Once Again, Trump's "Space Force" Is A Colossal Boondoggle That Rivals Reagan's "Star Wars" Idiocy

The recent news that Donnie Dotard  approved funding – embedded within the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) -- for  the U.S. Space Force, ought to have every American's attention and outrage.   After all, in this age of outrageous military expenditures do we really need to be spending money on space wars. Trump, who first mentioned the Space Force idea in March 2018, and the U.S. Congress thinks so!

Among the lies put forward accompanying this phony event is that "Space force" marks  the first new U.S. military service in more than 70 years.  Trouble is,  it's not a "military service" but simply an unimaginative reinvention of the 'wheel'. To be specific,  a broken 'wheel' once known as the 'Strategic Defense Initiative' or SDI, other wise known as "Star Wars".   But now gussied up with PR and renamed "Space force".


According to The New York Times, Trump’s advisor and son-in-law-in-chief, Jared Kushner, “helped broker a deal to create the Space Force, a chief priority of the president’s, in exchange for the paid parental leave, a measure championed by his wife, Ivanka Trump, also a senior advisor to the president.”   

Which is more recycled bollocks that plays as a legit claim because most Americans can't keep up with the details of what's happening from one news cycle to the next.  Thanks to Trump and his incessant tweet storms and diatribes, crimes - as well as starting wars (like with Iran - and later likely North Korea) he won't be able to finish.

The truth?

The original idea for this boondoggle  was hatched some years ago by my feckless Colorado congress critter, Doug Lamborn  

 Lamborn is easily the most craven, mendacious, useless POS to ever grab power in our state.   Some  may recall that back in 2014 this walking turd wanted to slice Medicaid and food stamps for poor kids in order to feather the nest of the Pentagon and for expansion of already extensive military bases etc. near Colorado Springs.  Most recently, the miscreant mutt was almost eliminated from the GOP primary because of flouting Colorado law. To wit, a candidate may get his name on a primary ballot if he manages to get at least 1,000 signatures from likely voters- but these must be residents.

Problem was that 'Lame brain' used a lot of out- of -state dupes to garner signatures.  A legal case was brought, lawsuit filed, and the Colorado Supreme Court agreed, kicking him off the ballot. However, the slimy little douche took his case to federal court (which we know is stacked with Trumpie appointees) and argued that the residency rule for signature gatherers in Colorado was unconstitutional and "violated" his free speech. The federal judge (Philip Brimmer) agreed and tossed the case out so we're saddled with this shit head again.

Flash forward: the whole Space Force idea was originally Lamborn's, hatched in order to grab more money in campaign contributions-  from defense contractors  promised gigs here in Colorado Springs.  Lamborn as well as the defense contractors  saw only huge dollar signs,  with $$$$ pouring in at taxpayer's expense.

Cue the startup music and we beheld that  the knuckle dragger GOP House (prior to the 2018 midterms) had approved the creation of a "Space Corps" inside the Air Force. (Not separate from it!)  There  followed Trump's alleged novel brain fart on June, 18, 2018  at a meeting of the National Space Council  (WSJ, 'Trump Calls For A Space Force', 6/19/18, p. A3) 

But anyone with more than air between the ears could see it was merely a regurgitation of Lamborn's - though he also called it a "Space Corps".  At the time reported  (Denver Post, May 14, 2018) Lamborn had insisted :

"I don't care what we call it, or what it looks like as long as we make space the priority in the Department of Defense that it deserves to be".

According to the Times' piece:

"The aim of Space Force is to maintain U.S. superiority in space, particularly weighed against threats by China and Russia. The Space Force is part of a $1.4 trillion government-spending package. (Congress approved $40 million for Space Force operations and maintenance in the fiscal year 2020 appropriations.)  It will not be its own military department, like the Navy, Army and Air Force, as the secretary of the Air Force will administer it. The Space Force will have its own representation on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to the law that created it."


Now let's cut to reality as opposed to fantasy:  What's really behind this bull crap? Well, the old term - which I still prefer - is "pork barrel spending". In other words, Lamborn's and Reagan's reincarnated boondoggle was merely revived under a new(?) title and different PR.  But like most current defense projects  it is merely an expedient device to  funnel  money to the Pentagon and its defense contractors for a fake project with the U.S. taxpayer the easy mark.  This, btw, is after the Pentagon has already lost track of trillions of dollars of funding, since at least 2002. (According to former analyst Chuck Spinney, see e.g.  
The Pentagon Merits NO Further Budget Increases Un...   )

So we are on the same plane of reality here (and why I used the term "specious") , let's note this is another one of those "bad ideas" exposed by Matt Miller in his book The Tyranny of Bad Ideas.  I.e. god awful, already proven disasters like trickle down tax cuts,  that keep coming back like bad pennies....or zombies.  In this case, no matter what Dotard and his cabal of lackeys claim about  being "a matter of national security', this is simply Reagan's Star Wars boondoggle in a new guise.  What's worse this time around is that this money waster could be approved under the "enactment" of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act.  Talk about snake oil scams!

Indeed,  as we read in the Times' piece:

“Roughly 16,000 active-duty and civilian personnel who used to make up Air Force Space Command are now assigned to the Space Force following the enactment of the fiscal 2020 NDAA.” And, over the next year-and-a-half, "


So, in other words, those 16,000 recruited for this sham "service" will now be forced into a pretend job that supposedly makes us all more secure, but in reality is a Potemkin ruse.   ("Potemkin" is derived from "Potemkin Village" -  which term signifies any deceptive or false construct designed to mislead those within the false enclave and those peering in from the outside.)

For the benefit of those with poor memories, recall Star Wars, or the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), was never proven workable or even remotely feasible.  It depended upon incorporating space-based interceptors as well as powerful lasers mounted on satellites to take down Soviet ICBMs.   The  most devastating exposure of the missile defense con appeared in the May, 1987 issue of Physics Today and was entitled "APS Directed Energy Weapons Study (Executive Summary)".   Versions of it  subsequently appeared in other journals, including the Reviews Of Modern Physics, e.g.
https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.59.S1


The study basically took apart the SDI  piece by piece  with no fewer than 26 major  deficiencies identified on everything from the weaknesses of the proposed lasers to shoot down the incoming missiles (too weak by several orders of magnitude) to the problem of identifying the targets at sub-micro-radian resolution in the boost phase to "lack of precision tracking via active sensor systems".

 This more recent iteration of the Star Wars snake oil emphasizes the theme that "we need to protect our satellites from being shot down",  say by the Chinese, Russkies...or maybe even the Iranians.(According to a recent Pentagon report China and Russia pose the main threats  and are "making serious headway in space and could develop technologies to 'disrupt or destroy U.S. and allied satellites" in a future conflict.  

But let's get real here: satellites typically fly in predictable orbits and so will always be fairly easy to target, say by a determined bad actor.  But launching a typical weather or defense satellite is expensive enough without adding hundreds of pounds more weight for defenses (excimer lasers?) , or attempting to devise expensive ground A.I. systems to disable enemy satellites in orbit.  A more practical solution - which maybe trillion less in cost- is to employ greater redundancy in the satellites we do put up.  Thus, the military - say Air Force, not a redundant useless "Space Force"- could also deploy backup systems on unmanned aerial vehicles - integrating them into a fraction of the fleet.

But  here's the hard fact.  These wastrels and weasels in the Pentagon never ever got over their little 'Star Wars' (SDI) farce being exposed for the claptrap scheme it was.  As proof, I point to a little known 1989 congressional report entitled  "Military Space Forces - The Next Fifty Years".  Therein we learned that  the aerospace industry had a boner for the resurrection of a bottomless money pit  analogous to the original SDI but using fear, to concoct a "space force".    The money wastrels realized SDI had its day so they needed a new con and  new con artists. Enter the likes of Doug Lamborn - and later, Donald Trump - the ultimate con artist.   As Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power In Space noted in a recent press release regarding this plan:

"The aerospace industry has long claimed that  this new Star Wars would be the largest industrial project in the history of our planet. So much money would be needed that the industry has identified the ‘entitlement programs’ for defunding to pay for ‘everything space.’ That means Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the remaining tattered social safety net would be cut to pay for Space Force.”

Which is exactly what defense analyst Chuck Spinney also warned when the  portion of  GDP allocated to national security, defense spending doubled  post 9/11, e.g.

Former Defense Analyst Chuck Spinney Predicted ‘Wa...

But now the spending for the "space force" will be on steroids.  While the malignant and malicious budget -busting cost is bad enough, there is also the destabilizing effect for global security.  Translation: the 'Doomsday' clock  (of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) will now move another minute closer to midnight, if this scheme is implemented -at least to the exent other nations believe it to be a real threat.
  

Writing for Counterpunch, Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, and  the author of the book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet, pointed out that the Space Force deal flies in the face of “the landmark Outer Space Treaty of 1967, put together by the U.S., then Soviet Union and the U.K., designating space as a global commons to be used for peaceful purposes”.

The Outer Space Treaty “bans weapons of mass destruction in space,” Grossman pointed out.  Further:

 “The Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) treaty that the three nations have sought to expand would prohibit the placement of any weapons in space. But the U.S. “has opposed the PAROS treaty and effectively vetoed its enactment at the United Nations.”

Oh, one last thing you ought to know:  the magic words "Space force" have been a reliable applause line at Trump's political rallies  - appealing to the cabbage brains that flock to them and cheer. (I.e. those in the lower half of the IQ curve.)   Most of these goobers are delirious because no one explained to them that 'space force' doesn't really mean Trump will be leading a military unit against extraterrestrials, aka aliens.  Why would he if 'Captain Bonespurs'   wasn't even prepared to fight any wars on Earth,   choosing to get out of service five times using the ruse of bone spurs.   (He did this by getting a special doctor's letter each time as opposed to undergoing an actual draft physical - such as I had to take in March, 1965.)

But now this consummate con man and grifter pestilence has succeeded in getting even the Dems to sign on to his cockamamey bullshit space force idea.   No wonder so many Dem voters (and others) are terrified at the prospect of the ambulatory orange maggot getting reelected this year.

See Also:

Armed Forces | Donald Trump | Space & Astronomy

With Space Force, Congress Hands Trump a Major Victory

Excerpt:

"The idea for Space Force started out as a joke by Trump when he flippantly said, during a 2018 speech in San Diego, California: “I was saying it the other day because we’re doing a tremendous amount of work in space. I said, ‘Maybe we need a new force, we’ll call it the Space Force.’ And I was not really serious. Then I said, ‘What a great idea, maybe we’ll have to do that.’” A year ago, when Democrats won enough congressional seats to claim victory in the House, the fate of Space Force was in serious doubt. The Atlantic speculated that “[w]ith the House of Representatives flipped and Congress split, the Trump administration’s Space Force will probably never get off the ground.” But just 13 months later, Democrats and Republicans together gave the most unpopular president in memory the approval he needed to fast-track his idea into reality.

In 2018, Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island expressed his opposition to Space Force, saying it was “not the way to go.” A year later, Reed capitulated when he voted for the latest NDAA encompassing the creation of Space Force, saying the bill was “a responsible compromise that strengthens our national defense capabilities.” Regardless of the liberal party’s feigned opposition to warfighting, militarism has always been a bipartisan project, and it is no surprise that the militarization of space is as well."

And:

Armed Forces | Donald Trump | Space & Astronomy

Trump: Make Space Great Again

by John Feffer | January 16, 2020 - 7:33am | permalink

An Unspoken Travesty: How BOTH Parties Are Feeding The Pentagon's Bloated Coffers

Perhaps the biggest howler in WSJ editorial history appeared in one skewed sentence yesterday ('A Bad Budget Deal',  p. A16):

"Entitlements are already squeezing defense spending, and that squeeze will get worse without reform"

Thereby pushing one of  the most noisome and erroneous tropes, i.e.  that the poor little military budget is "small relatively as a percentage of GDP" and is being "squeezed" by them monstrous "entitlements".  If only!  But the true fact is that defense spending has more than doubled since 2000, from 2.4 % of GDP to nearly 5.9%. This uptick in GDP percentage led former Pentagon Analyst Chuck Spinney (the same person who exposed the unaccounted for $1.2 trillion) to remark nearly two decades ago that the increase was nothing less than "a war on domestic programs, including Social Security and Medicare".

Fast forward and the congress is now on the cusp of approving a budget that will literally break the bank with deficits - up to $2 trillion in the next two years - according to Steve Rattner this morning on MSNBC.   This is given the debt ceiling has now been "suspended" until July, 2021 (cf. WSJ, today, p. A1).  What happened to spending caps?  Why is the debt ceiling now abolished, errr.... suspended? What happened to financial sobriety?  What happened to 'Deficits matter!' ? Well they vanished, first with the Trump -GOP tax cuts, which were never going to "pay for themselves".  That was a financial fantasy much like the laughable "Laffer curve". And  second, in the race for both parties to avoid another gov't shutdown by erasing spending caps, especially for military spending. Much of which is misappropriated and plain old waste - as I will show.

Left unsaid, or at least under-reported - at least until Fareed Zakaria's CNN report Sunday morning -   has been:  a) How no military funding should be based on GDP % but on actual threats, and b) How both parties have shamelessly fattened the Pentagon's cash cow of shameful spending and waste, but for differing reasons.  As Zakaria pointed out on his Sunday a.m. show: 

 "Last week, the Democratic House - filled with radicals according to the Republicans-  voted to appropriate $733 billion for 2020 defense spending. The Republicans are outraged because they along with Trump want that number to be $750 billion.  In other words, on the largest item of discretionary spending in the federal budget,  Democrats and Republicans are divided by 2.3 percent."

Of course, this is totally batshit nuts, or as Zakaria so aptly put it:

"That is the cancerous consensus in Washington today."

Adding, in a description I can't improve upon:

"America's defense budget is out of control. Lacking strategic coherence.  Utterly mismanaged. Ruinously wasteful. And yet, eternally expanding. Fourteen thousand dollar toilet seat covers, and one thousand three hundred dollar cups. Yes cups!  Are par for the course."

Most abominable of all is how the Pentagon has clearly broken free from even congressional oversight, as if fulfilling Eisenhower's warning about the military industrial complex and its cancerous metastasis.  As Zakaria went on to note, last year the Pentagon finally subjected itself to audit, "after a quarter century of resisting".   And "in true Pentagon style, cost over $400 million."

And what, pray tell, was the outcome of this gargantuan costly audit?  I will let Zakaria tell it:

"Most of its agencies: Army, Navy.  Air Force, Marine, failed. The then Defense Secretary Shanahan admitted 'We never expected to pass'. "

Well, why the hell not?  As Chuck Spinney would have put it, the Pentagon has become a power unto itself even surpassing congressional checks and authority.    Reinforced by Coward Dotard's attitude to them, i.e. as an "indulgent parent".  As when he tweeted  not long ago in typical Trump-tardian style: "We love and need our military - and give them eveverything and more."

In Zakaria's parlance, "opening the piggy bank while trying to slash spending by almost every other government agency."

How explain for why a military coward would do such a thing? A putz who had his doc five times sign a release-excuse medical form based on "bone spurs" - without ever formally having to take a draft physical, as I and millions of others had to. My psychologist great niece Shayl as usual has the answer: "It's easy! He's using a compensation mechanism.  Making up for his cowardice then - by enabling huge military spending now - to ingratiate himself with the Pentagon's bigwigs so they will now respect him."

Adding, "I believe they still believe he's a coward!"  Well, I agree. Can't get a much bigger coward than this yellow-bellied, orange -hued maggot.  But his compensation cowardice is unfortunately breaking this nation financially, even while exposing a much deeper danger.  As Zakaria went on:

"The much deeper danger is spotlighted by Jessica Tuchman Mathews, in a superb essay in the New York Review Of Books. Mathews points out that we think of defense budgets in an overall erroneous way, tying it to GDP. But the defense budget should be related to the threats the country faces."

Amen!   The key and most salient point being that as time goes on, defense spending as a percent of a growing economy should decline. I.e. as GDP increases by 30 percent the defense budget should not also increase by that amount unless there are very serious, imminent threats. But this isn't what we are seeing, including with this nonsensical budget now on the verge of passing.  

So let's examine Ms. Mathews' piece, 'America's Indefensible Defense Budget' in more detail.   As she writes in respect to the misplaced reference of defense spending as a percentage of GDP:

"If you have read anything about defense spending in recent years, it was probably expressed as a percentage of GDP. At roughly 3–4 percent (it was more than 40 percent in 1944, 15 percent during the Korean War, and over 10 percent in the early 1960s), it seems eminently affordable.

But this almost universally used measure is close to meaningless, except to make rough international comparisons. It makes no sense to expect that external threats will expand in parallel with a country’s economic growth. A country whose economy has grown by, for example, 30 percent has no reason to spend 30 percent more on its military. To the contrary, unless threats worsen, you would expect that, over time, defense spending as a percentage of a growing economy should decline."

She goes on to note:

"Instead, the valid measure of affordability is defense spending’s share of the federal discretionary budget: that is, of all federal spending other than the mandatory allotments to entitlements and interest on the national debt. Discretionary spending is everything else the government does: not just for the military but for the federal judiciary and law enforcement; support infrastructure, education, and agriculture; invest in science and technology; protect the environment, wilderness, and National Parks; manage relations with the rest of the world and with international organizations overseeing everything from trade to arms control; fund the National Weather Service; police the border; explore space; develop energy resources; ensure the safety and soundness of food, drugs, communications, airline travel, consumer products, banks, the stock exchanges, and on and on."

That's a LOT, and the pie chart below -  from 2013 - shows the military's chunk of discretionary spending then, which has since ballooned:

Ms. Mathews adds:

"The budget embodies the country’s core political choices: how much government its citizens want, what their priorities for it are, and how large a debt they choose to shoulder and to pass on. Defense spending now accounts for almost 60 percent of the budget: everything else is accommodated in the remaining two fifths".

That is, $3 out of every $5 for the military, and $2 of every $5 for everything else, which as Zakaria observed is more than the ten next nations combined.  Can anyone say "fiscal insanity" without registering objections as a paper patriot?  That is, a poltroon who wears the red, white and blue when it suits, but lacks any capacity for critical thought.   The most appalling aspect as both Zakaria and Mathews point out, is the abominable waste of money - leaving out for now how many audits the Pentagon has failed.   Let's let Ms. Tuchman Mathews tell us about the case of tanks and  aircraft carriers and money thereby wasted (ibid.):

"Tanks are a classic case. For years, the army has tried to convince Congress to stop buying new ones. They are expensive to build, maintain, exercise, and train troops to use. The army already has more than six thousand of them—far more than it needs for any conceivable future combat. More controversially, the navy remains wedded to new aircraft carriers, but at $13 billion each they are arguably more an outdated symbol of twentieth-century power than an effective weapon system for a future in which they will be increasingly vulnerable to attack by high-speed, maneuverable missiles that can be bought for a minuscule fraction of what a carrier costs."

 What's the reason for this inexcusable waste?  Well, pork barrel spending in red (and blue districts)  to protect defense contracting jobs.  Mathews again on these congress critters:

"They prefer to protect spending and jobs in their districts. The result is funding for weapons systems the armed forces don’t want, bases and facilities they would like to close, and bloated, inefficient back office—that is, noncombat—operations."

 You know we're in deep shit as a nation when the only major jobs program is not the repair of our collapsing infrastructure (a cost now estimated at over $2 trillion) but making cups for defense contractors at  $1300 each and Pentagon toilet seat covers for  $14,000 a pop.   Oh, and 'make work' adding to the 6,000 tanks the army already has which is way more than it'll ever use -  say in a modern war.

And of course, "Dotard the Coward"  Trump -   as Ms. Mathews observes-  fits into this toxic stew of waste and mismanagement as well (ibid.)

"The last ingredient in this political mix is, of course, the White House. After last year’s budget deal, Trump captured the unfortunate national mood when he tweeted, “We love and need our Military and gave them everything—and more.” This year, defending his failure to serve in Vietnam, he boasted that with his $750 billion budget, “I think I make up for that right now…. I think I’m making up for it rapidly.” Trump is not the first president to want to leave his mark on something new and bigger for defense spending. As in everything else, he is simply the least interested in the substance of his policies and the most transparently self-serving."

Meanwhile, as we blow through trillions the real critical needs for the future and asymmetrical warfare go begging, e.g.

"The world that lies ahead of us is unequivocally one in which more and more of the greatest challenges—cyber regulation, arms control, nonproliferation, financial stability and trade, climate change, health and the environment, crime and the rule of law—can only be dealt with multilaterally. Yet since the end of the cold war, the US has rejected most of the international agreements the rest of the world has approved, including the Law of the Sea Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Antipersonnel Landmine Ban, and the International Criminal Court. It has refused to ratify treaties protecting genetic resources, restricting trade in conventional arms, banning cluster bombs, and protecting persons with disabilities. In just two years under President Trump, it has rejected the Transpacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement and withdrawn from the Paris Accord on climate, the INF Treaty on intermediate-range missiles, the UN Human Rights Council, UNESCO, the Iran nuclear deal, and NAFTA (which was renegotiated).

During this nearly thirty years of sweeping diplomatic withdrawal, America has been engaged in conflict for all but a few months. It has undertaken nine large-scale military actions, including three of the five major wars it has fought since 1945. Of these, the brief Gulf War of 1990–1991 was a clear success. The war of choice in Iraq was a catastrophic mistake. The now eighteen-year-long war in Afghanistan will almost certainly end in failure—if we can ever bring ourselves to let it end.

It has become increasingly clear that the largely intrastate conflicts in which the US has embroiled itself, fighting small groups of shifting, local opponents rather than national armies, have not been the kind of conventional interstate wars for which its weapons systems and doctrine were designed. Every approach the US has tried—regime change, nation-building, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, redlines, responsibility to protect—alone or in concert with others, has failed to achieve the desired results.

We are now at the point of allocating too large a portion of the federal budget to defense as compared to domestic needs, tolerating too much spending that doesn’t buy useful capability, accumulating too much federal debt, and yet not acquiring a forward-looking, twenty-first-century military built around new cyber and space technologies. We have become complacent and strategically flabby about adapting to a profoundly altered world. Major change will require a quality of leadership we haven’t seen in a long time, from men and women in the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon who are respected for their knowledge and national security experience and who are willing to pay a political price for what must be done. Even then the process will be tough, slow, and painful, but it is surely overdue."

In other words, Ms. Mathews has accurately spelled out our path to collapse as a nation because of our misplaced priorities and lack of vision  engendered by venal politicians, their associated poltroons, a cowardly unfit "resident" and a myopic citizenry - often too invested in their own gadgets and comforts, and an inability to do critical thinking.  Especially after 63 million in the last general election put into office - with the aid of  an archaic system - an unqualified buffoon who isn't fit to be a dog catcher,  far less leader of the 'free world'.  (Since joined by another buffoon, Boris Johnson, in the UK.)  

Yeppers, we are in seriously deep shit, especially if Dotard Donnie somehow manages to bamboozle enough simpletons to get in again!

See also:

War

Why We Must Restore the Title, “War Department”

And:

America's Indefensible Defense Budget | by Jessica T. Mathews | The ...

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/07/18/americas-indefensible-defense-budget/

Clarifying Ocasio -Cortez' $21 Trillion Pentagon Waste Gaffe

WaPo columnist Aaron Blake (Monday) continues the Post's  "Pinocchio" campaign against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)  now claiming she "has made a bigger splash than any freshman in the 116th Congress — in either the House or Senate."   Quickly adding that:

"And a big reason is an often-overzealous conservative effort to knock her down a few pegs. The congresswoman has put on a PR master class in using those efforts to build her profile and social media following. (Her retort to the overblown dancing-video kerfuffle last week has been viewed nearly 20 million times.)"

So what?  I have seen it and have no problems with it.  The conservos bellyaching needed a good slapping down and putting in their place anyway, and Alexandria delivered it.  Besides, it's not the conservos'  business to "knock her down a few pegs"  - or to dismiss her as a "commie" because she belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) like I do..  Blake then goes on:

"But she’s also shown a tendency to exaggerate or misstate basic facts. And her defense of this in a Sunday interview with “60 Minutes” was very bad. When Anderson Cooper confronted her with The Washington Post Fact Checker’s Four-Pinocchio verdict on her claim about $21 trillion in waste at the Pentagon, Ocasio-Cortez offered this (emphasis added):

COOPER: One of the criticisms of you is that-- that your math is fuzzy. The Washington Post recently awarded you four Pinocchios --

OCASIO-CORTEZ: Oh my goodness --

COOPER: -- for misstating some statistics about Pentagon spending?

OCASIO-CORTEZ: If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they’re missing the forest for the trees. I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.

COOPER: But being factually correct is important--

In the case of the $21 trillion, Ocasio-Cortez was suggesting that this was all Pentagon waste and that cleaning it up could pay for two-thirds of the estimated $32 trillion price tag for single-payer health care, which she and others are referring to as Medicare-for-all.

 

$21 TRILLION of Pentagon financial transactions ‘could not be traced, documented, or explained,’" Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a tweet that still appears on her timeline and has been shared more than 26,000 times. "$21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T. That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.”

Okay, I think it's time here to take a deep collective breath and inquire what Blake and the Post's "Pinocchio" designators are so worked up about.. In fact, it turns out Ms. Ocasio-Cortez main gaffe was simply conflating the magnitude of the Pentagon's accounting scams with actual money being available, i.e. for "Medicare for all'. This is based on the recent extensive investigative piece ('Exposing The Pentagon's  Massive Accounting Fraud',)  by David Lindorff, appearing in The Nation (Jan. 7, 2019, pp. 12- 16).  As Mr. Lindorff write (p. 13):

"As a result of the Pentagon's accounting shenanigans some $21 trillion - yes, trillion- worth of financial transactions cannot be accounted for. That number caught the eye of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio -Cortez who tweeted )on Dec. 2) to her 1.47 million followers that this missing $21 trillion cold have been used to fund a Medicare for All program.

However....there is no $21 trillion pot of money hidden inside the Pentagon. what there has been instead is a systematic, long standing, unconstitutional effort by the Department of Defense to feed  phony numbers to Congress and thereby inflate the DOD's budget by billions of dollars each year.   NO one knows for sure, though informed estimates put it as high as $100 billion - not enough to fund Medicare for All but a good down payment on a Green New Deal..."

So there you have it: Ocasio-Cortez basically was over optimistic regarding the money available from the Pentagon's funny money accounting gimmicks. For example, one method entails laundering "one year money" pools into "five year money" pools.   The reason? The unspent money in the latter (longer ) pool doesn't have to be returned during the 5-year period.  The phony numbers arising are then referred to as "plugs"  (as in plugging a hole) by the Pentagon's money wonks and paper pushers.

As Lindorff puts it (p. 14):

"Such nippering can be repeated multiple times - according to one Pentagon budgeting veteran- 'until the funds become virtually untraceable'"

Of course, this deplorable fudging of budgets and accounts didn't just pop up recently. Former defense analyst Chuck Spinney  - as long ago as 2000 (on Bill Moyers' PBS NOW program)-  reported on the Pentagons' accounting gimmicks and 'plug' rackets to the extent of being unable to account for $1.1 trillion - at that time.

Enter now Thomas Hedges who reported for The Guardian  in March 2017 - after Trump proposed a $52 billion increase in military spending -  "the Pentagon has exempted itself without consequence for 20 years now, telling the Government Accountability Office that collecting and organizing the required information for a full audit is too costly and time-consuming."   

Exempted itself!?  Are you kidding me?  As Chuck Spinney pointed out on Bill Moyers' NOW program, if a gov't  agency declines fiscal accountability we are no longer a democracy because the agency or department is no longer accountable to the citizens - the taxpayers. It is then a law unto itself, and we are short steps from fascism.  Lindorff himself also references Spinney's previous efforts at examining the mess, i.e. :

"For Spinney, the Pentagon accounting fraud is deja vu all over again.  Back in the 1980s he and a handful of reform-minded colleagues exposed how the Defense Department used a similar accounting trick to inflate its spending and to accumulate money for 'off the books' programs. Spinney recalls: 'The DOD routinely overestimated inflation rates for weapons systems. When actual inflation turned out to be lower than the estimates, they did not return the excess funds to the Treasury as required by law. They slipped them into something called a merged surplus account. In that way the Pentagon was able to build up a slush fund of almost $50 billion, or about $120 billion in today's money."

OK, so Ocasio-Cortez basically erred by mixing up Pentagon slush fund money accrued from sleazy accounting with a total amount ($21 trillion) missing from the ledgers on account of such a ruse'.  But she's young and still learning, so should be forgiven. I warrant she didn't lie (with implies intention) but simply "shot from the hip" in not really investigating the fiscal mechanics behind the shady accounting using 'plugs'.  In other words, she's not guilty of "Pinnochios" but rather laziness.  After all, it's not that there doesn't exist ANY money from the Pentagon's accounting tricks for social uses, only it just isn't enough to support a Medicare for All program.   What we do know is right now there is a desperate need to provide a much wider social safety net, and we need to find any and all means - including higher taxes- to pay for it! 

See also:

Paul Buchheit

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