The Pentagon budget is big. It’s complicated. In fact, it’s a multi-headed beast of complications. And the most expensive parts of the beast are the four, errr FIVE, military services. (We’re still adjusting to the existence of Space Force Guardians as part of the Department of the Air Force.)

To cut through some of the complications of all parts of the federal budget, and get down to the brass tacks, Taxpayers for Common Sense created “Five Fast Facts” fact sheets. In the national security realm we’ve produced them on the NATO Budget, Pentagon appropriations in response to the war in Ukraine, and the Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the annual Pentagon policy bill.

Today we’re rolling out a Five Fast Facts document for each of the five military service budgets. That adds up to 25 Fast Facts for your perusal. Looking at them side-by-side, you’ll notice some interesting similarities and differences.

The most expensive military service? That’s an easy one for anybody who follows military budgets: the Air Force at $209.6 billion. This supports a total force end strength of 501,800 Airmen across the Active Duty, Guard and Reserve components.

Even splitting off the Space Force, the Air Force outstrips the budgets of other, numerically larger, military services. Hey, all that fancy hardware ain’t cheap! The powers-that-be are trying to push back at the perception that the Air Force is expensive. This year’s budget splits out so-called “Non-blue” Air Force spending of $40.2 billion and seems to argue its actual topline is “only” roughly $189 billion. Details of the Non-blue budget are thin on the ground. They appear to be so-called pass-through accounts, and we’re determined to figure out exactly what this category of funding includes. But, let’s be clear, these funds are requested as part of the Air Force budget, so they’re included in our calculations.

The least expensive military service? That would be the brand-spanking-new Space Force. At $24.5 billion, it is almost exactly half the cost of the Marine Corps at $50.3 billion. Of that $24.5 billion, a huge chunk ($15.8 billion) is for Research and Development. So, we’re calling it right now, the Guardians will quickly eclipse the cost of the Marines. Part of it is the aforementioned high costs of the gee-whiz technology for the Space Force. If you’re spending close to $16 billion on R&D, pretty soon your Procurement budget is going to climb into the Wild Blue Yonder (yeah, that’s Air Force; we know). Another part is the currently very low end strength of just 8,600 Active Duty personnel. We’ll give it five years and the Space Force budget request will be higher than the Marine Corps. Check back with us when the Fiscal Year 2028 budget request comes out.

So, is the Marine Corps just a really, really cost-efficient bunch? Well, sort of. As mentioned above, the Marine Corps budget is presented as a lean and mean $50.3 billion. The Marines take pride in being the small (total end strength of just 210,000 Active and Reserve Marines), scrappy, not-at-all-fancy military service. Take a look at Marine Corps housing compared to what you find on an Air Force base, and you’ll see what we mean. But the dirty little secret is that a whole lot of Marine Corps equipment is actually purchased in the U.S. Navy budget – like all those very expensive fighter jets and the ships that haul the Marines to the fight. Marine Corps Research & Development is just over $3 billion in this budget request. Compare that to the whopping great $21 billion in R&D for the Navy. But a bunch of that “Navy” R&D is being spent to develop weapons that will eventually be used by the Marines. Being part of the Department of the Navy has its budgetary advantages.

What about the Army? With the highest total personnel end strength (across Active Duty, Guard and Reserve troops) of 998,500, the Army is a relative bargain at $178 billion. The largest budgetary subset is for Operations and Maintenance ($69.7 billion) with Personnel right behind ($69.1 billion). This is due, at least in part, to substantially lower costs of Army Procurement programs ($21.3 billion). When you aren’t buying fighter aircraft and warships, your costs are lower. The Army also proposes to cut three subsets of its budget: Military Construction is reduced 38.7% from the amount appropriated for the current fiscal year; Procurement is reduced by 5.7%; and Research & Development would drop by 5.5%.

What’s with these Unfunded Priorities List (UPL) requests? Sigh. We’re not fans of these lists of programs the services didn’t squeeze into their toplines. We think they’re road maps to wasteful spending, as we’ve written many times before. The Army list is by far the highest at $6.6 billion. The Air Force and Space Force now have separate lists, as the Space Force becomes its own military service. The Air Force clocks in at $4.6 billion and the Space Force is still a relative bargain at $638 million. But more than half of the Space Force total is classified and unknowable to the public. The Navy is $4 billion, and the Marine Corps is $3.5 billion. You can check out the details of each Unfunded Priorities List for the services and the Combatant Commands here, on our handy-dandy landing page for all things UPL.

Now you have 25 Fast Facts on the military service budgets. Print them out. Look at them side-by-side and draw your own conclusions. Take them to your next family picnic and dazzle everyone with your command of the details of the Pentagon budget. That’s what we do at Taxpayers for Common Sense.