Over the past few weeks, a number of pernicious myths have popped up regarding the Pentagon’s budget. Here I want to dispel these myths with an exhaustive, and exhausting, look at the details. The charts below, compiled with my colleague Charles Zakaib, should help.
The President’s Budget officially requests $613.9 billion for the Pentagon FY 2013, broken down between $525.4 billion in the Pentagon’s base budget, and another $88.5 billion for Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO)—mainly the war in Afghanistan. This compares to a base budget and OCO of $530.5 billion and $115.1 billion, respectively, for FY 2012. (For other good overviews, see Chris Hellman’s analysis for the National Priorities Project; and Carl Conetta’s “Keeping Pentagon Cuts in Perspective” [.pdf] for the Project on Defense Alternatives).
There are, however, other costs in the budget that should be lumped under the rubric of national defense. For starters, there is about $33 billion in the non-Pentagon portion of what is official classified as “national defense.” Aside from the Pentagon and the wars, that includes the cost of the nation’s nuclear weapons (chiefly within the Department of Energy), and some mandatory spending not captured in the DoD base budget and OCO figures shown above. That brings requested defense spending to $647.4 billion. In addition, as Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information points out, the Obama administration has requested $137.7 billion for Veterans Affairs, and $46 billion for homeland security (that’s a government-wide total compiled by the Office and Management and Budget, excluding the defense portion). Wheeler also points to another $29.4 billion in military retirement and DoD retiree health care costs (these show up under budget functions 550, 650, and 950). All the items above total about $860 billion.
Americans likely spend even more on things loosely connected to national security. For example, there might be some additional intelligence spending that is not captured in the above numbers. Wheeler suggests that we should also count the International Affairs budget ($69.8 bn), and the DoD’s portion of interest on the debt ($63.7 bn). According to Wheeler’s calculations, the actual “defense” budget proposed for 2013 weighs in at a whopping $994.3 billion.
In the charts below, however, I have chosen to focus solely on the Pentagon’s base budget, excluding the wars, and the various other costs mentioned above that are not counted under the “National Defense” budget function (aka 050 for budget geeks).