“THE BUNKER” AT PROJECT ON GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT (POGO)
“Every year, there is a pair of reports issued that clash. First, there’s the Heritage Foundation’s Index of U.S. Military Strength, which makes clear how much trouble the U.S. military is in because it’s not spending enough money.
Two days later, the Pentagon released its own annual accounting of how much of its money goes to each state to support that supposedly threadbare military force. Well, here’s a secret from The Bunker: if the nation’s defenses are rickety, it’s not for lack of money.”
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“While Heritage’s report has been published for only eight years (“The only non-governmental and only annual assessment of U.S. Military Strength,” it notes), the Pentagon’s state-by-state spending list has been around pretty much forever. A much-younger Bunker remembers poring over it while working for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Washington bureau, in between the Vietnam and first Gulf wars. Hometown readers were always eager to learn how much tax money was flowing back into their pockets as the U.S. military bought their locally-produced General Dynamics F-16s fighters (before General Dynamics sold the line to Lockheed), Bell helicopters, Texas Instruments HARM missiles, and Vought A-7 attack planes (told you it was a long time ago), among other hardware.
Just for fun(ding), let’s pit the Pentagon’s biggest state winners alongside its most fearsome foes. Turns out that in 2020, Texas, all by its Lone Star lonesomeness, collected $83 billion in Pentagon contracts and salaries. That made it #1 among the 50 states. That’s more than the $61.7 billion Russia spent the same year, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (There are as many ways to measure defense spending as there are excuses for the F-35 program, but The Bunker finds SIPRI’s data [PDF] pretty solid). In other words, one of the biggest foes of the U.S. spends about as much on their military as one U.S. state pockets from the Pentagon.
Virginia, mainlining Navy funds, ranked second among the states, at $64.3 billion. Iran spent $15.8 billion. Tossing North Korea into the mix—SIPRI says “data unavailable” for the fanatically secret nation, but the State Department estimated it spent an average of $3.6 billion annually between 2007 and 2017. Bottom line: Virginia, all by its itself, collects three times more from the Pentagon than the two surviving members of President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.”
California came in third, with $61 billion. That was enough to eclipse Australia ($27.5 billion), Britain ($59.2 billion), Canada ($22.8 billion), France ($52.7 billion), Germany ($52.8 billion), Israel ($21.7 billion), Italy ($28.9 billion), Japan ($49.1 billion), Saudi Arabia ($57.6 billion), and South Korea ($45.7 billion). Granted, California outspends each when counted individually, and not added together, but…They…Are…Our…Allies.
The Pentagon says it spent $593.9 billion on contracts and payroll in 2020 in the 50 states and D.C., an 8% hike over 2019. That’s more than twice what China spends on its entire military. “If the total spending were divided across every U.S. resident,” the Defense Department added, “it would amount to $1,803 per U.S. citizen.”
Skeptics will maintain that such comparisons are apples-to-oranges, if not closer to fruit cocktail. But the logic is clear: when the U.S. military can’t defeat an insurgency in Afghanistan despite 20 years of trying—at a cost of more than 2,000 U.S. lives and $2 trillion—money ain’t the issue.”
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