The paper considers the influence of the budget for military spending in the Soviet command economy. A specific problem is that the Soviet strategy of concealment left us without good measures of the military burden on Soviet resources. The paper surveys previous western attempts to fill this gap alongside post–Brezhnev revelations. A new documentary source from 1982 that appears authoritative suggests much higher figures than anything proposed or revealed so far, and supports these higher figures in detail. However, the figures contain many puzzles and the authenticity of the document itself cannot be fully assured.