Military budget of the United States

The military budget pays the salaries, training, and health care of uniformed and civilian personnel, maintains arms, equipment and facilities, funds operations, and develops and buys new items.

[a] On 20 December 2024 the House approved a Continuing Resolution to fund DoD and DoE operations at the FY2024 levels until 14 March 2025, at which time the Appropriations process for the NDAA is to be revisited by the 119th Congress.

[53] After the release of the FY2022 budget requests to Congress, the military departments also posted their Unfunded priorities/requirements lists for the Congressional Armed Services Committees.

Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT&E) investments for the future are offset by the OCO cuts, and by reduced procurement of legacy materiel.

[47][65] (Expenditures listed in millions of dollars) For fiscal year 2020 (FY2020), the Department of Defense's budget authority was approximately $721.5 billion ($721,531,000,000).

For the 2011 fiscal year, the president's base budget for the Department of Defense and spending on overseas contingency operations totaled $664.84 billion.

Russian aggression, terrorism by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and others, and China's island building and claims of sovereignty in international waters all necessitate changes in our strategic outlook and in our operational commitments.

Quantity refers to the number of items requested: This program's purpose is to "invest in and develop capabilities that advance the technical superiority of the US military to counter new and emerging threats.

Military pay remains at about the 70th percentile compared to the private sector to attract sufficient amounts of qualified personnel.

The system has 9.4 million beneficiaries, including active, retired, and eligible reserve component military personnel and their families, and dependent survivors.

"[104] The GAO was unable to provide an audit opinion on the 2010 financial statements of the US Government due to "widespread material internal control weaknesses, significant uncertainties, and other limitations.

[106] Robert F. Hale, Chief Financial Officer and Under Secretary of Defense, acknowledged enterprise-wide problems with systems and processes,[107] while the DoD's Inspector General reported "material internal control weaknesses ... that affect the safeguarding of assets, proper use of funds, and impair the prevention and identification of fraud, waste, and abuse".

[109] The accompanying graphs show that US military spending as a percent of gross domestic product (GDP) peaked during World War II.

For example, the Department of Defense budget was slated to be $664 billion in 2010 (including the cost of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan previously funded through supplementary budget legislation[117][118]), higher than at any other point in American history, but still 1.1–1.4% lower as a percentage of GDP than the amount spent on military during the peak of Cold-War military spending in the late 1980s.

[120] This calculation does not take into account some other military-related non-DoD spending, such as Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, and interest paid on debt incurred in past wars, which has increased even as a percentage of the national GDP.

Methods to counteract rapidly increasing spending include shutting down bases, but that was banned by the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013.

This figure has risen over the past years, and of the Pentagon waste that has been calculated, two figures are especially worth mentioning: the expenditure of "$150 million on private villas for a handful of Pentagon employees in Afghanistan and the procurement of the JLENS air-defense balloon" which, throughout the program's development over the past two decades, is estimated to have cost $2.7 billion.

[126] The US spends more on national defense than China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil combined.

[139] In 2009 Robert Gates, then Secretary of Defense, wrote that the US should adjust its priorities and spending to address the changing nature of threats in the world: "What all these potential adversaries—from terrorist cells to rogue nations to rising powers—have in common is that they have learned that it is unwise to confront the United States directly on conventional military terms.

[141] According to a 2009 Congressional Research Service report there was a discrepancy between a budget that is declining as a percentage of GDP while the responsibilities of the DoD have not decreased and additional pressures on the military budget have arisen due to broader missions in the post-9/11 world, dramatic increases in personnel and operating costs, and new requirements resulting from wartime lessons in the Iraq War and Operation Enduring Freedom.

[142] Expenses for fiscal years 2001 through 2010 were analyzed by Russell Rumbaugh, a retired Army officer and ex-CIA military analyst, in a report for the Stimson Center.

As Adam Weinstein explained one of the report's findings: "Of the roughly $1 trillion spent on gadgetry since 9/11, 22 percent of it came from supplemental war funding – annual outlays that are voted on separately from the regular defense budget.

Declaring that nearly 65,000 troops were temporary rather than part of the permanent forces resulted in the reallocation of $4 billion in existing expenses to this different budget.

[145] In May 2012, as part of Obama's East Asia "pivot", his 2013 national military request moved funding from the Army and Marines to favor the Navy, but Congress has resisted this.

[147] In January 2015 Defense Department published its internal study on how to save $125 billion on its military budget from 2016 to 2020 by renegotiating vendor contracts and pushing for stronger deals, and by offering workers early retirement and retraining.

[156] The GAO was unable to provide an audit opinion on the 2010 financial statements of the US government due to "widespread material internal control weaknesses, significant uncertainties, and other limitations.

[158] Further management discussion in the FY2011 DoD Financial Report states "we are not able to deploy the vast numbers of accountants that would be required to reconcile our books manually".

[174] In a statement of 6 January 2011, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates stated: "This department simply cannot risk continuing down the same path – where our investment priorities, bureaucratic habits and lax attitude towards costs are increasingly divorced from the real threats of today, the growing perils of tomorrow and the nation's grim financial outlook."

The rise in the military budget over the last decade can be traced to the production of new technologies such as a 5th generation fighter aircraft to meet the increase in demand for new combat capabilities.

On the contrary, proponents of increasing the US Defense budgets have long argued that factors such as China and other adversaries of the US must be kept in check (from a military standpoint).