivers hour-length lectures dealing with the war in Ukraine. Necessarily must of his discussion deals with corruption in the Russian military, and following his thread makes this disaster at the Pentagon much more believable. Anyway, please check out Perun if you aren’t already. His work is remarkably detailed, his focus — his ability to point out salient points that immediately make sense, but that perhaps didn’t occur to (me) — make him essential watching.
I worked at a large corporation. We had a very hard time keeping track of all our equipment. At one site with about 10,000 pieces of equipment. Our inventory database was about 85% correct. We were shocked to find that it was about the industry average. We studied the problem. We found stuff that we had no record of. Someone bought a piece of equipment and never put it in the database. A lot of stuff was decommissioned without being removed from the database. We found the larger the site the larger the discrepancy. So, the Pentagon has TRILLIONS of things to inventory. It is not possible to keep track of that much stuff. You can’t hire enough people, auditors, to keep track. The harder you try the worse it gets. Plus, stuff gets blown up. No one is going in after a battle to record all the serial numbers of each piece of destroyed equipment. So, this does not bother me too much at all.
It bothers me. When was the last Penta-Claus or Penta=Gone audit done before the current one? How much money and equipment were “reported” missing” then? I cannot fathom that that much money and materials are or could be unaccounted for. Good grief!! Nearly speechless here.
I agree with Barbara here. Keeping track of “stuff” is not that hard (especially if you can use bar coding to help you do so). Yes, there will be disconnects, but not a 60% disconnect! And certainly when it comes to important expendables, such as ammo, fuel, etc., you really want to know how many (or how much) you no longer have where you want it to be, so you can replenish it in a timely way – to provide the front line people what they need to succeed militarily and to (you know) survive.
Now, most of us have probably visited some big box store and tried to find something. Seeking help from the aisle staffers, we learn they think they have that something somewhere in the store, but they cannot find it. So the problem is both counting and tracking the stuff you have, are selling, or decommissioning – that is, accounting and inventory control — aka logistics.
We also see road signs about watching for road crews and “let them live” expressions! A similar real world focus, with a serious attitude towards what the DOD’s real mission is, needs to be inculcated. Clearly it is not wokeness, etc. Nor, really, is it getting the next contracted stuff in on time and on budget, but that is important, too, since lives may still depend on achieving that. [Maybe strapping someone to the front of a cannon is not punishment enough, as the end comes too quickly.]
Perhaps, before being promoted to a full colonel or general officer, an audit should be done of the assets over which you presumably had control. If significant discrepancies are found, you don’t get that promotion after all. But again, we need to be hard nosed about this, not because the stuff is all that important by itself, but because it is needed and/or used to protect our troops and make their difficult missions as successful as possible. If you can’t focus on, and incentivize your subordinates to focus on, this element of your job/assignment, why should you be trusted to lead people in combat?? Or even “merely” support the people who do.
Maybe the guys can follow up with segment addressing some of the ideas they mentioned for corrective action, or those ideas that surface from our comments.
Perhaps they will add a few hundred billion to the omnibus bill for apple tags, so China can keep track of our stuff for us.
After thinking about this some more. Our government is almost totally corrupt. Ineptitude, theft, nefarious plots, support to who knows whom. This is not an accounting error. They are purging all the good and honest people from the Military, FBI etc. Very dark times are ahead. There are no more good guys, there is no more America to run to.
Except for scale I think you had it right in your first comment. The problem isn’t poor accounting, it’s an accounting system where obvious things cannot be made immediately available because no one knows where the are. Like ships for instance.
I’d say, in this case, it’s not that nobody knows where they are. I can assure you that CNAF knows where all their aircraft are every morning. Likewise, SURFLANT and SUBPAC can tell you where their ships and boats are. They people who DON’T know are the bean counters at the SYSCOMs and NAVSUP who can’t find them in Navy ERP – an accounting program that had inventory management poorly force-fit onto it.
In other words, the people who matter know; the people the auditors are asking don’t.
That’s what I was saying in my more lengthy previous comment above. You make the same point using specific examples but the general meaning is the same.
I have friends who are still active duty or are retired and returned to their jobs (or something very similar) in a civilian capacity. They are constantly making reference to how screwed up the various computer systems and software that they use are and how there is little or no compatibility within a service let alone between services and agencies.
There are constant ongoing efforts to remedy that problem but those are as subject to the military phenomenon of FUBAR and SNAFU as much as anything else in the military.
People who have not worked in/with military and defense have no idea how all this stuff works. One post above says — “Keeping track of “stuff” is not that hard (especially if you can use bar coding to help you do so).” — and that’s simply an ignorant thing to say in this situation. (NOT a stupid thing to say; ignorance is lack of knowledge, stupidity is the incapacity to accrue information. The person posting the comment just doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. This is why in my previous comment I said I do not give much weight to such uninformed inexperienced opinions.) It wouldn’t be “that hard” if there was a unified compatible computer system to “keep track of stuff” but there’s no such critter.
The people in command know where their stuff is, they may not know if it’s properly inventoried and records transmitted so the Pentagon knows where their stuff is but they know. Everyone from a Fire Team Leader on up to squad, platoon, company, battalion, regiment and division knows where their own stuff is.
The higher you go the fuzzier it all gets but that’s because there are a lot of moving pieces on the board at any given time. Records updates are often significantly behind what is happening in the real world.
The way I see it, it’s not so important that the Pentagon knows where every single cartridge of 5.56 ammo is at any given moment as it is important for the people who need things have the things they need.
So things like this inventory accounting worry me because they are likely to add another layer of mule-headed impediments to people out there on the pointy end of the stick getting what they need to do their jobs.
I don’t know but I’d be willing to bet that this situation has always existed as long as the Pentagon has been around. If you looked at Pentagon inventory records during WWII I bet you’d find exactly the same thing.
As I have said before on this page, if the Pentagon cannot account for and locate things as big as ships that’s a problem too. The Pentagon cannot plan actions if it doesn’t have a good idea what resources are available to apply to the situation at hand.
If the Pentagon needs to order SURFLANT into action but doesn’t know what resources SURFLANT has immediately available that is not a good thing no matter how you look at it. If that problem can be remedied by a simple query to COMNAVSURFLANT, who presumably knows how many boats and ships he has and can locate them, then the problem is minor and can easily be remedied with an email exchange over SIPRNet.
In that case, combat effectiveness is not impaired, it’s just some bean counter somewhere that is suffering an impairment and the odds are very good that bean counter isn’t at fault either. If he doesn’t have the tools he can’t do his job any better than anyone else who is improperly equipped. When it comes to IT situations DOD is notoriously bad at things.
Inventory accounting is IT intensive.
I think we’re mostly on the same page here. It’s like I kept preaching when I was at one of the major BSOs (the particular BSO left out because of trolls and griefers) – Property management cannot be the MAIN Priority of the Program Offices… but it needs to be A priority.
Also, most people don’t realize that it costs the DOD more to account for 5 million $0.20 gaskets than it does just to buy more. At a certain level, steel-trap accounting is wasteful. Put it in a pre-expended bin to make sure we have enough and move on!
But to go with your SURFLANT example, I think we are close to right. SUBLANT/SUBPAC known where every pre-sunk boat is (well, maybe except for the boomers on patrol). SURFLANT/SURFPAC know where every ship is. AIRLANT/AIRPAC know where every aircraft is. Their material conditions are reported every day. The geographic commanders and combatant commanders know where they are. To me, that’s more important than an auditor from EY or Booze Allen Hamilton being able to account for them.
That said, I’d love to see a replacement for Navy ERP designed by Amazon or Toyota. I’d also love to see the entire Defense Acquisition system set on fire. But Congress forced that on us, so only Congress can take that yoke off our necks.
Doesn’t every Company do their own summary of materiel available at any given time? This would flow up through Battalion -> Regiment-> etc. The Pentagon may not “know” how many of a specific type of ordance is on hand at every Battlalion, but they ought to know at that level and be able to send it up the line.
Similarly, from a NAVY perspective, when the auditors say do you now where these ships are, the answer could be yes, but I can’t tell you. That should not be counted as a missing asset.
Every Carrier group knows what ships are at sea with them and where they are.
The other are in port, someone knows where they are.
This really just shows the scale of the problem and reinforces that the Pentagon as created and existing does not have a useful reason for existing.
Let the Navy track naval assets, the army do the same, etc.
Bet each Coast Guard District knows how many assets they have to patrol their assigned area.
As Ken Miller pointed out above, every command knows what’s available and where it is. I parsed and amplified on that in my answer to him and that reply covers the bulk of what you said to me above so you might want to read that. The breakdown is in getting that information to the Pentagon and/or what happens to that information after it arrives at the Pentagon.
I posted my views on the Pentagon in a separate comment on this page. I agree, the Pentagon as it exists today is not only useless but counterproductive.
If you don’t know what assets you have and don’t know where they are then you might as well not own those assets because they are useless to you.
If the Navy knows what it has then what the Navy has isn’t useless, to the Navy. If the Pentagon doesn’t know what the Navy has then what the Navy has is useless … TO THE PENTAGON. Which means the actual entity that is useless is the Pentagon.
I think you’ll find few who disagree. I wouldn’t be sad to see the services given more control over their budgets and doctrines.
I’d like the services to not only have control over budgets and doctrines but mission control also.
We have people that have studied the results of armed conflict over the last 5000+ years and know their trade well. Civilian authorities micromanaging mission parameters is like having a prepubescent kid telling an IT pro how to set up a three tier network. The kid might be an ace at gaming and wrecking his own computer by ‘hacking’ things his buddies in grade school found on YouTube but he’s not the computer genius that a doting mommy and daddy think he is.
Optimally the civilian authority should tell the military what it wants to accomplish and then turn them loose to accomplish that thing whatever it may be.
As in …
“Devise ways to neutralize the Chinese Navy and show us your plans and materials requirements” or “Go kill all the terrorists in Afghanistan and then get back to us after that’s done”, etc.
Military force is not the optimal solution in every situation but in the situations where it is the optimal solution it should be applied in the most optimal manner. Which is for the civilian leadership to clearly and precisely define the thing it wants accomplished and then hand that off to the military and turn the guys with the guns loose to do what they do best.
If Truman had done that with MacArthur North Korea wouldn’t be a problem today and China would be a lot less problem than it is.