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... and I have to say that the money isn't "missing," as much as it can't be accounted for in the Pentagon's accounting system. Even if it were missing, there's no evidence that it is being funneled overseas, nor for nefarious purposes (at least not the bulk of the couple of trillion in question).
Let me offer these two things as examples of what I think is going on. First, in the early `80s, the Reagan administration was desperate to help out its California friends--that's why Northrop and Rockwell got the B-2 and B-1 contracts, respectively. In the case of Northrop, there was incredible waste in the R&D part of that contract, which ultimately was added to the unit cost of the B-2. By the late `80s, Air Force auditors went to Northrop and found, for example, that the government was being billed for supercomputer time to design the B-2 when the time, in fact, was being used by some designers to design houses they were building for themselves. The Northrop books were in such a mess that the Air Force auditors, just to keep the project going, told Northrop to wipe the books clean and start over. And that, in 1989, was the third time that they let Northrop start the books over.
Now, here's another part of what accounts for the accounting mess. When Caspar Weinberger got his tit in a wringer over lying about Iran-Contra, Frank Celluci took over. In his fourteen months or so as Secretary of Defense, he took it upon himself to completely revamp the purchasing system of the DoD. Supposedly, he was streamlining it. In fact, he was making it harder to determine where in the government the DoD was spending money. Some contracting was done directly by the Pentagon, some classes of contracts were to be administered by the GSA. Some spending was even squirreled away in the Department of Agriculture.
What Celluci was doing was creating hiding places for defense spending. When one looks at the discretionary budget, everyone says, "oh, defense is 18-19% of the budget." Nope. It didn't get much press, but there's a little-known agency called the Bureau of Economic Analysis. They recently issued a report based on a line item-by-line item examination of the entire budget, not just the DoD's portion. They found that actual military budgeting (not counting the defense share of debt interest paid each year) was actually 56% of the total budget.
Combine that, the LOGCAP no-bid system created by Cheney in 1991-2, and the waste, and you can probably account for most of that couple of trillion dollars that's unaccountable over the last decade. I don't think that money is funding huge private armies overseas (that sort of thing isn't invisible), but it has, rather, been funneled into the pockets of defense contractors of a growing number of types. One of those types is so-called private security contractors (mercenaries) of which we've seen a great explosion, in Iraq, for example.
The interesting thing about those covert operations you suggest all this money is being spent upon is that one couldn't hide spending $2 trillion in that way. It would literally turn economies upside-down in a great many places. These shadowy affairs are actually pretty cheap to run. Consider this. A significant portion of the Soviet Army was in Afghanistan from 1980-1989. One would think it would take a tremendous amount of money to drive them out. The US spent about $3 billion over ten years and the Saudis contributed roughly an equal amount (much of which wasn't spent on the insurgency effort--the Saudi money was being handled by Pakistani intelligence, ISI, and they squirreled away a considerable portion of that with the intention of using the money to support the Taliban when the war with the Soviets was over). Funding that conflict for ten years cost less than $5 billion. Iran-Contra was even cheaper. That whole operation, involving almost 30,000 fighters for several years was financed on the overcharges from a few arms sales to Iran. The cocaine money involved wasn't really being used to fund the contras to any great extent as much as it was going into people's pockets.
As a further example, let's look at Paraguay. Let's say the US's intentions are to create a military coup in Bolivia. The Bolivian Army has about 25,000 soldiers. Say, the US needs ten percent of those to initiate the coup and, say, 10,000 indigenous Paraguayans to help out. Pay them $100/mo for six months of training and they think they're making a fortune. The US taxpayer is paying for the base to do the training and you need a surreptitious source for the incidentals. You can feed, clothe, equip and train 12,500 indigenous fighters for six months on about $25 million.
Now, as for the taxpayers having the right to know how the money's spent. Yup, they do. But, if Congress doesn't demand that accounting, doesn't cut off the Pentagon until they comply, it won't happen. The Congress has given up a tremendous amount of oversight responsibility in the past few decades, and they deserve considerable opprobrium for that. But, as a nation, we keep on electing the people who are beholden to the corporations making all that money off of taxpayer dollars. Until we throw out those bastards, we won't get that accounting and that oversight.
Cheers.
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