The authors of a new Defense spending conference report ran a victory lap last week to tout the billions of dollars they added to the U.S. military budget, but they hardly mentioned the cuts they had to make to pull that off.

Members generally prefer to tout the “winners” in their bills, not so much the “losers.” That habit can obscure the hard work appropriators and their staffs do to wring savings out of the Pentagon and intelligence agency budgets, even when the total funding is an epic $674.4 billion, as it will be in fiscal 2019.

At the same time, the astonishing amounts of money cut from individual defense programs — often enough to run entire agencies elsewhere in the government — highlight the sheer amount of fat in the Pentagon budget.

The explanations for these cuts in the appropriations funding tables are typically as vague as the amounts are large. Often the only reason given for what in some cases are cuts nearing a half billion dollars each — and adding up to multiple billions of dollars — is little more than a few words, such as “historical unobligated balances” or “revised estimate.”

On such barely explained decisions, historic weapons buildups are made.