Paying for War: Funding U.S. Military Operations since 2001

From 2001 through 2011, the United States allocated about ;The dissertation begins with an examination of the period when emergency supplemental appropriations were the primary instrument used for allocating funding to military operations. I found that the continued use of supplemental appropriations weakens the normal checks between executive and legislative participants in the budgetary process. Furthermore, wartime supplemental appropriations were used to introduce defense policy changes, became a mechanism for augmenting annual defense budgets, and provided a convenient way to pass additional legislation that was often unrelated to operations and politically contentious.;The next part of the dissertation examines how recent wartime budgets influence different portions of the annual defense budget. Changes made to personnel policy in wartime budgets introduced large costs into the annual defense program. Additionally, the migration of some costs from the base into wartime budgets along with the introduction of some programs in wartime budgets will likely lead to additional claims on the base budget as operations end. Finally, the Department of Defense must determine how to manage stocks of new and often non-standard equipment acquired during operations. The dissertation details the results of an analysis into how the Army may manage its fleet of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles as operations in Afghanistan and Iraq conclude, recommending that the Army retain a large number of these vehicles while using its rotational readiness cycle to equip units for their expected operational tasks.;Finally, the dissertation addresses how the U.S. should fund military operations in the future by examining how alternative wartime budgetary policies may perform during extended military operations. Many of the budgetary complications that resulted from recent wartime budgetary policy could be ameliorated through developing operational funding criteria early in an operation along with requesting funding at the same time as the base budget.