This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 6, 2014.

I'm Kila Brown.

The Pentagon spends hundreds of billions of dollars each year,

and then tens of billions more in what's known as overseas contingency operations,

primarily for unplanned costs of war.

But as the war in Afghanistan comes to a close, it's well past time to shut the fund down.

Chris Prouble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute,

explains why.

When you hear the term overseas contingency operations, it sounds like something that is an emergency, doesn't that?

Yes it does, but we've learned over the course of the last 13 years that things that we are planning for are treated as unexpected

emergencies and things like that hence the OCO the term that's

thrown around here in Washington.

Over the last 13 years from 2001 to 2014,

we have spent 1.5 trillion dollars on the overseas contingency operations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

That's in addition to the 6.1 trillion that we have spent in that same period on the

so-called base budget, the Pentagon budget excluding the cost of the wars.

So we're talking about real money even here in Washington.

The latest critique of the Obama administration's use of the OCO, the overseas contingency

operations account is questioning why after next year, for example, or beginning this year, but starting in

particular next year, why do we continue to budget $30 billion for

for what's left, which is the war in Afghanistan.

Remember, the military component, the combat

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