At $700 billion a year, the US military budget accounts for 20 percent of the US Federal Budget. Indeed, it's the biggest military budget in the world.
The Pentagon will be hit with $825 billion of Budget cuts as a result of the debt deal but the real issue is that the US military can't actually account for how it spends its money.
As reported in the Miami Herald, no one really knows what the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost US taxpayers, citing one study showing the wars and their ripple effects have cost the United States $3.7 trillion, or more than $12,000 per American. We learn that US Defense Department figures shows that by the end of April the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – including everything from personnel and equipment to training Iraqi and Afghan security forces and deploying intelligence-gathering drones – had cost an average of $9.7 billion a month. That's roughly the entire annual budget for the US Environmental Protection Agency. The US State Department, with an annual budget of $27.4 billion, would take more than four months to spend that amount. NASA could have launched its final shuttle mission in July, which cost $1.5 billion, six times over for what the Pentagon is allotted to spend each month in those two wars.
But the problem is structural. As reported here, the Pentagon has long term liabilities with pension and medical insurance plans. And if you think Enron had accounting problems, the Pentagon is a lot worse. Maybe the CIA is laundering its money through the Pentagon.
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