[ballenf]

I don't see the reference to the money as "missing". My read is that it's the total of ledger entries made without sufficient supporting justification.

It could be a tank squadron on the books that wasn't removed when it got destroyed (or dismantled) or a whole military base decommissioned but still being depreciated.

This isn't (necessarily) "the Army spent 6.5 trillion too much in one year" nor is it "the Army lost 6.5 trillion".

A single dollar mistakenly accounted upfront can sometimes require at least twice that in corrective ledger entries.

Finally, consider a mistake of the type of over-estimating the value of a capital item by an order of magnitude. The corrective ledger entry would make it look like a huge loss was incurred in a particular year when the reality was much more benign. For the purposes of this report, that corrective entry needs to be supported by specific explanation which was missing.