All Budgets Are Not Equal

I constantly pick on the Air Force, but because it is Friday and I have a three day weekend coming up - today I'm going to give them some rare attention by playing the role of an Air Force blogger.

The DEW Line has a nice little blog post on aviation, which is actually a live feed of reporting from the other day when the DoD budget was released. While they are covering aviation in all three services, I was mostly looking to see if there was anything interesting happening in Naval Aviation.

In his post, Stephen Trimble makes a comment I want to expand on a bit.

Top-line budget documents show how the DoD has requested $44 billion to spend on aircraft procurement next year. It's always amazing to me that the navy spends more money on aircraft than the air force!

Yep, every year the Navy spends more on aircraft than the Air Force, but it is important to note that the Air Force budget has long been like a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. If you ever dig into the Air Force budget you will find there is a mini-budget that is about as transparent as the Peoples Liberation Army budget, and it has been like that for several years.

The Air Force FY12 baseline budget is $166.3 billion. For comparison, the Navy baseline FY12 budget is $161.4 billion. Wow, the Air Force gets more money, right? Not really. If you go to page 7 of this Air Force Budget rollout brief (PDF), you can get a good idea of what I'm talking about. There are basically three Air Force budgets; Blue, Non-Blue, and OCO. Just so everyone knows, OCO stands for Overseas Contingency Operations and every military service has an OCO budget, which for the Air Force is $16.4 billion in FY12.

The Blue budget is the vast majority of the actual Air Force budget, and in FY 2012 the Air Force has budgeted $119 billion in the blue budget. This budget include Military Personnel Costs, R&D, Procurement, Military Construction, Health Care, Housing, Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC), and Operations and Maintenance.

Lets think about something for a second.

The Navy budget is $161.4 billion.. Of that, the Navy is spending $18.775 billion on Navy and Marine Corps aviation, which comes to about 11.6% of the Navy budget being spent on aviation.

The Air Force budget is $166.3 billion. However, the Air Force also has a "Non-Blue" budget of $30.9 billion that must be subtracted, leaving the Air Force with a "Blue" budget of $135.4 billion. Of that, the Air Force is spending $17.897 billion on Air Force aviation, which comes to about 13.2% of the Air Force budget being spent on aviation.

By numbers alone the Navy does spend more money on aviation than the Air Force, but by percentage of budget the Air Force spends more money on aviation. By now you are probably wondering what the "Non Blue" budget is.

Well, I think we all would love to know. The "Non-Blue" budget in the FY 12 Air Force budget is $30.9 billion. Historically, about 15% of the "Non-Blue" budget is spend on Health programs and Special Operations. The other 85% is where the Office of the Secretary of Defense has traditionally put all their classified stuff in the DoD budget (most of which is intel, so it is said), and the funding directive for that money in the Air Force budget isn't actually the Air Force, rather historically OSD decides what to spend that money on.

So in FY 2012, based on historical patterns, there is a bit over $26 billion worth of classified goodies hidden in the Air Force "Non Blue" budget. It has been suggested this is how the Air Force pays for mystery space planes, but also why even though the Air Force baseline budget is higher than the Navy's baseline budget, the Navy has a higher top line to work from and can spend more money on aircraft than the Air Force every year.