You can google that and get a breakdown.

The military doesn’t have any debt financing. Any debt to finance military expenditures is a debt of the United States.

How do you count?

For example, soldiers, tanks, planes, are all clearly military expenditures.

One could argue that most officers, and certainly most generals and high ranking people – are paper pushers and therefore administrative overhead, and not combat-involved or combat ready.

I think you need to define your terms more. Lots of grey area.

@elbanditoroso I will narrow it down into what can be cut from the military budget. Non-combat first.

@zenvelo @elbanditoroso I found what I was looking for Federal waste As of September 2014, the Department of Defense was estimated to have “$857 million in excess parts and supplies”

@RedDeerGuy1 That is one tenth of one percent of the Defense Dept budget. That is not considered a material expense.

But that is accumulated inventory, not part of the annual budget.

@zenvelo Thanks. My question was going nowhere anyway.

I’m not following this question anymore. My bad.

R and D, is one of the most expensive, and wasteful costs in the budget. Do some quick research on the F-35 project. The numbers are ridiculous. Factor in the cost of actually building the fighter, and maintenence over the next couple decades, and it gets beyond belief.

Don’t get me started on how much money the US gives lots of other countries, just so they can fly over their airspace, or use their airfields, or manipulate their resources.

Military is important. But the amount of money going into our military is crazy. Consider that some/much of the technology gets stolen by China, or hacked. The best strategy seems to be, wait for the US to figure it out, and steal it exponentially cheaper than doing it yourself.