Skip to content
The Art of Liberty Foundation
Sign in Subscribe

The Pentagon Shakedown No One Noticed

By Etienne de la Boetie2
Published:
|
Share to X Share to Bluesky Share to Facebook Share to LinkedIn Share by email
Pete Hegseth coming for your money

by Ken Klippenstein

For my money (and yours), the most insane scandal today is how little anyone seems to care about the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion budget request — an increase of more than $400 billion over last year.

Congress has barely said anything about this, instead spending precious hearing minutes arguing with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as to whether the Iran War costs 25 or 29 billion dollars — a drop in the bucket compared to what the Pentagon is poised to spend.

No need to worry, Hegseth insists, this new budget will create a cost-saving plan to innovate how the Pentagon buys things, breaking with the ways of the past.

“We have flipped the Pentagon acquisition process from a bureaucratic model to a business model,” Hegseth says, adding that the Department is “decisively moving from an acquisition environment paralyzed by bureaucratic red tape into an outcomes-driven organization focused on delivering the most for taxpayer dollars.”

We’ve been hearing the same bullshit since the Reagan years. The Pentagon’s dirty secret is that it has no business model. It’s never even passed an audit!

But this year’s request is the military’s biggest taxpayer heist ever.

Sure, we all know about the $600 toilet seats, the soldiers sent to war without proper armor, the drone threat nobody planned for. But those seem almost quaint compared to the biggest problem these days: the billions spent on the kind of business model “innovation” Hegseth described earlier, supposedly to speed things up or take advantage of “commercial” offerings.

In fact, I did a deep dive and counted at least 211 Pentagon organizations devoted to “rapid,” “innovative,” or “future” procurement. I’m not even talking about the research laboratories that have been around for decades; or the normal R&D orgs that exist; or the regular “materiel” commands of the services. I’m talking about 211 organizations created since the second Iraq War because those existing organizations obviously and evidently didn’t do their jobs.

Organizations, plural! This is duplication at an industrial scale.

Here’s the reality. Time and again, when the troops have had to go out there and fight, we’ve watched ad hoc organizations spring up to spend billions because someone didn’t foresee something or didn’t anticipate the very warfare that they’re supposedly preparing for. Or they didn’t buy enough. Or they bought the wrong thing. Or they bought too much of something and not enough of another. Or they priced themselves out.

“We’re not just buying something,” Hegseth said just before the Iran War. “We are solving life and death problems for our war fighters. We’re not building for peacetime. We are pivoting the Pentagon and our industrial base to a wartime footing.”

The irony, of course, is that Hegseth oversees the exact bureaucracy he’s decrying.

All these 211 (and counting) offices, cells, labs, experiments, agencies, and commands are part of the problem. They dole out money. And they constantly change their names, their sponsors, and their emphasis and they search for a funding source, as they keep up with the buzz words of the day, and as they shovel money to everyone from their obscure and favorite Death Inc., to the giants at Amazon.

One organization exists today, another pops up tomorrow. They are their own universe, an army that marches to its own cadence. Will Hegseth slash them? No. Instead, we’re sure to see the creation of a new Business United Thoughtful Futures Cell (BUTFUC) to spread the extra $400 billion around.

It’s almost impossible to audit the American military. It is so vast. But it can be done. Here’s a start:

The Best “Go Paid” Deal on Substack! You Get REAL Stuff!!

Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the https://artofliberty.org/store/.

Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many OR “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive if you live in the US. If you are international, we will give you a $10 credit towards shipping if you agree to pay the remainder.

Support us at the $250 Founding Member Level and get a signed high-resolution hardcover of “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History... Exposed! + Liberator flash drive + a signed high-resolution hardcover of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many + everything else in our “Everything Bundle” of the best in voluntaryist thought delivered domestically. International pays shipping. Our only option for signed copies besides catching Etienne @ an event.

The Daily News from the Art of Liberty Foundation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Etienne de la Boetie2

Etienne de la Boetie2

All articles
Tags: War, Empire & Foreign Policy Inflation & Central Banking Economy, Markets & Collapse Daily News

More in War, Empire & Foreign Policy

See all

More from Etienne de la Boetie2

See all