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A series of events this week should have shaken Pentagon overseers, but so far they haven’t. On Wednesday, the Senate passed a $900 billion defense bill by an overwhelming margin of 77 to 20. A few days ago, the New York Times devoted an entire 13 pages of its Sunday opinion section to arguing that much of the budget was a colossal waste of money.
The document, titled “Equal Match: Why the U.S. Military Needs to Reinvent Itself,” lays out numerous ways the U.S. war machine is “ill-prepared for today’s global threats and revolutionary technologies.”
Its findings are largely based on exclusive leaks of a classified, comprehensive assessment of U.S. military capabilities prepared and briefed in 2021 by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, the now-defunct analytical center under Donald Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth. The review not only analyzes recent war games, primarily against China, but also tracks “the decades-long decline in America’s ability to win long wars with great powers.”
The New York Times article attributed the decline to several factors, and many intelligence agencies and private defense analysts have been following the decline for years. Chief among these was the post-Cold War consolidation of more than 50 arms manufacturers, some of them nimble competitors, into a handful of slow-growing, redundant giants. The trend is matched by the rigidity of the Pentagon bureaucracy, which is said to be tasked with monitoring these companies, and by lawmakers who have a vested interest in protecting the companies’ monopolies as their districts profit from their contracts.
This article details two symptoms of the resulting stagnation, one large and one small. After spending the past few decades focusing on building a small number of large, overly complex, and increasingly vulnerable warships, in 2020 Navy leaders outlined a plan to purchase a fleet of smaller warships based on off-the-shelf European designs. Then big contractors and their allies in the bureaucracy and Congress took over the project, resisted all innovation, and fell into the same pattern. The project was canceled last month after five years, $3.5 billion and zero ships built.
On a more mundane, and in some ways more stunning, scale, The Times detailed the Army’s 2011 plan to provide soldiers with new handguns. It should have been simple, but officers found themselves embarking on a heartbreaking odyssey that included “a 350-page list of technical specifications, years of testing and a protracted battle on Capitol Hill between competing gun manufacturers.” The Pentagon now estimates that the weapon will be delivered to battlefield troops “at the earliest” in 2027. It takes at least 16 years to develop, build and deploy a system pistol.
At the same time, despite a defense budget of hundreds of billions of dollars (much of it devoted to large warships, warplanes, nuclear missiles, and other “legacy” weapons), the defense industry found itself unable to manufacture the vast quantities of weapons used in large numbers during wartime.
For example, in an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, the United States launched 30 Tomahawk cruise missiles. Each missile costs $2 million to replace. Only one company, Raytheon, makes the missile, and today it can’t build new missiles fast enough that the military can launch them against some target or other.
Last year, the Pentagon was close to negotiating a cooperation agreement with a Japanese company so that the two companies could jointly build more cruise missiles. The deal fell apart early in the Trump administration, largely because Raytheon wanted to retain sole ownership but found allies in the White House and Pentagon who wanted to retain an “America First” monopoly.
The same resistance also hinders the joint production of ships (South Korea has more shipyards than the United States, but politically South Korea has no interest in outsourcing shipbuilding contracts to non-American companies) and even joint production of artillery shells. The war in Ukraine demonstrated the need for millions of such shells to sustain a long-term battle. European countries are cooperating to provide Ukrainian soldiers with these munitions, but the Pentagon is ignoring the lessons of long-term production needs.
The Times series exaggerates some points. Most broadly, simulated war games, such as the one that informs the Pentagon’s cyber assessment study, are designed not so much to predict war outcomes as to highlight vulnerabilities, shortcomings, and imbalances so commanders can make adjustments.
Still, the Times’ blanket summary of games and research highlights many shortcomings, noting that the Pentagon has done little to adjust because the bureaucracy, defense industry and Congress often work together to make that difficult.
The Times also exaggerated other, smaller things. For example, it correctly points out that China has more warships than the United States, but the firepower of U.S. ships—the number and range of missiles and aircraft, as well as the training of crews and pilots—far exceeds that of China. Then again, the United States has global It does not have enough ships to fight a large-scale war in multiple areas of the world simultaneously.
What’s more, U.S. warships are vulnerable. Deploying aircraft carriers such as U.S. warships Gerald R. Fordentering tense areas to convey a powerful message; it is a powerful tool for “gunboat diplomacy”. But it’s questionable whether commanders will be willing to send it into an active war zone, especially against China, which is ready to launch swarms of precision drones and anti-ship missiles that can destroy even a powerful aircraft carrier, and launch cyber weapons to jam the high-tech sensors and guidance systems that make aircraft carriers and their escorts so powerful.
Many analysts have been aware of these issues for some time. A small arm of the Department of Defense called the Defense Innovation Unit has actually been sidestepping and overcoming many bureaucratic hurdles, particularly in streamlining military supply chains and developing autonomous drones. Heggs announced several changes, at least on paper, aimed at applying some of DIU’s breakthroughs to larger weapons systems. But making the announcement is one thing, executing it is another — and the defense secretary lacks the Pentagon personnel, White House commitment and support from Capitol Hill to do much of the job.
The Times’ special section is unusual—its focus on a single issue, its depth of analysis, and its range of prescriptions. Of course, newspaper editorials rarely make much of an impact, especially now, when no newspaper, not even The Times, can ascend to the mass media stage with the majestic authority it once held.
Still, in this season of big budgets and looming threats, this quote from the Times section is worth pondering:
It’s an old and familiar pattern. Despite ample warning, military and political leaders trained on a set of assumptions, tactics, and weapons were unable to adapt to change. …This is the risk America faces. The Trump administration hopes to increase defense spending to more than $1 trillion in 2026. Much of the money will be wasted on capabilities that amplify our weaknesses more than enhance our strengths.
In other words, this isn’t just a budget story. This is a story about global power, and perhaps a crisis, and how our own political and economic systems, which have been the source of our power in the past, are limiting our power in the new era.
