Daily Kos: Military Budgeting and Iraq Escalation

by Airpower

Sun Jan 07, 2007 at 08:36:19 PM PST

With potential escalation in Iraq and the desire to see Congress oppose it -- possibly through exercising its power of the purse -- I thought it might be useful to offer a little background on the mechanics of how the Department of Defense gets funded.

First, a word of caution. Military budgeting is a difficult subject to explain because:

• (1) the budgeting "system" has many moving parts,
• (2) it bumps up against other systems (the Joint Strategic Planning System and the Acquisition Process) each of which has more moving parts,
• (3) it is influenced by internal "Pentagon politics" where civilian and military personalities merge and clash, internally and across services, along with conflicting warfighting "theologies"; that is, how the Air Force thinks a war should be fought can be at odds with how the Army believes a war should be fought, and
• (4) it constantly changes.