A recent Reuters investigation into the Pentagon’s inability to conduct a simple audit of its finances highlights the principal reason why the American empire is doomed. When reconciling the Navy’s accounts with those of the US Treasury, number-crunchers over at the Pentagon’s Defense Finance and Accounting Service simply made up figures and inserted them. This is how the Pentagon’s books are "balanced."

With a budget of over $600 billion, the US military is so vast, and the systems running it are so complex, that no one knows where the money is going, much less how much is being wasted, stolen, or simply lost. The whole sorry mess makes the Augean stables look like a bit of spilt milk: