Pentagon's Black Budget More Than $50 B

Pentagon's Black Budget Grows to More Than $50 Billion --About seven and a half percent of DoD's total spending now classified - By Noah Shachtman, 07 May 2009

The Pentagon wants to spend just over $50 billion on classified programs next year, newly-released Defense Department budget documents reveal. "That’s the largest-ever sum," according to Aviation Week’s Bill Sweetman, a longtime black-budget seer -- a three percent increase over last year’s total. It makes the Pentagon’s secret operations, including the intelligence budgets nested inside, "roughly equal in magnitude to the entire defense budgets of the UK, France or Japan," Sweetman adds.