Pentagon To Undergo First Ever Audit After Decades Of Sloppy Accounting And Missing Trillions

Zero Hedge
December 10, 2017

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis speaks with DoD Comptroller David L. Norquist, June 15, 2017

After decades of waste, overpayments, trillions of missing or improperly accounted for dollars, and most recently losing track of 44,000 US soldiers, the Pentagon is about to undergo its first audit in history conducted by 2,400 auditors from independent public accounting firms to conduct reviews across the Army, Navy, Air Force and more - followed by annual audits going forward. 

The announcement follows a May commitment by Pentagon comptroller David Norquist, who previously served as the CFO at the Department of Homeland Security when the agency performed its audit. "Starting an audit is a matter of driving change inside a bureaucracy that may resist it," Norquist told members of the Armed Services Committee at the time when pressed over whether or not he could get the job done at the DHS. 

According to the DoD release: 

The audit is massive. It will examine every aspect of the department from personnel to real property to weapons to supplies to bases. Some 2,400 auditors will fan out across the department to conduct it, Pentagon officials said.

"It is important that the Congress and the American people have confidence in DoD's management of every taxpayer dollar," Norquist said. -defense.gov

The Pentagon is no stranger to criticism over serious waste and purposefully sloppy accounting.  A DoD Inspector General's report from 2016 - which appears to be unavailable on the DoD website (but fortunately WAS archived)- found that in 2015 alone a staggering $6.5 trillion in funds was unaccounted for out of the Army's budget, with $2.8 trillion in "wrongful adjustments" occurring in just one quarter.

In 2015, the Pentagon denied trying to shelve a study detailing $125 billion in waste created by a bloated employee counts for noncombat related work such as human resources, finance, health care management and property management. The report concluded that $125 billion could be saved by making those operations more efficient. 

On September 10th, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," after a Pentagon whistleblower set off a probe. A day later, the September 11th attacks happened and the accounting scandal was quickly forgotten.

And twenty years before that, DoD analyst Franklin C. Spinney exposed what he called "accounting games," saying "Those numbers are pie in the sky. The books are cooked routinely year after year." In a 2002 testimony before the House Committee on Government Reform, Spinney laid out the DoD's accounting quagmire of un-auditable books and budget projections which don't match reality. 

Franklin Spinney, 2002

Finally, those of us old enough to remember the 80's, let's not forget the bombshell report on overpayments the Pentagon made for simple items, such as $37 screws, $7,622 coffee makers, and $640 toilet seats which Sen. William Roth Jr (R-DE) was able to whittle down to $200. 

The announcement of the audit comes amid a looming government shutdown battle which was given a two-week extension last week until December 22. If this occurs, military personnel would report to work as usual, but the DoD would not pay them until the shutdown ends. 

 "I cannot emphasize too much how destructive a shutdown is," Norquist said. "We've talked before about the importance of maintenance on weapons systems and others, but if it's not an excepted activity, there'll be work stoppage on many of those maintenance functions."

With both parties standing to lose more than gain from a shutdown, that is unlikely to happen. Meanwhile, with decades of lost confidence in the Pentagon's accounting practices, we eagerly await the results of this "massive" audit to see exactly how much dirt - and where -previous administrations have swept under the rug.

ALERT: Obama’s Pentagon Issues Response to Texas’ Move Against “Martial Law” Exercises

Conservative Tribune

May 8, 2015

Recently, news broke concerning Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott’s announcement that he ordered the commander of the Texas State Guard to mobilize his forces to monitor the activities taking place soon in his state that will be part of a domestic military exercise known as Jade Helm 15.

The governor made the announcement after hearing an outcry from Texas residents who live in counties where the large special operations exercise will take place. Many feared the exercise would lead to a federal takeover of Texas or serve as the start of implementing martial law.

But the Pentagon issued a response to the Texas governor and residents of the state Monday, essentially telling them to chill out — dismissing claims of a possible federal takeover of the state as “wild speculation.”

“Operation Jade Helm poses no threat to any American’s civil liberties,” Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said Monday.

Jade Helm 15 will involve thousands of special operations military personnel, including Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, Green Berets and similar units training across seven states, including Texas, which was labeled as “hostile” for training purposes.

A spokesman for the Texas State Guard, a state-based military force that answers to the governor’s office and cannot be pressed into service by the federal government, said, “The Texas State Guard stands ready to support the governor of Texas when called upon to serve.”

While many Democrats and even a few Republicans blasted Gov. Abbott for his actions, 2016 presidential hopeful Ted Cruz defended the governor, saying, “You know, I understand the concern that’s been raised by a lot of citizens about Jade Helm.”

He added, “When you see a federal government that is attacking our free speech rights, our religious liberty rights, our Second Amendment rights, that produces distrust as to government.” (H/T McClatchy DC)

There seems to be a split among Texans as far as concerns Jade Helm 15, which is set to launch in July. Some cities held council meetings allowing U.S. Army officials to present their operational plans for within city limits, allowing them to vote whether or not to allow the operation to move forward in their city. Many voted yes.

But there are plenty of citizens who smell trouble, standing by the idea that Jade Helm 15 is part of something much more sinister than a simple training exercise.

FACEBOOK EMOTIONAL EXPERIMENT LINKED TO PENTAGON RESEARCH ON CIVIL UNREST

Infowars News
July 1, 2014

Facebook’s controversial “emotional study”, which subjected over half a million unwitting users of the social network to a psychological conditioning experiment, has direct ties to research funded by the Department of Defense concerning the likelihood of civil unrest.

The Facebook scandal hit the headlines this week, as it was revealed that the company participated with a federally funded UCSF study into how emotions can be swayed on social media by controlling the content of personal feeds and deciding whether to show negative or positive material.

While that fact in itself is disturbing, it seems that the rabbit hole goes even deeper.

Bloggers and online sleuths have since highlighted that the research appears to be at least in part connected to a Pentagon-led project called the Minerva Initiative.

Researcher and London Guardian writer Nafeez Ahmed has noted that the project provides “funding to universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world.”

In other words, the DoD wants to master how to predict, prevent, manipulate, control, and even instigate mass civil unrest. It wishes to do this by developing “operational tools” related to “social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces.”

The initiative seeks to provide authoritative knowledge on “social movement mobilisation and contagions”. Social networks including Facebook and Twitter are highlighted as key indicators in the research.

It has been noted that within the official credits for the controversial study recently conducted by Facebook, Cornell University’s Jeffrey T. Hancock is listed as an author. Hancock is also listed on the Pentagon’s Minerva initiative website, where it is noted that he received funding from the Department of Defense for a study called “Cornell: Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes”.

The section of the website devoted to that study includes a visualization program that models the spread of beliefs and disease.

This is not the only connection Cornell University has to the Pentagon civil unrest study. There is a second project listed on the funding page of the Minerva website entitled “Cornell: Tracking Critical-Mass Outbreaks in Social Contagions”.

The US government in conjunction with the military has long been concerned with studying the potential for civil unrest and how it can control, facilitate and combat it. The U.S. Army War College, in conjunction with numerous think tanks have somewhat obsessively studied the subject for years.

In recent years, the rise of social media, and its potential use for growing and organising protest movements, has spurred a new urgency within government and the military to adapt to and co-opt such tools.

The so-called “spring” revolutions of recent years have been heavily centered around the use of social media, with many even suggesting that Western government and military forces have, at least in part, controlled and even initiated unrest in other parts of the world for strategic purposes by employing social media.

Reports have recently emerged of the Military setting up fake Twitter-like social networks in countries such as Cuba, in order to manipulate and sway popular opinion there. The Military also developed so called ‘sock puppet’ software to create fake online identities and spread propaganda at home and abroad.

The government has also heavily invested in companies that monitor social media and track how opinions and information spreads on such networks.

Facebook was and is deeply connected to the NSA’s PRISM program. Via leaked information, and by the NSA’s own admission, it has been noted that Facebook not only knew about, but also cooperated with the mass spying program. The NSA even masqueraded as Facebook via fake servers, using them as a launching pad to grab information from hard drives, in order to infect millions of computers around the world with malware as part of the mass surveillance program.

The trend is clear – the government and the military have set about fully co-opting social media and turning it into a tool for social control and manipulation, and Facebook has cooperated in the process.

Hat tip: SCG News

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Steve Watson is a London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.

The Defense Clandestine Service (DCS) sound awful sinister to me!

The Ground Report
April 24, 2014

Defense Clandestine Service or DCS has been compared with a militarized CIA. What it is exactly is hard to say for sure, we are not even allowed to know basic information like how many personnel is staffing the service and how much it costs?

As a reporter when you try and get information as a reporter on the Defense Clandestine Service (DCS) it is very hard to do.

Even basic questions like how many military personnel are staffing the new agency is apparently a secret, because nobody is saying.

We do know the DCS is an intelligence agency of the Department of Defense – call it a militarized Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for lack of a better term.

It was announced on 23 April 2012 by the Pentagon to increase spyingoperations against high-priority targets such as Iran , China, Russia, under an intelligence reorganization aimed at expanding on the military’s espionage efforts “beyond war zones.”

The new spy service will supposedly work closely with the CIA, and other spy agencies in an effort to increase espionage operations overseas.

The plan was hatched in response to a “classified study” completed in 2011 by the Director of National Intelligence that concluded that the military’s espionage efforts needed to be more focused on major targets “beyond the tactical considerations of Iraq and Afghanistan.”

While the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was effectively conducting its traditional, and much larger, mission of providing intelligence to troops and commanders in war zones, it needed to focus more attention on “outside the battlefields” . On what is called “national intelligence” – gathering and distributing information on global issues and sharing that intelligence with other agencies.

This is apparently where the DCS come in (see article: Defense Department Plans New Intelligence Gathering Service http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/world/asia/defense-department-plans-new-spy-service.html?_r=1 ).

If it sounds confusing it is. The DIA and DCS will basically act to compliment each other.

The “realignment” as it is sometimes called is expected to affect several hundred military operatives who already work in spying assignments abroad, mostly as case officers for the DIA, which serves as the Pentagon’s main source of human intelligence and analysis.

Agents for the new Pentagon spy service will work out of U.S. Embassies and from military bases and outposts all over the world. It is unclear if they will be working under official cover or non official cover or both?

The new service is expected to increase from several hundred to almost a thousand operatives in the coming years.

How much will all this cost?

Nobody really knows for sure. Estimate range all over the place, depending on who you ask, anywhere from a few hundred million to a $1 billion or more?

That is also part of the problem.

At a time of budget cutbacks, particularly in the military, it’s unclear how the Defense Department has been able to shuffle around the money to afford a new agency.

The Pentagon of course, refused to get into specifics saying only that the so-called “Defense Clandestine Service” wouldn’t involve “significant new resource requirements.” But if that was the case why won’t it admit its cost? It simply doesn’t make any sense…

What we know so far is that about “15% of the DIA’s case officers will be part of the Defense Clandestine Service.”

Others will be recruited from other agencies and from the U.S. military services directly”, according to one source at the Pentagon.

The new military spy agency is authorized to conduct a broad level of espionage, including clandestine operations in the field.

Rumors indicate it will not be restricted like the CIA which cannot spy on Americans athome.

The creation of a new espionage unit by the Pentagon called the Defense Clandestine Service is driven by a “desire to continue a policy of aggression around the world and destabilization” by the U.S., says Webster Tarpley (see video: Webster Tarpley on the Pentagon’s Defense Clandestine Servicehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U56vU1ZugVw ).

See also: DOD’s New Spy Service, Another CIA? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjx_wySV6_0

My question is do we really need another spy service?

Apparently the answer according to the Pentagon is “yes”.