Cooking the Books

There are all sorts of ways to manipulate accounting records to portray things as you wish they were.  One of the ways the Pentagon uses to increase its budgets is its assumptions of the rate of inflation.  It does not use the same measure as other government agencies do.  The result of this difference means that the Pentagon argues that it needs more money just to “stay even” with inflation.  This more money has meant as much as $8 billion in some years.  When you use a different inflation factor, you see that Pentagon spending since 2001 vastly exceeds that of any decade since 1950, and it is notable that the wars of the 1950s and 1960s (Korea and Vietnam) involved far larger deployments of troops and equipment than the wars since 2001.