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The Pentagon can’t even pass an audit for the past 6 years, but yeah Microsoft is the national security threat.
by theturtletalks 3y ago
The Pentagon can’t even pass an audit for the past 6 years, but yeah Microsoft is the national security threat.
- skhunted 3y agoWhat does one have to do with the other? It’s possible to have more than one threat.
- prepend 3y agoSecurity is frequently only as strong as the weakest link. If you’re an adversary, would you spend more time on an org’a poor security practices (pentagon failing audits) or a more difficult software vendor?
- Brybry 3y agoThat's not just a 6 years thing. The Pentagon has never passed an audit (the first Defense Department audit in its history was in 2017).
- vkou 3y agoWhat do you think 'can't pass an audit' means in the context of the DoD?
- theturtletalks 3y agoAt best, incompetence. At worst, corruption.
- vkou 3y agoIf so, you don't seem to understand why the DoD is failing to pass one, but are very well versed in the outrage you're supposed to feel when it does.
- theturtletalks 3y agoCare to enlighten me?
- vkou 3y agoIt's an enormous organization (one of the largest in the world) that is largely getting audited on physical objects that either spend 99% of their life sitting in stockpiles, or getting actively used and discarded. Passing an audit isn't having its checkbook balanced. Passing an audit is like your employer delivering a full and accurate account of how many chairs it owns, as well as providing all the necessary paper trail for how all of them were acquired, moved, and discarded. Doable in a 5-person company, or a 50-person company, next to impossible in a 5,000-person company, actually impossible in a 500,000 person company. And the DoD has hundreds of thousands of different types of such items to keep track of, all of which were tracked by disparate physical-fingers-counting-stuff accounting systems, that were historically not up to the expected standards. Updating them and reconciling all of them is a long process, which the DoD is working through. I hate war departments as much as the next liberal, but I also recognize that this is an incredibly difficult ask. And that the failures are generally not caused by Lt. Billy Bob filching Stinger missiles to sell to some warlord in East Oblastan. The grift in the DoD comes from contracts for buying more crap that it doesn't need, or for paying good money for contract work that doesn't get done (Iraq, Afghanistan), not from having stuff that was bought 'fall off the back of the truck'. The organization "has* an audit problem, but it's main issue is one of procurement.
- conover 3y agoThe Marine Corp actually just became the first military branch to pass an audit: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/02/24/marine-corps-becomes-first-military-branch-pass-financial-audit.html https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/02/24/marine-corps-...