Mid-level-Government Regulation

Within 16% of government spending, what does the military actually do with the money?

A lot of military money goes to maintaining what the military currently has- staffing bases, fixing ships, and deploying troops. That all checks out. A good portion of the budget also goes to paying soldiers. The pay of soldiers in the United States is much higher in the US than many other countries (almost 10 times that of China's, for example), so that makes sense too. Research and Development checks out as well, for the military. Family housing for military families makes sense too when you think about it. But what on earth is procurement?

Procurement, essentially, is the US military buying things it needs for its missions. This can include investment, development, design, contracting, and more. Ok, but what does the US government actually do with that money? There is a lot of debate over this. There are some examples of money being spent poorly, on private villas for Pentagon officials for example, but also decently good uses for procurement spending, like paying Lockheed to make airplanes.

Either way, most people agree that federal military spending is out of control. We the People should be getting a lot more bang for our buck. Basically, this boils down to several main reasons:

Cost estimation- The US military is notoriously bad at estimating their costs. In 2011, the Government Accountability Office was unable to formulate an opinion on DoD spending because of how poorly the military had compiled their financial statements. This means that money is often squandered in corners where it is not needed and absent in places of need, simply because nobody knows how much money anybody actually needs.

Stupid rules- Due to the way our democracy works, there are often arbitrary spending bills that add up over time because nobody spends the time or congressional wrangling to fix them. They may have been useful at the time, like tank production for the Cold War, but nobody bothered to stop production afterwards, so the excesses just kept on getting made. Not only this, but congress will often pass spending bills, adding funding for pet projects of congress members, to try and get them to vote for it. This legislation gives everyone what they want, but not necessarily what anybody needs.

Bottom level- Monopolies- F-35 development

To look at the whole of government military spending would be an impossible task, so we will be looking at the government spending in the US F-35 fighter jet development program. This program was designed as a collaboration between Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon's DARPA to produce a revolutionary new fighter jet. The project was developed in 1980, with hopes that the planes could be fully finished and purchased in 2006 for around 50 million dollars apiece. Not surprisingly, the planes had more than doubled in price since first conception and had much more limited capabilities than promised. To this day, Lockheed claims the F-35 still needs work. The final price tag for the US federal government? More than a trillion dollars, almost 5 times the original estimated cost.

What happened to all that money? A lot of it was put to research and development at Lockheed, where the plane encountered issue after issue. Most of these were due to the lofty promises of the F-35's capabilities being harder to attain than planned, if at all. Plans were changed and re-designed many times, each with their own cost or compromise. In the end, all this development put the project more than 7 years, and billions of dollars, behind schedule. This isn't to say that the F-35 is a bad airplane, it's a quite good one, but the plane isn't everything it was advertised, and funded by the government, to be.

This entire project was done with the US in collaboration with Lockheed Martin. This is starting to sound like a monopoly. Does Lockheed have a monopoly over US airplane defense and development? Well, yes and no. Lockheed has pretty heavy competition with Boeing when it comes to the Pentagon's dollars, among other companies. The F-35 project was even fought over by Lockheed and Boeing, with Lockheed making the winning bid. Many of the parts for the US's aircraft are made by different companies in collaboration, so competition between companies can still exist. Then again, that close collaboration in and of itself could be considered a monopoly. The F-35 project was planned in a way that it could have easily been contracted to three different companies, so Lockheed did monopolize the project's top levels, although it is unknown if changing the contractor between the parts of the project would have saved any time or money.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is fairly hard to track where the US's military money goes. On the surface level, the US government spends so much money on the military simply because it can't reduce the amount, because of global threats and congressional gridlock. Within the military, a majority of the money goes towards maintaining the military in its current state ,while around a third of the money goes to new projects and development. Within projects, money can be spent irresponsibly, although most of it seems to disappear because projects go over budget. Money is often caught up in congress and it's bickering, regulations can affect how money is spent within the military, and monopolies can take US money, although their detriments aren't immediately seen.