"What's remarkable about this year's military budget is that it's the largest budget since World War II, but, of course, we're not fighting World War II," noted William Hartung, a defense expert at the World Policy Institute in New York.

"We're fighting terrorist networks armed with explosives and AK-47s. This has to be considered a triumph of an arms lobby that can obviously sell us things we don't need at a time that the president claims we're in mortal danger."

To put a different perspective on the figure, $623 billion is about $10 billion more than the total gross domestic product (GDP) of all 47 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa and oil giants Nigeria and Angola, in 2005, according to the World Bank. ...

With the additional spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, total US military spending appears to be well above that of all of the rest of the world's combined.

In addition, the administration has announced it will push for expanding the size of the army from 482,000 to 547,000 troops by 2012 and the Marine Corps from 174,000 to 202,000 over the next four to five years.

"At a time when public opinion polls show strong support for a less militarized, less unilateral foreign policy, this budget clearly takes us in the wrong direction," according to Miriam Pemberton, an analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies.