Why has waste at the Pentagon been so hard to rein in? The answer is, in a sense, not complicated: the military-industrial complex profits from waste. Closer scrutiny of waste could mean not just cheaper spare parts, but serious questions about whether cash cows like the F-35 are needed at all. An accurate head count of the hundreds of thousands of private contractors employed by the Pentagon would reveal that a large proportion of them are doing work that is either duplicative or unnecessary.