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Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

breakingdefense.com

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Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#131

Post by psunavy03 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #104

The US Department of Defense was not audited until six years ago, when it began a project to make their organization auditable. From the start, it was expected to take longer than six years: You are looking at a potential new job. A large company wants you to lead a project on their audits. Here is the situation: They are large and complex - on a different order of magnitude, possibly the largest, most complex organi…

As someone with 20 years active and reserve time, the only thing I'd really tweak here is that the budget is somewhat centralized; it's just the execution that's decentralized. DOD is an Executive Branch department that operates on money programmed by Congress. Agencies choose, within limits of Title 10 US Code, how to spend that money, but the "pots" or "flavors" of money they have to spend are allocated in the Congressional budget.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#133

Post by dragonwriter »

Mistletoe wrote: post #3

Can anyone explain to me why it is awful for a person to live in debt but it is okay for the federal government to do so? I've never understood this in the least, other than the "kick the can down the road, America superpower backed by military blah, blah, blah" very weak argument. History is full of the carnage of failed empires that had this same idea. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN 32 trillion in debt…

> 32 trillion in debt seems insurmountable, has anything like this ever reversed course historically?

If you look at output or income relative, instead of meaningless absolute nominal terms, yes, in fact, the current US debt to to GDP ratio and debt to revenue ratios are a drop from the recent peak—a result of exactly the kind of reversal of course you are asking about.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#135

Post by psunavy03 »

thelastgallon wrote: post #120

Sounds like an ideal job for AI. AI, please read this COBOL code and rewrite it all in Rust. Understanding 85 COBOL Standard reserved words is orders of magnitude easier than understanding English. AI should bludgeon this task in no time. And Rust can be 180,000x faster[1], all the code will be efficient and run on a mac mini or raspberry pi. It sounds like the easiest way for AI startups to make a pitch and collect…

Do you even code?

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#136

Post by dragonwriter »

HideousKojima wrote: post #13
Mistletoe wrote: post #3

Can anyone explain to me why it is awful for a person to live in debt but it is okay for the federal government to do so? I've never understood this in the least, other than the "kick the can down the road, America superpower backed by military blah, blah, blah" very weak argument. History is full of the carnage of failed empires that had this same idea. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN 32 trillion in debt…

Most explanations I've seen boil down to to "The US (or any other sovereign nation with control over their own currency) can print their way out of debt, it's literally impossible for the US to default." This ignores the devastating economic effects that printing such a huge amount of currency would cause (likely comparable to the effects of simply defaulting) and ignores the fact that sovereign nations with control…

> Most explanations I've seen boil down to to "The US (or any other sovereign nation with control over their own currency) can print their way out of debt, it's literally impossible for the US to default."

Its impossible for the US to be forced to default.

Its quite possible for the US to make a political choice to default, and it has come very close to doing so.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#137

Post by xeromal »

wslh wrote: post #41
MrMetlHed wrote: post #38

Worked with a guy ten years ago that would obsessively read these reports from the Pentagon. Here's a couple of his stories about the matter: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/ and https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-mari... (very old and I apologize for my horrific javascript at the time.) It sounds like nothing has changed. Relevant to this crowd, maybe: "Most of the Cobol code the P…

I would love to perform static security code analysis to that code.

Not all the RAM on earth would be enough to process that shit

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#139

Post by bastawhiz »

uticus wrote: post #44
MrMetlHed wrote: post #38

Worked with a guy ten years ago that would obsessively read these reports from the Pentagon. Here's a couple of his stories about the matter: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/ and https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-mari... (very old and I apologize for my horrific javascript at the time.) It sounds like nothing has changed. Relevant to this crowd, maybe: "Most of the Cobol code the P…

Of course, devil's advocate would point out COBOL in 60s was written with a lot more focus on lasting in general. They didn't largely have the same general attitude of 'we iterate quickly with our script kiddies' as is prevalent today. Not that all software from then was wonderful. Or that COBOL magically guarantees great code. But, on the flip side, you can't say the code base isn't battle-hardened (to various liter…

> you can't say the code base isn't battle-hardened

Your statement is undermined by the fact that the system has failed its sixth consecutive audit. If it's not hardened against failing an audit, I'm not really sure what it could possibly be hardened against.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#140

Post by bastawhiz »

encoderer wrote: post #55
Yahivin wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine the opposite.

Cool tell me more.

I can't get Copilot to generate Python that adds numbers together correctly sometimes. Getting an LLM to generate correct, working code for a language that hardly anybody writes anymore is almost assuredly going to lead to failure.
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