Pentagon Wars: DOW Budget Edition

If you’ve ever seen The Pentagon Wars — that comedy where Kelsey Grammer and Cary Elwes spend two hours exposing the dysfunction of military procurement — you’ll understand exactly what my career felt like. Except instead of “tanks,” I was chasing dollars. And instead of explosions, I got spreadsheets.

Picture this: the world’s largest office building, full of America’s best and brightest, all dressed alike (but slightly different camouflage patterns) and all supposedly fighting the same enemy. Except the enemy wasn’t foreign. It was our brother — the guys in the same family tree, just sitting at a different table. And my job, handed down with a wink and a “go get ’em,” was to find where my brother had hidden the cookies and bring them back home.

There were many colors of money, each with rules more confusing than the plot of Pentagon Wars. Procurement funds, operations funds, training funds — dollars coded so precisely that spending the wrong kind on the wrong thing was like wearing your boots on the wrong feet. My mission was to find those wrong-footed left handed Armenian made boots and drag them back.

Armed with databases, spreadsheets, and an unhealthy amount of coffee, followed by free RipIt energy drinks… I became a kind of secret agent auditor. I’d pore over transactions, line items, and training invoices with the intensity of a Cold War spy decoding intercepted radio chatter. When I found an error — a mis-coded purchase, an unexecuted contract — I didn’t call it out gently. No, I harvested it. Like a farmer shaking apples from a tree, except these apples were budget dollars my brother swore were already his.

Was it dysfunctional? Absolutely. It was Cain and Abel with Excel and PowerPoint. Brothers fighting brothers, not over land or cattle, but over which office got to keep a stack of appropriated dollars. Every day felt like a battlefield — except the battlefield was a meeting of Full Bird Colonels and above fighting over table scraps of dollars, and the casualties were war fighting readiness and trust.

Looking back, it’s hilarious. We told ourselves it was for the greater good, that “our” mission was the higher priority. But truth be told, it was a war of paperwork and emails where everyone thought they were the hero. Kelsey Grammer could have played my boss: storming into meetings, waving around our “finds” like battlefield trophies. If you squinted, you could almost hear the movie soundtrack swelling in the background.

Now retired, I see it clearly: the Pentagon’s real and constant wars aren’t always fought overseas. Sometimes, they’re fought in cubicles, in fluorescent-lit hallways, with colonels arguing over money that all came from the same tax payer pot. It was absurd, satirical, and just a little tragic. But it was real.

So yes, I fought in Iraq too, but the most damage I did was in the ongoing Pentagon Wars. Not with tanks or Bradley fighting vehicles, but with spreadsheets. Not against enemies abroad, but against my own brothers ans sisters in arms. And like the movie, it was equal parts comedy and cautionary tale.

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