Pentagon leaders love to tout the $330 billion they saved by cutting or killing weapons programs over the past two years, but that's not the whole story. “Even if somehow it does add up to $330 billion in savings that were cut from these programs … it’s not net savings because there’s going to be replacements for a lot these things anyway,” said Todd Harrison, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank. “These were hypothetical savings anyway, because there weren’t hard programs.”
Classified programs, as well as “various Army and missile defense programs,” also contributed to the savings, according to DoD.
And that’s just one more thing that clouds the $330 billion number, Harrison said.
“Classified programs that might have been killed … they wouldn’t have been named explicitly and … they may have already been restarted and we don’t know it,” he said.