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pentagon budget
Why Does the Pentagon Seem to Be Spending More for Less?
One has to wonder how on Earth the Pentagon needs more money to not fight wars than it did to fight two of them at the same time.
Sep 04, 2025
As US Congress returns from its summer recess, Washington’s attention is turning toward a possible government shutdown.
While much of the focus will be on a showdown between Senate Democrats and President Donald Trump, a subplot is brewing as the House and Senate, led by Republicans but supported by far too many Democrats, fight over how big the Pentagon’s budget should be. The House voted to give Trump his requested trillion dollar budget, while the Senate is demanding $22 billion more.
To justify this historic largesse, both Trump and Congress give the same reason: peace through strength. Harkening back to Ronald Reagan’s Cold War military spending spree, today its invocation often boils down to one simple idea: Give the Pentagon more money. But, since Reagan’s famed buildup actually cost much less, it's worth asking if the problem really is a lack of funds
Four decades ago, the newest aircraft carrier in the fleet was the USS Theodore Roosevelt. It was a remarkable acquisition project coming in a full 16 months early and more than $80 million under budget. Today, the latest carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, was billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. And even after adjusting for inflation, the Ford class carriers are also much more expensive than the Nimitz class they are replacing, and costs may keep going up. And those costs come before even asking if the ships are actually matched to the military’s current needs, let alone for the decades ahead they’ll be in use.
Sadly, this cost explosion and questionable alignment with modern warfare are far from unique to carriers. A quick Google search for the F-35, Littoral Combat Ship, Sentinel ICBM, or any number of other recent boondoggles tells the same story. Today, nearly every Pentagon acquisition program is a mess, coming in late, over budget, and significantly more expensive than the weapons and platforms being replaced.
This collapse into dysfunction of the Pentagon’s procurement system cannot be ascribed to a lack of funding. Despite a genuine drop in spending following the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon is now nearly two and a half decades into an unprecedented era of massive budgets. More money hasn’t solved this problem, and there’s zero reason to think even more will do anything but make it worse.
Before going further, it’s worth examining two of the most common justifications for why costs have skyrocketed: technology and personnel.
There’s a decent chance you’re reading this on a smartphone like the iPhone, a remarkable encapsulation of just how dramatically technology has increased in power and decreased in costs over the past 40 years. In 1985, the CRAY-2 was the world’s most powerful super computer. It cost between $35-50 million (adjusted for inflation) and weighed nearly 3 tons. Instead, that iPhone in your hand weighs a few ounces, costs around $1,000, and is thousands of times more powerful. Oh, and it also makes phone calls, plays music, takes photos and videos, lets you surf the internet, and much more.
When you put it all together, Washington has some tough questions to ask about the Pentagon’s budget, and one of those questions should not be, “Can we add $22 billion more?”
Put another way, you have far more computing power in your pocket than the entire US military did four decades ago, and you didn’t even need a multi-billion-dollar spending spree to get it. Yet somehow, every time someone tries to explain why the Pentagon needs a trillion dollars today, the inevitable answer is the role of advanced technology in today’s military. Is technology more ubiquitous and more complex? Unquestionably. It is also outrageously more powerful and cheaper today than it was 40 years ago. Reagan’s military wasn’t sailing tall ships and using an abacus. They bought most of those supercomputers and utilized some of the most sophisticated technology of the time.
Yet somehow, while the rest of us have cheap supercomputers in our pocket, the Pentagon’s spending more than ever.
Of course, the Pentagon doesn’t just buy things; it is the largest employer in the United States, and, so the justification for more money goes, those people cost more today than they used to. Let’s start with acknowledging two facts: Military personnel have seen real and meaningful increases in their pay and benefits over the past 40 years; and also their compensation, particularly among the lower ranks, remains woefully low and should be raised further.
But what’s also true is that the size of the armed forces under Trump is significantly smaller than those under Reagan. In 1985, there were 2.15 million active-duty personnel with another 1.1 million civilians supporting them. Today, those numbers are more than one-third smaller. So, while one can justify some budget pressure by the increasing costs per person due to better pay and benefits, any honest math would have to also account for significant cost savings of a smaller workforce both in and out of uniform. Today, we’re simply paying more for a far smaller military and civilian workforce than 40 years ago. Since in Washington, “more” is never enough, we’re left to wonder what happened to the savings of a smaller workforce utilizing ever cheaper technology?
It’s worth adding into the equation what the military is actually doing. There is no doubt that a wartime military costs more than one at peace. At the center of today’s calls for a larger budget is thus, the so-called “return of great power competition,” with the US-China rivalry at its core. Add in a resurgent and aggressive Russia, ongoing crises in the Middle East, and other challenges like North Korea, and the Pentagon’s boosters say the threat environment is simply far more complex and involved than 40 years ago.
Accepting that logic, however, requires one to dramatically downplay the complexity of the Cold War, which of course was only “cold” if you leave out conflicts like Afghanistan, Central America, and the Iraq-Iran War. There was also US support for brutal dictators like Mobutu, Pinochet, and Suharto and their armed forces. Today’s threat environment is no doubt complex, but Reagan hardly oversaw a time of cheap, global peace.
Trump’s trillion-dollar budget is also coming in far larger than those of the recent past when the US was actively fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with as many as 200,000 uniformed personnel deployed in theater simultaneously. While the US undoubtedly maintains a not-insignificant operational tempo across the Middle East and North Africa today, it is a far cry from those peak war years.
One has to wonder how on Earth the Pentagon needs more money to not fight wars than it did to fight two of them at the same time.
When you put it all together, Washington has some tough questions to ask about the Pentagon’s budget, and one of those questions should not be, “Can we add $22 billion more?” How will more money fix a completely broken acquisition process? What happened to savings from cheaper technology and a smaller military? And why exactly are the military’s missions of the future so much more expensive than the past? Ultimately, if we want our nation to experience either peace or strength, it's going to take answering those, and other, questions, not just an ever larger fortune for the Pentagon.
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Is the Pentagon Spending Taxpayer Money on Alien Tech?
Too over the top? Perhaps, but the Pentagon is so secretive that the public is left to speculate. Congress must hold the DOD accountability for how it uses its funds.
Aug 31, 2025
The US federal debt has now passed $37 trillion and is growing at the rate of $1 trillion every five months. Interest on the debt exceeds $1 trillion annually, second only to Social Security in the federal budget. The military outlay is also close to $1 trillion, consuming nearly half of the discretionary budget.
As a sovereign nation, the United States could avoid debt altogether by simply paying for the budget deficit with Treasury-issued “Greenbacks,” as Abraham Lincoln’s government did. But I have written on that before (see here and here), so this article will focus on that other elephant in the room, the Department of Defense (DOD).
Under the Constitution, the military budget should not be paid at all, because the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Expenditures of public funds without a public accounting violate Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution, which provides:
No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
The Pentagon failed its seventh financial audit in 2024, with 63% of its $4.1 trillion in assets—approximately $2.58 trillion—untracked. From 1998 to 2015, it failed to account for $21 trillion in spending.
As concerning today as the financial burden is the wielding of secret power. US President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell address: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
President John F. Kennedy echoed that concern, warning in 1961 that “secret societies” and excessive secrecy are “repugnant in a free and open society,” threatening democracy by withholding truth from the public. He warned that excessive concealment, even for national security, undermines democracy by denying citizens the facts needed to hold power accountable. “No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed,” he said. If untracked billions fund classified programs, citizens are left powerless, governed by a shadow entity answerable to no one.
Those concerns persist today. On August 13, 2025, Joe Rogan interviewed US Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), who leads a House Oversight Committee focused on government transparency regarding various topics, including UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, formerly UFOs). Luna said the committee had been formed after she and two other congresspeople were denied access at Eglin Air Force Base to information on UAPs provided by whistleblowers. The problem, she said, was that Congress was supposed to represent the public and be an investigative body for it, “and you have unelected people operating basically in secrecy… I think this goes all the way back even to JFK, with how they basically have operated outside of the purview of Congress and basically… have gone rogue…”
A Behemoth Without Oversight
The Department of Defense’s $885.7 billion budget for 2025, approved by the House of Representatives, dwarfs the military spending of China ($296 billion), Russia ($84 billion), and the next eight nations combined. Managing $4.1 trillion in assets—from aircraft carriers to secret drones—along with $4.3 trillion in liabilities (e.g. personnel costs and pensions), the federal government’s largest agency oversees a military empire spanning over 4,790 sites worldwide. Yet it operates with minimal oversight.
The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 mandated audits for all federal agencies, but the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018 delayed the Pentagon’s first department-wide audit to 2018 due to its unwieldy size, its decentralized systems, and its outdated software. The DOD has failed every audit since that time. In 2024, it could not account for its $824 billion FY 2024 budget, with 2,500 new audit issues identified. Of 24 reporting entities, only nine received clean opinions, while 15 received disclaimers due to insufficient data. In fact the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has flagged DOD financial management as high-risk for waste, fraud, and abuse ever since 1995.
A 2016 report in The Nation highlighted $640 for a toilet seat and $7,600 for a coffee pot.
As observed in a January 2019 article in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi, openly secret budgets were first legalized in 1949 with the passage of the Central Intelligence Agency Act, which exempted that newly created agency from public financial disclosure. The act stated, “The sums made available to the Agency may be expended without regard to the provisions of law and regulations related to the expenditure of Government funds.”
The aim of the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 was to curb billions of dollars said to be lost each year through fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement of public budgets. Despite the mandated audits for all federal agencies, the DOD—the only major agency without a clean audit—has received $3.9 trillion in congressionally approved funding since 2018. “Every year that members of Congress vote to boost Pentagon spending with no strings attached,” observed federal budgeting expert Lindsay Kosgharian, “they choose to spend untold billions on weapons and war with no accountability.”
The Audit the Pentagon Act of 2023, backed by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), proposes docking 0.5–1% of budgets for audit failures, but the measure has not received a vote.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched with promises to strip waste, fraud, and abuse from federal agencies, has conspicuously sidestepped the Pentagon. A June 2025 article titled “Why DOGE Was Always Doomed: The Pentagon Problem,” points out that the DOGE mission was seriously hampered by the Pentagon’s exemption from auditing:
In FY 2024, total discretionary spending was about $1.6 trillion. Of that, the Pentagon alone received $842 billion. In other words, it got more funding than all other departments combined. You read that right: one (very special) department received more than all the rest put together.
Funds that are not accounted for divert resources from critical needs like troop readiness, healthcare, and infrastructure. Overbilling by contractors enriches corporations while taxpayers foot the bill. And the lack of transparency erodes public confidence, as Americans struggle with domestic priorities.
The Missing $21 Trillion: Fraud, Waste, or Something Worse?
The Pentagon’s audit failures mask not just inefficiency and waste but pervasive fraud and corruption. Between 1998 and 2015, Inspector General reports show that the DOD could not account for $21 trillion in spending—65% of federal spending during that period. For perspective, the entire US GDP in 2015 was $18.2 trillion. In 2023, the agency failed to document 63% of its $3.8 trillion in assets, up from 61% the prior year. A 2015 DOD report identifying $125 billion in administrative waste was suppressed to protect budget increases.
There is plenty of verified waste to support the case for mismanagement. Military contractors, who receive over half of the Pentagon’s budget, are a major culprit. The F-35 program, managed by Lockheed Martin, was reported in 2021 to be $165 billion over budget, with $220 billion in spare parts poorly tracked. A 2023 CBS News investigation found that contractors routinely overcharged by 40-50%, with some markups reaching 4,451%. A 2016 report in The Nation highlighted $640 for a toilet seat and $7,600 for a coffee pot.
It is no longer even necessary to cover up fraud and corruption by wildly inflated prices. In 2017, former Housing and Urban Development (HUD) official Catherine Austin Fitts collaborated with Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University, to document the missing $21 trillion in unsupported journal voucher adjustments at the DOD and HUD. In a June 2025 article published in Fitts’ journal The Solari Report titled “Should We Care about Secrecy in Financial Reporting?,” Dr. Skidmore discussed how the government responded to the publication of his research with Fitts. Its response was to immediately eliminate the paper trail leading to its covert financial operations. In particular: “Pentagon officials turned to the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) for advice. Several months later, FASAB posted a new document (FASAB 56), which recommended that the government be allowed to misstate and move funds to conceal expenditures if it is deemed necessary to protect national security interests.”
Fitts remarked, “The White House and Congress just opened a pipeline into the back of the US Treasury, and announced to every private army, mercenary, and thug in the world that we are open for business.”
Speculation Run Rampant
In a widely-viewed interview by Tucker Carlson on April 28, 2025, Fitts expressed her belief that the missing trillions had been funneled into classified projects involving advanced technologies, including massive underground bunkers to protect elites from a “near-extinction event;” and that they were using advanced energy systems and hidden transit networks possibly linked to extraterrestrial tech. She discussed “interdimensional intelligence” and a secret space program linked to a “breakaway civilization.” The latter term was coined by UFO researcher Richard Dolan and is defined by Google as “a theoretical, hidden society that operates outside of mainstream civilization with advanced technology, often linked to UFO phenomena and secret space programs.”
In a Danny Jones interview in May 2025, Fitts alluded to Deep Underground Military Bases (“DUMBs”), perhaps used for “advanced technology or off-world operations.” Existence of these bases was confirmed two decades earlier by whistleblower Philip Schneider, a US government geologist and engineer involved in their construction. In his last presentation in 1995, Schneider said there were 131 of these cities connected underground by mag-lev rail, built at a cost of $17-26 billion each. According to his biographer, Schneider was assassinated in 1996 by a US intelligence agency for disclosing the government cover-up of UFOs and aliens.
Too over the top? Perhaps, but the Pentagon is so secretive that the public is left to speculate. Are we dealing with a scenario like that in such Hollywood movies as the 1997 film Men in Black, in which hidden forces—human or alien—control our fate?
As taxpayers footing the bill, we are entitled to know not only where our money is being spent but who is really in charge of our government.
The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) contends that no verifiable evidence supports extraterrestrial activity. But other prominent figures support the UFO-UAP narrative. In 2017, the New York Times exposed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), said to be a $22 million DOD initiative run by Luis Elizondo investigating UAPs from 2007-2012.
According to BBC News, Haim Eshed, former head of Israel’s space security program, claimed in a 2020 interview with the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that the US government has an “agreement” with a “Galactic Federation” of extraterrestrials. He alleged aliens have been in contact with the US and Israel, with secret underground bases where they collaborate on experiments. Eshed claimed the United States was on the verge of disclosing this under President Donald Trump but withheld it to avoid “mass hysteria.” The claims were unverified but provocative.
In recent years, Congress has increased its focus on UAPs, with high-profile hearings in 2022, 2023, and 2024. In 2023, whistleblower David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, testified that the US possesses “non-human origin” craft and “dead pilots,” based on classified briefings. On November 13, 2024, the House Oversight Committee’s hearing, “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” featured testimony from Luis Elizondo, retired Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, journalist Michael Shellenberger, and former NASA official Michael Gold, who claimed the US possesses UAP technologies and has harmed personnel in secret retrieval programs. Shellenberger alleged that a covert “Immaculate Constellation” program hides UAP data from Congress.
Some lawmakers, including Rep. Luna and Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), continue to criticize Pentagon secrecy and to push for transparency. In May 2024, Burchett introduced the UAP Transparency Act, requiring the declassification of all UAP-related documents within 270 days. He stated:
This bill isn’t all about finding little green men or flying saucers, it’s about forcing the Pentagon and federal agencies to be transparent with the American people. I’m sick of hearing bureaucrats telling me these things don’t exist while we’ve spent millions of taxpayer dollars on studying them for decades.
Secrecy Undermines Democracy
With $21 trillion unaccounted for historically, $165 billion in F-35 overruns, and $125 billion in buried waste, the DOD’s financial mismanagement needs urgent reform. Congress is primarily responsible for overseeing the DOD budget, exercising its constitutional “power of the purse” under Article 1 of the US Constitution. So why isn’t it enforcing this mandate?
The chief excuse given is the need for secrecy for security reasons, but a congressional committee could be given access to the Pentagon’s financial data in closed session in order to exercise public oversight and enforce accountability. Other factors are obviously at play, including political influence, lobbying, campaign contributions from the defense sector, and a lack of penalties for noncompliance.
To restore accountability, Congress needs to enforce the Audit the Pentagon Act, modernize DOD systems, and investigate contractors profiting from lax oversight. UAP transparency is also critical, whether to debunk myths or uncover truths.
As taxpayers footing the bill, we are entitled to know not only where our money is being spent but who is really in charge of our government. The Pentagon’s secrecy and lack of accountability could be shielding anything from contractor fraud to UAP programs and alien alliances. If there is information so secret that even our elected representatives don’t have access to it, who does have access? Is there a secret government above the government we know? Without fiscal transparency and accountability, we can no longer call ourselves a democracy, as JFK warned.
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Trump’s Military Parade Is Only the Tip of the Pentagon Waste Iceberg
The cost of the parade, which was poorly attended, pales in comparison with the trillions of taxpayer dollars the U.S. military has squandered since the turn of the century.
Jun 20, 2025
Much has been made about the price tag of the military parade that took place on Saturday in Washington, D.C., commemorating the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary and, coincidentally, Donald Trump’s 79th birthday. Pegged at between $25 million and $45 million, the parade featuring 6,600 soldiers, 150 vehicles, and 50 aircraft has been roundly criticized as colossal waste of money.
But the cost of the parade, which was poorly attended, pales in comparison with the trillions of taxpayer dollars the U.S. military has squandered since the turn of the century.
Consider the astronomical cost of the U.S.-sponsored “global war on terror” launched after al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001 assault on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people. That attack by a relative handful of terrorists triggered a wildly disproportionate response, primarily in Afghanistan, which was harboring al Qaeda, and Iraq, which had no ties to al Qaeda and no weapons of mass destruction. As of September 2021, the global war on terror cost U.S. taxpayers more than $8 trillion, including more than $2.2 trillion for veterans’ care over the next 30 years, according to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
If the Pentagon were a private corporation, gross mismanagement would have forced it into bankruptcy years ago.
(Then there’s the war on terror’s human cost. More than 7,000 U.S. service members and 8,000 contractors died in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other war zones, the Watson Institute calculated, along with more than 400,000 civilians, 680 journalists, nearly 900 humanitarian aid workers, and more than 190,000 Afghan, Iraqi, and other U.S. coalition soldiers.)
Certainly, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—both abject failures—predate even Trump’s first administration. But at the same time the current Trump administration is rushing to dismantle the federal workforce, slash critical safety net programs, and maintain massive tax breaks for corporations and the uber rich, its fiscal year (FY) 2026 budget plan proposes spending more than $1 trillion on the military for the first time, a 13% increase from the previous year.
No other country’s military outlay come close. In FY 2024, the U.S. military budget of $997 billion (including the cost of veterans services) was three times bigger than China’s estimated $314 billion and more than six times bigger than Russia’s estimated $149 billion, according to data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. All told, SIPRI found, the U.S. military budget last year exceeded the next nine countries’ military outlays combined and singlehandedly accounted for nearly 40% of all military spending worldwide.
The Pentagon Wastes Our Money
If the Pentagon were a private corporation, gross mismanagement would have forced it into bankruptcy years ago. Dysfunctional internal controls, aided and abetted by years of lax congressional and administration oversight, have enabled it to waste billions of dollars annually, and the last 25 years are littered with a parade of overpriced, botched, and bungled projects.
In just the first decade of this century, the Pentagon was forced to cancel a dozen ill-conceived, ineffective weapons programs that cost taxpayers $46 billion in 2011 dollars, amounting to more than $65 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. They included the Future Combat Systems program, a fleet of networked high-tech vehicles that did not work; the Comanche helicopter, which—after 22 years in development—was never built; and the 40-ton Crusader artillery gun, which never even made it to the prototype stage.
Then there are programs the Pentagon continues to green-light with zero assurance they will ever perform as advertised. Exhibit A: The Pentagon has wasted more than $200 billion since the late 1990s on a ballistic missile defense system that has failed 43% of its 21 tests, despite the fact that operators knew approximately when and where a mock enemy missile would be launched, its expected trajectory, and what it would look like to sensors—not remotely akin to a real-world situation. A spawn of Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars fantasy, the system—based in Alaska and California—will never be able to defend the continental United States from a limited nuclear attack. Any country capable of launching a ballistic missile could easily foil the system with decoys and other countermeasures.
Trump recently announced he wants to spend $175 billion on another unworkable Star Wars offspring he dubbed Golden Dome. The Arms Control Association warns that Trump’s pipedream of defending the United States against ballistic, hypersonic, and advanced cruise missiles “will incentivize China and Russia to double down on building up their nuclear arsenals, it will cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars, and it will not work as intended.”
Another prime example of a dysfunctional weapon system is Army parade sponsor Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which is 80% over budget. Now expected to cost more than $2 trillion over its lifespan, the program has the dubious distinction of being the Department of Defense’s most expensive of all time. As of last August, there were more than 1,000 F-35s in service around the world, but they continue to be plagued by serious defects, according to a highly classified Pentagon report obtained by the Project on Government Oversight late last year.
Last week, Defense One reported that the Air Force has quietly proposed to Congress halving its planned purchase of 48 F-35s in FY 2026 and increasing funding for the new F-47 fighter jet slated to be built by Boeing. Critics have questioned the necessity of yet another new fighter given the Air Force is already planning to buy at least 100 of Northrop Grumman’s next generation stealth bomber, the B-21 Raider, at an estimated cost of $203 billion.
Besides the ill-fated F-35, other high-profile Pentagon lemons include:
- The Navy’s three Zumwalt destroyers, built at a total cost of $22 billion, which “suffered from poorly functioning weapons, stalling engines, and an underperformance in their stealth capabilities, among other shortcomings,” according to 2018 report by Military Watch Magazine;
- The $30 billion Lockheed Martin littoral combat ship, which the Navy began using in 2003 but started mothballing in 2019 because they constantly broke down; and
- Boeing’s problem-plagued $43 billion KC-46 aerial refueling tanker. The Air Force had to temporarily halt production of the tanker in 2020 due to serious technical problems, and in March it paused deliveries because cracks were found on two of them.
Making Us Less Safe with Costly New Nukes
Last, but certainly not least, the Pentagon is currently in the midst of spending $2 trillion over the next few decades on a new generation of nuclear weapons and delivery systems—the missiles, bombers, and submarines that make up the so-called nuclear triad.
More than $140 billion of that money is earmarked for a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), Northrup Grumman’s Sentinel, to replace the 400 Minuteman III missiles currently deployed across the Great Plains states. Sentinel was originally expected to cost $77.7 billion, but the Pentagon said last year that a “reasonably modified” version of it would now cost $140.9 billion—81% more. The Air Force also will have to dig new silos for Sentinel, further complicating the program.
Meanwhile, the Air Force conducted yet another successful test of the Minuteman III on May 21, one of more than 300 it has held for the ICBM, which has been continuously upgraded. “This ICBM test launch underscores the strength of the nation’s nuclear deterrent and the readiness of the ICBM leg of the triad,” Global Strike commander Gen. Thomas Bussiere said in a statement. After a successful test in August 2020, the Air Force was even more emphatic, proclaiming that it “demonstrates that the United States’ nuclear deterrent is safe, secure, reliable, and effective to deter 21st century threats and reassure our allies.”
The United States has no legitimate security justification for maintaining the current size of its nuclear arsenal.
Then why does the Pentagon need to spend $140 billion on brand new ICBMs, especially since a growing number of experts say they are no longer necessary? A former defense secretary, two former generals, and nearly 700 scientists and engineers—including 21 Nobel laureates—argue that Americans would be safer if ICBMs were eliminated altogether. Bombers and submarines, they say, are enough to guarantee national security.
Historically, the United States has far outspent every other member of the nuclear club. Last year, it allocated $56.8 billion for nuclear weapons, more than half of the $100.2 billion spent worldwide, according to a report released last Friday by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). The second-largest spender, China, paid out $12.5 billion, less than a quarter of the U.S. outlay. The United Kingdom spent the third-largest amount, $10.4 billion, 10% of the total figure.
The United States has no legitimate security justification for maintaining the current size of its nuclear arsenal. Just one U.S. nuclear-armed submarine is capable of carrying warheads that together are nearly 10 times more powerful than all the bombs dropped during World War II, including the two atomic bombs. One full salvo from a single sub could wipe out two dozen cities—and the Navy has a fleet of 12 at sea, where they are virtually undetectable.
The money spent worldwide on nuclear weapons “is being wasted given the nuclear-armed states agree a nuclear war can never be won and should never be fought,” ICAN asserted. “It is also diverting resources from real human priorities. $100 billion could have been used to fund measures to address the threats posed to our security by climate change and the loss of animal and plant species, or to provide funding for improving essential public goods, such as healthcare, housing, and education.”
Of course, the same could be said for wasteful, non-nuclear military spending, which brings us back to Saturday’s Army parade, which gratefully did not include nuclear missiles, which are the purview of the Air Force and Navy. To be sure, spending as much as $45 million on the Army parade to stroke Donald Trump’s ego is no doubt an outrage. But even more outrageous is how much the United States spends on its military—conventional and nuclear—every year, siphoning off billions of dollars that could support critical domestic needs.
This column was originally posted on Money Trail, a new Substack site co-founded by Elliott Negin.Keep ReadingShow Less
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