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I’m old enough to remember when Republicans criticized Democrats for “throwing money at a problem.” Now here comes President Donald Trump, proposing a military budget for next year of $1.5 trillion, and most GOP lawmakers are just nodding.
If passed, this would be, even when adjusted for inflation, the United States’ largest defense budget ever—larger than the amount spent (again, adjusting for inflation) in any year during World War II, when the nation’s entire economy was geared to war.
Joe Biden was the first president who, just two years ago, nudged a military budget up against the $1 trillion mark. The world is a turbulent place, to the point where almost nobody in politics proposes cutting defense spending. But is the world so turbulent, and is our position in it so precarious, that we need to increase the budget by almost 50 percent in a single year? Nobody in the Trump administration has made the case, and it’s particularly puzzling, given that Trump’s “National Security Strategy” proposed reducing America’s security commitments abroad.
Let’s say we do need to buy a lot more weapons. Are the weapons he proposes to buy in larger quantities the sorts of weapons we need? And to clarify matters, most of this $1.5 trillion will be spent on weapons. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth touts that the budget includes a 7 percent pay hike for members of the armed forces (about twice the national inflation rate), but the total proposed cost for military personnel is just $205 billion (about 13 percent of the defense budget), which exceeds this year’s amount by only $8 billion.
By contrast, Trump and Hegseth propose boosting the budget for weapons procurement from $223 billion to $413 billion—a staggering 85 percent increase. Research and development for new weapons rise almost as steeply, from $210 billion to $344 billion—a 64 percent increase.
There is almost no precedent for such a surge.
The Pentagon has not yet released all the line items in the budget, so it’s hard to break down these figures in much detail. Some of the growth seems somewhat related to advanced satellites (a $24 billion increase for Space Force) and A.I. (a $42 billion increase for “autonomous” systems). But steeper increases (and larger stacks of money) go for traditional Cold War–era systems, such as piloted combat planes (money for Navy aircraft alone doubles from $17 billion to $34 billion), and warships (up from $45 billion this year to $66 billion next year).
The warships are especially expensive ($13 billion for a new USS Gerald Ford–class aircraft carrier, $2.7 billion for a DDG-51 destroyer) and take many years to build. It could be argued we need more ships, but do we need the kinds of ships we’re buying? They are far more capable than ships of older times, but they’re also more vulnerable, given the swarms of anti-ship missiles and drones, which, for instance, China has prepared to fire in case of a war near the Taiwan Strait.
A few years ago, some analysts noted that big ships were good for crisis management—all those attack planes and missiles could intimidate an adversary—but they should probably be moved out of harm’s way if bullets started to fly. (Submarine crews have a related joke: “There are two kinds of warships—submarines and targets.”) This spring’s war with Iran shows they’re of limited use for crisis management: Two aircraft carriers and their escort ships didn’t scare the Iranians into backing down. (However, against a country of limited military power, such as Iran, the carriers can still launch a lot of firepower.)
There’s another, more mundane problem with this budget, especially with the scads it devotes to shipbuilding—the largest sum (adjusting for inflation) since 1962. Even if Congress passes it, the Navy won’t be able to spend it.
A recent report by the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the Navy’s program for 2025 placed greater strains on the nation’s shipyards than they had faced in recent decades, adding that the yards “suffer from an insufficient quantity of skilled labor … and supply chain challenges.” And the proposed shipbuilding program for 2027 is more than 50 percent larger than that for 2025. Nothing has been done in the meantime to enlarge our shipbuilding capacity, or entice a larger or more skilled workforce. In fact, according to the CBO report, employment in the shipyards hasn’t grown since 1990.
Similarly, a new study by the conservative American Enterprise Institute concludes that “we lack the manufacturing ability and supply chain to produce weapons” at a scale that Trump and Hegseth envision not only for shipbuilding but for projects throughout their $1.5 trillion budget.
In other words, in so many ways, this budget is a fantasy. Under ordinary conditions, congressional leaders would declare it “dead on arrival.” But, of course, these are far from ordinary conditions. GOP lawmakers, who control Congress, bow down to their party leader’s commands, even at the price of abrogating their own constitutional powers. The question, this time around, is whether they’re willing to do so to the point of political suicide—which is what they would risk committing if they passed this budget in this midterm year.
First, their majorities in the House and Senate are perilously slender. Second, Trump’s positive ratings recently dipped below 40 percent. Third, his war with Iran is less popular still. The defense budget, though far broader in scope, would be viewed by much of the public through the same prism, especially since the Pentagon will request more money still—Hegseth has suggested $200 billion more (though he hasn’t officially requested so much)—as a supplemental to this year’s budget, to compensate for the costs of the war: for instance, to restock the munitions, spare parts, and other supplies that the airstrikes and other activities chewed up.
This is crucial to decisions of political risk because, in order to pay for his massive increase in defense spending, Trump is proposing to slash $73 billion in domestic spending—including for popular programs in education, agriculture, housing, and health. Trump himself acknowledged the causal connection, saying at a private lunch, “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicare, all of these individual things” because “military protection” had to take priority.
Even some Republicans are starting to chafe against the budget, not so much because they care about social programs but because, even with those cuts, the soaring military costs swell the federal government’s already-ballooning deficit.
The real problem with the defense budget is that, given an unavoidably finite amount of money, we’re buying the wrong kinds of things. This was dramatized in the air war on Iran, when U.S. ships and warplanes fired 850 cruise missiles, the newest of them costing $3.6 million each, at targets whose destruction had no effect on the course of the war—or when a $4 million battery of Patriot air-defense missiles was deployed to shoot down a small swarm of drones costing as little as $20,000.
This sort of exchange rate is unsustainable. After five weeks of airstrikes on Iran, the world’s 16th strongest military, the U.S. Air Force and Navy—the world’s mightiest power, we’re told over and over—is on the verge of running out of crucial missiles. Think about the calculations that China’s generals are running through their heads in pondering a war for Taiwan.
The Pentagon is moving into the modern era to some extent; for example, it’s building a lot more drones, but even many of our drones are more expensive than those on the world market. Ukraine, which learned how to build drones from Silicon Valley engineers, is now building models that cost a fraction of ours—and are more effective.
At a Senate Budget Committee hearing this week, Republican Lindsey Graham gushed over Trump’s military request, calling it “the best military budget I’ve seen since I’ve been in Congress,” adding, “If you’re a guy like me, this is the budget you’ve been dreaming of.”
Dreaming is one way of describing what Graham was doing. Then again, the Democrats on the panel didn’t offer much in the way of alternatives. What the Pentagon, other agencies, and private think tanks need to do is rethink the defense budget—how much is really needed to do what?
