Bloodless Coup

The Real Defense Budget, and the Triumph of Bureaucratic Politics

And the budget maker spoke and said, I give unto each service one third, now and forever ...

It really is amazing that the Pentagon's budget has been divied up so precisely in every budget for 40 years. Definitely a point to drive home in classes on policymaking and the power of bureaucracies. But while that's getting most of the attention in Fred Kaplan's latest column, what I think the bigger untold story of the defense budget tends to be is the reporting of it that always underestimates the spending - sometimes by hundreds of billions of dollars. He does a nice job of walking through the big parts of the budget and explaining how the $515 billion requested for the Pentagon doesn't even begin to approach our actual military spending (which he puts at about $200 billion higher).