Congress excludes all war-funded base costs from official overseas tallies.

Evidence

Far more significantly, my $71.8 billion calculation does not include the costs of maintaining bases and troops in war zones such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Congress instructs the OCS to exclude all of the costs of maintaining bases and personnel overseas if those costs are funded by war appropriations, which appear in a separate annual Overseas Contingency Operations budget. On the other hand, one could argue that the entire war budget should be counted: after all, war spending crucially helps maintain the physical security and political legitimacy of U.S. bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond. Calculating the overseas base expenses without including the immense costs of the “contingency operations” revolving around those bases is a bit like setting up a family budget without accounting for the cost of a luxury vacation beachfront rental, or discussing the finances of the New York Yankees while excluding the cost of the team’s big free-agent signings. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 643

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• CANDY: The Yankees/free-agent signings analogy is a vivid, tweetable image for the accounting exclusion.

Related

• Official overseas base cost figures exclude all war-zone maintenance spending (similarity 0.95)
• Overseas base spending exceeds every federal agency’s budget except Defense. (similarity 0.86)
• Independent estimates put overseas base costs tenfold above the Pentagon’s figure (similarity 0.85)
• Official Pentagon figures understate overseas base costs by over fivefold (similarity 0.85)
• Official overseas military cost reports omit hundreds of millions in allied spending (similarity 0.84)
• Official overseas base costs undercount true spending by more than threefold. (similarity 0.84)
• Official war appropriations exclude huge unacknowledged costs like veterans care and interest (similarity 0.84)
• Overseas base maintenance costs taxpayers over $100 billion annually (similarity 0.84)
• War-zone base maintenance added roughly eighty billion dollars yearly in 2012 (similarity 0.84)
• Total overseas base costs reached $170 billion for fiscal year 2012. (similarity 0.84)
• Official base cost tallies exclude billions in classified overseas programs (similarity 0.83)
• US overseas bases cost taxpayers at least $71.8 billion annually (similarity 0.83)
• The Pentagon legally must report total overseas base spending each year (similarity 0.83)
• True overseas base costs exceed the official Pentagon total by over threefold (similarity 0.83)
• Overseas bases and troops cost around $136 billion in 2014 (similarity 0.82)