For an industry that claims it can't withstand a round of cuts without catastrophe, the companies making up the Defense industry have a habit of showering the CEOs with cash.

The average compensation package for a CEO at one of the top five contractors in the business was $21.5 million. The Project on Government Oversight pored through Securities and Exchange Commission filings to come to the figure, looking at the books of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon.

This sort of makes their claims that the businesses would be absolutely devastated with forthcoming cuts ring a bit hollow.

Just a few weeks ago, Lockheed Martin's CEO and a number of his colleagues hit Capitol Hill to emphasize that the cuts could cause massive layoffs of their employees.

POGO calculated that for the price of one CEO, these businesses could pay the salary of 268 industry workers.

The typical CEO for an S&P 500 company made only $9.6 million in compensation.

At $21 million per year, the average CEO for a defense corporation made more in a single day than the average American worker makes all year.

What has outraged POGO is that the taxpayers pay for this compensation directly — for most of these companies, the only customer is the U.S. Government. They don't sell missiles in Wal-Mart.