numbers in and around both countries:

• DOD's Contingency Tracking System counted 260,000 deployed in and around Iraq (as opposed to numbers varying from 140,000 to 160,000 for those inside Iraq) and 60,000 deployed in and around Afghanistan (as opposed to 18,000 to 20,000 reported in Afghanistan);

• DOD's report "Active Duty Military Personnel by Regional Area and by Country" listed 207,000 deployed altogether for Iraq and 20,000 for Afghanistan.

• DFAS cost data supports 202,000 deployed for Iraq and 50,000 deployed for Afghanistan.

In short, nobody in the executive branch or Congress can reliably say what the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost, nor the exact number of troops deployed for them.  Various entities have different estimates that vary by tens of billions of dollars and thousands of people; they cannot even agree on the dollars publicly appropriated by Congress.  Also, there is no reliable record for how the Pentagon planned to spend the money appropriated to it by Congress, and there is no record whatsoever for how it was actually spent. 

Students of DOD finances over the years will understand this unhappy fact as just one more example of the Defense Department's failure to comply, as most other federal agencies have already done, with generally accepted laws, regulations, and practices for financial management.  According to the discussion in the hearing, this problem has been with us since 1947.

Under the banner of "support for the troops," Congress has been heaving hundreds of billions of dollars at DOD, but it has not made a public record of how much it has appropriated for the wars, and it has not required DOD to keep any competent records either.  These problems caused some uncomplimentary comments at the July 18 hearing, but no plan for remedial action was decided upon.

What would seem to be a laudable exercise of congressional oversight has actually become a painful example of how little oversight there actually is. 

Shays deserves credit for asking for testimony and complaining to the Pentagon and the appropriations committees.  However, he might as well just shout down an empty well.

If he climbed down to the bottom of that well, he'd find the financial and moral accountability Congress and the Pentagon have thrown down there.