Pentagon provided $2.4tn to private arms firms to ‘fund war and weapons’, report finds

Exclusive: most of defense department's discretionary spending from 2020-2024 went to military contractors

A new study of defense department spending previewed exclusively to the Guardian shows that most of the Pentagon's discretionary spending from 2020 to 2024 has gone to outside military contractors, providing a $2.4tn boon in public funds to private firms in what was described as a continuing and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons manufacturing".

The report from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Costs of War program at Brown University said that the Trump administration's new Pentagon budget will push annual US military spending past the $1tn mark.