Decoding the Pentagon Budget

[Elvis]

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The US "military budget" is so intertwined and interlocked with the rest of of the federal budget & bureaucracy it's difficult to know what it really is.

http://defense.aol.com/2012/02/09/an-in ... d%3D134442

An Insider's Guide To Decoding the Pentagon Budget

By Winslow Wheeler

Published: February 9, 2012

The Pentagon will release the details of its fiscal year 2013 budget on Monday.

If this year is like most in the past, some of the numbers, specifically those in the Pentagon's press release, will be the wrong ones, and many of the important and fundamental issues will be distorted or ignored.

What follows is an effort to help people through the budget maze.

This year, the Defense Department has already released the top line numbers for 2013 and the next four years. But, as usual, they are very incomplete -- even for just the top line. They are discretionary spending (annual appropriations) and do not include mandatory spending (entitlement programs) in the DoD budget. The latter amount is only a few billion dollars (peanuts in DoD budget terms), but that only starts the list of missing numbers.

To identify defense spending not in the Pentagon budget you need to know what the Department of Energy is spending for nuclear weapons, and what other agencies are spending for the National Defense Stockpile, the Selective Service and other activities that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) calls "Defense-related activities" in the "National Defense" budget function.

You probably will not find these in the Pentagon's press materials because they frequently aren't there. [Eds. note: Nuclear weapons funding is usually contained in the energy appropriations and Energy Department budget because the Energy Department oversees most of that spending.] You can always find them at the OMB website, but you'll need to know where, lest you get lost in the blizzard of tables and tomes that OMB releases on budget day.

At the OMB website, hunt down a document in the 2013 budget materials called "Analytical Perspectives;" then go to the "Supplemental Materials" and find a table titled "Policy Budget Authority and Outlays by Function, Category, and Program." For the past two years, it's been numbered Table 32-1. All the National Defense spending categories are there: DOD, DOE/Nuclear, the other cats and dogs, and both discretionary and mandatory spending are listed. They are right at the top of this long table; "National Defense," or budget function 050, is the first one. Get those numbers straight, and for completeness and accuracy you will be heads and shoulders above the herd relying on just the Pentagon press release. There you can also find what the actual numbers were for 2011 and 2012, which, given the chaos in Congress, has not been easy to sort out recently.

Sometimes getting to table 32-1 in Analytical Perspectives can be tricky. For example for 2012, it is not listed in the Table of Contents to "Analytical Perspectives," and the "Supplemental Materials" for the entire budget did not show it; you want the "Supplemental Materials" for "Analytical Perspectives." Also, in the past, there have been other tables labeled 32-2 and other numbers. You don't want them; you want "Policy Budget Authority and Outlays by Function, Category, and Program," and it should, repeat should, be numbered 32-1. All this navigation advice should help, unless OMB has messed around with its formatting for 2013. Perplexing just to get an accurate set of numbers? Yup.

Next, you might want to assess national security spending not in the Pentagon or even the "National Defense" budget. In the same Table 32-1 you can find the budgets for Veterans Affairs (function 700) for some additional costs of past and current wars, and International Affairs (150) for military and economic aid and other State Department programs integral to the overall national security budget.

You can also find some spending for military retirement and DoD health care that is not in the National Defense budget function. They, however, are hard to tease out. You can find them if you word search in the .pdf version of Table 32-1 for "military retirement" and "DoD Retiree Health Care." But they are a thicket of positive and negative numbers and tricky to net out to an accurate number. Perhaps it is best to simply be aware that they are there and that they can amount to low double digits of billions of dollars. Ask your favorite budget geek what they net out to. If he or she can sort it out in a day or two, get a new budget geek.

You still do not have all the defense-related numbers. You don't have the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Go back to the "Supplemental Materials" for "Analytical Perspectives." There find "Appendix -- Homeland Security Mission Funding by Agency and Budget Account" or Table 33-1. (At least that's what they were labeled for 2012.) They should list the budget for DHS which is embedded in the various budget functions in Table 32-1. But be careful again; make sure you are not double counting any homeland security funding that shows up in both the National Defense budget function or 150 or 700 and the DHS budget. There should be tables that help you avoid the double counting.

Don't look for any intelligence community spending; it's a few score billions, but it's not there; it's embedded inside the 050 numbers. Don't try to add anything for intel; if you do you will be double counting about $80 billion.

Perhaps you will decide to include the defense share of the national debt, specifically the share of interest of the debt that can be attributed to DOD, or National Defense, or all of the above for 2013. Find the total interest payment in function 900 and make your calculation.
Add it all up and you will get about $1 trillion, probably more; if you don't get that high, you are missing something-something big.

Next you may want to make comparisons to show what direction defense spending is headed. Some will compare this defense budget to previous plans, showing a gigantic reduction. Some will compare it to last year's spending, showing a tiny reduction-basically a flat budget. One comparison is mostly phony; one is not. (Hint: Last year I planned to win the lottery. I didn't; ergo, my flat salary this year means a gigantic pay cut.)

If you want to go viral on phoniness, compare contemporary spending to historic defense spending using percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the measure. That way you can pretend the big recent increases are big decreases, and more huge increases should be oh-so affordable. Avoid this gimmick, especially those who use it. Apply that thought also to people who use the same-and other-gimmicks for non-defense spending.

Finished with the numbers? Why not address some of the long term, fundamentally important (and disturbing) trends in US defense spending for the last few decades. Two chapters in the anthology "The Pentagon Labyrinth: 10 Short Essays to Help You Through It" address such things. One is by Chuck Spinney, and I think it's an important exposition. The other expands on the Pentagon's habitual misdirection on numbers and briefly addresses the shrinking and aging that is continuing in our combat forces and their equipment. I wrote that one. I am sending you this piece with enough time before budget day on Monday to read those short essays and to conjure up your own take on what they mean for questions you should be asking Monday.

I hope this helps. Have fun on budget day.

Winslow T. Wheeler is director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information. A member of the AOL BOard of Contributors, he is also editor of the recently published "The Pentagon Labyrinth: 10 Short Essays to Help You Through It."

[Elihu]

What follows is an effort to help people through the budget maze.

or you "could" call lockheed or any number of the contractors to whom the fedgov's accounting and banking functions have been contracted out. the plebes "reel at the possibility of keeping up with it all!"
so sly...

[slimmouse]

Well , Ya know, once of a day the 4th estate used to shout out such issues to the rooftops, which is of course what most of us in the west expect them to do to this day, the vast majority not realising of course who currently owns the said 4th estate, and how much progress the corporatocracy has made.

The 5th estate meanwhile is just full of conspiracy theorists.

You gotta hand it to the reptiles dont ya ?

[cptmarginal]

Bankrupt and Irrelevant: the Presidential Debates and Four Recent Studies on Pentagon Spending

by PIERRE SPREY, CHUCK SPINNEY AND WINSLOW T. WHEELER - August 30, 2019

In the almost 12 hours of Democratic Party presidential primary debates on June 26-27 and July 30-31, the words “Pentagon budget” or “defense spending” were not uttered, except for a fleeting, unanswered comment from Senator Bernie Sanders. Nor did any of the cable news moderators ask a single question about the more than $1.25 trillion dollars spent in 2019 for national security.

This is sad but unsurprising. Despite the parade of scandals and the billions of dollars wasted on poorly performing, schedule busting, cost exploding weapons systems, the dismal failure of the Department of Defense’s (DOD) audit, the grossly overpriced spare parts, the ethically challenged senior leaders and the widely reported collapse in training and readiness, the issue of Pentagon spending and a decaying defense has been steadfastly shunned by both the candidates and the debate moderators.

Many people are quite happy about that. They wear star decorated uniforms in headquarters around the globe and expensive suits in corporate board rooms, congressional hangouts on Capitol Hill and wood-paneled offices on the E-ring of the Pentagon. The brass and the suits are well aware that candidate interest in their stewardship could get more than a little embarrassing.

Clearly, the Democratic candidates think they have good reasons for their silence on defense spending. Political gurus urge them to avoid serious, fundamental criticism of the military services. After all, such criticism can get costly–both in unkind media fault-finding and vanishing campaign donations. There’s a long history of Pentagon-critical politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, trashed by the warhawk media and the corporate shills for being “anti-defense” and not “supporting the troops.”

Being literally non-existent, this year’s defense debate is every bit as bankrupt as ever.

Obviously, real scrutiny is badly needed. Tinkering with defense budget cuts here and there won’t do. Instead, changes must be based on a deep understanding of why we are now spending more in inflation adjusted dollars than at any time in post-World War II history, excepting Obama’s 2010 spending peak—and why we now have the smallest, most problem-riddled forces as well.

We need to start with the simple fact that defense spending since the Korean war has never fallen below a long term 5% growth curve (in current dollars), quite independently of strategy, worldwide threats or changing alliances. As shown in the figure below from a new analysis tracking annual appropriations, the American political-military-industrial system has developed a safeguard system to perpetually increase the money flow.



In other words, for 65 years the military budget’s inexorable expansion has not been controlled by the dramatic changes in America’s actual national security needs but by political and independent cash flow demands from inside the Pentagon, Congress, industry, and think tanks.

Secondly, we need to recognize that this inexorable money growth has shrunk our forces and weakened their capabilities so dramatically that today we would be utterly unready for and incapable of supporting–much less winning–Korean or Vietnam war sized campaigns. War with Iran would be disastrous according to insightful current military assessments.

There are underlying pathologies that connect rising spending with decaying force effectiveness. This naturally leads to the idea that we can have a better defense for less money, but only if the proposed budget changes—along with other reforms—address those pathologies. Without doing so, the big spenders in the Department of Defense, the White House and the Congress as well as the campaign-donating greasers in defense corporations, Wall Street and K Street will happily cherry pick the line item changes they like and trash the rest. Business as usual in the Pentagon will march on; the soul-destroying American wars will continue, and trillions will be wasted on perpetuating the decay of our defenses.

Without bearing directly on these basic pathologies, how can any analysis be relevant?

Four recent national security studies by respected Washington think tanks and issue organizations address the current defense spending problem. They each cut DOD programs and change policies to save money. The 25 authors (some with decades of experience and for whom we have real appreciation) have written over 50 recommendations supported by considerable details. That the Democratic candidates have publically ignored them all does not speak to the studies’ quality. Instead, it speaks to the candidates’ unwillingness to pick a fight with the horde of big spending advocates in both parties who will sling Pentagon- and corporation-written slick rebuttals, but certainly not campaign contributions, at any proposed reduction. Nonetheless, the studies warrant close examination as they exemplify the character of today’s inside-the-beltway Pentagon criticism.

Taken together, the four studies have three common themes:

+ The US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and elsewhere—initiated or perpetuated by Presidents Bush, Obama and Trump—have “failed” and “have made the world more dangerous,” and something should be done. The ‘something’ varies from study to study.

+ The massive nuclear programs initiated by President Obama and expanded by President Trump should be partially reduced or eliminated–again, the recommendations vary.

+ A long list of conventional weapons, basing infrastructure and Pentagon military and civilian personnel programs should be cancelled or reduced. The four cut lists have many common elements, several of them sourced from the Congressional Budget Office’s “Budget Options” book, an annual publication which in the past has generally been ignored except by a small pockets in Congress and a few think tanks and issue organizations. Each study differs, however, on details and how much money to save.

The four studies’ recommended cuts vary from $1.25 trillion to $3.5 trillion over ten years. Two of the studies state they want to spend the savings on domestic programs; the other two do not commit themselves.

Beware the Caveats

Inspected closely, many of the recommendations have caveats, not all of them stated clearly.

The most ambitious of the studies is the Center of International Policy’s “Sustainable Defense: More Security, Less Spending.” It credits 16 authors, some of them also involved in the other papers. It calls for an end to “endless wars” but also allows for “a small, short-lived train and assist role.” We have been training and assisting in Iraq, Afghanistan and many of the rest for decades, all costing scores of billions of dollars. The training and assist deployments are already smaller than before. What is to be achieved with a “small, short-lived” presence is unclear. Moreover, there is no mention of pulling back the thousands of very expensive US contractor personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere who are doing the same training and support, and more, and who in Afghanistan, for example, significantly outnumber US Armed Forces personnel. The study does separately recommend reducing overall DOD contract personnel, but it does not specify where, and it cites the reduction as only a cost saving measure, not a war-reduction measure. This is not a plan to end the US role in these wars but to continue it, pointlessly but at a reduced level that is to be “short-lived.” When was it not to be that?

A different study from the Institute for Policy Studies and allied organizations, the “Poor People’s Moral Budget,” has 10 authors. They clearly recommend “bring home the troops” without any “train and assist” caveat. However, they do not mention the thousands of US civilian contractors, their “train and assist” involvement in the wars nor their high cost.

“The Agenda” for the National Priorities Project study, “People Over Pentagon” does not list the author(s) of its “Agenda,” and it does not say what it wants to do about the troops and contractors deployed in the various wars. It does state, “The U.S. should never again go to war without congressional authorization, and Congress should not authorize military action without identifying revenue to pay for current and future costs, including taking care of injured veterans.” And further on — “Examples of illegal wars include the conflicts in Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria” — an assertion that lawyers for Presidents Obama and Trump have consistently ignored as they exploit Congress’ expansive mandate, the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force.

“The Agenda” cites a “Guide to Cuts.” This is the Project On Government Oversight’s (POGO) study, “Spending Smarter, Spending Less: Opportunities to Reduce Excessive Pentagon Spending,” which POGO also lists at its own website. The text is silent on Iraq; for Afghanistan the recommendation is to reduce the troop presence by half. In-theater contractors are not mentioned. Elsewhere, like the Sustainable Defense report, POGO urges a non-specific 15% cut in service contractors. Again, the stated reason is to save money rather than to address the wars.

In sum, the four studies appear to recommend continuing, at some level, the US troop and/or contractor role in these wars—with the possible exception of the “Poor People’s Moral Budget,” which may want to bring home the US contractors without actually saying so.

Each of the studies calls for “eliminating” the Pentagon’s special Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account (“slush fund”), an account that was deliberately exempted from statutory budget caps on the basis that it was just to pay for the various wars. Not quite: for more than a decade the Pentagon and the Congress have been stuffing in extra and ever growing non-war billions. Sadly, the studies have no advice on how to eliminate this slush fund. Exhort the Pentagon and the defense committees in Congress to stop abusing the account? Good luck with that. Effective action would be to simply repeal the provisions of the 1990 Budget Enforcement Act that permit money designated “emergency” by Congress and the President to be exempted from discretionary spending caps. In 1991 the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) tried to rein in the slush by releasing a directive restricting this spending to what was “necessary, sudden, urgent, unforeseen, and not permanent.” Congress and Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump (and subsequently OMB itself) have made an unholy mockery of that directive. It’s obviously time to just repeal the exemption and return to the traditional, pre-1990, budget supplemental process when emergencies arise. Otherwise, this cap-dodging charade will simply persist.

The four studies contain various recommendations that look like they should not be controversial: reduce contract personnel especially those that are outsourcing jobs DOD civilians can and should perform at lower cost, close excess DOD bases and DOE nuclear facilities, and eliminate at least some parts of the ten year, $494 billion nuclear weapons “modernization” program launched by President Obama and augmented by President Trump – a program whose stated costs are assuredly understated and whose lifetime burden will easily exceed $1 Trillion.

Again, however, there are caveats. The Sustainable Defense and POGO reports urge elimination or reduction of several of the nuclear programs. The former recommends the elimination of the nuclear triad’s land leg and cancelling the new Obama/Trump ICBM program — but indirectly supports going ahead, in reduced numbers, with the new Columbia ballistic missile submarine program (SSBN).

POGO also recommends cancellation of the new ICBM program, but retains the triad’s existing Minuteman ICBMs and the existing Trident SSBNs—both in reduced numbers. This triad advocacy overlooks the serious analyses—including one from GAO from as long ago as 1993 as well as a 2009 study in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists—both recommending a non-ICBM “dyad” because it made no economic, military or deterrent sense to retain the ICBM force. (GAO also found the nuclear strategists’ declaration of dangerous “ICBM vulnerability” to a “disarming” Soviet/Russian first strike to be unsupported by the data and wantonly overstated.)

As with the call to eliminate the OCO slush fund, all the base closing (BRAC) recommendations fail to specify any useful action. Presidents and the military services have recommended closings for years. A previously cooperative, even if reluctant, Congress has simply refused ever since Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld crafted a BRAC that actually raised costs—thereby presenting Congress with a handy excuse to reject all future base closing proposals. The four studies provide no hint of any practical step for overcoming Congress’ dedication to the pork that prevents the needed cooperation. Clearly, suggestions for creative new legislative (or executive) tactics are needed, not just high-minded recommendations.

Playing into Pentagon Pathologies?

From the perspective of doing something about ingrained DOD pathologies, the most problematic of the various study recommendations are those on weapon systems and force structure. We will cite just two examples, but there are many more.

Continued at link

See also:

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/fil ... FY2019.pdf

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Finished with the numbers? Why not address some of the long term, fundamentally important (and disturbing) trends in US defense spending for the last few decades. Two chapters in the anthology "The Pentagon Labyrinth: 10 Short Essays to Help You Through It" address such things.

A quick reminder that this book is still freely available: