The story said that, taking out the effects of inflation, the Army was spending the same amount of money in 1983 on new tanks as it had thirty years earlier, but the number of tanks produced declined by 90 percent. In 1951 the Pentagon spent $7 billion to buy 6,300 aircraft. Now the United States was spending $11 billion to build only 322 aircraft, or 95 percent fewer than in 1951.
