Defense

What the military costs, and who it pays

The spending hub publishes these, from USAspending. Obligations and outlays are different measures, and none of these pages adds one to the other.

• Two official figures for what the military costsThe National Defense budget heading against the Department of Defense’s awards, both for the last complete fiscal year.
• National Defense, the budget headingOutlays and obligations under the heading, by the agencies that report them.
• The Department of DefenseWhat the department obligated in awards, by year, state and recipient.
• The largest defense contractorsThe department’s contract recipients, ranked by obligations.
• What the military buysThe department’s contracts by product and service code.
• States by defense shareHow much of each state’s federal money is the Department of Defense’s.

What this data cannot show

• An operation is the Department of Defense’s named campaign, not a declaration of war. A death outside a named operation is not in these figures.
• Hostile and non-hostile or pending are the Department’s categories: its tables head the second “Non-Hostile/Pending Deaths”, so a death not yet determined is counted there. The figures say who died and how the Department classified it, not why.
• Wounded in action are reported by month and service only; the publisher does not break them down by category.
• The Defense Manpower Data Center revises its tables as records are completed, and each figure carries the publisher’s own extraction date.
• The spending figures linked from this hub are the spending hub’s: obligations and outlays as USAspending reports them, which are not the same measure and are never added together.
• The months beside each operation are the first and last in which the publisher records a casualty, not the dates the operation began or ended. These are its tables as of September 23, 2026.