Bullshit story. This idea of not being able to account for spending is because the military changed its procurement method. Originally, everything the military bought was done through massive contracts. Inside the military, they had an extensive distribution system to bring purchased supplies from central warehouses to individual units. This included everything from missiles to toilet paper. Missiles you can understand. Toilet paper? Using the military's original method, units paid the cost of the item plus the cost of the distribution. To replace this inefficient system, the military started "spending funds" for each unit so it could acquire its toilet paper, copy paper (and most other common items) locally. What these conspiracy theorist reporters do is point to the fact that the Pentagon doesn't have exact receipts for how much the USS Spongebob spent on toilet paper vs their printer paper. This has been going on for decades, and the number keeps growing because the years keep marching along. Its all accounted for.

Where would that money come from? Isn't money allocated by Congress? Where would all the extra come from?

OK, let's calm down a bit from the hysteria promoted here. "Unsupported Adjustments' means that there's not enough 'paperwork' to back up specific transactions within DoD.
This story arose (first time in 2001 that I recall) because the DoD has multiple different accounting systems across multiple departments. Unfortunately, they are not "interoperable". This means that entries on one system do not
automatically flow to another system. At the end of the FY, DFAS (Defense Finance and Accounting Service) has to account for assets and liabilities - and some of this has to be done by 'hand'; assets include things like aircraft carriers...after a few years of not accounting properly for these 'assets', it piles up.
DoD is not 'missing' more money than they have been allocated by Congress over the past 30 or more years. Sorry.

The Iraq war cost at least $5,000,000,000.00. That's right. And people are still having orgasms over what a great Prez Dubya was. And now we see that even more money has just disappeared due to outrageous military spending. Every person in this country deserves a good education and good health care, and there is plenty of money to pay for it. We are all being left to hang out to dry, and NOTHING but revolution will change that.

It was all about funding the "black programs" the military industrial complex is involved in. How can technological breakthoughs happen and be kept secret? Money is the fuel. Someday we will learn about an ongoing "Space Force" that employ anti-gravity technology, Then the world will learn we had help, We are not alone in the universe, the story will blow people's minds and change everything.

All of that unaccounted money went into the Stargate program:

https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

This may not be the joke you think it is!

The DOD may be able to obfuscate it spending with 'national security' curtains but that doesn't explain HUD's spending.

This is a magician's trick. The Pentagon did not lose $21 trillion dollars. It's the Central bank funding other Central banks

The comments to the linked article suggest it has NOT been debunked. It also includes links to updated investigations. This is good journalism - taxpayer money is unaccounted for. It should be investigated. Some might trust the MIC over truthdig. I do not.

The inherent contradiction is that, absent audits, it is impossible to verify any of this. So Mr Camp can type "21 trillion" as often as he likes, but there is no way to fact check. If every bomb costs a million a pop (ahem), we may as well be raining high-end Lambo supercars on the ragheads. It would be no less ruinous, no less pointless, and a lot more amusing. Good for the Italian economy, too.

If it seems too bad to be true, it probably is. That said, if the Fed can make money from nothing, and it does, there's no reason to doubt the Pentagon can do the same.

The criminals aren't the generals, though. Mostly they are meat-head time servers, eager to muster out to their pensions and, with a well-played hand, a sinecure with Raytheon (e.g.). The suits at Raytheon (e.g.) are the criminals.

The thug payed to kill is indifferent to the victim. It's all about the money. So don't expect the suits sucking Pentagon hind teat to have any opinions about foreign policy, other than that the wars should never end. The GWOT is a profiteer's wet dream...it never ends and the victims are poor and powerless and can't touch you. You scatter smoking human remains all over a landscape thousands of miles from J Street and the Hamptons, and no one cares. No one who counts, anyway.

Hell, most days, I'll gawp and stretch and brew up a cuppa in the AM, and I won't give a thought to the rotting corpses in Mosul. You?

I do think of the rotting children corpses in Yemen daily. This is why I'm convinced civil war / revolution is the only solution to worldwide Crimes against humanity by the USA. Nothing else will ever make a difference until Washington, DC is burned down along with all the humans inside the beltway, as starters. During the collapse, the USA will finally break up into several sovereign nations, much as the Wehrmacht was broken up into 5 separate corporations after WW II at the Yalta Conference to prevent the rising up of WW III a la Germany. Same goes for the USA: break it up for any hope of peace, not to mention the threat of the USA to the survival of any life on Earth. Read "Twilight's Last Gleaming" for a picture of how civil war starts, proceeds and concludes in the USA, coming soon. Remember, 31% of Americans expect Civil War soon according to a May poll - this number is certainly larger by now:

http://www.informationclear....

Looking forward to the DOD Audit due in late Sept. (end of fiscal period).

If a few generals retire suddenly in the next week or two you know why.

I'd bet folding money that those generals were told to look the other way if they wanted to retire anywhere but to the stockade at Ft. Leavenworth Kansas after having taken the rap for the looting.

The fix was in, and the usual suspects have the money safe in offshore accounts, where it will never ever come to official attention even while being spent.

One trillion dollars is one million piles of one million dollars. 21 trillion would be 21 million piles of a million dollars.

When you think about it its a lot of money. Equal to our national debt.

Where is Congress on this? In the pockets of the war profiteering corporations of death.

So the entire national debt is a rounding error at the Pentagram. Can someone at the central bank pull up the national debt and hit the Delete button?

Yep, we can delete our national debt at any time if we choose to do so:

Behind the Money Curtain: A Left Take on Taxes, Spending and Modern Monetary Theory

They can indeed hit the delete button on the national debt but then how are they going to control you and your fiat after that stunt, eh?
Administrations run deficits to keep you frightened & cornered into submission. They are not about to empower you with their delete button superpowers.
RW

Look up an online copy of Prouty's book to understand where this "missing" money is being spent.
The Gates comment on how much you spend and how many people you have working for you is a huge tell...

Hunter S. Thomson told us to 'follow the money' & 'motive' if we want to know anything about 911 or Deep State shenanigans. Shenanigans to the tune of $21 trillion for the Pentagon are par for the course in Hyman Minsky's Late Stage Ponzi Capitalism. The $21 trillion is likely in the pockets of Pentagon brass & Dick Cheney. Getting Cheney to cough up is unlikely. Getting the Pentagon brass to cough up is unlikely.
Austin Fitts & Professor Skidmore are great forensic accounting types but they still can't take directive from Hunter S. Thomson so it is unlikely that anything will ever come of the $21 trillion that the Pentagon bombed the World Trade Centers for so that they could assassinate the forensic accountants that were in the process of researching indictments that would have made their crimes public had they not been assassinated by the CIA & US Special Forces in the 911 controlled demolition.
Bottom line is that the money is not in my pockets that's for sure.
RW

This is also the reason they targeted that precise area of the Pentagon by the one plane: the records of corruption were there and now they aren't. Burned to a crisp, planned by Cheney / MOSSAD / CIA. But enacted by a few SA pilots, also in cahoots with the other players.

Congratulations Deep State - there goes the infrastructure budget for the next quarter century.

So Trump envies Mohammad bin Salman's power over his own camel kingdom? Well then, maybe the center garden of the Pentagon is a good location for America's own Chop Chop Square, where public beheadings for fiscal incompetence, grand theft and outright kleptocracy are conducted on a weekly basis. After a few weeks, I'm sure this problem of missing trillions will be totally fixed.

Being that the pentagon has a yearly budget and 21 trillion is a lot of overage, who wrote the checks? Surely there’s paperwork, invoices, materials bought and on and on. There should be a broad paper trail hidden in plain sight. As they say ( the Russian investigation ) follow the money. When Bob Mueller puts his current project to rest put him on the trail of the unknown expenditures. That is, if anyone is really serious about getting to the bottom of this.

Hell on earth is what you have when there is $21 TRILLION of our tax money spent on War and destruction of other nations while our environment is destroyed, or infrastructure crumbles, our people go uneducated, our college graduates are in debt for life and we lack Medicare for All! That's not merely government mismanagement, it's hell on earth!

What else would one expect from dead-Capitalism after Tricky Dick closed the gold window for a petro-backed currency instead of a gold backed currency?
Charles Dickens & Karl Marx knew how you feel about so-called Capitalism.
When life gives you hell on Earth give it hell back in spades, baby.
RW

The other nouns that should always be preceded by "f**king" used as an adjective are the proper noun,"Pentagon," and the compound noun, "Department-of-Defense" (aka "war"). This is appropriate in denoting the same word used as a verb, in the context of what those agencies have done and are doing to this f**king society, so many of whose citizens seem to be in thrall to those criminal institutions.

You make it sound like a Fiat currency is a negative. The beauty of a Fiat Currency is that we can fully fund any program or project that we desire at any time. This unaccounted $21T is proof of that. WE choose to fund war and destruction, so we have unlimited money to pay for it. But our politicians don't want to pay for projects that benefit the majority in our society so they come up with lame excuses like we're on the verge of bankruptcy so we have to cut popular New Deal and Safety Net programs. But if it were true that we're on the verge of bankruptcy, the MIC wouldn't continue working for our government knowing that they may never get paid since they're all for profit, private businesses:

National Debt Tops $18 Trillion: Guess How Much You Owe?

The chart below contains this data which shows how it has more than doubled over the past 11 years, rising from $72,051 per taxpayer in 2004 to $154,161 today. As the debt continues higher, the liability of every taxpayer is also rising. The change in the amount of the federal debt per taxpayer from 2004 to 2015 represents an average annual increase of 7.16%. This is much more than the average annual wage increase during the same period.

If our politicians actually believe that taxes are used to pay our debts, then we're already bankrupt since there's no way for every man, women, and child living in the US to pay a $154,161 tax bill that is only climbing, not dropping...

The fact that our politicians continue increasing defense spending proves that their claim that we're going bankrupt is a complete lie used to convince Americans to agree to spending cuts in programs they love and benefit from...

The Pentagon Can't Account for $21 Trillion

The Bahamas can.

So can Eric the Prince

I see what you're alluding to - Erik Prince earnings originate from the same source.

When I was in the army, back in the dark ages, I would occasionally, when on KP, see hams, etc, going out the back door of the kitchen into somebody's car. Pilfering is eternal in the military. But it takes a lot of hams to make $21 trillion.

Thank God one can indict a ham sandwich!
I was worried there for a second.
RW

Oh good grief. The Army didn't spend more than congress authorized. Hat tip to Bob Shear for pointing to a good article.

If my memory is correct, Rummy talked about the trillions missing at the Pentagon at a news conference. That was 9/10/01. Next day was 9/11.

You are correct, and the cruise missile - i mean first 757 to ever crash and not make a dent in bricks with wings, tail, engines, etc, not throw luggage and body parts all over the everywhere, not leave any sign of a black box - AND leave a 14 foot diameter hole in the bldg(matching cruise missile sizes) instead of a 25 foot diameter hole.

You know that 757? Well it magically hit the exact place where all of that accounting was happening.... Don't you LOVE magic and coincidence?

It's not accounting errors. It's not missing, the Forbes article is a fake and this guy works for Russia Today. The Forbes article isn't a real news article, it's posted on Forbes website space given to one of its contributors (on Retirement Planning). The last paragraph is a commercial for his consulting business. Check it out. The full debunking of this nonsensical story is at https://www.metabunk.org/de...

If you want to believe what is written on the metabunk site, that is your prerogative. But, you should examine closely what this government shill writes about other subjects. He also attempts to "debunk" chemtrails stating they are persistent contrails. I would say that the "debunkers" need some scrutiny also. Many of their debunking attempts are indeed dodgy. The Norquist article concerning the accounting problems when referring to the missing trillions is very sketchy in that Norquist is saying they are errors in accounting procedure which is preposterous.

If I am dealing with $10,000 in expenditures, how bad does my accounting system have to be if my balance sheets continuously keep coming up with expenditures that read 25 billion dollars? If you read Norquist's details and look between the lines, he makes no sense at all. But, his excuses seem to smack of a continuing cover up.

I would urge all readers to visit the metabunk site and read what the web site owner attempts to debunk. Judge for yourself whether this guy is a shill or if he is real and factual.

Nice try, Mr. Shear, in attempting to besmirch Lee Camp by stating he works for the Russians (RT). I guess in your mind there can never be any truth coming out of RT because it is financed by those evil Russians.

How is it possible to spend more than their annual budgets allow for?
It gives me the idea that probably most of that 21 Tri!lion loss is due to some accounting errors.
Has anyone suggested an audit to pinpoint where there is theft and/or accounting errors?
(I didn't read the whole post).

There has been an analysis of the accounting procedures wherein the examiner states their accounting procedures are in bad need of fixing. Why? Because they constantly come up with numbers in the TRILLIONS when their yearly budgets are in the billions. How is this possible you may ask? The examiner gives no good reason why the system is lacking, but despite the horrible system, he is able to say that the trillions are really billions although he is not sure why.

To me, this sounds like more obfuscation. What this article is saying is that there really are trillions involved which arise from the government rolling out the printing presses. These extra curricular expenditures seem to be noted somewhere, but are not included in the official budget.

Is it a coincidence that our national debt is 21 trillion dollars and 21 trillion dollars seems to have disappeared?

To be fair, it is $21 trillion in accounting errors. These are made in both directions and may sum to zero. The first DoD audit this summer should be very revealing, presuming it sees the light of day.

At last someone is taking on the task of trying to explain this concept of a trillion ie 10 to the power of 12.

Yes. If memory serves, I believe we finance the staffing and upkeep of approximately 900 facilities around the world (mostly military).

Oh, and By the By, how much does it take to build an Airport, NOT NEEDED, in Denver with crazy satanic artwork and miles of underground tunnel networks ?
Hmmmmmm !
FOR WHOM ?

WIth the words "New World Order" in a plaque way up on one of the supporting posts i've heard from people coming through there.

If it is any comfort the train that services it is a piece of crap. So bad that the city of Denver has had to charge them fines for uncompleted work and performance issues.
America 2017, so corrupt and incompetent, we can't even build functioning trains.

Public works are a notorious boondoggle in the US, and military spending that much worse. I worked on a large public works project in California that won a special award for being the only public works project in state history to finish on time and on budget. Who knew? We thought that was the way you were supposed to do it.

You are One BADASS WRITER !
Keep up the GREAT WORK!
And GOD Bless.