What portion of U.S. overseas military costs are salaries and equipment versus installation support and logistics?
Executive summary
A review of recent public budget analyses shows that most U.S. defense outlays are concentrated in personnel pay and the procurement of weapons and equipment, while a large but smaller slice covers operations, maintenance, installation support and logistics; precise “overseas-only” splits are not published in any single authoritative source, requiring inference from DoD-wide category totals and targeted overseas estimates [1] [2] [3]. Using FY2024–FY2026 budget snapshots: military personnel plus procurement together account for roughly 40–50% of the total defense budget, while operation & maintenance (the category that contains most installation support and logistics) accounts for roughly the high-30s percent—overseas-specific facility costs are reported separately and are much smaller in absolute terms [1] [2].
1. What the official categories tell the story about “salaries and equipment” versus “support and logistics”
The Department of Defense and budget analysts divide spending into broad categories that map onto the question: “military personnel” (pay, benefits, retirement), “procurement” and “research & development” (weapons and equipment), and “operation & maintenance” (O&M, which includes training, maintenance, base support, logistics and many installation costs); by FY2024 figures cited by the Peterson Foundation, military personnel was about $192 billion and procurement about $152 billion, while O&M represented roughly 38% of total DoD spending—making personnel and procurement the single largest combined share and O&M the principal bucket for support/logistics [1].
2. Translating those categories into a practical split for the overall defense budget
Applying the Peterson Foundation FY2024 magnitudes to recent total defense requests (DoD budgets near $800–900 billion in FY2025–FY2026), military personnel plus procurement together represent roughly 40–50% of the total budget—about the order of a few hundred billion dollars—whereas O&M alone accounts for roughly the high‑30s percent (again hundreds of billions), and smaller line items such as military construction and family housing add single‑digit billions more to the installation/support tally [1] [4]. Put bluntly: most dollars go to people and the kit they use; the single largest “support/logistics and base” slice is captured within O&M, which is large but not dominant compared with personnel+procurement [1].
3. What “overseas” spending looks like and why precise splits are hard to extract
Analysts who isolate overseas presence point out that the additional direct cost of hosting forward bases is meaningful but much smaller than the major personnel and equipment lines: the U.S. operates roughly 750 overseas facilities, which the Econofact analysis estimated cost about $55 billion in 2021—an explicit overseas‑facility figure that sits inside the broader O&M and military construction envelopes [2]. Meanwhile, long-running overseas contingency accounts (post‑9/11 OCO) totaled some $2.3 trillion across two decades, but that aggregate mixes combat operations, equipment replacement, personnel costs, and interest on war spending and cannot be cleanly reallocated into “salaries vs. logistics” without additional internal DoD accounting [3] [5].
4. Limits, caveats and the bottom line
No single public source provides a neat, contemporaneous pie chart that isolates “overseas military costs” and splits them into salaries & equipment versus installation support & logistics; the authoritative public data instead give category totals for the entire DoD budget from which reasonable inferences can be drawn: personnel + procurement (salaries and equipment) are the largest combined share (roughly 40–50% of the overall defense budget), O&M (installation support and logistics) is the next largest (about high‑30s percent), and dedicated overseas facility costs are measurable but materially smaller (about $55 billion in 2021) [1] [2] [3]. Alternative interpretations exist—some analysts fold research, procurement and sustainment differently, and overseas contingency accounting historically obscured comparisons—so definitive, up‑to‑the‑dollar overseas splits would require DoD internal allocation tables not published in the cited public sources [6] [7].