Maybe the reports don't say what they claim (I'm no accountant), but if they do, the only other possibility I see is outright fabrication of official documents (with signatures!) by people who aren't exactly anonymous loonies.
https://missingmoney.solari.com/dod-and-hud-missing-money-su...
It might also be write-downs on assets that should have been taken over decades and weren't.
I'd love an actual accountants' (or anyone else's) take on things, but that explains at least how both the total budget number and the adjustment number can both be correct.
Ie,adjustments were less surgically applied line-item corrections, and more bandaids to fix what could easily be underlying math errors.
So if a unit budget was $10mil one year, and could only account for $9mil, they might make $1mil in adjustments to avoid coming in under budget (a kiss of death, as your next year's budget would be cut by however short you were).
Lots of this kind of accounting was made public last yr in the army, so this isn't a total shock:https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army/u-s-army-f...
Roughly speaking that's like 8.8% of the GDP of the planet. That... just doesn't make sense.
Or approximately 1/3 of the of the entire us GDP, compared to the 3% listed.
It could be a tank squadron on the books that wasn't removed when it got destroyed (or dismantled) or a whole military base decommissioned but still being depreciated.
This isn't (necessarily) "the Army spent 6.5 trillion too much in one year" nor is it "the Army lost 6.5 trillion".
A single dollar mistakenly accounted upfront can sometimes require at least twice that in corrective ledger entries.
Finally, consider a mistake of the type of over-estimating the value of a capital item by an order of magnitude. The corrective ledger entry would make it look like a huge loss was incurred in a particular year when the reality was much more benign. For the purposes of this report, that corrective entry needs to be supported by specific explanation which was missing.
The money is not missing, just not tracked up to expected accounting standards
Article from 2013: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pentagon-waste-specia...
Article from 2002: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-war-on-waste/
And you can Google [missing trillions] to find an article on the topic from any given year.
As it is, it's an eye-glazingly complicated story about government accounting regardless of how big the numbers are. It's hard to imagine the number of hours necessary to fact check the article not to mention finding experts in the field to break it all down.
Daily press does tend to go after blow-by-blow stuff but you're selling the media short. The entire Trump collusion thread right now is itself crazy complicated and it's in the news daily.