The fate of the Pentagon’s war chest will be left up to a successor of President Barack Obama, who tried to rein in Defense Department spending but wound up expanding the use of a budget accounting gimmick in an era of fiscal turmoil.

The Pentagon’s war budget — formally called the overseas contingency operations account, or OCO, and formerly known as the supplemental request — is being used far more broadly than it was when when Obama entered White House seven years ago. Today, it helps pay not only for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but for combat operations in all regions of the world, training in the United States, and new equipment for the military.

“This [war] budget provides us everything we need, we believe, right now to execute our global operations,” Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work said at the Pentagon Tuesday when he unveiled the Pentagon’s fiscal 2017 budget request of $583 billion, including a $59 billion war budget.

In his first presidential campaign, Obama said he wanted to end the use of supplemental budgets for the military. After he took office, there was a strong push inside the Office of Management and Budget, the arm of the White House that oversees the federal budget, to tighten the criteria for war spending. And after just a month on the job, Obama criticized the Bush administration’s use of what was then called the Global War on Terror supplemental spending request.

“For too long, our budget has not told the whole truth about how precious tax dollars are spent,” Obama said in February 2009. “Large sums have been left off the books, including the true cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that kind of dishonest accounting is not how you run your family budgets at home; it's not how your government should run its budgets, either.”

A few months later, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates took the first steps in moving war-funded items, especially soldier support programs, back into the Pentagon’s base budget.

“We must move away from ad hoc funding of long-term commitments,” Gates said that April. “Thus we have added money to each of these areas and all will be permanently and properly carried in the base budget.”



Then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates speaks to Marines at Forward Operating Base Cafferata, Afghanistan, on March 9, 2010. (DoD photo by Cherie Cullen)

The effort started with some promise as war-born task forces were realigned or eliminated. Money for projects like the Air Force’s drone program were shifted and the process of institutionalization started to take hold. But just a few years later, the defense budget would get turned on its head. Unable to strike a long-term fiscal deal with Republicans, Congress capped the Pentagon budget in the Budget Control Act of 2011. By March 2013, automatic spending cuts, known as sequestration, hit the Pentagon’s base budget, reducing troop training and arms purchasing. This left the uncapped war budget as a spending loophole to fund all sorts of military projects, including home station training and operations outside Afghanistan. And it has been the Pentagon’s relief valve ever since.

“[I]n the OCO budget as submitted we have funded all of our anticipated operational costs, both in South Asia as well as across the North and West Africa portions of our trans-regional fight against terrorism and the violent extremist organizations,” Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday. “That has all been fully covered.”

While Congress has at times criticized the Pentagon’s use the war budget as a loophole, they also have used the caps to circumvent spending caps. Last year, lawmakers moved $5 billion from the base budget to the OCO account.

“We have money that is in OCO that should be in base,” Work said. “It just happened over the last 14 years of war. And we have to address that.”

Mike McCord, the Pentagon comptroller, justified the account, saying Tuesday the Obama administration has brought greater predictability to the war budget request.