The time is long since passed for a reckoning – with the bloated, out-of-control defense budget.
Even at the height of the Cold War, DoD spending was always a matter of intense debate and DoD always had to make tradeoffs. You want nuclear weapons? Great, that will let us reduce conventional forces. Even during President Reagan’s massive buildup, tradeoffs had to be made. We’ll bring some WWII battleships out of mothballs, not build a new class of battleships. That B-2 is pretty cool but you only get 20. We’ll go all-out for strategic force modernization, but we’ll trim some conventional systems. There was always an awareness of the unbuilt schools or other things that money could have been used for.
And there were always cutbacks. After Korea. After Vietnam. After the Berlin Wall fell. DoD never had a 25 year period of steadily increasing budgets. Even at the height of the Cold War, when the Doomsday Clock was never more than a few minutes before midnight.
Until 2001. Since 9/11, the Pentagon has been a sacred cow – for 25 years and counting. A war in Afghanistan? Sure, no need to even include it in the defense budget – just tell us what you spent and we’ll write a check. Iraq? No need for tradeoffs, we know you need all those other things too. Modernizing the entire strategic triad, all at once? Gotcha, let’s add a couple more strategic systems – and Golden Dome. Trump battleships, a $200 billion vanity project nobody thought we needed until Trump designed it? Drones for long-range strike? Sure, but let’s keep all the aircraft carriers too. And we still need a new, $300 million a copy 6th generation fighter. And, far from rethinking tanks, we accelerated the program to get the new tanks even sooner. And a new B-21 Bomber an opening guess of its total program cost of $203 billion.
This all comes at a time when there is quite literally nobody out there. China and Russia, #2 and #3 in the world, together spend less than half what we spend. If you add the cost of past wars (VA), we’re spending $1.4 TRILLION. Every year. And that’s before the 2027 budget, which would raise the Pentagon and DVM budgets over $2 trillion.
In a world where military technology and tactics are evolving faster than at any time since mechanization, we are the world leader in targets. We sent an army to Iraq that defeated the main army in a few days but sent vehicles that couldn’t protect our troops from a roadside bag of fertilizer. Ukraine stymied mighty Russia – and Iran checkmated us – with $20K drones that make $5 million Strykers and $20 million Abrams tanks worthless death traps. But we have plenty of $4 million Patriot missiles or $30 million Aegis or $15 million THAAD to protect those tanks and $120 million F-35s from those $20K drones.
The time is long since past for a vigorous debate on defense strategy and priorities. The budget is too large and there’s reason to think we’re buying the wrong things. For years, liberals didn’t object too strenuously to record defense budgets as long as conservatives didn’t savage their priorities. Those days of friendly logrolling are gone. Especially with a president who claims we can’t afford “little scams” like childcare, Medicare, or Medicaid. And the 10% cuts called for in non-defense spending – that’s everything from the space program to FAA to cancer research to weather forecasting to crop subsidies to food stamps – are a gross underestimate of the cuts that will be needed to pay for a $1.5T budget. Those spending categories will be savaged.
President Trump is wrong when he says, “We have to take care of one thing, military protection.” Constitutionally, our job is to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
This is far more than a matter of dollars and cents. The military has become far too easy to use, and far too willing to commit atrocities and war crimes. The Vietnam war was finally ended by cutting off funds. President Trump has shown there is no end to his appetite for military adventures. Cuba is next. After that, who? Mexico? Denmark? Israel? Italy? Los Angeles? Atlanta?
The Founders thought a standing army was an invitation to wars and tyranny. In the hands of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, that danger is very real. Time to put that genie back in the bottle. The Pentagon needs to be put on a serious diet.
We need more people like you to put things in prospective!