What does one have to do with the other? It’s possible to have more than one threat.

Security is frequently only as strong as the weakest link. If you’re an adversary, would you spend more time on an org’a poor security practices (pentagon failing audits) or a more difficult software vendor?

The audits in question are financial. There’s no doubt some overlap with security – e.g. failing to replace out of date software due to financial constraints exposes them to risk – but it’s not a simple relationship.

That's not just a 6 years thing. The Pentagon has never passed an audit (the first Defense Department audit in its history was in 2017).

What do you think 'can't pass an audit' means in the context of the DoD?

At best, incompetence. At worst, corruption.

If so, you don't seem to understand why the DoD is failing to pass one, but are very well versed in the outrage you're supposed to feel when it does.

Care to enlighten me?

It's an enormous organization (one of the largest in the world) that is largely getting audited on physical objects that either spend 99% of their life sitting in stockpiles, or getting actively used and discarded.

Passing an audit isn't having its checkbook balanced. Passing an audit is like your employer delivering a full and accurate account of how many chairs it owns, as well as providing all the necessary paper trail for how all of them were acquired, moved, and discarded.

Doable in a 5-person company, or a 50-person company, next to impossible in a 5,000-person company, actually impossible in a 500,000 person company.

And the DoD has hundreds of thousands of different types of such items to keep track of, all of which were tracked by disparate physical-fingers-counting-stuff accounting systems, that were historically not up to the expected standards. Updating them and reconciling all of them is a long process, which the DoD is working through.

I hate war departments as much as the next liberal, but I also recognize that this is an incredibly difficult ask.

And that the failures are generally not caused by Lt. Billy Bob filching Stinger missiles to sell to some warlord in East Oblastan.

The grift in the DoD comes from contracts for buying more crap that it doesn't need, or for paying good money for contract work that doesn't get done (Iraq, Afghanistan), not from having stuff that was bought 'fall off the back of the truck'. The organization "has* an audit problem, but it's main issue is one of procurement.

Wow, thank you for the detailed write-up. Your points make a lot of sense and I do think the general hate for the military industrial complex makes people look at these failed audits as malicious, probably prematurely.

Do you think the Pentagon will be able to pass that audit anytime soon (within the decade)?

The Marine Corp actually just became the first military branch to pass an audit:

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/02/24/marine-corps-...