Source: DOD

President Trump doesn’t much care for efforts to monitor and report on wasteful Pentagon spending and other military inefficiencies. This month, he ordered acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan to withhold battlefield reports from inspectors general in order to keep the information from becoming public.

“The public means the enemy,” Trump explained. “Those reports should be private reports.”

This order doubles down on a worrying trend at the Defense Department since Trump took office toward increasing unnecessary secrecy.

While it’s true that the Pentagon has always kept its share of secrets, and for good reason, it is working toward a new level of opacity, classifying all sorts of information that has been public in the past — including the inspection grades on America’s nuclear-weapons infrastructure, records of Navy aviation accidents, and Government Accountability Office assessments of Pentagon waste. The Defense Department has also stopped revealing publicly the numbers of troops it has deployed in each theater of the war on terrorism.

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