The president and Congress have just completed another painful round of defense budgeting. That infamous battle cry — Pork Project! — has once again been heard throughout the nation. The taxpayer feels shafted again. What's one to do?

What is needed is a process that lays out all aspects of military requirements and fiscal reality so interested parties, including the public, can make informed judgments about programs and pork.

The problem with understanding national defense budgeting is one of perspective and interpretation. Here is a typical scenario:

• The Defense Department converts military requirements into budgets. It declares a military requirement for 600 jet fighters over 10 years, 60 per year, to replace older aircraft.

• The Office of Management and Budget (an agency I like to call the real evil empire) says that's fine, but we can only afford 48 a year, based on our perception of affordability compared with projected tax revenues and how much each federal agency should receive.

• Congress, under its dual constitutional roles to provide for an Army and Navy and use its power of the purse, can add or subtract from the budget request as it sees fit. In this example, let's say Congress adds six aircraft each year to the president's budget request. The press and taxpayer organizations call it "pork."

What is needed here is a full-disclosure budget, where all parties can see the real military requirement backed by quantifiable rationale (60 aircraft per year), the budget plan (48 aircraft per year), and any gap (12 aircraft per year) created by affordability or other development or acquisition delays. Congress can then exercise its constitutional responsibilities and funding prerogatives, and public criticism can be muted when not appropriate, such as when the addition fills in a legitimate requirements gap.

We need to move to a more informative process. To rechannel all the misspent pork war energy, DoD can set up a show-and-tell office, where companies, research institutes and universities (the real porkers these days) can bring their ideas and proposals.

DoD conducts a detailed, hard-nosed evaluation of how the proposal adds military value and fits into the budget plan. Open to the public, the senator or congressman sponsoring the proposal then has cover to support the effort as germane to the nation's defense or tell the proposer it doesn't pass the national defense test.

Not wanting to bite the hand that feeds it, DoD provides a standard nonresponsive letter that suggests the addition may have some military value. For a bunch of war fighters, DoD needs to show some spine. Congress, which can never say no to local business and educational institution constituents, will at least be able to do its job and reject some of the proposals, saving some money. The public watchdog organization can then go after the proposer of the "wasteful" project and not the congressional sponsor, president or Pentagon.

So, DoD needs to come clean, and since OMB will not permit DoD or any other federal department or agency to lay out the real requirement versus the affordable funding profile in a nonprejudicial manner, Congress needs to legislate a Sarbanes-Oxley-like full-disclosure budget, with locked-in business rules, across the federal government. Only then can we get away from these divisive arguments about what's pork and what's not, and get on with the real business of managing national defense.

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John King is a retired Pentagon senior budget analyst.