Pete Hegseth in his wisdom has identified “the greatest threat that our nation faces,” as he told Congress on Tuesday.
It’s not nuclear weapons. Nor is it China. It’s not Iran, Russia, or North Korea. It’s not Cuba or any other country rising or falling. It’s not drugs. It’s not terrorism. It’s not Islam. It’s not “Antifa” or the political left or immigration or migration or anything relating to people. It’s not cybersecurity or the smart phone, artificial intelligence, killer robots, or weapons. It’s not anything related to health or, in Hegseth’s arsenal, laziness or appearance. It’s not an asteroid or some other extinction event. It’s not overpopulation, a pandemic, nor biotechnology in nature. It’s not climate change (of course). And it’s not war itself.
In his eternal quest to remind everyone there’s a dumber official than Sebastian Gorka (somehow), the Secretary of War testified under oath that the greatest threat to America is not giving the Pentagon more money.
“Not funding this department at $1.5 trillion, I believe, is the greatest threat that our nation faces,” he told the Senate. The one-and-a-half trillion dollar figure refers to the record budget sought by the military.
You read that right: the Pentagon is seeking a whopping 40% increase over last year’s budget that already tops $1 TRILLION dollars(!)
War is hell — a hell of a good business, that is.
All of World War II, all of it from 1941 to 1945, cost the United States an estimated $4.5 trillion in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars. Hegseth wants to spend even more than that over the next four years. Not to fight World War III, mind you. (That would require a supplemental budget.)
Handsy Hegseth now has his hand in America’s pocket, trying to fish our wallet out. And by all appearances Congress, with its power of the purse, is going along.
Democrat Congressman Adam Smith, the ranking member on the committee overseeing the Pentagon, condemned any calls to defund the Department of War this week.
“ The Democratic Socialists of America, in their platform, is ‘defund the Department of Defense,’” Smith complained during a nearly ▶hour-long interview with Krystal Ball of Breaking Points.
Smith continued: “ I believe that we do need to have a Department of Defense. We need to support our troops. We have national security threats that we have to be prepared to deal with, all right?”
And what will all of this bonanza buy? A military 40 percent larger? Forty percent more planes, ships, tanks, etc.? The answer is even more obscene than you can imagine, for Hegeth’s vision isn’t even a major increase in the size. The most powerful military in the world, with every dazzling weapon and innovation you could imagine, just wants more. It wants more weapons — the business end (bombs, missiles, drones, and on and on) — to be able to bomb Iran, or Cuba, or China, forever and never run out.
Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert at the American Enterprise Institute, calls a spade a spade.
“This is not at all a strategy-driven budget. This is a budget-driven budget,” Harrison says in one of his interviews excoriating the $1.5 trillion budget request.
The budget buys newer nuclear weapons and a next generation of bombers, submarines, and ground based ICBMs. The budget buys sixth-generation airplanes; and the next generation of one-way attack drones. The budget pays the troops more, pays the consultants more, pays for more research, pays for more budget specialists (and even auditors); but in the end, it does not anticipate all any of this resulting in MORE of anything. Not more than any prudently planned investment might. Not more nuclear weapons. Not more bombers, fighters, or ships. Not more soldiers even. Each individual item perpetually gets so expensive that fewer are purchased. So the Army and Marine Corps won’t get bigger, nor will the Air Force or the Navy. The nuclear arsenal will stay the same size.
In other words, this 40 percent higher military budget would not result in a 40 percent larger military.
The one thing that will be new will be drones. A next generation of “one-way” loitering autonomous weapon will be purchased: drones, mini-missiles, and robots. The budget request asks for a mind-boggling $54 billion into a single line item for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG) — but even there, how you get to $1.5 trillion overall is an otherworldly arithmetic formula.
You can see why the Pentagon has never once passed an audit.
I agree that the Pentagon budget represents the greatest threat to America — but not in the sense that Hegseth means.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
