The military budget isn't the entirety of military spending. It doesn't include the VA budget, the DOE budget (maintaining those nukes), the actual cost of wars themselves, etc.
Adding up all the parts, it's pretty close to a trillion a year - about 933 billion.
A lot of military spending is disguised (not to say maliciously) as funding to other agencies. For example, that number is probably just the Pentagon's budget, and wouldn't include things like Veterans Affairs (which is about $300 billion) or foreign aid (around $50 billion) or the Department of Homeland Security (around $50 billion) or our nuclear force ($35 billion), etc.
Even some of NASA's funding is for monitoring nukes.
The point is that it's actually kind of hard to calculate how much we spend on defense, because it's hard to know what to count, but it's certainly more than it looks like. Over $1 trillion is a safe guess.
It's really hard to get a precise number of how much money we spend on military. The budget for the military is snuck into other line items and obscures the true cost. For instance the VA is not included, even though we only need the VA due to having veterans. And the costs for nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants are included in the Department of Energy's budget.
Sorry, but your figure is wrong. The annual US Military budget is about $600 Billion, not $600 million. That's 3.5% of US GDP and a non-trivial amount; it's more than the entirety of US trade with China (imports in 2015 were $481 billion). It's half of US Government discretionary spending.
It is not a question of spending money on military, it is a question of how much. Last I checked, the US military budget is around 700B, while healthcare, education etc account for a tenth of that amount. Another question is, how much of this eye popping amount is wasted?
The budget of the Department of Defense is only a small part of what the United States spends on war. Add in the Department of Energy's portion for nuclear weapons, the Veteran's Administration, the "black budgets" for the CIA, NSA, and others, the accumulated interest on the national debt for various wars (declared and undeclared), and the costs of PTSD-wounded warriors shifted to the public. I don't have a number, but I imagine it's quite a sum.
The pentagon's budget is only[1][2] about 600 billion dollars a year, over the 17 year period. This is saying they can't account for over 35 years of budget.
I don't understand how this number can possibly be correct in the sense that it's being presented. The article doesn't really explain it, can someone explain how the numbers add up? Is the Pentagon running a hedge fun in the background along with it's funding from congress?
While military spending (not counting veterans' benefits) in 2015 was around 16% of the total US federal budget[1,2], it made up 53.71% of the discretionary spending budget, dwarfing the next closest category, "government", at 6.54%.
From the BusinessInsider link below:
"The military budget is by far the largest single cost displayed. It is almost six times larger than the 2015 education budget and it is more than 34 times the size of NASA's 2015 operating budget. In total, the costs of running the military amount to approximately 16% of the overall 2015 US budget."
US military spending is HUGE compared to other countries budgets. It is not that big compared to the US budget - in WW2 we spent about 45% of GDP on military stuff - if that was done today we'd have a budget of about ten trillion dollars.
Also much of what is classified as military spending could probably be moved to other categories - the VA, for example.
The US is budgeted to spend $637 billion on the military in 2015. If the same is true for 2016-2019, the US will have spent $2.5 trillion. If you include 2020, then it's more than $3 trillion.
The defense budget is in fact over 1.25 trillion dollars in real terms. We just don’t count it like most other countries. For example nuclear weapons are under the Department of Energy.
> The government expects to spend $6.011 trillion in 2022. More than 65% of that pays for mandated benefits such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
> Military spending includes the Departments of Homeland Security, State, and Veterans Affairs. All of these military costs combined equal $943.9 billion.
> Pensions are entitlements and we can't really touch those.
They are touched all the time. Implicitly via decreased purchasing power of currency that is not made up for via cost of living adjustments, and explicitly via things like increasing retirement age and changes to benefit formula.
Healthcare spending is also frequently adjusted via reduced remuneration and policies for remuneration to providers changing the quantity and quality of services received.
Adding up all the parts, it's pretty close to a trillion a year - about 933 billion.
https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-military-budget-components-ch...
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