The military serves a purpose. A military with NO audits, NO spending accountability, a totally broken acquisition and contracting system, and a revolving door between management and contractors, serves a purpose, its serving as welfare for the ultra-wealthy. The amount of money to be made in defense contracting is fucking ridiculous. Both anecdotal evidence AND careful studying of financial data report MASSIVE waste, fraud, and abuse.
Only there is auditing, there is accountability... You literally even reference it yourself with your "all the data shows waste, fraud, and abuse"... What data if there is no auditing or accountability?
And you speak as if the military is the only place such malfeasance exists... Yes it is bad, yes it should be addressed, but such things are not exclusive to the military by any stretch of the imagination. Literally every single aspect of the government is rife with such things.
We have tens of billions (perhaps even hundreds, no one knows the full extent and there is no possible way they could ever account for everything) in medicaid/medicare fraud every single year... Hell just a few weeks/months ago (I can't remember) they arrested a half dozen doctors in one state who defrauded medicaid of hundreds of millions of dollars by themselves... And all they needed to do was report to the government that they were doing procedures they didn't do, and the money flowed in like water. You want to talk about government spending with no accountability, look no further.
We have public school districts that have to spend billions in legal fees/attorney retainers because the unions in their districts have negotiated contracts that made it so difficult to fire bad teachers that they literally have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in adjudication in every single case to dismiss them... An issue so bad that some districts in more affluent cities (New York, for example), don't even bother to try and fire bad teachers who have tenure, they literally just keep paying them and keep them out of classrooms because that is cheaper than taking them to court to fire them.
On and on and on for literally any aspect of government. Wherever there is money involved in anything there will be greedy selfish people abusing whatever system it is a part of for their own gain.
And once again before you start complaining about whataboutism or some such nonsense... ALL OF THIS waste, fraud, and abuse is bad, it should all be addressed... But to single out the military in such regard is laughable... They have arguably the most oversight of all. I have never suggested it shouldn't be addressed... I responded to someone who argued the nonsensical typical far left position of "lol just cut military spending everything will be great".