Official Pentagon figures understate overseas base costs by over fivefold

Evidence

While overseas bases are clearly more expensive than domestic bases, the total bill for maintaining hundreds of bases and hundreds of thousands of troops abroad remains a mystery. In theory, we should know the total: by law, the Pentagon must tell Congress what it spends on all the military’s activities at bases, embassies, and other facilities abroad in an annual report called the “Overseas Cost Summary” (OCS). … For the 2012 fiscal year, the Overseas Cost Summary put the total at 22.7 billion. That's a considerable sum, roughly equal to the entire budget of the Department of Justice or the Department of Agriculture. … In 2009, the economist Anita Dancs estimated total spending on bases and troops abroad at 250 billion—a more than tenfold difference. Part of the discrepancy stems from Dancs’s including war spending in her total, whereas at Congress’s direction, the OCS doesn’t include the billions spent on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the globe. But even without war spending, her figure comes to around 140 billion—still almost 120 billion more than the Pentagon suggests. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 603

Categorization

• QUESTION: Which estimate is closer to truth, and how could the discrepancy be resolved given Pentagon accounting secrecy?