Where Hegseth Might Find His $50 Billion CutsActually, no cuts. Just More Money for Silicon Valley.
Although President Trump reportedly invoked the possibility of cutting defense spending in half during his telephone call with President Putin, it seems abundantly clear that the miitary budget will continue on its upward trajectory. For a brief moment there was indeed Atalk of an 8 percent cut, but as the Trumpian leadership newly installed in the Pentagon has made clear, the 8% is to be an “offset,” money that will be saved on existing programs and shifted to more favored recipients of the new regime’s patronage. In a sane world, saving real money should not be hard. Everywhere one looks in the budget, there are billions crying to be tossed into the shredder, as Elon Musk would say. How about the $3.7 billion the air force is asking for the Sentinel ICBM in FY 2025, not to mention the adjacent $1.1 billion for the W-87.1 nuclear warhead it will carry? The B-21 bomber, a study in uselessness, is slated to get $2.7 billion this year. The Navy wants $3.3 billion for the second of its ill-starred (at least 18 months behind schedule) Columbia class missile subs and about $6.2 billion in advance procurement for subsequent boats. Then there’s $2.9 billion to modernise facilities for plutonium pit production, essential for nuclear weapons, an egregious boondoggle even by the standards of the weapons labs who crafted the initiative. (The U.S. already has about 4,000 pits on hand, and they remain “useful” for 150 years.) Overall, the defense budget bequeathed by the Biden Administration included $69 billion for nuclear “modernization.” (Adjusted for inflation, as the Stimson Center’s Dan Grazier and Julia Gledhill have pointed out, the Manhattan Project cost a mere $30 billion.) None of the nuclear programs cited above are in any way necessary for national defense. They are all supposedly justified by the supposed need to project “deterrence.” As if the 90 warheads carried on a single Ohio-class missile submarine aren’t enough to deter anyone thinking of striking the U.S. Yet the nuclear programs will in no way be molested. Rather, they will be cosseted with whatever degree of “contract nourishment” is deemed necessary. We know this thanks to a list first published in Inside Defense (paywalled): “Pentagon to cut FY-26 budget by $50B to re-invest in new priorities” tabulating seventeen program, nuclear and conventional, that will be specifically excluded:
Note that “nuclear modernization” is up there, so are a host of other programs currently eating up titanic amounts of taxpayer dollars, such as the Virginia class submarines, currently running a $17 billion cost overrun. Most pertinently, the list features items beloved of the emerging Silicon Valley military complex, such as “counter-small unmanned aerial systems” “One-way attack and autonomous systems” and “collaborative combat aircraft” - drones acting in concert with a manned aircraft, optimistically priced at $30 million a pop. Predictably, the F-35 fighter is not among the protected programs. Yet despite the derision heaped on the hapless program by Elon Musk it may well be spared the chopping block. Thanks to adroit political engineering by its military-industrial sponsors, its manufacturing base is spread across forty eight states and at least ninety congressional districts, a formidable lobby. So where will Hegseth find that $50 billion in “offsets.” I turned to my friend Winslow Wheeler, beady-eyed scrutineer of Pentagon spendthrifts and the lies they tell, for suggestions. He pointed me to Pentagon agencies unloved by the machine, notably the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, instituted by congress in the 1980s, and hated by the service bureaucracies ever since. DOT&E has a comparatively modest budget - some $69 million - but since it has an honorable record of calling out defective weapons development programs, leading to lengthy delays, its elimination could be hailed as a welcome development, allowing said programs, however defective to proceed to service in a speedy manner, thus saving costs. Another agency ripe for the chopping block could be Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) a 155 person outfit, with attendant contractors, charged with providing independent analyses to the defense secretary on all aspects of Pentagon operations. An institutional descendent of the “Whiz Kids” office created by Robert McNamara early in the 1960s and loathed by the service bureaucracies whose data-light assessments it challenged. Subsequent incarnations marked its descent into ineffectiveness, but the purported function - independent analysis of the bureaucracy’s self-interested assessments - is still there on paper, rendering it ripe for elimination. Meanwhile, of course, the DOGE Musketeers are poised to descend on the Pentagon and slice into the workforce without discrimination. Interestingly there are signs that Hegseth will attempt to retain some control. In a video posted on X on Thursday, the Defense Secretary remarked that “we're going to take a little bit more time, make sure top to bottom we're doing a review, those who we need, who are the best and brightest are going to stay.” In other words, the Pentagon will attempt to make its own decisions on the job cuts, striking first at offices, such as CAPE and DOT&E, that the high command has never liked much anyway. Wheeler suggests Hegseth and the Musketeers might resort to another tool already at hand for anyone seeking to demonstrate a $50 billion cost-saving. The Pentagon, he explains, has its own inflation index. “They predict what the increase in program costs will be due to inflation and put that into their appropriation requests. The trick is that after they have submitted their request based on that assumption, the Comptroller will call the congressional appropriation committee and announce that the inflation rate turned out to be lower than predicted, so suddenly there is extra money. This has yielded some pretty significant amounts - $10, $15 billion when they have done that in the past. But that money doesn’t go back to the U.S. Treasury. Instead they keep it to spend on whatever goodies they desire.” In this case, of course, Hegseth could deem it a “cost saving.” |