In the same way that a fish is unaware that it lives in water, Americans don’t often contemplate a defining feature of the place they call home: That the US spends more on its military budget than the next nine countries combined. Despite rhetorical gestures toward eliminating nuclear weapons, ending endless wars, and overseeing “a much-needed cleanup of the military-industrial complex to stop war profiteers,” as he said at a 2024 rally in Wisconsin, President Donald Trump in his second term has done nothing of the like. Indeed, he is overseeing the first year of what was once unthinkable: a full trillion dollars spent on the military and its weapons. It comes while Americans are clamoring for affordability on all fronts, healthcare, housing, childcare, and what they get are more F-35s and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
It’s hard to fulfill one’s duty to be what Eisenhower called an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” with a volume of money far too vast for any one human to track. One person, however, has come pretty close. We spoke with longtime arms industry researcher William D. Hartung, coauthor of the new book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, along with Ben Freeman, about what to be on the lookout for in this extraordinary year.
Inkstick: This year the military budget will, for the first time, be over $1 trillion in the United States. How does that compare to other moments in history when the United States actually had troops deployed in ground wars?
William D. Hartung: One gauge is that it’s much higher than it was when Eisenhower gave his military-industrial complex speech, probably $100 billion more adjusted for inflation. It’s higher than the peak of the Vietnam War, the Korean War. It’s in the ballpark with when we had hundreds of thousands of troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but it’s moving above that. And of course, even the hawks didn’t believe they could hit a trillion, but now they view this as a floor.
Inkstick: Is the trillion-dollar war budget here to stay?
Hartung: They did some fancy budget maneuvers to get to a trillion. Some came out of the “Big, Beautiful” — some would say “ugly” — Bill, some was directly requested by the Pentagon. So they may have to do something like that again. Congress is uncertain. But most years, Congress has added to what the Pentagon requested. So in the current alignment, it’ll probably be, again, these two streams of money. The money from the bill is money the Pentagon has more flexibility with. It’s not specified as clearly. They can move money around. It’s even less accountable than the regular Pentagon budget, if that’s possible.
Inkstick: Which weapons projects and companies stand to benefit from that spending?
Hartung: More than half of that trillion is going to go to contractors, large and small, but the big payoff will be from Golden Dome, which every scientist who is not on the payroll of the industry says is unworkable in the form they’re promising.
But the beauty for the industry is there’s money for the old guard like Lockheed Martin, and there’s money for the new guard like Anduril or Palantir. Because the old guard will do most of the hardware, the new guard will do the software. It’s really a marketing plan. It’s not a defense program. It’s to make people feel like they’re being protected, even as we have a nuclear arms race. That’s going to be another big winner for companies. Northrop Grumman’s new nuclear missile Sentinel is going to put it under the umbrella of Golden Dome to, I think, protect it, because it’s had huge cost overruns.
And then the build-up targeting China, the Pacific Islands, whatever they spend in Venezuela, may actually be in a supplemental spending bill. So there’s all manner of ways to make money, and they don’t seem to be getting rid of anything.
Inkstick: You and your coauthor Ben Freeman write in the book that “the greatest driver of astronomical Pentagon budgets is America’s cover the globe strategy” which seeks the capacity to fight anywhere, any time, on short notice, through a network of hundreds of bases. What kind of flashpoints should we be watching out for over the coming year?
Hartung: There’s this little bit of rhetoric in the Trump national security strategy about not fighting endless wars, which is completely out the window given what they’re doing with respect to Venezuela.
But the Pacific buildup hasn’t gotten as much attention as it should. It’s mostly in the Pacific islands like Guam where, not only is it already almost virtually a US military base, but they’re building a new marine base to bring some Marines from Okinawa. They’re putting in new missile defense systems. They’re deepening the ports, so bigger ships can come there. So in a war with China, they will be target number one. And of course, there’s a lot of toxins left over from other military activity. They don’t have sovereignty. They have an observational member of Congress. And they’re even taking the base that was used to launch the plane that dropped the nuclear weapons on Japan and refurbishing that air base to use it again.
And Lockheed Martin gets a lot of money because they’ve got a missile defense base there. It’s a big money maker, but it’s also kind of the front of the spear in terms of pushing our military up against China’s borders — and then wondering why they build up in return.
Inkstick: In the chapter on lobbying by the arms industry, you call it “perfectly legal corruption.” What kind of people end up becoming lobbyists for the industry?
Hartung: My coauthor Ben Freeman took the lead on this chapter, because he knows everybody on the planet, including some lobbyists. One guy that he met with said, “Nobody really wants to be a lobbyist. It’s just I couldn’t raise a family with what I was making on the Hill.” So, one of Ben’s recommendations is to pay Hill staffers a living wage and have more of them so they don’t juggle six issues at once. Because if some 3,000-page bill is coming at you and you’re trying to figure it out, then some lobbyist shows up and says, “Oh, this is what it is, and by the way, here’s how that’s going to hurt your district. Don’t vote for that,” it gives them a lot of power. The arms industry has about a thousand lobbyists in DC.
If you’ve got money behind you, if you’ve got jobs in Congressional districts behind you, it’s a lot easier job than being a peace lobbyist. I mean, we don’t have an economic pitch. We can’t say, “Oh, we’re not holding our meeting in your district anymore!” That’s not a jobs thing. Nor do think tanks create a lot of jobs. We really have to appeal to the public’s sense of safety and the fact that we could build a better world if we weren’t tied down in a militarized economy.
Inkstick: Speaking of corruption, you delve into the major conflict of interest behind industry-funded think tanks like the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Hudson Institute. How influential are these thinktanks, and what do they have to say about the trillion-dollar Pentagon budget?
Hartung: Until the Silicon Valley tech bros came along, the old companies didn’t like to advocate on their own behalf in a big way. Lockheed Martin thought it was not good decorum to say, “Let’s go to war with China.” Because people knew it was going to profit from it. But if you find a thinktank that says that, they have an aura of respectability, and as we say in the book, there’s not a lot of transparency. So if you see an expert on television testify to Congress, you don’t realize that their job is heavily dependent on money from contractors.
Sometimes it’s just subconscious, like, “Well, if I write this, is Northrop Grumman going to be mad at us and pull our grant?” Sometimes it’s direct. The company or the foreign government will lean in and say, “We need this study so that we can be eligible to buy long range drones.” And of course, the think tanks all say, “Oh, we would never let them influence us. We give independent judgments.” But it’s surprising how close those judgments align with the interest of the industry.
Inkstick: For military-industrial complex watchers who are used to following the likes of Raytheon and Lockheed — you’ve already written the definitive book about the latter — can you talk to us a little bit about the new entrants to the field, like Anduril and SpaceX? What makes them different from a Lockheed Martin?
Hartung: The thing that surprised me about the tech world was that I knew they were going to brag about their technology, overstate what it could do, and minimize the harms of automated warfare. But I didn’t know the leaders were so unhinged. You know, “I want to live forever.” “I’m going to colonize space.” “I’m a gamer who likes to play with weapons.” They call themselves founders, as if they founded the country. They don’t believe in government. They think they can solve everything.
Peter Thiel of Palantir groomed and employed and financed the political career of JD Vance, and when Vance was named vice president, in Silicon Valley, the champagne corks went off and the money flowed in. That’s when Musk started throwing big money at the Trump team.
I think their political influence is mostly in the executive branch at the moment. But with Congress, the old firms have the advantage. They already have the factories, they already have the relationships. But Anduril putting a factory in Ohio is a good bet. Coincidentally, it’s JD Vance’s state. It’s a red state. It’s something to point to and say, “See! The jobs are coming.” Because a lot of times when they talk about this stuff, it’s just ideas. So we have this nifty idea for a weapon, but they don’t tell you what it’s going to cost, where they can build it, what will be the environmental effects, like the huge amounts of power that’s sucked up to do AI. They have a good case to make that the old guard is dysfunctional, that they’re ripping us off and they’re not providing a good defense. But be careful what you wish for. This new crowd has to be regulated as much or more. And their whole selling point is, “We can be cheaper if you just get rid of all these pesky regulations, including independent testing and measures against price gouging.” Things that are protections, not just paperwork.
Inkstick: Your book about Lockheed is very relevant to how the industry is shaped today.
Hartung: Lockheed sort of tracks the ascent of the military-industrial complex. These two brothers were tinkering around in their garage in Burbank, about 10 years behind the Wright brothers. They didn’t have a big market. They were doing joyrides around the San Francisco Bay Area. Then they got some contracts with the Post Office, and in the 1930s, they were bought up by a bunch of auto executives, and the brothers were squeezed, and they said they’re going to be the General Motors of the air. And then in World War II, it was golden. They built 38,000 planes, with mixed reviews about how great they were. And then post-war, there was a brief moment when they were going to reduce the Pentagon budget. The industry screamed, and their CEO, at the time, was giving speeches about how if we want to be a global power, we need to be able to get forces abroad quickly. And that’s why you should build our huge transport planes.
They had huge overrides on their transport plan in the 1960s, which were revealed by a whistleblower, Ernest Fitzgerald. And their overseas bribery led to the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which was the first time the US government had said that foreign bribery is illegal. Lockheed used to take their middlemen off of their taxes.
So, there’s this battle of the power of Lockheed Martin versus government oversight. When they won the 1971 bailout, it was by one vote. Alan Cranston, the liberal from California, who had a lot of Lockheed work in his district, went to the senator from Montana, who was the last vote they needed. He said, “You’re going to hurt my state. Give me a break here.” And Lockheed won by a vote. And then, of course, they were the big winner in the merger boom of the 1990s. And now they’re head and shoulders, and they get $40 or $50 billion a year from the Pentagon, $10 or $20 billion more than the closest competitor.
Which is one of the things the tech companies like Anduril and Palantir have to deal with. Lockheed is just buried in government money and government projects. How do you chip away at that? I mean, my best hope is they spend more of their lobbying money fighting each other than fighting us, and that they talk out of school about each of those others’ flaws, and, at least, you know, slow the wheels of the machine a little bit.
The difference with the tech firms is that a lot of their money to develop everything they sell came from the Pentagon. When there was a commercial market that was booming, they decided the Pentagon was too much paperwork, lower profit margin. We’ll sell to the Pentagon off the shelf, but we’re not going to design stuff for you. But then the Pentagon kind of courted them, especially Ash Carter during the Obama years, who started these Defense Innovation Units that were placed in Silicon Valley and other places that made these kind of cheerleading appeals. A lot of the opponents in Silicon Valley were weeded out, blacklisted, some of the protests didn’t hold. And now, between the venture capital firms and the startups, they’ve decided the military is a stable market. [As] one venture capitalist said, “Well, you know, we can’t just invest in crypto casinos. We need something that’s steady.”
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
