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Comment by hos234 | Hacker News Reader

Yup. That's the strategy the Military uses - https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/pent... "At a cost of $400 million, some 1,200 auditors charged into the jungle of military finance, but returned in defeat. They were unable to pass the Pentagon or flunk it. They could only offer no opinion, explaining the military’s empire of hundreds of acronymic accounting silos was too illogical to penetrate"

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Remember when Rumsfeld announced that 2.3T USD were missing from the military? https://www.city-journal.org/html/americas-missing-money-157...

Yeah, nor do most people.

The date he announced that? September 10, 2001. The section of the Pentagon hit? The accounting wing with all the records.

As though the US government would have to orchestrate several terrorist attacks just to obscure some bad finances which are basically meaningless anyway.

Yeah, that's the funny thing, we're supposed to trust that the Rumsfield thing is 100% legit but then they'd turn around and run a plane into the records to "hide" it.

They could have just like not said shit.

It's amazing how often conspiracy theories rely on the Illuminati DMV

Conspiracy theories are always so impractical. It would’ve been way easier to just ship all of the documents to an incinerator and yeah, just not say anything.

Alternatively, the terrorist attack didn't actual hit the records in question (or at least not as many as are implied) and is unrelated, but was used as a convenient cover for bad finances that are basically meaningless anyway.

ummm, are you making an oblique "9/11 truther" claim?

What is wrong with those facts? Did they keep copies of those files in other locations? Did they explain the unaccounted money later on?

EDIT: According to other comments who explained what's wrong, the "facts" are wrong and belong into the realm of "911truther" propaganda.

Money continued to disappear and in fact keeps disappearing and the Pentagon just says “oops, e we don’t know where it went, we’ll just permanently offset the books to balance them,” with no further accountability than that (across three administrations). They are basically untouchable even with records physically around; they do not need to resort to destruction of physical evidence so long as the military industrial complex is alive and well.

as mentioned elsewhere, the part of the pentagon that was destroyed was not "the accounting wing" which is also not even a concept that makes sense.

Pretty much every 9/11 truther cites "facts" but then has trouble when the facts turn out to be not true or are willful, limited misinterpretations of reality.

It’s a lot easier on your sanity to just accept that (insanely) crazy coincidences happen. If it helps, that number jumped to 6.5T a few years later and now stands at 21T and the military and Pentagon have simply stalled all attempts at enforcing audits. They have the gall to simply refuse to account for the discrepancies and believe they cannot be taken to task for misappropriated funds; they don’t need to blow up records when no one does anything if they simply refuse to make them available.

I do not doubt that the waste and accountability are a huge problem in the DoD, but $21T sounds extreme. The FY19 total military budget, according to Wikipedia, is a bit under $700B and you need to misappropriate 30 years of that to embezzle $21T. And that assumes everything is misappropriated (no salaries, no fuel to fly planes, etc.) and does not account for growth (30 years ago the budget was a lot smaller than it is today). My 2c.

It’s not really $21T in cash but rather $21T worth of book-cooking “adjustments” to make the numbers align. This article gives a good overview: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/us/politics/fact-check-pe...

The NYT article claims that’s the absolute value of cooked assets and liabilities rather than the net amount but in truth it’s misappropriation so many levels deep (and recursive in parts) that you can’t even tell whether dollars are being made or lost. Purposely, I can only presume.

> It’s a lot easier on your sanity to just accept that (insanely) crazy coincidences happen.

Perhaps if your goal is peace of mind rather than correctness. All crazy things are not necessarily coincidences.

What would you think about the whole thing if the missing money announcement came on the 9th of September ("can you believe it came less than 48 hours after Rumsfeld came public with this info!?)? The 8th? The 4th? The 1st?

The 10th of September, 2001 was a Monday. What percentage of announcements are delayed until the start of the business week? How close did this particular announcement come to being delayed to Tuesday (in which case it wouldn't have even happened)? There are so many factors that pivot on the most tenuous or whimsical of things that it actually is borderline ridiculous to read too much into any one single aspect of it.

Perhaps you didn't notice the word necessarily in my sentence.

I'm trying to deduct what you're implying, and as an armchair conspiracy theory fan¹, I love all of the options! This stuff is so nuts, it's lovely.

¹ I mean that I don't believe in the average conspiracy, but I love reading about them for the entertainment value

I do recall that, and recall discussion of it after 9/11.

As for what I infer is an implication of the 9/11 attack being motivated by a desire to cover this up, I can't find any reference to the outer ring of the west wing of the Pentagon being "the accounting wing". Even if it were, I can't imagine that we're doing our federal accounting in the 21st Century on paper that's stored only in one central location.

That said, the military is in fact missing a ton of money and is not in compliance with laws that require annual audits of all federal departments. That's a huge problem that should be addressed, but I see no evidence whatsoever that it's in any way related to 9/11.

> I can't imagine that we're doing our federal accounting in the 21st Century on paper that's stored only in one central location. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, nor do I even remotely believe the idea that there's some sort of cover-up. But I will say one should _never_ assume the federal government doesn't do almost everything in the most backward, ancient way possible. Certainly they have tons of meetings, task-forces and plans to update things. Yet mostly they just flounder and keep on using ancient technology... like paper.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2002/09/11/hard...

If they were going to fly a plane into the pentagon to cover up 2.3T in missing funds, why would they bother to announce the shortfall beforehand?

You don't orchestrate an elaborate cover-up, and also publicly announce the thing you're trying to cover up.

Because that's, like, what they want you to think man. :)

Rofl! I needed that today. Thanks!

I don't buy into this particular conspiracy theory, but the answer to your question is really simple. Try to imagine the US government as a mob. "Helpful" services it runs are like fronts. So when the government builds a library, it's like the mob running a garbage collection company. The helpful services are fronts for complex murderous organizations with many factions. Once you see it that way, it's easy to see why one faction might tattle or fight against another faction within the mob, even though they are still all kind of in on the game together.

Yes, Rumsfeld did make this speech on the day before the attacks. It's actually a great speech too! He talks about the cumulative bureaucratic waste of the previous few years of the Department of Defense, and poor auditing.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4623026/donald-rumsfeld-speec...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-war-on-waste/

https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-missing-3-trillion-dolla...

But the section of the Pentagon that was hit was not the "accounting wing". There is (and was) no "accounting wing". The specific areas that were hit were mostly "Naval Command Center" and "Defense Intelligence Agency", but even then, the area was relatively unoccupied due to renovations that started in 1998.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FirstFloor_Pentagon_Bodie...

https://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/images/pent...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_77#Cr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon#September_11,_200...

Forgot to note that, the money wasn't "missing" in the sense that it disappeared. It was definitely spent, over many projects, over many years. The problem he was trying to point out was that the auditing and tracking is poor and it is difficult to retroactively see where it was spent. I'm not trying to downplay it too much, because it obviously was (and IS) a huge problem. But there wasn't any implication of nefariousness or intentional fraud. (Caveat: There may have been smaller cases of fraud to make up that number, but the $2.3trillion itself wasn't implied to be all fraud).

It wasn't "wait, wtf happened to all this money? >:( ".

It was more "ah crap, we didn't do a good job tracking all this money... :*("

The nuance is subtle and easily hand-waved away by truthers, but such is politics.

This is just a single example but it was eye opening when my friend told me about one of his clients. He is the chief mechanic at an exotic car dealership and one of their biggest customers is an active duty general in the Marines, this guy has millions of USD worth of cars.

Forgive me if I am misinterpreting, but wouldn't the taxes of an individual general in the Marines be completely different from the Department of Defense itself?

The implication was that they should be distinct but are not.

I didn't get that at all. Can you explain?

Generals do not earn millions in salary. To afford millions worth of automobiles, the general must have misappropriated funds.

> To afford millions worth of automobiles, the general must have misappropriated funds.

Or have, or at least have once had, a lucrative side business (military personnel can do this, legally.)

Or have inherited money.

Or have a spouse with a greater income or inheritance.

Or restore cars, such that the market value of their vehicles vastly exceeds the purchase price.

Or purchase cars that have significantly appreciated in value for other reasons (lots of high-end luxury cars that are limited run not only are pricey but limit sales to selected buyers, and the market value of the cars is almost immediately much higher than the purchase price and appreciates rapidly.)

Or a combination of the above.

What's the most plausible explanation? My wild guess is inherited wealth. The lucrative businesses come after retirement, as far as I know.

xapata's interpretation of solotronics's post is that "Pentagon's impenetrable, unauditable accounting" + "Reports of trillions of dollars missing" + "General with a multi-million-dollar sports car collection" = The sports cars were paid for by embezzlement.

Of course, it's also possible the general saved up, or made lucky investments, or married into money, or there was an exaggeration or misunderstanding.

Each general is the CEO of a multi-thousand person organization. Whether CEO pay is reasonable is a different discussion, but it would be surprising if generals were not paid well.

Generals are not paid that well, at least not compared to a Silicon Valley software engineer's salary. I think they make ~$200k (https://militarypay.defense.gov/Portals/3/Documents/ActiveDu...), so if any of them are obscenely wealthy, best guess is they make a lot of money off of "speaking events" like any other person with political connections.

They also have many other benefits, including housing subsidies, commissary access, essentially free health care, etc. Officers especially are compensated very well.

combat zone pay, as well, perhaps?

seems like a general with a 40 year career who could (and did) save all of his money could have accumulated a few million dollars in cars without very many shenanigans, if that was their sole financial goal in life.

According to [0], a major general (O-8) makes something like $160k, depending on years of experience. I'm sure there's additional hazard pay and such, but you wouldn't expect a general to be making millions through their core pay.

[0]: https://www.navycs.com/charts/2019-military-pay-chart.html

Yeah but that doesn't include their kickbacks, consulting fees, etc. Can active duty generals sit on the board of directors of companies? I seem to remember a startup I worked at had one either on the board or heavily involved as a consultant but I can't remember if he was active duty at the time.

Active duty personnel aren't allowed to take on a second job, side hustle, etc. without written permission, and I understand that that permission is relatively uncommon. That doesn't completely answer your question (maybe generals get that permission more often), but it may point directionally.

The other thing that can confuse this issue is that Generals and Admirals generally (sorry) keep their titles after retirement. So if you have "Gen. James McClinton" on your board, that doesn't speak to whether or not they're active.

From looking around, it looks like board recruitment efforts toward Admirals and Generals are targeted at those who are retired or nearing retirement: http://blogs.reuters.com/financial-regulatory-forum/2012/01/...

I believe some positions get a stipend (particularly if they are expected to entertain dignitaries) but are generally (ha) not allowed to serve outside positions that might be a conflict of interest. I couldn't find details yet of a specific article in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), but there are some memos out:

https://ogc.osd.mil/defense_ethics/resource_library/deskbook...

I know a marine general (just retired) and he drives a ten year old Ford Escape. Generals are paid well relative to the rest of the military but definitely are not paid obscene amounts.

Without some concrete statistics, it’s hard to analyze that. A non-trivial number of officers have family money.

In the UK id buy that chaps joining the guards regiment their fathers /grandfathers did

I kind of got the impression that the military isn't seen in that way in the USA and didn't have such a high social status

It’s not as high social status as the UK, but there are plenty of officers who come from relatively wealthy families. The officer corps skews upper middle class, with 40% of ROTC recruits coming from the top quantile of households in terms of income. (At Harvard or Stanford, 65% are from the top quantile.) The other major entry point for officers, the service academies, requires excellent test scores and two letters of recommendation from the Vice President or a Member of Congress.

By no means are officers all from wealthy families, but those folks are definitely over represented.

> The other major entry point for officers, the service academies,

Of academy, ROTC, OCS, and direct appointment, I'm relatively certain that, unless things have shifted recently, the academies are the least significant source of commissioned officers in the US military overall, rather than the second major entry point.

Any indication as to whether this was career or family money?

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