The Changing Challenges of US Defense Spending: An Update
Source: Center for Strategic & International Studies

US ability to outspend its enemies has long been a key advantage of the American way of war. This advantage has increase with time. President Bush’s decision to engage in a Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) in the aftermath of 9/11 has been followed by a period of steady increases in Pentagon baseline spending, in addition to constantly larger GWOT budgetary supplementals.

DoD’s discretionary base spending in both Budget Authority (BA) and Budgetary Outlays (BO) increased by more than 60 percent between FY2001 and FY2008. To keep things in perspective, however, recent levels of spending in constant dollars are similar to those during other wartime periods such as Vietnam or Korea, and only slightly larger than the levels present at the end of the Cold War.

The actual level of total spending has been raised far beyond the baseline request by an increasing reliance on large “war supplementals.” Funds appropriated through these less scrutinized funding mechanisms have come to represent more than a third of DoD baseline spending in the FY2008 budget request ($141.7 billions for GWOT supplemental, compared to the $481.3 billions for baseline spending). Almost a quarter of all the money requested for defense has been classified as “emergency” spending.

+ Full Report (PDF; 574 KB)

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Government and politics, Military and defense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.