Reply #9: When Northrup Grumman was designing... [View All]

... the B-2, Air Force auditors tracking the development dollars found such a mess that they wrote off the books and told NG to start the books over a total of three times. In most large secret military contracts, the development money equals or exceeds the profits to be made on actual production.

The other big problem was created when Congress decided to "fix" a problem--general contracts for services were to be run through the GSA, which supposedly had standardized its procurement and contract processes. The Pentagon saw the opportunity to use GSA to run money off the books through other agencies and therefore had no accounting of its own when doing so. That's why it was recently found that the GSA was contracting out to American security firms for personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, so the actual number employed by the Pentagon could not be determined.

Despite the published numbers in the Pentagon budget, when one adds up all the money for defense, long-term contracting, black world, the intelligence budgets (which are fundamentally a part of the military budget in this national security state of ours) and the defense monies hidden in other agency budgets (NSF, Agriculture, etc.), we're likely budgeting $550-600 billion per year on defense (more when carrying on multiple small wars)--that's the real problem--the budget isn't just bloated, it's a national obsession. We've been literally throwing money at the Defense Department for sixty years, because politicians like Bush and Reagan (and many others) have chosen to scare the hell out of the American public and/or fight protracted wars of choice.

It's no wonder they can't keep track of it all.

The government is fond of saying that it's not a lot of money in terms of the GDP, but, in fact, it is. Two-thirds of the GDP is consumer spending. Take that out of the GDP, and it means that one single government agency is responsible for 15-16% of all non-consumer spending in the nation's entire economy.