Like the weather, everyone complains about Pentagon spending and mismanagement, but no one does anything about it. Leaders of the world's most expensive military have refused to conduct or failed to complete every internal financial audit since Congress first demanded such accountability in the 1990s. The Department of Defense owns over 70 percent of the nation's assets and can't account for half of them. In fairness, military brass has had plenty of enablers in its failures to tame wild and sometimes blindfolded spending, with a special boost from political leaders who consistently block reform.
Although the Pentagon budget has grown by 50 percent over the last 10 years, President Trump wants to add another 12 percent to the Pentagon's budget for fiscal year 2026, a move that for the first time will boost defense spending to over $1 trillion.
This has been routine since the 1990s, and the procedure became federal law in 2017. The lists don't need to include lengthy justifications of why the money is needed, as is the case for most budget requests to Congress.
The opportunities to spend go beyond even the wish lists. Members of Congress often add "Congressional increases" to the Pentagon budget -- de facto earmarks for programs neither the president nor Pentagon officials thought were important enough to include even in their dream spending plans.
The largest single addition last year was $1.8 billion for the Navy to buy ten extra planes. Other add-ons have little direct connection to defense, such as $110 million for prostate cancer research.
Trump's planned increase of the military budget would go a long way to wiping out the $160 billion that DOGE claims it's saved taxpayers with its government-wide cost cuts.
The added resources don't mean the military is getting stronger or better at equipping its warfighters. It means there's more bureaucracy to feed. In 2000, the Defense Department spent roughly $150 billion on its active personnel, adjusted for inflation. Since then, that number has only inched upward, to $166 billion in 2024. Active forces made up just 21 percent of the 2025 budget request. Most of the rest is eaten up by "operations and maintenance," the conducting of day-to-day business, which has increased sharply. In 2000, the military spent roughly $175 billion 2024 dollars on O&M. For 2025, the Pentagon requested $338 billion, a 93 percent increase.
The F-35 might be a test case for military spending because it could be seen at odds with Trump's noninterventionist, "America First" philosophy, according to Richard Aboulafia, managing director of the consulting firm AeroDynamic Advisory. "It was developed in partnership with our allies, and it's meant as an expeditionary force, meaning it's good for defending U.S. interests in Europe or Asia, but not as effective at home," he said. On the other hand, the pricey plane is built in Texas with an engine from Florida.
The Air Force was singled out for criticism in the April 9 White House order. The first flight of the Sentinel, the Air Force's new intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, is two years behind schedule and its costs have slopped 37 percent over what was initially promised.
"With adversaries like China and Russia rapidly advancing their own military technologies," the executive order said, "it is essential to prioritize speed, flexibility and innovation to deliver cutting-edge capabilities to our Armed Forces."
The Pentagon wrings its hands over one of the roots of this predicament -- the lack of competition for contract work -- but it's partly its own fault. At a 1993 dinner party now known as the "Last Supper," then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin urged defense companies to merge with each other. In the afterglow of the Soviet Union's collapse, the conventional wisdom at the time was that without the antagonism of its main rival, the U.S. military would be spending less.
The subsequent consolidation of the defense industry was a marvel of corporate wheeling and dealing. What were 51 separate companies during the Clinton administration are now the "Big Five" defense contractors -- Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon Technologies, and Northrop Grumman. Together, they account for 15 percent of the Pentagon's contract spending, which, defying experts of the early 1990s, has ballooned since the end of the Cold War. The companies' exalted status doesn't mean they've skimped on PowerPoint presentations, wining and dining, and the occasional arm-twisting. Defense companies spent $70 million on lobbying in 2023, with the Big Five making up the bulk of that.
"While commercial industry has rapidly adjusted to a software-defined product reality," Hegseth wrote, the Defense Department "has struggled to reframe our acquisition process from a hardware-centric to a software-centric approach. When it comes to software acquisition, we are overdue in pivoting to a performance-based outcome and, as such, it is the Warfighter who pays the price."
Alexander Karp, CEO of defense surveillance software contractor Palantir Technologies and co-author of "The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West," has emerged as head cheerleader of the new relationship. He has said he hopes it yields new and better ways for America's war fighters to find and kill their enemies. "If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it," he said in the book. "And the same goes for software."