President Donald Trump’s proposed solution to these problems is to shoot our way out. He wants a 50% increase over last year’s Pentagon budget, to $1.5 trillion. It is stupid in the measure to which it is excessive. It is suicidal to the extent it will degrade our security and our chances of improving national prosperity.
A wiser policy would be to rethink how the US is to co-exist with other nations in what is emerging as a multipolar world. That’s a big rethink. There’s another rethink coming as well: how we run the economy and what it is that actually accounts for national well-being.
The era when the US could dominate, intimidate, and expropriate the rest of the world is over. If it continues to push military power as its primary path forward it will continue to produce catastrophe.
Neither of these “rethinkings”—neither security nor the economy—will be easy. Both will go against existing failed doctrines and the powerful interests that back them. But, without doing this, we face the certainty of continuing national decline.
The highest-level rationale for rejecting a 50% increase in the Pentagon’s budget is that the military simply doesn’t win wars. Sure, it can knock off defenseless, pipsqueak principalities like Grenada, or Serbia, or Libya. But whenever it goes up against a committed adversary, especially one that fights back, it loses.
It lost in Vietnam to a nation of rice farmers that hadn’t even entered the industrial age. It killed more than 3 million Vietnamese, 4 million Southeast Asians when you count Laos and Cambodia. Yet, it lost.
It lost in Iraq, despite Iraq having been bombed for the prior decade, since the first Gulf War in 1991. Even in losing, the US killed more than a million Iraqis and spawned ISIS, one of the most virulent terrorist organizations ever let loose on the world.
It lost in Afghanistan, despite 20 years of trying to win. Afghanistan was a fourth-world country, with the Taliban literally living in caves. The Taliban had only hand-held firearms. No air force. No artillery. No satellite intelligence. The US still managed to lose.
Ukraine isn’t over, yet, but it is lost. Russia has crushed every one of the fabled “wonder weapons” the US has thrown at it. Remember when Trump was going to end the Ukraine war “on Day One”? We’re now past Day 500. It hasn’t ended because Trump is too weak to take the Loss on his watch. But it is lost.
Iran is the most recent—and damaging—case of catastrophic US military failure. It has a military budget one-one hundredth that of the US. Yet, Iran has “humiliated” the US, at least in the words of German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz. Neocon heavyweight Robert Kagan recently wrote, “It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored.”
None of these outcomes are equivocal. None are ambiguous. Is that the kind of outfit we want to give a 50% raise to when it can never come close to accomplishing its essential mission? And when it never learns from its repeated failures?
This is one of the major rethinks that will have to be conducted before any thought can be given to giving even one extra dollar to the Pentagon. We need to hear from the leadership what, exactly, is going to change. And we don’t mean fiddling at the margins. We mean at the core of the institution. For example…
US weapons systems are not made to be able to win in battle. They are made to deliver maximum profits to the weapons makers. Consider…
The Patriot missile system is easily baited with low-cost drones into giving away its location and radar signature. “Here I am! Here I am!” It is then a sitting duck for cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, even swarms of the same low-cost drones.
The HIMARS rocket launcher uses common GPS as part of its guidance system. This is easily jammed resulting in missiles sometimes landing kilometers away from their intended targets. Its greatest value might be that every battery reliably drains $20 million from US taxpayers.
The M-1 Abrams tank wears a gigantic “shoot me” sign as soon as it’s spotted by one of the Russian drones that saturate the skies over Ukraine. The phrase “Fish in a barrel” comes to mind.
The bigger problem—bigger than weapons that don’t work—is that the US economy is not set up to support sustained, high intensity warfare. It gave up that capability decades ago, when it decided to de-industrialize so its companies could make more money building their stuff in China.
This is one of the reasons the US, via its proxy, Ukraine, has not been able to defeat Russia: it simply cannot supply the amount of ammunition Ukraine would need to prevail. Russia is firing 5-10 times the amount of artillery Ukraine is, and there’s literally nothing the US can do about it.
It would take decades to rebuild the weapons-focused industrial capacity the US possessed in the 1960s. Given the failure of the larger military enterprise in the US, there is no certainty that, once delivered, it would not be ill-conceived, misdirected, or already obsolete. In fact, given the Pentagon’s track record, the likelihood is that it would be all three.
The deepest problem for the US in grappling with increased Pentagon funding is rooted in its world view.
That was formed in the aftermath of World War II and reinforced following the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. After both events, the US stood astride the world like a colossus, unchallenged in its ability to destroy any other country. Heady stuff but the world doesn’t sit still.
Countries do not acquiesce in their own destruction. They organize themselves to fight back; they collaborate with other countries for collective self-defense; and they employ asymmetric strategies to defeat predators, as Vietnam and Afghanistan did, and as Iran has just done. The US military hasn’t gotten the memo.
The unprovoked Iran debacle has boosted the fortunes of Russia and China, the US’ principal rivals. It has elevated Iran to being the hegemon in the Persian Gulf. That rise is abetted by a quartet of Islamic powers that are tired of US and Israeli bullying: Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. They are forming an “Islamic NATO” to keep the US and Israel out of the Gulf. This is super important.
Since World War II, the Middle East has been one of the most important regions in the world because of its vast oil wealth. A 1945 US State Department memo stated that “Arab oil resources constitute a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”
It is the Trump Pentagon, the Pete Hegseth Pentagon, that has destroyed the US’ control of that “greatest material prize in world history.” Actually, it’s even worse than that. By forcing 50% higher oil prices on the rest of the world, the US is draining wealth from every country on Earth. Many of those countries were already economically tenuous. There’s not a one that doesn’t despise the US for the extortion.
Is that an organization to which we want to grant an additional half a trillion dollars a year? Every year? So it can wreak more destruction on US fortunes? Before it rethinks itself and how it can contribute responsibly to US well-being in the world? It’s not even fatuous. It’s insane.
So, if a $1.5 trillion budget for the military is not the solution to the US woes, what is?
The US could more plausibly revive its fortunes in the world by investing the would-be increase in Pentagon spending into the civilian economy, instead.
It should invest in the nation’s people—education—so as to improve the economy’s productivity. It should invest in the nation’s infrastructure to increase the economy’s efficiency. It should invest in scientific research and development to boost innovation. And, it should re-invest in alternative energy to build resilience.
Productivity. Efficiency. Innovation. Resilience. Those are what built the US in the 20th century. They are the real foundations of national well-being. None of them are mysteries as far as how they lead to a better economy and a stronger state. None are conceptually hard to carry out.
Donald Trump is doing exactly the opposite.
He is gutting education, rescinding major infrastructure projects, savaging scientific research, and in all ways possible dismantling alternative energy. Those avenues all go against the essence of Trumpism, which is looting, shifting national resources and wealth to the already wealthy—Trump’s base.
Looting is what Trump’s proposed increase in the Pentagon budget is really all about. It is the Mother of All Trump Grifts. It is 277 times larger than his laughable $1.8 billion Slush Fund. It wants to hide the grift under the quasi-sacrosanct cover of military spending.
But it doesn’t begin to even acknowledge, to say nothing of fix, the deep failings in the military. It actively damages the economy by diverting scarce resources to parasitic looting that inflicts more harm than it heals.
Trump’s proposal improves the fortunes of the already very wealthy, as all things from Trump do. It lards them with $500 billion of unaccountable giveaways every year. It is a payoff to his rich backers and to the military Trump thinks he’s going to need to finish his overthrow of the government when the time comes, in 2028.
The era when the US could dominate, intimidate, and expropriate the rest of the world is over. If it continues to push military power as its primary path forward it will continue to produce catastrophes like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Iran, all of which have degraded US power, influence, and standing in the world.
Alternatively, it can invest in the economy, in the American people, to create higher growth, income, equality, resilience, and prosperity. Instead of trying to shoot our way out of our self-inflicted decline, we can try to think our way out, earn our way out, work our way out. It’s not certain. Nothing ever is. But it has so much more dignity and likelihood of success about it.
