As it actively seeks war in the Pacific, the Caribbean, the Arctic, the North Atlantic, with an energized expansion in the Middle East, the Pentagon brings to mind not American security, but rapid metastasis.

The tasks of the Pentagon are threefold: To expand and maintain markets for the dollar; to subsidize risk and eliminate competition for favored US industries; and to serve as a mechanism for government payment transfers to the citizens in all 435 congressional districts.

Despite its new moniker, the Pentagon isn't about winning wars.  From 1939 to 1941 the US ginned up and aided the British war effort, as it scaled back similar assistance to Germany.  The end of the war – and those gratuitous nukes – signaled the United States as sole superpower, materially unwounded, in permanent search of new war markets.  The Pentagon effectively was established to maintain and grow these markets – and not a single war has been won since.

A vast bureaucracy developed around this institution for redistribution of what is now a trillion dollars a year.  The MIC is a matrix of taxpayer supported industries that use their cut to enhance their stock value and the health of the matrix.  Like state-supported and heavily subsidized industries everywhere, corruption, monopoly and propaganda become the three legs of the stool, and these must remain in balance.

Pete Hegseth is right.  Only eight months after a convincing call to "burn it down", quick-draw Pete is doing just that.  Not as quick as he gutted the fraud, waste and abuse reporting system, nor as fast as he had Pentagon media swear loyalty oaths, but still pretty fast and it all seems to support the cause of mo' money, mo' stuff, mo' war, in less time.

In reality, our bright boy is actually weakening all three legs of the Pentagon stool.  The Pentagon has long been a swamp of corruption and graft, some driven by bureaucratic regulation and habit, and some driven by the sheer amount of waste in the system that is created, tolerated and ignored.  "If I don't steal it, someone else will" explains well how it works inside the military matrix.  The recent $100 million fraud in federal contracting, discovered by independent media, is an example of how this can work.  The most recent Ukrainian corruption scandal is another $100 million example of how this can work.  We are inured to examples from the 1980s Packard Commission findings, as we find in Part Three of that 1986 report, "Problems with the Present Acquisition System."  Later sections contain comprehensive reform recommendations, one of which was to "substantially reduce the number of acquisition personnel." In any case, my review of that 40 year old study tells me that little has changed, little has been corrected, and meanwhile, the Pentagon budget has risen steadily far above the rate of inflation since 1986 – despite the conclusion of the Cold War only a few years later.  Just last year, a decade after he was first arrested, Fat Leonard and his costly schemes had yet to be punished, in part because he was serving as an informant (for years) to identify the rest of the scoundrels, in part because he escaped custody for 16 months and had to be recaptured.  Your Pentagon at its finest!