It’s way past time to shift our national defense strategy. Contrary to what some in Washington seem to believe, we don’t have a bottomless bank account when it comes to military spending and national security. The Pentagon should never be immune to thoughtful spending and strict fiscal accountability – and that statement does not make us soft on defense, disloyal to the military, or unpatriotic in any way. What it makes us is a responsible realist.

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We spend more on defense – by far – than anyone on the planet. In 2023, defense spending by the U.S. accounted for almost 40 percent of military expenditures by countries around the world. In fact, we spend about as much on our defense as the next nine countries combined. Defense accounts for thirteen percent of all federal spending and is the largest category of discretionary spending. The U.S. spent $916 billion on national defense in 2023 (this includes discretionary and mandatory outlays by the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of State, and the National Intelligence Program).

 

And surprise, surprise! With that level of spending, here come the lobbyists. The defense sector spent a whopping $148,454,498 to lobby Congress in 2024 alone. Sixty-three percent of the registered lobbyists were former government employees.

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Does this sound like a good idea to you? These numbers make it pretty obvious who devises our national security strategy, and it ain’t the people we elect.

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Now, more than ever, we need to heed yet another piece of advice from President Dwight Eisenhower: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”

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Listen, we believe deeply in free market enterprise, but we also believe we have to watch our defense suppliers like hawks because they have billions and billions of reasons to maintain the status quo. U.S. Department of Defense contracts for FY2025 – which equal 842,550 transactions – total $72.41 billion. In 2023, defense technology supplier Lockheed Martin made $49.2 billion worth of net sales to the U.S. government, the highest ever. Incidentally, Lockheed Martin has spent $336,502,693 to lobby Congress since 1998.

 

John F. Sopko was the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) from 2012 to 2025 (he was appointed by President Obama and served under the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations before leaving at the beginning of Donald Trump’s second presidency). In a January 2025 guest essay for The New York Times, Mr. Sopko said that, in the absence of actual success on the ground, spending became the default measure of success in Afghanistan – which he acknowledges is true of most things in Washington, “where unspent allocations are tantamount to failure, leading to budget cuts.”

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He recounts a story where one general told him that he faced a challenge: “How to spend the remaining $1 billion from his annual budget in just over a month? Returning the money was not an option.” Another official his group spoke with said he “refused to cancel a multimillion-dollar building project that field commanders did not want, because the funding had to be spent.” But “the building was never used.” Mr. Sopko continued, “As one former U.S. military adviser told my office, the entire system became a self-licking ice cream cone: More money was always being spent to justify previous spending. Old staff departed, new staff arrived with ‘better’ ideas, and new iterations of the same old solutions were repeated, for years.”

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Relying on defense lobbyists to write our national security strategy guarantees that our national security strategy will be all about bombers, helicopters, Super Hornets, Phantom Eyes, Growler, Prowler, B-2, PAC-3, F-15s, ICBMs, MEADS, B-52s, MHTK – and a lot of other cool weapons and bombs that ensure the United States’ arsenal has all the latest, greatest hardware. But it also guarantees that innovative, forward-thinking strategic planning will be discouraged. After all, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right?

 

The most dangerous part of punting our national security strategy to the defense lobby is that it lets Congress off the hook from asking the truly critical questions. Questions like: Given the changing nature of war, how many armored brigade combat teams do we need to keep active and what exactly will their role be going forward? How can we redesign our aging fleet of aircraft carriers since they are now sitting ducks thanks to China’s new anti-ship missiles? Should we replace the F-35 and/or the F-22 with longer-range strike bombers since the Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons (JAM-GC) calls for weapons that can hit distant targets to better retaliate against China’s new anti-access/area-denial capabilities?

 

What types of missions will hypersonic weapons be used for, and are they really necessary for deterrence … and, while we’re at it, what exactly is up with the Conventional Prompt Strike program and why in the hell does it cost so much money?

 

According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) program “allows the U.S. to strike targets anywhere on Earth in as little as an hour. This capability may bolster U.S. efforts to deter and defeat adversaries by allowing the U.S. to attack high-value targets or ‘fleeting targets’ at the start of or during a conflict. These weapons would not substitute for nuclear weapons but would supplement U.S. conventional capabilities. They would provide a ‘niche’ capability, with a small number of weapons directed against select, critical targets.”

 

Okay, this sounds pretty good, but in 2021 the CRS reported that the “Pentagon’s FY2021 budget request continues to show significant increases in funding for the Navy’s CPS program. In FY2019, this program received $278 million. The Navy received $512 million for this program in FY2020 and requested $1.008 billion for FY2021. The budget request shows continuing increases in funding over the next five years, with $5.3 billion allocated to the program between FY2021 through FY2025.”

 

Cut to February 2025, when the CRS reported that “the Pentagon’s FY2025 budget request for hypersonic research < note: these are maneuvering weapons that fly at speeds of at least Mach 5 and are part of the CPS program > was $6.9 billion – up from $4.7 billion in the FY2023 request. The Pentagon declined to provide a breakout of funding for hypersonic-related research in FY2024 but requested $11 billion for long-range fires – a category that includes hypersonic weapons. The Missile Defense Agency additionally requested $182.3 million for hypersonic defense in FY2025.

 

This is an obscene amount of money. What due diligence is being done to justify this program? What is the end game, or do we even have one? Who are the players involved in making these decisions? Are strategies like these even the best way forward?

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The questions about our national defense just keep coming: Should we endorse submarine- and sea-launched low-yield weapons and/or a nuclear modernization program like the one outlined in the latest Nuclear Posture Review and the Assessment and Recommendations of the National Defense Strategy Commission? Or do we even need the New START Treaty limit of 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), deployed submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and deployed heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments? Or, for that matter, do we even really need the treaty limit of 1,550 nuclear warheads on deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs, and deployed heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments, or 800 deployed and non-deployed ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments – when it takes only a fraction of that to blow any country off the face of the earth?

 

Really think about that last sentence for a second. There are 195 sovereign countries in the world. The number of nuclear warheads in our arsenal is 5,044. If you take only our 1,770 deployed warheads on strategic delivery systems – which include intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and heavy bombers – we could literally blow up every single country in the world 9 times!

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Why in the world are we still spending so much money on this?

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In 2017, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that modernizing and maintaining America’s nuclear arsenal would cost $1.2 trillion over the next thirty years (however, the Arms Control Association argues that, adjusting for inflation, the cost would be more like $1.7 trillion). No, that is not a typo. $1.7 TRILLION. The New York Times opinion series At the Brink did the math for us: That comes to nearly $57 billion a year, or $108,000 per minute, for 3 DECADES. Twelve submarines are being built by 2,700 companies at a cost of $130 billion. Eighty plutonium pits will be built at a cost of $28 billion. Five uranium facilities, involving 2,000 employees, are being built at a cost of $10 billion. Four-hundred missiles will be put in underground silos at a cost of $141 billion.

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Do we really want another arms race? If your answer is yes, be careful what you wish for. The number of nuclear warheads increased from around 3,000 in 1955 to over 70,000 by the late 1980s.

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And remember, that’s just the money it takes going forward…but this outrageous spending has now been going on for well over eight decades. The Brookings Institution found that: “From 1940 through 1996, we spent nearly $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons and weapons-related programs, in constant 1996 dollars.” In today’s dollars, that’s $11.2 trillion. “If we could represent $5.5 trillion as a stack of dollar bills, it would reach from the Earth to the Moon and nearly back again, a distance of more than 459,000 miles.”

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This has gotten out of hand. It’s high time we have a serious conversation about our nuclear program because it’s bleeding us dry. Plus, it’s keeping us from doing other things we need to be doing.

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In an essay for The Wall Street Journal, Glen VanHerck, a retired U.S. Air Force general who served as commander of U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense command, and Pete Fesler, a retired Air Force major general who served as deputy director of operations for the North American Aerospace Defense Command warned:

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"The services are investing heavily in modernizing the nation’s nuclear deterrent… these systems were designed to deter a nuclear attack by promising devastating retaliation. They were never intended to deter more limited non-nuclear strikes, cyberattacks or attacks by small, unmanned drones on infrastructure. Adversaries are unlikely to believe the U.S. will respond with nukes to a non-nuclear attack. Nuclear deterrence isn’t enough to defend against new weapons."

 

"Despite the National Defense Strategy’s declaration that homeland defense is the Pentagon’s top priority, almost no additional resources have been allocated, and none are forthcoming. The focus is on offense and the fight around the world. Today the nation is defended by a small number of professionals equipped with systems largely designed and bought in the 1970s and ’80s, with no defined path to modernization. Today, as Russian ultraquiet submarines prowl off American shores and Chinese and Russian bombers and warships conduct joint operations near Alaska, our military is focused elsewhere. Fortress America stands largely unguarded."