LETTERKENNY ARMY DEPOT, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense's accounts.

Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon's main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy's books with the U.S. Treasury's - a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies.

And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from. "A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate," Woodford says. "We didn't have the detail … for a lot of it."

The data flooded in just two days before deadline. As the clock ticked down, Woodford says, staff were able to resolve a lot of the false entries through hurried calls and emails to Navy personnel, but many mystery numbers remained. For those, Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to take "unsubstantiated change actions" - in other words, enter false numbers, commonly called "plugs," to make the Navy's totals match the Treasury's.

Jeff Yokel, who spent 17 years in senior positions in DFAS's Cleveland office before retiring in 2009, says supervisors were required to approve every "plug" - thousands a month. "If the amounts didn't balance, Treasury would hit it back to you," he says.

After the monthly reports were sent to the Treasury, the accountants continued to seek accurate information to correct the entries. In some instances, they succeeded. In others, they didn't, and the unresolved numbers stood on the books.

WASHINGTON — Cracks were found in the fuselage of a test model of the F-35B, the Marine Corps variant of the joint strike fighter, Defense News has learned.

The discovery will have no impact on flights occurring on any of the three F-35 variants, but will require that the test model be shut down for two to four months while inspectors look at the issue.

“During a late August 2013 inspection of the F-35B short takeoff/vertical landing (STOVL) ground article used for durability testing, two minor cracks were identified in one of the ground article’s four primary wing carry-through bulkheads,” Kyra Hawn, an F-35 program spokeswoman, said in an Oct. 10 statement.

The cracks appeared after more than 9,400 equivalent flight hours, or roughly 17 years of flight time. The F-35 program of record requires a lifecycle of 8,000 hours per plane; the test vehicle will eventually go through a simulation of two lifetimes, or 16,000 hours.

In other words, while the cracks are hardly a good thing, this was a problem discovered after extensive stress testing designed to find such problems. That said, a fix will need to be introduced into the production line, as well as added to previously produced models.

“A combined effort by government and Lockheed Martin engineering teams is underway to address modifications to the bulkhead that will be incorporated into production and the fleet as part of the normal program concurrency process to ensure aircraft full life,” Hawn’s statement said.

Hawn added that the cost and time needed to retrofit fixes for the issue into the current F-35B fleet are unknown at the moment. About 50 of the F-35Bs will require retrofitted bulkhead repairs

MIDDLEBURG, Va.—Blackwater founder Erik Prince personifies the hidden hand in America's terror wars. His company secretly armed and maintained drones in Pakistan, trained CIA hit teams, and collected $2 billion as a government security contractor.

Mr. Prince said he looks back on that adventure as "13 lost years." The billions of dollars are gone now, and he blames the U.S. government.

After a series of federal investigations, government contract battles and critical congressional hearings, Mr. Prince sold Blackwater in 2010. Following continued controversy over his most recent pursuits while based in Abu Dhabi, Mr. Prince has returned to Virginia to write a new chapter of his life—as an entrepreneur buying oil, land and minerals in Africa

On Monday, he is also releasing a memoir, "Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror." It is his attempt to defend his work, challenge public perceptions of Blackwater and settle scores with a government he says made him a scapegoat when things went badly overseas.

Mr. Prince's rise-and-fall became emblematic of the shifting political currents since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

When al Qaeda struck the U.S. in 2001, Mr. Prince was a 32-year-old former Navy SEAL running a modest security training business he had built with family money in Moyock, N.C.

In his memoir, published by Penguin Random House's Portfolio Penguin, Mr. Prince says he provided the Central Intelligence Agency with links to Afghan warlords who helped the U.S. topple the Taliban and drive al Qaeda fighters into hiding. From there, Blackwater's business grew exponentially.