Illustration by Victor Juhasz/Rolling Stone
A retired Air Force auditor — we’ll call him Andy — tells a story about a thing that happened at Ogden Air Force Base, Utah. Sometime in early 2001, something went wrong with a base inventory order. Andy thinks it was a simple data-entry error. “Someone ordered five of something,” he says, “and it came out as an order for 999,000.” He laughs. “It was probably just something the machine defaulted to. Type in an order for a part the wrong way, and it comes out all frickin’ nines in every field.” Nobody actually delivered a monster load of parts. But the faulty transaction — the paper trail for a phantom inventory adjustment never made — started moving through the Air Force’s maze of internal accounting systems anyway. A junior-level logistics officer caught it before it went out of house. Andy remembers the incident because, as a souvenir, he kept the June 28th, 2001, email that circulated about it in the Air Force accounting world, in […]
Always funny to me how that socialist moniker is never applied to the military which without question would fit. My friend’s brother and his son both went to the Naval Academy. The brother became a naval officer serving for 20+years exiting with a life-long pension and access to the VA. His son is still in the navy after receiving his MD all expenses paid with salary. What a life all on the government sounds positively communist doesn’t it? Free education, medicare for all, etc will destroy the country make us lazy and fat getting something for nothing just like Venezuela!
The only thing in nature which operates within a system like this is a cancer.