Pentagon's Accounting Mess - National Business News - Portfolio.com

There are a couple of benign quotes from the article below. They take comments, if anyone wants to help them connect the dots.

The Pentagon's $1 Trillion Problem
by Scot Paltrow May 2008 Issue

The defense department has spent billions to fix its antiquated financial systems. So why does the Pentagon still have no idea where its money goes?

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/04/14...

In a September 10, 2001, speech, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pressed for a top-to-bottom overhaul of Pentagon financial systems, which he later estimated would save the department as much as $25 billion a year. "It is not, in the end, about business practices, nor is the goal to improve figures on the bottom line. It's really about the security of the United States of America," Rumsfeld said, arguing that waste, mismanagement, and overspending on bureaucracy were taking resources away from weapons and troops.

That it can't be audited "goes to the heart of the department's credibility," says Dov Zakheim, who was Defense Department chief financial officer and comptroller under Rumsfeld. "Nobody would trust even a half-million-dollar enterprise if its books weren't clean."