The Pentagon’s Flawed Account of Its Failure to Keep Accounts

Precisely three years ago, in November 2021, Reuters featured this headline: “U.S. Pentagon fails fourth audit but sees steady progress.” Both the Department of Defense (DoD) and Reuters hoped at the time to put the best spin on this chronic failure. Handling billions and even trillions is no easy job. Mistakes will be made. Oversight will be occasionally real. But, as the Beatles once insisted, “it’s getting better all the time.”
Reuters, like the Pentagon itself, sought to reassure the public that, however poor the performance, the DoD’s intentions were good. (Cue the Nina Simone song, “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good; Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood…”)
For United States citizens, late 2021 was an odd moment in history. It was the first year of Joe Biden’s presidency. Following the withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 after 20 years of war, the increasingly bloated US defense establishment was, for a few months, no longer visibly involved militarily, diplomatically or logistically in an overseas conflict. Yes, there was some action in Syria and even Iraq. But the public felt this as a moment of peacetime. The perfect opportunity to set one’s house in order.
Reuters cannot be blamed for failing to notice that the State Department was busy at the time setting the scene for a war with Russia as NATO — but not the US on its own — was putting increasing pressure on the Donbas region in Ukraine. No journalist could predict the Russian invasion that would take place three months later. It was indeed a privileged moment for reassessing the entire defense establishment’s capacity to manage and even audit its own accounts.
In the meantime, that war not only began but is still going on, with hundreds of billions of US defense expenses transferred to Ukraine. Even less predictable than Putin’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine, was the equally “unprovoked” Gaza revolt of October 2023 that put the DoD money machine into overdrive as the ironclad commitment to Israel had to be respected, no matter what.
So, with all that unexpected activity and the complex politics that accompanies it, we should not be astonished today to discover that not too much has changed on the audit front.
This time it’s Brad Dress writing for The Hill who offers us what has now become a somewhat predictable and repetitive headline: “Pentagon fails 7th audit in a row but says progress made.”
But the Beatles certainly got it right, since, according to no less an authority than Under Secretary of Defense Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer Michael McCord, the Defense Department “has turned a corner in its understanding of the depth and breadth of its challenges.” He even gave a reading of the dynamics when he added: “Momentum is on our side, and throughout the Department there is strong commitment — and belief in our ability — to achieve an unmodified audit opinion.”
Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:
In the language of military officials, vague intention, which is a generous reading for something that more likely means “a weak non-commitment.”
It may sound abusive to claim that a phrase such as “strong commitment” can mean literally its opposite, as we propose in our definition. But meaning comes from context. In baseball, a 7-0 shutout is a weak performance, and this one resembles a “no-hitter.”
But there is another linguistic test we can apply to determine the meaning here. If a Silicon Valley entrepreneur makes a statement such as, “We have a strong commitment to rival the market leader,” no one will doubt that the company’s focus will be squarely on achieving that goal. In contrast, we learn from McCord that “throughout the Department there is strong commitment.” First, we should notice that “there is” signifies a passive assertion, compared to the type of formulation that identifies a determined will. The “we” in “we have a strong commitment” includes the speaker. McCord’s assertion is so vague it would be true even if he himself didn’t for a moment share the commitment.
McCord uses the idea of “throughout the Department” to rhetorically magnify the effect, but instead it dilutes it. “Throughout” suggests a dispersion in space, a diffuse feeling rather than the kind of moral engagement one would expect him to affirm. But it’s his following parenthesis that gives the game away. He speaks of a “belief in our ability.” The idea of “belief” is considerably weaker than, say, “confidence in our ability.” Belief expresses a form of hope that relies on no concrete evidence.
McCord allows the fog of his reasoning to thicken. “I do not say we failed, as I said, we have about half clean opinions. We have half that are not clean opinions. So if someone had a report card that is half good and half not good, I don’t know that you call the student or the report card a failure. We have a lot of work to do, but I think we’re making progress.”
At least the Beatles affirmed that it’s getting better all the time, not that they “think” they’re making progress.
In a January 2022 Devil’s Dictionary piece, we cited the reflections of an observer of Beltway politics who provided a clue as to why things need not get better all the time. “None of the ‘centrist’ Democrats or Republicans who complained about the cost of the Build Back Better Act have said a peep about the ever-growing Pentagon budget — and the fact that it is somehow still growing even despite the Afghanistan pullout. It has grown about 25% in size over the past five years, even though the Pentagon just failed its fourth audit last month.”
We cited an earlier article from 2019 that began with this astonishing sentence: “A Michigan State University economics professor discovered $21 trillion unaccounted for in the federal budget starting in 1998 until the end of fiscal year 2015.”
In other words, there is no reason to be surprised today that a “strong commitment” to conduct accurate audits is necessary and will continue to make headlines… probably for decades to come. And the only change will be similar to what we’ve already seen when, three years later, four failed audits turn into seven.
But let’s look more deeply at the historical context. The latest article cites what appears to be a serious deadline, only four years away. “The Pentagon said it is firmly committed to achieving a clean audit by 2028, as mandated by the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.”
This leaves us wondering. Could this be related to another commitment we’ve been hearing about? Some will call it not so much a commitment, but a belief widely shared in national security circles and that concerns the medium term: that a war with China has been at least “mentally” programmed for 2027. Noah Robertson writing for Defense News this May published a two-part article with the title: “How DC became obsessed with a potential 2027 Chinese invasion of Taiwan.”
This leaves us speculating about why 2028 was chosen as the objective. How convenient a hot war with China would turn out to be for anyone seeking to avoid having to face up to the first “clean audit” the following year. Who would dare to demand accountability in the midst, or even the aftermath of a hot war with China?
So, how much “confidence” should we have in the breakout of a war with China in 2027? Remember, this forecast of a war at a precise date was formulated at a time when no one expected Donald Trump to be elected for a second time. It isn’t Trump’s volatility that explains it, nor his promise to focus his attention on China rather than Russia.
Robertson explained the logic by citing a Joe Biden administration official who paraphrased the remarks of Chinese President Xi Jinping: “Look, I hear all these reports in the United States [of] how we’re planning for military action in 2027 or 2035.” Xi affirms: “There are no such plans.” Which many interpret as the proof that such plans do exist.
“That first year, 2027,” Robertson says, “is a fixation in Washington. It has impacted the debate over China policy — a shift from the long term to the short term. It’s also helped steer billions of dollars toward U.S. forces in the Pacific. And in the last several years, it’s been a question mark hanging over the Biden administration’s approach to the region.”
There’s the answer to the mystery of the failed audits. We know that the military-industrial complex is all about helping to “steer billions of dollars” in any chosen direction. At the same time, one steers one’s regard away from the auditor’s books.
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]
[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.