The US government’s more than $1 trillion dollar annual spending on security – for a country that may very well be the most intrinsically secure great power in world history – should be the first hint that something is amiss. The United States has two great ocean moats, weak and friendly neighbors, and the world’s most potent arsenal of nuclear weapons, which threatens annihilation of the territory of any potential attacker. Such nuclear weapons cost only a small portion of the $1 trillion in security spending.

First of all, according to Winslow Wheeler on Truthout, the largest agency in this multi-agency spending total, the Department of Defense (DoD), which alone spends almost $600 billion per year, cannot pass an audit to determine where all the money is going. Wheeler reports that this horrendous and long-standing financial management debacle will not be solved anytime soon.