The administration's precise request for the FY 2008 military budget was $503.9 billion. The House armed services committee voted to authorize $503.8 billion. However, a staff member of the committee told me the $100 million variation was due to "a rounding difference," not to anything substantive. In either case, the sum consists of the allotment for the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy's nuclear laboratories, and about $5 billion in "defense articles" for other agencies, mainly the FBI. It does not include money for supplementals—especially emergency war-spending money—for the FY '07 budget. When that money is added in, the total sum of new money approved this year for military projects and operations totals $739 billion.