The Pentagon is not really broke. The amount of money available just isn’t what it was before. Worst-case scenario, it will only have about $496 billion to spend this year.

That is a huge amount of money, don’t get us wrong but that’s also less money than it used to have, and less money than it expected to have for this year.

This has caused some distress for the DOD because it’s hard to figure out a budget for something so big when you don’t know how much money you can spend.

Over the last five years, the DOD has worked to bring costs down, to make contractors more accountable for overruns but making those changes makes time. When you are dealing with a budget based in billions, it’s not going to be easy.

Read more here: Defense spending: Pentagon gravy train has less gravy