Whistle Blowing and Pentagon Fat

The nation’s military might is never more impressive than when the Pentagon is battling against those who criticize its efforts to rid the defense budget of waste, fraud, and inefficiency. Though the budget is widely conceded to be riddled with fat, the Pentagon has always succeeded in defusing the issue by attacking the bearer of bad news, not the news itself.

Defense employees bent on blowing the whistle on abuses run up against stone walls of superiors, are intimidated, transferred, or even fired. Those who persist often find a Congress, and most newspapers, with little stomach for working through mazes of bureaucracy and highly technical weapons-system data to support the struggle of one lone voice, while a highly organi...