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.
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.
