Reply #9: The White House, and government in general, plays games with the numbers [View All]

[MadHound]

There is the Defense Dept. budget, the official numbers concerning military spending. However other military spending goes on, that is counted towards the budgets of other agencies, even though it is still indeed military spending.

For instance, our nuclear warhead fleet is under the auspices of the Dept. of Energy. Thus, money allocated towards the upkeep, upgrade and maintenance of that fleet is counted towards DOE expenditures, rather than military or DOD spending. This happens time and time again throughout the budget. It is how the government keeps the public in the dark about how much we're really spending on the military.

And this doesn't even count the countless billions spent on "black box" military ops undertaken by the CIA and other such alphabet agencies. The money for this isn't listed as defense spending, in fact it might not be listed at all. Our Congressional members have little or no idea what it is being spent on, or in some cases, how much is being spent. But it is military spending nonetheless.