Is the Pentagon Incompetent, or Corrupt?

Imagine if Congress appropriated 200 billion for a program like say...health care, and the folks who were supposed to be getting the care, all became even more sick, and died? What if the medicine these people were supposed to be getting got lost, or even worse, found it's way to the streets.
What if some liberal program that provided free day care for children of poor mothers sucked up billions of dollars, and we discovered that the mothers were not really working, but sitting around watching soap operas, or taking drugs?

The reaction would be loud and persistent, and there would be no way to defend the loss of American tax dollars.

But my analogy of lost medicine and wasted money is not exactly on point. When we compare a loss of hard-earned tax revenue with the loss of very dangerous weapons that are being used against our own soldiers, the wasted aid for American citizens doesn't compare with the dangers of arming insurgents in a place like Iraq.

The GAO reached the estimate of 190,000 missing arms -- 110,000 AK-47s and 80,000 pistols -- by comparing the property records of the Multi-National Security Transition Command for Iraq against records Petraeus maintained of the arms and equipment he had ordered. Petraeus's figures were compared with classified data and other records to ensure that they were accurate enough to compare against the property books.

The guy who lost all of those weapons is none other than General Petraeus, the same guy we are counting on to bring about some miraculous turn around in Iraq by September. He spent several years arming and training Iraqi forces, and now, it seems as if he is fighting those very people he trained.

In my job, I spend over $1 million a year purchasing food that we sell to our customers. If somehow through my negligence, 30 percent of that food ending up in the hands of my competitors, or was lost or unaccounted for, I would lose my job, and I would expect to lose my job. In any company, lost inventory is not tolerated, but an inventory of weapons should be treated with the utmost care, you don't promote the guy who doesn't know where the Ak-47's went.

Unless you work for the Pentagon.

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