By: John Vibes,
This week, the Department of Defense in the United States announced that they would be spending at least a billion dollars, in the coming years, on projects with some of the world’s largest weapons contractors.
The contracts were announced in two separate press releases, with one coming on Monday night, and the other on Tuesday night. It is important to mention that these sort of contracts are announced fairly regularly, but these are very big announcements with agreements that stretch for many years. It is likely that these announcements were intentionally made on two separate nights, so the numbers that ended up being reported were far lower than they should have been. This is a common trick used by governments who are attempting to hide the specifics of their budgets.
On Tuesday morning there were announcements in the news that a half billion dollars worth of contracts were being sent out by the Department of Defense, but then just hours later, another half billion dollars worth of contracts were announced.
The announcements revealed that 22 defense contracts worth $923.4 million will be awarded to various different companies, but one company alone, Lockheed Martin ended up getting $600.8 million.
Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are among the largest defense contractors in the world, and these two companies certainly took a vast portion of this current round of contracts, but there were a dozen other less well known companies listed also.
Additionally, these figures don’t event include expenses for foreign military aid, black ops, salaries for troops and other administrative costs that go along with operating the military. It is likely that with all these external costs factored in, it would be revealed that the US defense budget is way larger than any estimate has ever projected. The full financial costs of having such a large military are never actually added together and totaled because then people would find out where the vast majority of their tax money was actually going.
Sources:
Defense.gov Monday announcement
