U.S. 2010 budgetU.S. "black" military budget is second biggest military budget in world

Published 8 May 2009

Forget the $490 billion U.S. defense budget; just the secret, or “black,” budget portion of the defense budget — the money dedicated to secret operations and space activities — ranks second or third among the world’s military expenditures

The defense budget, just submitted to Congress as part of the administration’s 2010 budget, is controversial, but these controversies aside, there one thing worth noting about it:  the U.S. military’s top-secret, or “black,” budget is now on the same level as the whole of U.K. defense spending — and, as Lewis Page notes, the United Kingdom has the second biggest defense budget in the world.

According to Bill Sweetman, editor of Defense Technology International, the planned black budget for fiscal year 2010 is just over $50 billion (see Sweetman’s discussion in AviationWeek). This is about £33 billion, a bit less than the total U.K. defense budget. The U.S. black military budget would thus, in itself, rank among the top military budgets of the world:

  1. Mainstream U.S. armed forces — $490 billion and change
  2. U.K. armed forces — $60 billion
  3. Chinese armed forces — $58 billion
  4. French armed forces — $54 billion
  5. “Black” U.S. forces — $50 billion+
  6. Japanese Self-Defense forces — $44 billion

We should assume that there is probably more — even much more — secret U.S. military funding in the black column. The U.S. government declines to disclose the CIA’s budget, but that budget is also use for military purposes: CIA funds were used to develop the cold war-era SR-71 Blackbird turbo-ramjet spy plane, fund paramilitary operatives on foreign soil from Afghanistan to Somalia, and operate Predator UAVs over Pakistan. Page says that we should thus add at least a few CIA paramilitary billions to the defense black budget, putting the U.S. secret forces up in the number three or even two spot.

Page also says that we should assume that there are between $20 billion and $30 billion for the black space program — compared that to the entire NASA budget of just over $17 billion.