Listen Live
My Baltimore Spirit Listen Live
Spirit 1400 Featured Video
CLOSE

Despite claims by conservatives that the U.S. military is suffering from decrepit battle gear and weapons, a new report shows the Department of Defense has spent nearly a trillion dollars on big ticket defense items with money that was supposed to be used for troops in the field.

See also: Pentagon chiefs: bigger defense cuts would hurt US

According to the report, the defense department has been double dipping into taxpayer money, using supplemental funds that are intended for day-to-day operations running in Iraq and Afghanistan, but is instead being used to purchase weapons back home.

As Time‘s Mark Thompson points out on the Battleland blog, as the trimming of the base defense budget becomes a reality, the winding-down of the wars and their supplemental funding represents a double whammy for US weapons manufacturers: “[A]s the supplementals evaporate, there won’t be those extra billions hidden away in the Pentagon cookie jar for new and improved arms.”

Read more at Mother Jones.