The press release for the Department of Defense 2025 Budget Request told one story, a story replete with lofty, aspirational goals expressed in the usual abstract text of DOD budget requests.
Reading the text, one would think the Arsenal of Democracy 2.0 was in high gear. On the other hand, the accompanying Comptroller submissions of the different Services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Space Force) that are the official numbers from DOD told a very different story. The Service submissions do have a similar, flowery textual chapeau laid over the numbers that perhaps this time were serving as a second layer of distraction from the numbers.
The Comptroller numbers don’t lie, the topline number of the entire Department of Defense was flat, $849.8 Billion, only $7.8B more than 2024. $7.8B is a lot, but it is budget dust in DOD world.
This is less than 1% growth in the DOD budget and taking inflation into account, the number is a significant shrinkage of the DOD topline. The Comptroller numbers revealed that almost every important warfighting line item, the numbers of ships, airplanes, and missiles, went down.
The disconnect of the descriptive text from the numbers took a few days to sink in with most of the experts. Professor James Holmes said simply, the “New Defense Budget Makes No Sense”.
Hellbound and Down 