/.../ Placing stricter restrictions on how OCO money is spent likely means the spending account will remain in place, said Todd Harrison, senior fellow for defense budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “That is part of keeping it around long-term is changing the criteria for what counts as OCO.”
The Pentagon has requested $58.6 billion for war-related operations in fiscal year 2015. Of that, about $20 billion is going toward operations in Afghanistan. The rest is being spent on counterterrorism operations across the globe. And air strikes in Iraq and Syria, which are currently costing as much as $10 million a day, are being funded through the OCO accounts, according to Pentagon officials.
“[W]e are going to require additional funding from Congress as we go forward,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said at a Pentagon briefing last week.
Gordon Adams, analyst with the Stimson Center and a professor at American University, estimated that operations in Iraq and Syria could cost about $15 to $20 billion per year, should the U.S. military put a total of 3,000 soldiers on the ground.
Harrison, in a CSBA report released this week, estimates a high-end ground campaign involving 25,000 troops would cost up to $22 billion per year, though President Barack Obama has made clear that he doesn’t intend to send a large ground force into Iraq or Syria.
The Pentagon has been using OCO money, formally called the war supplemental, since 2006. While it mainly funded operations for the war, the money also paid for administrative functions and task forces stateside. Soon after Obama took office in 2009, DOD had started moving money for institutionalized war efforts back into the base budget. But that process has slowed in recent years, particularly due to the federal budget caps, since OCO is not subject to sequestration. Critics in Congress, and some budget analysts, have called the OCO account a slush fund, a characterization Harrison and others take issue with. “The money is being spent for legitimate military purposes, that’s not the question,” he said. “The question is: Is it actually related directly to operations in Afghanistan?”