By Jason Ditz
(ANTIWAR.COM) — After generations of being a black hole down which money goes, never to return, a team of 1,200 auditors tried to give the Pentagon its first ever comprehensive audit, just to see where all that money went. Unsurprisingly, it went poorly, and was declared a failure.
How bad the failure was is something of a mystery at this point, with officials refusing to disclose the exact results, or even ballpark how much money is unaccounted for. The only clue to the sheer scope of the matter is that they believe it will take “years” to sort out.
And if there was one thing more dependable than the Pentagon failing an audit and missing an undisclosed, but vast, amount of money, it’s officials downplaying the matter. Deputy Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan told reporters that the Pentagon “never expected to pass it” in the first place.
Indeed, Shanahan insisted that even though the Pentagon failed the audit, the fact that they even bothered to do an audit at all “is substantial,” and shows effort toward compliance. That said, he said the issue of audits is “irritating to me.”
Since World War II, we have not outright won any war. The closest we came was the Kuwait War. We did liberate Kuwait, but we ended up in the field being shot at by Iraqi missiles for the next many years. The Iraq war was really the second campaign of the Kuwait War, to finally bring Saddam Hussein down. Again, we succeeded in that. But then we bobbled the occupation, fought a long civil war, and the country ended up a Shi'ite satellite of Iran. So, a win, in the end? Meh. It's better than it was under Saddam, but still, meh.
And that's our BEST performance.
Korea was a bloody stalemate we chose not to win - and it's STILL GOING ON, STILL draining us of resources every year.
Vietnam, Cambodia and Cuba were unmitigated defeats - total, irrevocable disasters whose blowback diminished our country internally forever.
Whether Afghanistan remains a "Meh" like Korea and Iraq, or an ultimate defeat, like Vietnam, Cambodia and Cuba, remains to be seen. If we have the will to stay and fight in Afghanistan forever, literally until the end of time, another Korea, but with a steady stream of live casualties - as long as we are willing to do that, we won't have to admit defeat. If Americans ever tire of it and we pull out, we will have followed the Soviet Union in defeat there.
If we were effective and winning wars, I'd say that the Pentagon was a good investment. But we haven't won a war since 1945. The French have a better record since World War II than we do - actually a much better record. They have 2 losses and 7 wins (in various African and Pacific Ocean places). We have 1 Pyrrhic win (Iraq), 3 or 4 ties and 3 losses. Unimpressive.
Oh, wait, we won Grenada. Yep. That was truly a decisive victory. I wonder if we could have managed to pull that off without the Pentagon. (Sarcasm off)
