Waste in the Defense Department: Wrong Context Is Worse Than No Context

This is really embarrassing, I'm having Robert Samuelson do my work for me. His column today pointed out that a Washington Post piece from last week may have misled readers on the amount of waste in the Pentagon's operations.

That article referred to $125 billion in waste that was identified in an internal Pentagon report that was never made public. This figure is then compared with the $580 billion annual budget for the Defense Department.

The problem is that the $125 billion is a cumulative...