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A remarkable convergence of events this week should have rattled Pentagon watchers but so far has not. On Wednesday, the Senate passed a $900 billion defense bill by an overwhelming margin of 77-20. A few days ago, the New York Times devoted its entire 13-page Sunday opinion section to arguing that the bulk of the budget was a colossal waste of money.
The package, titled “Overmatched: Why the US Military Needs to Reinvent Itself,” lists several ways the country’s war machine is “unprepared for today’s global threats and revolutionary technologies.”
Its findings are largely based on an exclusive leak of a classified, comprehensive review prepared and briefed in 2021 by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment of US military power — an analytical center that has been ousted by Donald Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth. The review not only analyzed recent war games primarily against China, but also found a “decades-long decline in America’s ability to win a protracted war with a major power.”
The Times article attributes the decline to a number of factors — which many intelligence agencies and even private defense analysts have been tracking for years. Chief among them is the post-Cold War consolidation of more than 50 arms manufacturers, some of them nimble competitors, into a handful of sluggish, overfed mega-companies. This trend has been matched by the calcification of the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, which allegedly monitors the companies, and the vested interests of legislators whose districts benefit from the companies’ contracts and who want to protect their monopoly positions.
The piece describes two signs of the resulting stability, one large, the other small. In the 2020s, the leadership of the US Navy—which in recent decades has focused on building a small number of large, highly complex, increasingly vulnerable warships—has outlined a plan to buy a fleet of smaller warships based on ready-made European designs. Then, the big contractors and their allies in the bureaucracy and Congress took over the project, resisted all innovations, and stuck to the same pattern. Last month, after five years, $3.5 billion, and zero ships built, the project was canceled.
On a more mundane and thus in some ways more laughable scale, the Times detailed the Army’s plan to get its soldiers new pistols in 2011. It should have been simple, but officers found themselves embarking on a soul-crushing “odyssey” involving “a 350-page list of technical specifications, years of testing, and a long battle on Capitol Hill between competing gun manufacturers.” The Pentagon now estimates that the weapon will be delivered to troops in the region “as soon as possible” in 2027. A will take at least 16 years to develop, build and operate pistol.
Meanwhile, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars in the defense budget (much of it spread over large warships, battleships, nuclear missiles, and other “legacy” weapons), defense industries find themselves unable to manufacture the large numbers of weapons that are used in large numbers in wartime.
For example, in June, the US launched 30 Tomahawk cruise missiles in an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Each missile will cost $2 million to replace. Only one company, Raytheon, makes them, and these days, the military is unable to build new ones fast enough to shoot them at one target or another.
Last year, the Pentagon was close to negotiating a partnership deal with a Japanese firm so the two could build more cruise missiles together. Early in the Trump administration, the deal fell apart, largely because Raytheon, which wanted to maintain sole ownership, found allies in the White House and Pentagon who wanted to preserve the “America First” monopoly.
The same resistance is blocking co-production of ships (South Korea has more shipyards than the United States, but has no political appetite to cultivate shipbuilding contracts to non-US firms) and even artillery shells. The war in Ukraine is showing the need for millions of these shells to sustain a long battle. European countries are helping to supply the Ukrainian military with these weapons, but the Pentagon is ignoring the lesson of long-term production demands.
Times series overstates some numbers. More broadly, as informs the Pentagon’s net assessment study, simulated war games are not designed to predict the outcome of a war, to highlight vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and imbalances so that commanders can make adjustments.
Still, the game and the study, which the Times package summarizes, highlighted several weaknesses — and noted that the Pentagon is doing little to adjust because the bureaucracy, the defense industry, and Congress, often working in tandem, find it difficult to do so.
The Times also promotes other, smaller matters. For example, it correctly notes that China has more warships than the United States, but the firepower of American ships—the number and range of their missiles and aircraft, the training of their crews and pilots—exceeds China’s. Then again, there is the United States worldwide missions, and it does not have enough ships to fight a major war in more than one region of the world at once.
Case in point, America’s warships are weak. Deploying an aircraft carrier like the USS Gerald R. FordA stress conveys a powerful message in the field; This is a powerful tool of “gunboat diplomacy”. But it is doubtful that commanders would want to send it into an active war theater, especially against China, which is ready to launch precision drones and anti-ship missiles to disable even a powerful carrier — and to unleash cyber-weapons to jam high-tech sensors and guidance systems.
Many analysts have noted these problems for some time. A small branch of the Defense Department, called the Defense Innovation Unit, has actually been avoiding many bureaucratic hurdles, particularly in streamlining military supply chains and developing autonomous drones. Hegseth announced several improvements designed, at least on paper, to apply some of the DIU’s successes to larger weapons systems. But making an announcement is one thing, implementing it is another—and the Secretary of Defense lacks the staff at the Pentagon, the commitment of the White House, and the supply from Capitol Hill to do much of the work.
The special section of the Times was very unusual—its dedication to a single issue, the depth of its analysis, and the range of its prescriptions. Of course, newspaper editorials rarely carry much sway, especially these days, when no newspaper, not even the Times, struts the streets with the august authority they once held on the stage of the mass media.
Still, in this season of big budgets and a world of heightened danger, this passage from the Times is worth considering:
This is an ancient and familiar pattern. Despite adequate warning, military and political leaders fail to adapt to a set of trained assumptions, tactics and weapons. … That is where the United States risks finding itself. The Trump administration wants to increase defense spending to more than $1 trillion by 2026. Most of that money will be wasted on capabilities that exacerbate our weaknesses rather than sharpen our strengths.
In other words, it’s not just a budget story. It is a story, and a potential crisis, about global power — and how our own political-economic system, which was the source of our power in the past, is limiting and constraining our power in the new era.
