The proposed budget for DoD in fiscal year 2024 is $842 billion.
Even if they manage to steal just 1-2% (and it's probably considerably more), that's a lot of beach houses for the 0.01% elites.
"Follow the money."
Let's talk about how you legally steal money from the Pentagon. What you do, if you are a friend of say Hillary or Obama, or want to become one is form a corporation in DC to prive support services to the Pentagon. If you are a preferred coddled minority or woman and even better if you can also claim small business status, you are on a fast track to getting preference. Support services mean providing folks to support the bureaucracy, at lower levels it means secretaries, admin assistants, that sort of thing. but at higher levels it means providing program analysis, budget analysis, and often "engineering" support which means helping to draft reports, PPT presentations, and assisting with management reviews of options. Now, when this really reaches critical mass, you have support service contractors writing memos that have to be answered by support service contractors. Meetings are all arranged and staffed by support service contractors.
90% of it is utter useless BS. But once you have one of these contracts, you as the executive get to rake a very very nice salary package off the skim. Oh, and you can lobby Congress and the WH and pay them skim off the contract so that you keep the contract and no one looks to closely at where the money goes.
It's a huge racket and does nothing. These guys don't build ships, or tanks, or aircraft, or missiles or radar, or .... They don't even do, at great expense, the kinds of logistics things that are now done at great expense by KBR and the like but used to be done by lowly soldiers and sailors.
It's all just a huge black hole in the DC metropolitan area swamp to take public money and create nothing.