Perhaps surprisingly and counter to popular sentiment, it is straightforward to understand how the United States spends its’ defense budget. Regardless of what the bottom line is, we can bin any modern defense budget in three broad categories:Acquisition. Acquisition for the United States is notoriously slow, mostly due to regulations that were generated by moving too rapidly in the past. The United States enjoys an all-volunteer force, and maintaining the AVF is a priority[v] both politically and operationally. Figure 1 shows the current ‘binning’ of the U.S. Defense budget in three broad categories:Figure 1: Allocation of the FY25 Defense budget along three major categories.
