“Adults in a Room” is a series in collaboration with The Stimson Center’s Reimagining US Grand Strategy program. The series stems from the group’s monthly networking events that call on analysts to gather virtually and hash out a salient topic. It aims to give you a peek into their Zoom room and a deep understanding of the issue at hand in less than the time it takes to sip your morning coffee without the jargon, acronyms, and stuffiness that often come with expertise.
For the better part of the last century, a defining feature of the United States has been its overwhelming military might. However, maintaining unrivaled military power necessitates spending an unrivaled amount on defense, and the US defense budget has increasingly reflected this reality. Even more, with costly, behind schedule acquisition plans and modernization efforts spiraling out of control, this spending has arguably become less effective over time at ensuring US security.
The Reimagining US Grand Strategy program’s July 2024 roundtable brought experts together to discuss the state of US defense budgeting and acquisitions. Members of the group discussed the various structural problems enabling this spiral, such as the highly opaque requirements process, increasing Department of Defense (DOD) reliance on a small number of contractors, and lackluster enforcement of limitations by Congress. Aside from structural inadequacies in the budgeting and acquisitions process, others in the group highlighted a critical underlying cause of this increased spending: overly expansive strategic aims that do not match ends with means. Four experts discuss these issues and potential ways forward below.
Julia Gledhill, Research Associate, National Security Reform Program, Stimson Center
Most people agree that the United States is at a critical juncture. The advent of a new era of strategic competition challenges US global dominance, and thus, US foreign and defense policy. How the United States adapts to an increasingly multipolar world, however, is the subject of hot debate.
What is clear is that the United States cannot afford to maintain global dominance forever. US defense spending has already grown astronomically in recent decades – 48% since 2000. The military services are now pursuing a slew of new weapon acquisition and modernization programs, the costs of which will likely far exceed their initial estimates. Generations Z, Alpha, and those that follow will bear the burden of unsustainable growth in defense spending, paying for today’s weapon acquisition programs through the 2030s and beyond. Despite this, some new acquisition programs will have negligible, if any, positive impacts on national security.
In fact, the continued pursuit of overly ambitious acquisition plans will hamper US force readiness, national security, and economic resiliency. Already the Pentagon struggles to keep acquisition programs on schedule and within budget, and the development of unnecessary weapons will only exacerbate those issues, slowing delivery to the warfighter while digging into taxpayers’ pockets.
The continued pursuit of overly ambitious acquisition plans will hamper US force readiness, national security, and economic resiliency.
Julia Gledhill
Now is the time to pump the brakes on overly ambitious weapon acquisition plans – before the United States falls off a fiscal cliff. Strategists and policymakers can pare down acquisition plans by critically evaluating US national interests – and whether they can, or should, be fulfilled militarily. But instead of making hard choices, decisionmakers are poised to ramp up the production of weapons that the United States may not even need at great expense to the taxpayer. Indeed, the United States appears more likely to permanently expand the arms industry before it makes sorely needed strategic and budgetary tradeoffs – particularly critical in a dynamic security environment.
George Beebe, Director, Grand Strategy Program, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
Walter Lippmann famously wrote that foreign policy “consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power.” When our objectives abroad greatly exceed our ability to achieve them, our nation’s foreign policy becomes “insolvent.” One sign of foreign policy insolvency might be a series of discretionary wars and military interventions that either fail altogether or cannot be successfully terminated. Another might be perpetual budget deficits and massive national debt.
In the case of post-Cold War American foreign policy, we have experienced both. Our national debt has ballooned to more than $35 trillion, and discretionary defense spending has played no small part in this. We have notched few clear successes and many clear failures among our numerous military interventions in the Balkans, Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America over the past three decades. Yet, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Washington has doubled the number of NATO allies it has a treaty obligation to defend, and the alliance’s expansion and forays into out-of-area operations have fueled, not reduced, threats posed by Russia and China.
In principle, addressing this bleak situation requires reducing our overseas commitments, increasing our capabilities, or some combination of the two. Smart diplomacy, which can entail both ameliorating threats posed by rivals and shoring up capabilities with alliances, can often help. The Nixon presidency’s opening to China, coupled with its pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, stands as a notable example of using diplomacy to reduce foreign threats and bring America’s commitments and capabilities into closer balance.
It is striking that our national discourse over defense spending has long been conducted with almost no reference to defining our national interests – what matters most to the security, prosperity, and freedoms of the American people – and what other tools US policymakers have available to advance them beyond coercive power.
George Beebe
In this context, it is striking that our national discourse over defense spending has long been conducted with almost no reference to defining our national interests – what matters most to the security, prosperity, and freedoms of the American people – and what other tools US policymakers have available to advance them beyond coercive power. Deficit spending on the military has enabled an end run around making hard choices about our foreign commitments. Until we grapple with those hard choices, recognizing that our resources are not unlimited and thus require prioritizing our objectives, we will find ourselves in perpetual foreign policy insolvency with significant consequences for our nation’s well-being.
Anand Toprani, Associate Professor, Strategy and Policy Department, U.S. Naval War College
The United States spends more on defense than any other nation on earth, including considerably more than China despite some breathless claims, yet one of the few issues around which there is something approaching a bipartisan consensus is that the United States does not get the full value for the money it invests in its defense. The noted critic of the Pentagon, Franklin “Chuck” Spinney, warned back in 1980 of a defense “death spiral” whereby the escalating modernization costs lead inexorably to a small military with lower readiness. While the applicability of his ideas to the Reagan defense buildup was debatable, it seems a rather accurate description of the present. The pathologies of US defense spending, how we buy weapons, equipment, and personnel, are the epitome of a “wicked” problem.
There are the many failures of Congress, which simultaneously demands that the nation spend ever larger amounts on defense while hindering efficiency through intrusive oversight, pork-barrel politics, and an inability to pass budgets on time, thereby leading to an unending stream of continuing resolutions that hinder the Pentagon and defense contractors from making necessary investments or adjustments that might theoretically reduce prices of the long run. The Pentagon has shown little interest in cleaning its own house, as overhead costs continue to rise, thereby starving the tooth for the sake of the tail. Likewise, the cost of recruiting and supporting an All-Volunteer Military, including retirees, is gobbling an ever-larger share of the budget (one quarter now and rising). The three phases of creating the defense budget all have profound shortcomings: programming and budgeting takes too long, in part because the Pentagon must translate its program-based budget into congressional appropriations categories, and often understates the full cost of weapons by burying much of them in the “outyears” beyond the coming fiscal year. Then the acquisition system takes far too long to certify weapons or systems as “programs of record,” stranding new firms in a “valley of death” and further solidifying the oligopolistic tendencies of the defense sector, which has been dominated by a handful of firms ever since the Pentagon’s counterproductive push for consolidation in the 1990s. Finally, there is an opaque requirements process, where the military services, with minimal external or civilian oversight, decide what sorts of items they must buy, often choosing weapons systems that are “gold plated” (full of unnecessary frills) and reflect the services’ existing institutional equities. As defense insiders have observed, if the requirements process is flawed, no amount of wizardry in the acquisition or budget process can undo the damage.
But these are symptoms rather than the causes of the underlying malady – a dysfunctional decision-making process that has proven incapable again and again of answering the basic questions necessary to making efficient allocations of public monies to defense. What are our political objectives? Twenty years of the “Global War on Terrorism” proved insufficient to answer this vital question. Do the objectives and strategies we have adopted meet the basic “FAS” criteria that every war college student should memorize – is it feasible, acceptable, and suitable? Even when we do achieve a strategic triumph, the nation has proved incapable at successful war termination since World War II. Just consider the on-going war on the Korean Peninsula, Saddam Hussein’s survival after his defeat in 1991 thereby leading to a disastrous second intervention in 2003, and Russia’s present bellicosity, which stems in part from the United States’ inability to create a post-Cold War international system that Russia would support.
Do the objectives and strategies we have adopted meet the basic “FAS” criteria that every war college student should memorize – is it feasible, acceptable, and suitable?
Anand Toprani
Strong civilian leadership to control cost growth and encourage competition is vital to getting value for money, but it will not be enough without a clear vision, realistic strategy, and sincerity of purpose. Until we have a clear idea of what it is we want as a nation, how we plan to achieve it, and how we will create a “better state of peace,” we will never make meaningful progress towards getting more “bang” for our defense dollars.
Dr. Toprani’s views are his own and not necessarily those of the US Department of Defense.
Sofia Guerra, Government Relations Associate, Win Without War
Many budgetary mechanisms and structural issues contribute to the Pentagon budget’s march toward an untenable $1 trillion. Sustainable peace and security will require confronting the political drivers of this trajectory. Skyrocketing expenditures are the result of a tangled web of relationships between the private sector, Congress, and the executive branch. Within those relationships, perverse incentives, parochial concerns, and opportunities to profit on the public dime pervade.
Unfunded priorities lists (UPLs) are a perfect example of how the broken structure of the budgeting process drives up spending. Since 2016, military leaders have been required by law to submit letters to Congress requesting funding for all the programs they would pursue if only they had the money. For example, the Army nixed the M1 Abrams tank from the President’s final budget request multiple times, only for Congress to fund it anyway because the Army puts it on its UPL wishlist. The wishlists give members of Congress the opportunity to play Santa, funding weapons or munitions programs that bring federal dollars to their districts and build political clout outside of any executive branch process for determining the actual defense value of those programs.
Skyrocketing expenditures are the result of a tangled web of relationships between the private sector, Congress, and the executive branch.
Sofia Guerra
Allowing military commands and services to wish for new weapons systems undermines the president’s national security planning goals, which are meant to be the main guide behind our civilian-led security policy. By empowering service-specific tunnel vision, UPLs facilitate an unbalanced military and stoke interservice rivalry, driving weapons manufacturer profits and preserving the jobs of acquisitions directors. UPLs enable Pentagon bureaucrats to prioritize avoiding the fate of former F-35 Program Director Maj. Gen. David Heinz—who was seen as having been fired for pushing a costly new engine program against the administration’s wishes—above executing the commander-in-chief’s vision.
Steep operations and maintenance (O&M) costs and artificially-low cost reports are a function of Congressional military advocacy and industry’s inherent profit motives. While Pentagon cost estimation practices also play a role, industry contributes to the “bow wave” of indefinitely-deferred balloon payments. Amid the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, industry sold new programs as cheap to maintain, diverting O&M funds to drive new acquisitions. Nonetheless, O&M costs increased across generations, with taxpayers footing the hidden costs.
By shifting our focus to the Pentagon budget’s political drivers, we can identify solutions beyond traditional acquisition reform, like repealing the UPLs mandate. This approach not only promises cost-effectiveness but aligns with the broader goal of achieving sustained, strategic, human-centered security.
