I won’t let Reagan off the hook — there was plenty of waste back then, but today it’s worse. We’ve built an expansive, “cover-the-globe” strategy, trying to be everything, everywhere at once. We’re overstretched, inefficient, and spending over half of the military budget — 54% —on Pentagon contractors.
When you combine all these factors, a clear picture emerges — what we call the “Trillion Dollar War Machine” — showing where all this money is going and why it’s not actually making us more secure.
William Hartung: Basically, we’re asking the smaller military to undertake missions impossible: impose democracy at the barrel of a gun, reconstruct a country at the same time it’s being destroyed. We’ve had 20-year wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where the U.S. spent more and had superior technology, but that didn’t determine the outcome. Local conditions, human motivation, and factors technology can’t address were what really mattered. Those two points together are deeply troubling. The question of why that happens was a lot of what we explore.
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About 13% of the federal budget goes to defense in the US. The Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, the largest in the world, cost $13.3 billion. What are we using it for? Plinking little boats off Venezuela to scare a country our president doesn't like. We paid to design and build the F-35, arguably the greatest fighter plane in the world. But now our president has pissed off Canada, so they're planning to cut their purchase of F-35s from the country that threatens to make them the 51st state.
So does all this money really help keep us safe if we're idiots in other international interaction? No. We need to be smart, not just spend-heavy.
