Current Defense Plans Require Unsustainable Future Spending
- July 16, 2024
Expansive strategic guidance documents written to justify and validate U.S. militarism and the permanent war economy only hamper U.S. military readiness because their authors suggest that the United States pursue global military primacy forever, at all costs – even if most major defense acquisition programs are over cost and behind schedule. This vision is neither strategic nor sustainable as it undergirds an egregious and ever-growing military budget. Even with a near trillion dollar Pentagon base budget, the military leaves servicemembers with equipment that doesn’t work, while padding record-breaking profit margins for military contractors.
The United States’ civilian and uniformed military leaders have created a budgetary time bomb set to explode in the next twenty years. Over the past several years, the military services have committed to a slew of new big-ticket weapon programs now in development. As these programs mature and enter production, national security spending is expected to increase to cover the costs. With weapons growing increasingly more technically complex, the ownership costs to maintain them over the long run could make an already challenging fiscal situation even worse.
To understand future trends, we can look at the growth of US defense spending over the past 50 years. In 1975, defense spending totaled $92 billion ($521 billion in 2023). By 2000, the Pentagon’s budget grew to $320 billion ($566 billion in 2023), representing a 7.41% growth in the last quarter of the 20th century.1 However, defense spending exploded in the post 9/11 era. The Biden administration recently requested $850 billion to fund the Pentagon in 2025. Adjusted for inflation, defense spending has increased more than 48% in just the first 24 years of this century.
Today, the United States spends more money on defense than it did during the peaks of the Korea, Vietnam, and Cold Wars, even after ending the longest war in our history three years ago.2
In addition to the future spending commitments already in place, there are efforts to further increase Pentagon spending. Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) released a report in May 2024 calling for a “generational investment to revitalize our armed forces” by raising defense spending to 5% of the Gross Domestic Product.3 Setting arbitrary spending levels rather than crafting rational defense policies sets the US on course to spend even more money on failed programs and ineffective strategies. By 2050, the American people may look back fondly on the “good old days” when the annual Pentagon budget was still under a trillion dollars.
A Legacy of Acquisition Failures
“There is a systematic tendency to underestimate future costs,” Pentagon analyst Chuck Spinney said during his historic appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee.4
In March 4, 1983, Spinney walked the committee members through a presentation titled “Defense Facts of Life”. Spinney’s presentation showed in stark terms how the costs of weapon programs will invariably grow over time because contractors routinely underestimate initial costs and overpromise the capabilities. Congress and the services frequently cut the number of systems to be purchased, exacerbating the problem.
What Spinney described more than 40 years ago was the “bow wave” of future defense spending created by the Reagan defense build-up of the 1980s.5 According to the Congressional Budget Office, a bow wave occurs when Pentagon leaders understate expected procurement spending to gain program approval by Congress. The department then obligates taxpayer money and distributes subcontracts nationwide to bolster political support for the program. The problem with the practice is that a faltering weapon program becomes difficult to abandon because elected officials have a vested political interest in seeing it continue. By lowballing Congress on the anticipated costs of a new weapon program, Pentagon officials effectively commit the government to much larger acquisition spending in the future.6
This approach has left the services in a difficult position. The Navy has had two major shipbuilding failures so far this century with another program delivered years late and billions over budget —
The Zumwalt-class destroyer was originally intended for shore bombardment, traditionally performed by battleships. Navy leaders chose a futuristic design that included an experimental naval gun. The program’s original plans called for the production of 32 ships to be produced, but as costs grew the planned fleet shrank to 24, then 7, and finally to just the three that were ultimately built. The gun experiment failed when the cost of each round climbed to nearly $1 million.7 Total costs for the program increased 86% meaning each ship cost $12.8 billion.8 That makes each destroyer at least as expensive as an aircraft carrier, yet Navy leaders still struggle to find a role for the three-ship program.
The other failed shipbuilding program was the Littoral Combat Ship. The Navy wanted to build a fleet of small and inexpensive surface combatants to increase the size of the fleet. Early plans for the program called for the Navy to purchase 74 ships for $212.5 million per copy.9 Navy leaders decided to pursue not one, but two, futuristic designs for the program. Neither design resulted in ships capable of filling the roles for which they were intended. The American people were ultimately charged $28 billion to build a fleet of 35 Littoral Combat Ships. The LCS proved to be such a failure that the Navy began mothballing them in 2021 citing a lack of combat capabilities and high operational costs. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), then chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said at the time, “We can’t use them, number one because they’re not ready to do anything. Number two, when they are, they still break down.”10 And shipbuilding failures aren’t even the costliest of the Pentagon’s procurement failures.
Aircraft programs will present the greatest budgetary and schedule challenges in the coming bow wave of military spending. The F-35 program is the most expensive weapon program in history. And when it isn’t regressing, the program continues to limp forward by inches. Despite nearly 23 years of development, the F-35 still requires years of further design work. The original estimates Air Force leaders used to sell the program show just how much the entire enterprise has slipped. The government expected the F-35’s design to be completed in July 2005.11 When announcing Lockheed Martin as the winner of the contract, then-Air Force Secretary Jim Roche said each F-35 would cost between $40 and $50 million.12 The cost of one Air Force F-35A variant in 2025 will be more than $116 million.13
Taxpayers are currently receiving an aircraft delivered straight to a warehouse until Lockheed Martin engineers complete the design work on the F-35’s upgraded computer. The program has a 30% full mission capable rate, meaning that less than a third of all F-35s can perform all their assigned missions at any given time. That means that less than one in three of the most expensive weapons in history can actually do their job when deployed.
The Army has also dealt with its share of failed acquisition programs since the turn of the century. The service spent at least $8 billion attempting to develop the Future Combat System, a family of armored vehicles to replace the service’s Cold War-vintage tanks and personnel carriers. Army leaders wanted a highly networked family of specialized combat and support vehicles on a common chassis rather than individual replacement programs. The defense industry failed to deliver on its promises for the Future Combat System and Army leaders canceled the program with little to show for the time and resources devoted to the effort. The RAND Corporation criticized the ambitious program for its “overreliance on assumptions.”14
Misinforming Congress to waste time and money on poorly conceived weapons programs detrimentally affects military forces. The Air Force had 2,688 combat aircraft in 2000.15 Today, there are only 1,473.16 The US Navy had 318 active battleforce ships in 2000.17 There are only 238 ships in active commission in the US Navy today.18 The defense establishment is spending more for less, at the expense of both servicemembers and taxpayers.
The Coming Bow Wave
The Department of Defense has begun several new major weapons programs in recent years that threaten to send Pentagon budgets to unprecedented levels in the next decade and beyond.
The Navy has two new shipbuilding programs in development with the Constellation-class frigate and the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine. The Air Force is developing the B-21 Raider strategic bomber, the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter jet program, the Sentinel nuclear missile program, and most recently, a stealth aerial refueler tanker aircraft. The Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy will also continue to sink money into the troubled F-35 program for the foreseeable future. The Army will be buying the V-280 Valor tiltrotor aircraft to replace the Blackhawk helicopter, the XM-30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle, and the M-10 Booker Combat Vehicle among other land systems. All the services have plans for new satellites, autonomous weapons, communications networks, and investments in cyber capabilities.
Most of these programs are already years behind schedule and over budget, often by billions of dollars.
Navy leaders plan to replace the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines with new Columbia-class submarines gradually over the next 20 years. The Government Accountability Office reported in 2017 that the Navy will invest nearly $128 billion to develop and build 12 Columbia-class boats.19 By 2023, the program’s acquisition costs for the program grew by $4 billion.20
The Navy went all in on the Zumwalt and Littoral Combat Ship programs. As a result, Navy leaders are now dealing with the opportunity costs of effectively losing decades of shipbuilding time to projects that have failed to increase the size or capabilities of the battle force fleet. To fill the capability gaps created by two failed programs, the Navy decided to adopt a European multi-purpose frigate already active in the French and Italian navies, theoretically reducing the risks associated with designing a completely new ship.
The Navy is modifying the parent design by making the Constellation-class frigate over 23 feet longer, adding approximately 500 displaced tons, modifying the bow, and drastically changing the ship’s silhouette to add weapons and more robust damage control systems. As a result, the American version will little resemble the French and Italian versions. Indeed, when the Constellation program began the Navy’s version shared about 85% commonality with the parent design. Today that figure stands at less than 15% — the American version has essentially morphed into a brand-new ship design.21 Despite the benefits of doing so, the US Navy decided against buying a fully developed ship from overseas. The redesign process has contributed significantly to the program’s anticipated 3-year delay while adding little in terms of capability.22 The Constellation-class frigate is one of several examples illustrating the Pentagon’s tendency to understate future costs to get a weapon program off the ground.
Unfortunately, this trend continues when military services pursue the next generation of flawed weapon programs. The F-35, for example, stumbled across a major acquisition finish line in March 2024 when the Pentagon’s top acquisition official cleared the program for full-rate production. But Air Force officials had already moved on to the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program. NGAD is the so-called “sixth generation” fighter. Few details about the aircraft are known other than the fact that it is supposed to operate with flashy sounding uncrewed drones called Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Rather than a single acquisition program, the NGAD will effectively be split into two, one for the NGAD and the other for the CCA. This split means there will be two programs to suffer schedule delays, software malfunctions, design hiccups, and long-term political priority changes that are most likely to set those programs on course to goover budget and fall behind schedule. Costs for the CCA program alone have already risen nearly 40%.23
The NGAD will almost certainly suffer cost increases like the F-35 program. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall raised eyebrows when he told Congress the price tag for each of the new fighter jets will be “multiple hundreds of millions of dollars.”24 Kendall may be trying to manage expectations for the new program since the F-35 is still fresh in the collective memory. But it could also be true that the staggering figure he cited is another conservative estimate. If that is the case, and recent history certainly suggests it is, then the combined costs of the NGAD and its accompanying Collaborative Combat Aircraft programs may dwarf the F-35’s nearly $2 trillion anticipated program cost.
What may result from such a program is that as costs increase and timetables fall behind schedule, older programs will be forced to cover the capability gaps, just as the F/A-18 and F-15X programs today have been restarted to shore up squadrons that expected to receive F-35’s by now. U.S. taxpayers are being forced to pay for the supply and maintenance of three aircraft instead of one due to the F-35 program’s delayed development.
While it is unclear how far the NGAD program has made it through the development process, the Air Force’s latest manned strategic bomber, the B-21 Raider, has begun flight tests following an elaborately staged unveiling ceremony at Northrup Grumman’s plant in Palmdale, California in late 2022. The new bomber – which is intended to eventually replace the B-1 and B-2, but notably not the 72-year-old B-52 program – has been draped in secrecy ever since Air Force officials announced the contract award in 2015. For years, the American people weren’t even allowed to know how much the program would cost. Air Force officials now say the service will spend at least $203 billion to develop, purchase, and operate the planned fleet of 100 B-21s over the next 30 years.25
The development costs of these programs already contribute to the historically high annual defense budget today. What many fail to mention is that the military is creating an enormous budgetary bow wave by undertaking so many new acquisition programs at the same time. Defense spending will drastically increase so the Pentagon can buy these new weapons as they come off the assembly line and move into the production phase in the coming years.
Those costs will place a heavy burden on taxpayers, but they are relatively small compared to what comes next. Modern weapons require extensive contractor support. Ownership costs for weapons are generally two times that of the original purchase price. The Littoral Combat Ship program’s acquisition cost of $28 billion seems reasonable next to the $60 billion that the Government Accountability Office estimates it will cost to operate the fleet over its anticipated 25-year lifespan.26 In sum, the services will ultimately spend approximately $442 billion to develop and build the planned F-35 fleet but then spend nearly $1.6 trillion to sustain it through 2088.27
Future costs of current plans for conventional forces are
significant, but those costs escalate even further when nuclear weapons
are also considered. Adjusting for inflation, the four years of the
Manhattan Project cost approximately $30 billion in 2023,28 while the total eight years of President Ronald Reagan’s nuclear build-up cost about $75 billion.29 The Biden administration’s nuclear weapons request for the coming fiscal year 2025 is $69 billion,30 a sharp increase from the $56.5 billion for nuclear weapons the Biden administration asked for last year.31
All
told, the CBO estimates that the United States is set to spend some
$756 billion on DoD and DOE nuclear weapons modernization programs
between fiscal 2023-2032.32 This averages out to $75 billion a year on nuclear weapons — more than two Manhattan projects every year for the next eight years.
Conclusion
The United States cannot afford to approach the next 20 years of defense policy as it has the past two decades. Expansionist defense policy premised on the goal of global military primacy has resulted in endless wars and human suffering. The defense establishment over the past 30 years has produced a succession of warships that can’t fight, aircraft that don’t work properly, and weapons that don’t perform as expected – all with little to no oversight or accountability to the American taxpayer.
These issues do not exist in a vacuum. No matter how singular or systemic each may be, these issues ultimately impact force readiness, national security, and economic resiliency. The United States cannot afford to waste money on systems that the military does not need, and that do not work. Such misuse of resources relies on destabilizing the threat of inflation. It negatively impacts the economic potential of future generations and escalates global tensions. Policymakers should carefully reconsider current defense plans to prevent the coming fiscal bow wave from turning into a tidal wave. Without prompt action, it is quite possible – even likely – that the American people will remember the days of a $850 billion Pentagon budget request with nostalgia.
The simple truth is that national security spending over the next 20 years will skyrocket because of the procurement decisions made today. Instead of the $850 billion proposed fiscal year 2025 Pentagon budget request, we could see the Pentagon budget alone approaching the $1.5 trillion mark annually in the next decade. On the current trajectory, total national security spending will far surpass that figure. The time to avert future budgetary disasters is now. A wholesale reevaluation of the nation’s national security strategy must take place based on a realistic appraisal of our security needs.
There is still time to make the trade-offs necessary to avoid falling off the fiscal cliff, but only if the U.S. government can root its national security policy around clear principles of strategic reality, program effectiveness, and accountability to U.S. taxpayers.