One way to understand the U.S. national defense budget is to break it down by broad function, or in the language of budgeteers, by "appropriations title." In rough numbers, this approach shows that the United States is proposing to allocate, in FY 2025, approximately: Personnel funds pay for an all-volunteer force that the nation has rightly decided should be well compensated, at a time when recruiting woes make any consideration of economization almost unthinkable. Operations and maintenance accounts include salaries and benefits for the 795,000 civilians who work full-time for the Department of Defense, and also pay for equipment upkeep, training, fuel, many spare parts, and more mundane aspects of running perhaps the second-largest organization on Earth.2 Procurement funds purchase the cutting-edge equipment that, along with our people, gives America's military its fighting edge. Finally, RDT&E pays not only for basic science and laboratory work, and initial design and development, but also for prototyping and testing advanced equipment. None of these categories of military expenditure is easily reduced; each is critical to what makes the American military successful and strong.
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