Military spending in Missouri comes from two federal agencies, the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Energy (DoE). The DoE supports the Kansas City National Security Campus operated by Honeywell, while DoD funds all the other military facilities and assets across the state. In addition, DoD contracts with many Missouri-based companies for various products and services. DoE’s contracts were almost exclusively to support the National Security Center in Kansas City.
Between FY13 and FY15, DoD spent over $14 billion average per year in Missouri and DoE spent an average of $700 million. Putting this in perspective, in FY14, DoD spent $418 billion in payroll and contracts across the U.S. or about 2.4% of U.S. GDP. While defense spending grew 68% from 2000 to 2010, it has been declining since 2011 and is expected to decline by 28% by 2019.
Missouri’s GDP for FY2015 was $261 billion. Military spending in Missouri for FY15 was 5% of GDP for the state or approximately $14 billion. The biggest portion of that spending (over $9 billion) was for contracts with Missouri-based companies. Those contracts were to produce goods and provide services to support not only DoD operations within Missouri, but nationally and internationally as well. A large portion of that contracting is with the aerospace industry (over $6 billion). In addition, DoD operations within Missouri resulted in visitor spending from the Whiteman “Wings over Whiteman” airshow (record 75,000 attendance in FY15) and visitors to the training graduations at Ft Leonard Wood.
The results are the $14 billion per year in military spending over the past three fiscal years (FY13-15) has resulted in an average of $32 billion per year in goods and services being purchased from Missouri companies and 183,000 jobs per year created in the state.
In other words, for every $1 of military spending invested in the state, Missouri has sold over $2.50 in goods and services it would not have otherwise sold and created jobs for almost 200,000 Missourians.