So, not a total expert on this, but I'm pretty sure that 17% is the DoD budget, which is (by some estimates) about half of the actual total military spending. By other estimates maybe more than half - it depends what you consider "military spending."

For example, iirc, a significant portion of NASA's budget is for military applications - spy satellites and such. Similarly, the DoD budget doesn't consider veteran's benefits owed to former soldiers, which is a large portion of the long-term obligations comprising the national debt. It also leaves out most of the national security complex (DHS, NSA, FBI), military applications in the Department of Energy, and so on.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

I figured some expenses were hiding, but hadn't found enough of them yet.

I'm cobbling together some more data points here. They aren't all for the same year, but are close to recent.

  - Veterans Affairs: ~160B [0]
  - DHS: ~65B [1]
  - "non-military intelligence spending" (I assume including a solid chunk of NSA and CIA): ~55B [2]
  - FBI: ~8B [3]
  - retirement from Treasury (for service before 1984. The reference is interesting!) ~8B [4]

This tallies up to an additional $296B or 8% (for 25% total).

The Project On Government Oversight has a similar table [5] that includes some of my items, some additional items, and excludes some of mine. It reaches a $1 trillion "National Security" budget, which shakes out to about 28% of spending.

Thanks for the linking and push to keep digging! The "Military budget and total US federal spending" section of the article linked in the parent was a good jumping off point for me, as well.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ve... [1]: http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/FY_2016_... [2]: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/02/02/black-budget-... [3]: http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/jmd/legacy/2013/1... [4]: http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB3005/index1.html [5]: http://www.pogo.org/our-work/straus-military-reform-project/...

EDIT: formatting

I'm not sure why you're getting down voted for this.

A lot is an interesting question, especially given this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...) which if you sort by percentage of GDP puts the US below Russia.

Is it that surprising that the country with far and away the highest GDP has the highest military spending in real dollars?

If we're going to talk about relative military spending... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...