U.S. Military Spending: The Cost of Wars | Center for Strategic and International Studies
▻https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-military-spending-cost-wars
“War” may not be the normal state of U.S. national security planning indefinitely into the future, but war—and/or the constant risk of war—is a grim reality of our time. Yet, the Administration and the Congress have tended to treat warfighting as a temporary aberration—as something to be delt with by supplementals or creating short-term budget categories like the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account that seem to reflect the cost of wars, but have become something of a slush fund and a mechanism for selectively avoiding the caps on defense spending set by the BCA.
Reporting by the Executive Branch seems almost designed to obscure the real costs of conflict, and avoid linking them to an examination of strategy, its effectiveness, and the prospects for conflict termination. Reporting on the civil dimensions of war is often lacking, and the civil and military budgets of war are developed and implemented separately by the departments and then reviewed (if at all) by separate Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees in each house and by separate elements in the appropriations committees.