Military spending

Defense spending: Pentagon gravy train has less gravy

The Pentagon is hardly broke. Under the worst-case scenario, it will only have $496 billion to spend this year.

However, that's less money than it used to have, and less money than it expected.

It's tough to run the military industrial complex — or run anything — when you don't know what your budget is. "The department's under a lot of stress," said Frank Kendall, under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.Kendall returned to the Department of Defense in 2010 and has been in charge of writing checks for weapons programs. Over the last five years, he has worked to bring costs down, to make contractors more accountable for overruns, and to bring some sanity to a system where everything always take too long and costs too much.