The House of Representatives put Capitol Hill in its rearview mirror last week. The Senate is sputtering to a stop this week, and soon the August doldrums will overtake the Capitol.  Traffic will be lighter and people talk about what books to read at the beach as much as they talk about world affairs.  This lazy pace started us thinking of the lazy budget habits the Department of Defense (DOD) has gotten into after more than a decade of war. Not that the Pentagon is entirely to blame, many of these habits have been forced on them by the Congress. And like that old Chicago song, they are a “Hard Habit to Break.”

First, there’s the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund – the most addictive of all. The President asked for $50.9 billion in OCO on top of the Pentagon’s “base budget” request of $534.3 billion. But because OCO funding is “off budget” and doesn’t fall under the modest caps on Defense spending in the Budget Control Act of 2011, Congress couldn’t resist the temptation (as Chicago would say: “I’m addicted to you, baby”) and added another $38 billion.

The National Guard and Reserve Equipment Account is worth about a billion dollars a year. Although it doesn’t meet the legal definition of an earmark, Congress actually singles out “high priority” programs where the funding should be spent. Since Fiscal Year 2011, when Congress started funding this out of OCO rather than the base budget, it has been a slush fund within a slush fund.

The National Sea-based Deterrence Fund has been Congress’ attempt to find a new way of funding the Navy’s next ballistic missile submarine (besides from the Navy’s budget) by labeling it a “national asset.” Never mind that all weapon systems are national assets.

For the last several years the Administration has asked for the authority to stand up another Base Closure Commission, but the Congressional committees most intimately involved in defense policy and budget have rejected the idea. For the last two years Rep. Adam Smith has attempted to offer common sense amendments for a base closure commission in the Defense authorization bills, but incredibly, the House Rules Committee ruled that they were “out of order.” This means the House has not been forced to vote on applying a little fiscal sanity to the size of military infrastructure in the U.S.

And then there’s the F-35, second only to OCO for Pentagon addictions. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is unaffordable and on track to be the most expensive weapon system in history. It’s particularly addictive because versions of it will be flown by three military services: the Marine Corps, the Navy, and the Air Force. The current plan is to fly them for at least 40 years – even though no one has a handle on what warfare will be like in 2055.

The alternative to these bad habits (and slush funds and shell games) is a sound, rational, budget process. One in which the Pentagon and the Congress have an honest discussion of the nation’s military priorities and make decisions based on actual requirements rather than parochialism. Perhaps the biggest stumbling block to such a change is the decades old habit of splitting the military-specific budgets by a one third/one third/one third formula. After more than a decade of war, the Navy and Air Force have seen their resources stagnate as money was needed for the Army and the Marine Corps in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s time to re-examine that. And it’s way past time for another round of base closure.

It’s too much to hope that Congress and the Pentagon will get some joint counseling for their mutual addiction to poor budget practices. But alas, these are hard habits to break.