5 ms·

And also accountability to the citizens who are financing all this. A 773$B black hole in the budget would be undemocratic and rife for embezzlement.

virgildotcodes 3y ago
The DOD is unable to account for 61% of its 3.5 trillion in assets. https://oversight.house.gov/release/comer-sessions-open-probe-into-department-of-defense-after-failing-gao-audit-for-fifth-time%EF%BF%BC/#:~:text=“The%20Committee%20on%20Oversight%20and,its%20%243.5%20trillion%20in%20assets https://oversight.house.gov/release/comer-sessions-open-prob....
- nvy 3y ago
  >The DOD is unable to account for 61% of its 3.5 trillion in assets. I bet most of the circumstances behind this stat are mundane. I used to be in military SAR and we had a mule[0] randomly go missing. We were mystified because it's not like a work-issued Blackberry you could forget at a Subway or something. It's hard to lose track of a 20-ton piece of GSE, or at least you'd think so. It later turned up in Kandahar at the coalition base. These things happen; it's not malicious so much as the fact that mission success sometimes mean you take the wrong tow mule and "oh well". [0]https://www.google.com/search?q=sellick+aircraft+tug https://www.google.com/search?q=sellick+aircraft+tug
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    Reassuring
    - nvy 3y ago
      It's the nature of the beast, in the same way that sometimes developers need access to prod.
- codyb 3y ago
  I think they've been working on that. The size of our military and the amount of logistics that occurs requires a tremendous amount of supply chain infrastructure that is not all wired up in to some centralized system. You can imagine the complexity of auditing the work of tens of thousands of different individuals annually with 100% coverage in a system distributed all over the world that has just tons and tons of constant hard real world material needs day after day, year after year. My understanding of the situation is that these early year audits were never expected to be a full audit of the entire DoD but the results of the path towards a more auditable system and that we'll see that number of unaccounted for assets continue to shrink over time. It's only in the last decade or so a system that'd be auditable would be possible without it divesting huge amounts of manual resources at the accounting department as far as I can tell.

virgildotcodes 3y ago

The DOD is unable to account for 61% of its 3.5 trillion in assets. https://oversight.house.gov/release/comer-sessions-open-probe-into-department-of-defense-after-failing-gao-audit-for-fifth-time%EF%BF%BC/#:~:text=“The%20Committee%20on%20Oversight%20and,its%20%243.5%20trillion%20in%20assets https://oversight.house.gov/release/comer-sessions-open-prob....

nvy 3y ago
>The DOD is unable to account for 61% of its 3.5 trillion in assets. I bet most of the circumstances behind this stat are mundane. I used to be in military SAR and we had a mule[0] randomly go missing. We were mystified because it's not like a work-issued Blackberry you could forget at a Subway or something. It's hard to lose track of a 20-ton piece of GSE, or at least you'd think so. It later turned up in Kandahar at the coalition base. These things happen; it's not malicious so much as the fact that mission success sometimes mean you take the wrong tow mule and "oh well". [0]https://www.google.com/search?q=sellick+aircraft+tug https://www.google.com/search?q=sellick+aircraft+tug
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Reassuring
  - nvy 3y ago
    It's the nature of the beast, in the same way that sometimes developers need access to prod.
codyb 3y ago
I think they've been working on that. The size of our military and the amount of logistics that occurs requires a tremendous amount of supply chain infrastructure that is not all wired up in to some centralized system. You can imagine the complexity of auditing the work of tens of thousands of different individuals annually with 100% coverage in a system distributed all over the world that has just tons and tons of constant hard real world material needs day after day, year after year. My understanding of the situation is that these early year audits were never expected to be a full audit of the entire DoD but the results of the path towards a more auditable system and that we'll see that number of unaccounted for assets continue to shrink over time. It's only in the last decade or so a system that'd be auditable would be possible without it divesting huge amounts of manual resources at the accounting department as far as I can tell.