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Suggest a Feature →$886 billion. Your tax dollars.
Broken down in terms that actually make sense. Every number sourced from public DoD budget documents, GAO audits, and IG reports.
All data from public sources. Accurate enough for Congressional staffers, engaging enough for E-4s to screenshot.
Where the $895B actually goes. Top-line breakdowns by service and appropriation.
View →Base-level O&M and MILCON for 25 major installations. Fort Liberty to NS Norfolk.
View →What the DoD spends per service member — and where that money goes.
View →GAO and IG findings. The stuff that makes you want to flip a table.
View →Top defense contracts. Who gets the money, and what for.
View →What it costs to produce each job code — training pipeline, equipment burden, and 4-year DoD investment.
View →Side-by-side comparisons that put spending in human terms.
View →The three Zumwalt-class destroyers cost approximately $7.5 billion total — about $2.5B each — making them the most expensive destroyers ever built.
The Post-9/11 GI Bill pays roughly $25,000–$30,000 per year in tuition and fees. The cost of one Zumwalt destroyer would fully fund four years of GI Bill benefits for approximately 75,000 veterans.
A single F-35A costs $82.5 million — and that's before lifetime sustainment costs of ~$8M per year per aircraft.
That's enough to pay an E-4 with 2 years of service for 1,755 full years of service. Or put another way: the plane costs more than the entire lifetime earnings of the crew it's supposed to protect.
The B-21 Raider stealth bomber costs an estimated $700 million per aircraft. The Air Force plans to buy at least 100.
An E-7 (SFC/GySgt/TSgt) with 12 years earns $63,576/year. One B-21 costs 11,009 years of that sergeant's pay. The 100-plane fleet: over a million years of service.
The F-35 program's estimated lifetime cost is $1.7 trillion — making it the most expensive weapons system in human history.
That's $5,100 for every American alive today. More than most E-4s earn in a month. The program was originally sold to Congress as an affordable alternative.
All spending data sourced from publicly available documents including the DoD Comptroller budget reports, Government Accountability Office (GAO) audits, Inspector General (IG) reports, USAspending.gov, and Congressional Budget Office analyses. Honest MOS does not editorialize raw numbers — we contextualize them.