And how much does the U.S. spend on weapons and war?
JAN 23, 2026
Last January, I published “My Father’s Journal,” which recounts my dad’s experience surviving the Great Depression, serving in the Civilian Conservation Corps in Oregon fighting forest fires, military service in the Army during World War II, and bringing up five children during the “Baby Boom” years of the 1950s and 1960s while serving as a city firefighter. If you’re interested, it’s available at Amazon for $10 for the paperback and $5 for the Kindle version. Follow this link, and thanks!
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I received two interesting queries this week, one on Blitzkrieg and the other on how much the U.S. spends on weapons and war. On the first subject, I was asked about the characteristics of Blitzkrieg, when the concept was developed and seen in battle, and for post-World War II examples. I was also asked about Russia-Ukraine and the recent U.S. attack on Venezuela. Here are my answers:
1. Speed, surprise, combined arms, and disruption are the main characteristics of Blitzkrieg. “Combined arms” refers to all combat arms working synergistically, i.e. infantry, armor, artillery, supported by air forces (nowadays, drones might be involved in large numbers). Special forces like airborne units may also be involved. Deception and misdirection are also aspects of Blitzkrieg. The fundamental idea is to move and maneuver so quickly that the enemy can’t keep pace–to disrupt the enemy’s cohesion. To place them in an untenable position where they have to withdraw or perhaps even surrender.
2. Blitzkrieg, though associated with Nazi Germany in World War II, is an old concept in warfare. Perhaps the best practitioners were the Mongols in the 13th century. The Western concept has its roots in World War I and the stalemate of trench warfare. Ideas associated with what became known as Blitzkrieg were tried on various World War I battlefields. The idea was to break the stalemate of fixed lines and fortifications without getting into costly battles of attrition. These ideas came to maturity in World War II.
3. Blitzkrieg, perhaps ironically, is sometimes attached to the Israeli Defense Forces, as in their attacks in 1967 in the Six Day War. You might say the USA used Blitzkrieg against Iraq in 1991. Russia’s initial attack on Ukraine in 2022 was not a Blitzkrieg–it was more of an uncoordinated show of force that backfired. The USA attack on Venezuela was a “snatch and grab” kidnapping, not a military campaign per se.
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The second query focused on how much the U.S. spends on weaponry and war and how we measure that as a percentage of the federal budget. Here’s my answer to that:
Yes, it’s a numbers game. If you include all federal spending (including non-discretionary spending like social security and Medicare/Medicaid), it’s a smaller percentage. Roughly 15% of the federal budget.
If you focus on discretionary spending, it’s more than 50%. It depends on how you count it. If you add Pentagon spending to Homeland Security, the VA, the DOE (nukes), and interest on the federal debt due to wars and military spending, the percentage is 60% or even higher.
There are many pie and bar charts that illustrate this. See this, for example: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/
When the warmongers really want to minimize war spending, they compare it to GDP.
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No matter how you measure it (or attempt to minimize it), a trillion dollars is a lot of money. Of course, the best way to think of “defense” spending is from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Cross of Iron” speech in 1953:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
That is the true cost of spending on weapons and war.
Bracing Views 
I have played a video game called Civilization that features many advances in technology and behavior over time. In the military sphere, combined arms is one of these. I wondered what it meant, so thanks for defining it today.
I’m reading an excellent book “The Kingdom of Iron” on the history of Prussia. In the part about Napoleon’s move across Europe that included the defeat of Prussia, it mentioned that he was the one to introduce combined arms for which his opponents were unprepared.
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