Throwing more tax dollars at the Pentagon won’t make us safer

April 15th is tax day — a good day to reflect on how the federal government is spending your money. With all the wars and war talk dominating the DC discourse, from debates about supplying weapons to Ukraine and Israel to talking tough about being able to “win” a war with China, it may not surprise you to learn that the Pentagon is consuming a large and growing share of your tax dollars. If current trends continue, the Pentagon budget could hit $1 trillion or more in the next year or two.

A new analysis from the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies has determined that the average taxpayer pays over $2,900 to support the Pentagon. Over half of that sum — $1,748 — goes to weapons contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon (now RTX). 

A good portion of the funds steered to the big arms makers is wasted on cost overruns and performance problems, and, in some cases, outright fraud.

Lockheed Martin’s F-35 aircraft, which was meant to usher in a revolution in air combat when it was first conceived of in the mid-1990s has been plagued with problems from the start. A recent analysis by the Pentagon’s office of independent testing has found that only about 30 percent of the F-35 fleet is mission capable at any given time, prompting the Project on Government Oversight to call it the “part-time fighter aircraft.” That’s a stunning figure for a plane that is slated to cost $1.7 trillion over its lifetime — the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken by the Pentagon.

Other major contractors have not fared much better. Boeing’s V-22 Osprey has been involved in 14 crashes since it entered the force in 2007, resulting in the deaths of 54 service members. The whole fleet was grounded after a fatal crash in Japan last November that left eight people dead. The aircraft, which can take off like a helicopter, then tilt its propellers so it flies like a plane, has had serious technical issues from the outset. A December 2023 analysis by Tara Copp of the Associated Press noted issues ranging from problems with the clutch to questions about whether key parts of the plane are strong enough to withstand the pressures generated by an Osprey in flight. The V-22 was cleared for a return to service in early March, but congressional critics like Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) said that their concerns about the aircraft had yet to be answered at the time of the Osprey’s reentry into use.

Then there’s the Air Force’s new Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), the Sentinel, which is now projected to cost 37 percent more than original estimates. But despite the cost problems, the administration has given the green-light to go full speed ahead on the program, which is headed by Northrop Grumman.

The real question about the new ICBM is not whether it is going to be affordable, it is whether it is needed at all. Former Defense Secretary William Perry has called it one “of the most dangerous weapons” we have because a president would only have minutes to decide to launch it upon warning of attack, increasing the risks of a nuclear war based on a false alarm. Ultimately, the only way to be safe from nuclear weapons is to eliminate them altogether, but in the meantime a U.S. arsenal composed of submarine-launched ballistic missiles and nuclear-armed bombers is more than adequate to dissuade any nation from attacking the United States.  The $264 billion or more that it would cost to build, deploy and maintain the Sentinel could definitely be put to better use.

At a time when there are urgent national needs to invest in repairing basic infrastructure, promoting public health, addressing climate change and reducing poverty and inequality, we can no longer allow the Pentagon to devour more than half of the federal government’s discretionary budget.  Cracking down on poorly performing contractors and canceling unnecessary weapons programs offers one avenue towards revising our skewed budget priorities.  

The other, larger question that the president, the Congress and the public must address is what role we want the U.S. military to play in the world. Continuing our current approach of seeking global military dominance at the expense of other tools of statecraft has imposed immense human and economic costs while failing to promote peace or stability. Until we craft a more restrained, realistic defense strategy, it will be extremely difficult to roll back the Pentagon’s bloated budget. But given the right strategy, America can be safer for far less than what we currently spend on war, weapons and preparations for war.

William D. Hartung is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.