14.Oct.2010
Fun With Charts: Military Contractor Spending Outstrips Rest Of US Gov’t
Browsing a Congressional Research Service report on the various versions of the latest US Department of Defense budget, I was struck by this chart showing the steady growth in total military spending since 9/11. The gray segment of each bar represents funding for “overseas contingency operations,” the currently acceptable bureaucratic euphemism for the wars in [...]
08.Oct.2010
Budget For Soldiers Stagnant As Contractor Funds Skyrocket
At the start of the Iraq invasion, the US military spent twice as much on its own personnel as it did on procurement from private sources. Within a few years’ time, the military was spending three times as much on outside contractors as on its own men and women in uniform. That’s one tidbit from [...]
27.Sep.2010
Global Pwnage
$1.12 trillion is the latest official estimate of how much the US government has spent to fight its post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other sundry majority-Islamic nations, according to the Congressional Research Service. $3 trillion is how much Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimated the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would eventually cost US taxpayers. [...]
