Though Obama’s 2012 budget remains in legislative limbo, the figures offered within provide a meaningful glimpse into the sorts of costs government programs are expected to incur. Hellman’s breakdown sheds light on just how much money the U.S. really spends on national security.

Last week, Hellman wrote an article for political blog the Tom Dispatch in which he explained that the $558 billion Pentagon budget and the $118 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan don’t come close to depicting the whole picture of national security spending. Nuclear program maintenance, additional war and terrorism-related operational costs and homeland security all drive up defense expenses by nearly $90 billion. Intelligence, veterans programs, miscellaneous peacekeeping and counterterrorism efforts and military pensions push national security spending yet further, tipping total costs just over $1 trillion. Hellman caps that figure off with the $185 billion the U.S. must pay in 2012 in interest on standing defense debts and arrives at a sum total of $1.22 trillion. To put that number in perspective, Hellman says that a country with a gross domestic product that high would have the 15th largest economy in the world, ahead of Indonesia, Australia and Saudi Arabia.

This is a good deal higher than the number typically reported in the media — a report on defense spending that appeared on The Economist’s infographics blog today, for example, uses the base Pentagon and Iraq/Afghanistan figures to arrive at a total of $693 billion in 2010 American defense spending. The Economist uses that figure as part of a calculation determining that the ten biggest defense budgets in the world add up to more than $1.1 trillion — a number that is in fact smaller than the actual defense budget of the U.S. alone, using Hellman’s calculations.

The news that well over a trillion dollars are spent on defense every single year would likely not sit well with the general American public. Recent polls report that Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of slashing defense spending to deal with the federal deficit.

Listen to Christopher Hellman breaking down the numbers from the Tom Dispatch’s regular podcast here:

There is a significant danger that the Obama 2-year tax cut would fail to raise spending, just as the rebate did. If it is made permanent, that is a major long-run increase in the national debt.

Feldstein, formerly the chief economic advisor to Ronald Reagan, said that “some direct government spending would be more cost effective.” And he’s puzzled why increased defense spending hasn’t gained more mention in the stimulus debate. (Not a new topic for him.)

I am disturbed that the Obama transition has not asked the military service chiefs for their suggestions for quick-spend programs that can strengthen the military.

Don’t worry. There’s plenty of time for the Pentagon — like everyone else — to come begging for a piece of this pie.

F-22 Raptors (Flickr: James Gordon)

The House Financial Services Committee, on Sept. 24, grilled Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson Jr. about the $700-billion financial bailout plan. The high-profile hearing signaled that lawmakers were not going to pass just any rescue bill before recessing to campaign.

But that same day, the House passed a bill almost as big — a $629-billion package titled the Consolidated Security Disaster Assistance and Continuing Appropriations Act of 2009. The legislation includes the Pentagon budget for next year.

The tab came to $488 billion — not including funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Passing bills with little fanfare, including enormous defense budgets, is nothing new for Congress. But this defense appropriations bill is remarkable in a number of ways.

First, it never went through the appropriations committees in the House and Senate. Instead, the legislation was tacked on to the larger continuing appropriations bill a day before the House approved it. The bill is also remarkable because it increases funding for programs, like the F-22 fighter plane, that have been repeatedly criticized by Defense Sec. Robert Gates.

Gates and lawmakers from both parties have said Pentagon spending should be revamped. But that will likely have to wait at least another year.

“The legislative process was devoid of any reform,” said Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information, a non-partisan defense policy group. “To not even have a debate in the House or Senate was a cheapening of the process.”

Each year, Congress must pass 12 spending bills before Sept. 30 to keep the government running. As the Sept. 30 deadline approached, congressional leaders said they would only focus on the spending bills for the Dept. of Homeland Security, Veterans’ Affairs and the Pentagon.  Money for the other nine bills would be part of a continuing appropriations act that would keep spending at current levels until March 2009.

But only the Veterans’ Affairs bill was debated in either chamber. So as part of the continuing appropriations act, the House added on that VA bill and also a Dept. of Homeland Security spending bill introduced last year.

Rep. John Murtha (Flickr: Matthew Bradley)

As the continuing appropriations act was about to hit the House floor, the top-ranking heads of the the House defense appropriations subcommittee, Reps. John Murtha (D-Pa.) and Bill Young (R-Fla.), hashed out a defense-spending bill. The legislation was not debated and voted on by the full appropriations committee but went straight to the House floor.

The continuing appropriations act sailed through the House, 370-58. Three days later, it cleared the Senate, 78-12.

The bill then bypassed the usual next step of being the subject of a conference report between the House and Senate because Murtha and Young had already struck a compromise with their counterparts in the Senate, Sens. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).

“I’ve never, ever seen a case where the entire defense spending bill was voted on and passed largely unseen by Congress and not at least go through a committee,” said Steve Ellis, a spokesman for Taxpayers for Common Sense. “It was made available to Congress at 11 p.m. Tuesday; and was voted on Wednesday afternoon the next day.”

In response, Matthew Mozankey, a Murtha spokesman, said in an email that, “Of course we would have liked to have gone through the process. But that wasn’t how it worked out.”

Mozankey disputed the idea that the bill was “done overnight,” noting that the appropriations subcommittee discussed it in August and also consulted with the Senate.

President George W. Bush signed the continuing appropriations act, which boosts defense spending by 6.2 percent, on Sept. 30. But more remarkable than the overall $488 billion price tag is the money the legislation channels to future combat systems, missile defense and the F-22.

Both Republicans and Democrats criticized these programs during congressional hearings, and the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ auditing arm, unfavorably evaluated them.

But their most prominent critic has been Gates, who reportedly may be in the next administration’s Cabinet.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (WDCpix)

In numerous speeches and testimony before Congress, Gates has criticized the Pentagon as having “next-war-itis”– focusing on hypothetical future enemies instead of the current asymmetrical, insurgent threats in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“In a world of finite knowledge and limited resources, where we have to make choices and set priorities,” Gates said in May at the conservative Heritage Foundation, “it makes sense to lean toward the most likely and lethal scenarios for our military. And it is hard to conceive of any country confronting the United States in conventional terms.”

In that speech, Gates specifically cited the costs and delays of future combat systems, an elaborate, oft-criticized plan to remake the Army through robotic and vehicle systems. But future combat systems got $26 million more in this year’s spending bill than the $3.6 billion requested by the Bush administration.

“Future Combat Systems marches on undisturbed,” said Wheeler, of the Center for Defense Information.

Perhaps no weapons systems has been as scrutinized aqs the F-22 fighter plane, first devised near the end of the Cold War to counter what some in the military saw as Soviet aircraft superiority. The first F-22, however, was not built until 2003, and Gates has questioned building more than the 183 planes already scheduled.

“We’re fighting two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Gates said at a February Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. “And the F-22 has not performed a single mission in either theater.”

But in this new bill the F-22 program got $523 million more than the $2.9 billion that the Bush administration wanted. “The subcommittee is looking at future threats,”  Mozonkey said in an email, “not only our ability to respond, but our ability to deter and prevent war.”

Murtha has also recently cited the conflict between Russia and Georgia as a reason to keep making weapons for the next war.

Mike Dunn, president and CEO of the nonprofit Air Force Assn., also evoked that conflict in defending the F-22. “If the president says, ‘set up a no-fly zone in Georgia,’ you need a F-22 to do that,” Dunn said.

But appeasing constituents with ties to the defense industry may have something to do with the F-22 spending increase. The plane is made by Lockheed Martin, as well as Pratt & Whitney, in Connecticut and Georgia. And Connecticut Rep. Rose DeLauro (D-Conn.) and two congressman from Georgia, Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.) and Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.), were among the group of lawmakers that earmarked the extra F-22 money.

Funding for missile defense, another Cold War weapons system, dropped by about $200 million, from $8.9 billion $8.7 billion. But congressional earmarks for additional missile-defense projects totaled around $98 million. For example, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Rep. Roy Blunt (D-Mo.) got $28 million for a short-range ballistic missile defense program called “David’s sling.”

The spending increases come as major defense contractors brace for cuts.  Last week, Boeing CEO Jim McNerny wrote to employees that there will be “some measure of impact” from the bailout of the financial system on weapons procurement.

On the other hand, advocates for greater defense spending point out that what they asked for — and Congress and the president have provided — no longer seems as expensive when compared to the cost of bailing out the financial system.

“The government spent $1.3 trillion on Fannie [Mae], Freddie [Mac], a stimulus package that didn’t work and a big bailout,” said Dunn. “We’re just asking for a few billion to replace airplanes.”