The Pentagon obtained a whopping $150-billion improve within the funds invoice handed by Congress and signed by the president July 4. That can push subsequent yr’s proposed Pentagon funds to greater than $1 trillion. Most of that giant quantity will go to weapons producers.
A brand new report by the Quincy Institute and the Prices of Warfare Challenge at Brown College discovered that for the interval from 2020 to 2024, greater than half of the Pentagon funds — 54% — went to personal firms. That determine has climbed significantly for the reason that fast post-Chilly Warfare interval of the Nineteen Nineties, when the contractor share was 41%.
The surge of spending on the Pentagon and its main weapons suppliers gained’t essentially make us safer. It might simply enrich army firms whereas subsidizing overpriced, underperforming weapons programs, even because it promotes an accelerated arms race with China.
Whereas weapons companies will fare properly if the brand new funds goes by way of as deliberate, army personnel and the veterans who’ve fought in America’s wars on this century won’t. The Trump administration is in search of deep cuts in personnel, amenities and analysis on the Veterans Affairs, and tens of hundreds of army households have to make use of meals stamps, a program lower by 20% within the funds invoice, to make ends meet.
The $150 billion in add-ons for the Pentagon embody tens of billions for the Trump administration’s all-but-impossible dream of a leak-proof Golden Dome missile protection system, a aim that has been pursued for greater than 40 years with out success. Different huge winners embody the brand new F-47 fight plane, and the army shipbuilding trade, which is slated for an enormous infusion of recent funding.
The query of how one can allocate the Pentagon’s orgy of weapons spending is difficult by the truth that there are actually two highly effective factions throughout the arms trade combating over the division’s funds, the normal Huge 5, composed of Lockheed Martin, RTX (previously Raytheon), Boeing, Common Dynamics and Northrop Grumman, and rising army tech companies resembling SpaceX, Palantir and Anduril.
The Huge 5 at the moment get the majority of Pentagon weapons spending, however the rising tech companies are catching up, successful profitable contracts for military-wide communications programs and antidrone expertise. And there might be extra such contracts. Even after the general public falling out between Elon Musk and the president, the rising tech companies have a determined benefit, with advocates resembling Vice President JD Vance, who maintains shut ties along with his mentor and political supporter Peter Thiel of Palantir, and dozens of workers members from army tech companies who are actually embedded within the nationwide safety and funds bureaucracies of the Trump administration.
In the meantime, the tech sector’s guarantees of a brand new, revolutionary period of protection made doable by artificial-intelligence-driven weapons and different applied sciences are virtually actually overstated. If previous observe tells us something, it’s that new, advanced high-tech weapons won’t save us.
The historical past of Pentagon procurement is plagued by “miracle weapons,” from the digital battlefield in Vietnam to Ronald Reagan’s “impenetrable” Star Wars missile protect to networked warfare and precision-guided bombs used within the Iraq and Afghan wars. When push got here to shove, these extremely touted programs both did not work as marketed, or have been irrelevant to the sorts of wars they have been being utilized in.
Only one instance: Even if the Pentagon spent properly over $10 billion to discover a system that might neutralize improvised explosive units in Iraq and Afghanistan, solely modest progress was made. Even after the brand new expertise was deployed, 40% of I.E.Ds couldn’t be cleared.
Expertise is a software, however it isn’t the decisive consider successful wars or deterring adversaries. An efficient army must be primarily based on well-trained, well-compensated and extremely motivated troops. Meaning taking a few of that 54% of the Pentagon funds that goes to contractors and investing in supporting the people who find themselves truly tasked with combating America’s wars. However to be actually secure, we have to combat fewer wars by adopting a extra real looking technique that emphasizes diplomacy and shut cooperation with allies, and that resorts to drive solely when there’s a main, direct menace to U.S. safety. A extra balanced technique could be a lot much less more likely to put U.S. troops in high-risk conditions just like the nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As a substitute of letting company particular pursuits distort our international and army insurance policies, we have to press for an method that places strategic concerns first. That can imply taking steps to cut back the ability of the arms makers, new and previous, by way of steps resembling stronger measures to restrict the revolving door between authorities and trade. And we have to convey extra impartial voices into the Pentagon’s funds discussions. Lockheed Martin, Palantir, SpaceX and different firms shouldn’t have undue affect over choices on how a lot to spend on our army, and what to spend it on. That’s no option to make a army funds, and no option to defend a rustic.
William D. Hartung is a senior analysis fellow on the Quincy Institute for Accountable Statecraft and the co-author, with Stephen Semler, of the report “Earnings of Warfare: Prime Beneficiaries of Pentagon Spending, 2020 to 2024.”
