President Reagan’s Address at Pointe du Hoc, Normandy, France, June 6, 1984

Pentagon Audit Showing $1.9 Trillion in Missing Assets Signals Urgent Need Not for More Money but for Reform

The accounting disaster is a reflection of layers of bureaucratic incompetence which are undermining and crippling American national security.

The new audit report about the Department of Defense is another signal that the Pentagon needs reform a lot more than it needs extra money. As the Hill reports, “1,600 auditors combed through DOD’s $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities, conducting some 700 site visits.”

Defense, like all government agencies, has to submit to mandatory audits, thanks to reforms passed in the early 1990s. The auditors “found that half of DOD’s assets can’t be accounted for,” the Hill adds.

Think of that statement for a minute. An estimated $1.9 trillion in defense assets can’t be accounted for. How much confidence can we have in a Department of Defense which can’t keep track of trillions of dollars’ worth of equipment and other assets?

The breadth of the Defense Department failure is astounding. There are 29 separate audits in the department. Comptroller Mike McCord says only seven passed. Four were conditional, and 18 audits completely failed.

(more…)

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America Gone Mad

By Conrad Black

October 26, 2021

Conrad Black’s bio is below at the end of the article

After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.”

As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”

From the European perspective, American leadership of the West has produced excellent results and very few unpleasant surprises since the United States stepped into that role under Franklin D. Roosevelt in World War II. At that time, the entire future of Western civilization rested essentially upon the shoulders of just two men, Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and it was the epochal good fortune of all of us that they were more than equal to their great task. The level of acuity and success of the subsequent administrations, as the competence of government of any nation must, has fluctuated. But the emphasis was on continuity, and the containment policy elaborated in the Truman Administration was generally followed through to the great bloodless victory of the West, as the Soviet Union crumbled and international Communism as we had known it evaporated.