Amid a climate supposedly riven by polarization and obstruction, few things remain capable of uniting America’s political class quite like the Pentagon budget. Indeed, in a place where the rhetoric of fiscal conservatism is so ubiquitous, it’s almost tragicomic to look at the disjuncture between what many of America’s supposedly penny-pinching politicians say and how they actually vote in Congress when funds for the military are on the line.

The country’s legislative institutions appear structurally incapable of passing all kinds of popular and desirable measures but lavish funds earmarked for the Pentagon routinely sail through with only minimal opposition — opposition which rarely, if ever, comes from those who so relentlessly urge “fiscal restraint” elsewhere. As Stephen Semler put it earlier this week: “Roll call votes on military spending reveal that there are considerably fewer ‘deficit hawks’ or ‘fiscal conservatives’ in Congress than reported by mainstream media outlets, if any at all.”

The dynamic is all the more striking when you try to comprehend the sums involved. According to a recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies, the United States has spent a nearly inconceivable $21 trillion on militarization since 2001 — a figure which only gets slightly smaller when you narrow it down to direct military spending ($16 trillion).