How Big Would DoD Budget be Under Sequestration? Pretty Big, It Turns Out.

How Big Would DoD Budget be Under Sequestration? Pretty Big, It Turns Out.

blogs.defensenews.com...

How big would the U.S. defense budget be if sequestration happens? Turns out, despite the sometimes-apocalyptic rhetoric, big. And how would the post-Afghanistan defense budget draw down compare to slowdowns in Pentagon spending that occurred after the Korean, Vietnam and Cold wars? Turns out, it would be smaller.

All of that is according to the work of a study group commissioned by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), released earlier today.

As the above CSIS graph shows, under sequestration, annual Pentagon spending would drop 31 percent from its 2010 peak to its

(visit the link for the full news article)

Basically, the DoD has grown so much post Afganistan, Iraq, and Cyber build up.... that we have reached a point where the draw down still creates a edible situation for the Military Industrial complex... ie .. business as usual.. All of the last minute panic from all the parties is smoke and mirrors for the sheeple says the industry journal Defense News...

blogs.defensenews.com...

That's a fascinating graph on so many levels. The period during the Korean War shows the establishment of a permanent spending spike that pans out, at levels, to be double what defense spending had been in the years prior to the Korean War. Eisenhower gave his final state of the union address that broached the subject of the military industrial complex in 1961, clearly after it was self evident that the machine had doubled in size with permanency. The "War on Terror" would appear to have been the obvious source of another $100 billion spike in defense spending during non-war periods. This works out to be a whole lot of money over the period from 1951 to present day. I'd estimate that, since the beginning of the spike (1951), we've probably spent around $30 trillion on national defense. That's a huge chunk of change that goes into something that has no specifically associated revenue such as social security, medicare/medicaid and more which are in part paid for by payroll taxes. In other words, we don't have a national defense tax to counter any of that spending and I would say that it probably has a great deal to do with our deficit issues when placed in combination with Reaganomics.

Some additional graphs for pondering these issues:

2011 discretionary spending: i.imgur.com...

Surplus/Deficit in the operations of our government from 1948-2011: i.imgur.com...

This is, depressingly, not a surprise.

After all, it takes a lot of money to be the biggest weapon's dealer in the world.

Here is my favorite store location Tank Depot

reply to post by R_Clark


We need the sequestration. It'd be painful but much less painful than the complete bubble burst that is coming.