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What's Really in the U.S. Military Budget?Much more than the oft-cited $515.4 billion.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, Feb. 4, 2008, at 6:51 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

The budget also allots $16.9 billion for Navy shipbuilding, including $4.2 billion for a new aircraft carrier, $3.2 billion for a new DDG-1000 destroyer, and $3.6 billion for a new Virginia-class submarine. (The Navy is also pushing up, from 2012 to 2011, the year when it starts to build two of these subs annually, instead of one.) Again, where's the imminent danger, what's the rush?

There is another $12.8 billion for missile defense, despite the numerous foibles that still plague that program (along with the occasional, but not so significant, successful test).

And there is $3.6 billion for continued research and development into the Army's trouble-ridden Future Combat Systems program. (According to the Pentagon's budget documents, the estimated "initial deployment" for this system has now slipped to 2015, and its projected cost has risen to $160 billion—second only to the F-35 in the list of most expensive programs. Only about $20 billion has been spent so far; it's not too late to bite the bullet.)

What efficiencies is the Pentagon taking to accommodate these technological risks? The "Overview" section of the Pentagon's budget document contains a section called "Program Terminations." It reads, in its entirety: "The FY 2009 budget does not propose any major program terminations."

Is it remotely conceivable that the Defense Department is the one federal bureaucracy that has not designed, developed, or produced a single expendable program? The question answers itself.

There is another way to probe this question. Look at the budget share distributed to each of the three branches of the armed services. The Army gets 33 percent, the Air Force gets 33 percent, and the Navy gets 34 percent.

As I have noted before (and, I'm sure, will again), the budget has been divvied up this way, plus or minus 2 percent, each and every year since the 1960s. Is it remotely conceivable that our national-security needs coincide so precisely—and so consistently over the span of nearly a half-century—with the bureaucratic imperatives of giving the Army, Air Force, and Navy an even share of the money? Again, the question answers itself. As the Army's budget goes up to meet the demands of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Air Force's and Navy's budgets have to go up by roughly the same share, as well. It would be a miracle if this didn't sire a lot of waste and extravagance.

Congress exposes this budget to virtually no scrutiny, fearing that any major cuts—any serious questions—will incite charges of being "soft on terror" and "soft on defense." But $536 billion of this budget—the Pentagon's base line plus the discretionary items for the Department of Energy and other agencies—has nothing to do with the war on terror. And it's safe to assume that a fair amount has little to do with defense. How much it does and doesn't is a matter of debate. Right now, nobody's even debating.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said recently that, quite apart from the wars, the nation should get used to spending 4 percent of its gross domestic product on defense. This isn't an unreasonable sum in terms of what the nation can afford. But the same could be said of many other functions of government. It has very little to do with what the nation needs. The $515.4 billion in the base line Defense Department budget amounts to 3.4 percent of GNP. Is that not enough? Should we throw in another $85 billion to boost it to 4 percent? The relevant question, in any case, should be not how much we spend, but what we buy.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and the author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. He can be reached at .
Photograph of jets by Kim Steele/Photodisc.
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