America Spends Less On Its Military Than You Think. Look At The Numbers.

Washington is embroiled in one of its periodic budget impasses as Democrats and Republicans struggle to impose their priorities. If hard choices need to be made, the usual reflex is for conservatives to attack welfare and progressives to attack warfare.

It is never hard to find a faction on the left that is convinced the Pentagon is getting more money than it needs or deserves. That sentiment is often eclipsed in debate by players on the right who believe the military is under-funded.

One reason this debate is so persistent is that public discussion of defense (and welfare) typically revolves around dueling abstractions, with few hard numbers and almost no comparison of relevant outlays with other kinds of spending.

For instance, $80 million may seem like a lot to pay for a fighter aircraft until you realize that many commercial jetliners list for several times that amount.

Or, to take another example, Washington may spend as much on defense as the next ten military powers combined, however the Pentagon’s annual outlays are only about a third more than revenues at Walmart
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Those are the kinds of comparisons you never see in the media, but they are a useful corrective for the overblown rhetoric often associated with the “military-industrial complex.”

So, let’s look at some other comparisons, starting with how military outlays fit into the overall federal budget.

The Biden administration has requested a federal budget of $6.88 trillion in fiscal 2024, which begins on October 1. According to the White House budget office, that is an amount equal to about a quarter of the nation’s $27 trillion economy.

National defense spending, which includes the Department of Defense, Department of Energy nuclear-weapons programs, and a few other items, is set at $886 billion in the president’s request—about 13% of the overall budget.

So do the math. If the federal budget represents a quarter of the economy, but defense spending is only about an eighth of the budget, then defense spending must be a miniscule portion of the overall economy—3.1% to be exact, if the president gets the budget he is requesting.

Is 3.1% too much? Washington is pressing European allies to spend at least 2% of their own economies on defense. The amount of money the Pentagon is seeking next year for research, development and production of weapons—about a third of its proposed budget—is equivalent to 1% of the national economy. Is that too much?

If you break down the weapons budget into specific types of systems, it is striking how little the Pentagon spends on signature warfighting platforms.

For instance, the Army wants to spend $3.8 billion on procurement of combat vehicles in 2024. With the government planning to spend $18.8 billion per day, that amounts to barely five hours of federal spending—for all types of tracked and wheeled vehicles in the Army’s inventory.

Or take the Navy’s shipbuilding plan. The service plans to buy exactly one aircraft carrier over the next five years, for a construction cost somewhere in the vicinity of $12.4 billion. It’s the most expensive warship in the world, but at $12.4 billion, the carrier represents only 16 hours of federal spending at 2024 rates—spread over five years.

Is that too much?

Let’s look at the planned level of defense spending a different way, through the lens of leisure activities popular in the U.S. Spending on holidays is one of the most common ways for people to use their discretionary income, and none of that spending is necessary if times get hard.

So, it tells you something about national priorities that last year Americans spent over $900 billion on the Christmas-Hannukah-Kwanzaa holiday season, considerably more than their government spent on all defense outlays.

Not that I’m knocking the holidays. That’s part of what the Pentagon exists to defend. But let’s keep in mind that the military is our main bulwark against nuclear Armageddon, and you still haven’t worn that tie your wife bought you for Christmas.

When you compare spending on some of the lesser holidays with the Pentagon’s budget, it provides a striking commentary on how resources are allocated.

Spending on Halloween during the pandemic year of 2021, for example, was over $10 billion—similar in scale to the 2024 budget request of the Missile Defense Agency. Just the amount spent on Halloween candy, about $3 billion, equals the Army’s 2024 request for aircraft procurement.

And the amount spent celebrating St. Patrick’s Day this year, approaching $7 billion, is well above the Army’s 2024 request for missile procurement.

All of which brings me back to where I started. If you think U.S. military spending is excessive, then you probably don’t want to look too closely at the other ways we Americans spend our money.

Democrats and Republicans can argue about whether the U.S. has the right defense strategy, or whether military outlays are adequate to sustain that strategy, but the notion that elevated levels of military expenditure are impeding the government’s ability to meet other pressing needs is far-fetched.

After all, most of the money in the Pentagon’s budget turns into mortgage payments, school taxes and grocery expenses when it reaches the local level. It stimulates the economy of every state.

Whether the billions of dollars we spend for candy on Halloween or green beer on St. Patrick’s Day is good for us is another matter.

Several major defense companies contribute to my think tank.