OPINION:
The Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2025 authorizes the Defense Department to spend $923.3 billion, or about $1 trillion if you’re rounding numbers. If you think the Pentagon’s budget is too big, you’re right — but probably for all the wrong reasons.
The reasons come down to three: Political nonsense the Biden administration has imposed, problems that are urgent and apparently aren’t being solved by President Biden’s Pentagon leaders and weapon systems we continue to buy but shouldn’t.
Last year, the Pentagon spent more than $110 million on DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — training. That will increase to $114 million in 2025. Between 2016 and 2021, it spent over $15 million on gender-switching surgery and other treatments for transgender service members. The fact that the number of service members has increased since then means more will be spent on those procedures.
There are bigger problems. For example, we and many of our allies rely on “smart” bombs and missiles guided by GPS data. According to a July 10 Wall Street Journal report, the Russians have found a way to jam the GPS guidance of many of our weapons, rendering them useless on the Ukrainian battlefield.
Our smart bombs are rendered dumb, as are the HIMARS — high mobility artillery rocket system — missiles. It’s only a matter of time before the Russians learn how to jam our other GPS-guided weapons.
This problem — which effectively disarms some of our allies and our capabilities — isn’t something that the current Pentagon’s leaders — from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on down — are fixing. If they were, the evil geniuses at DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — would be solving it quickly. I’ve seen firsthand how quickly they can do it.
Another threat for which Mr. Biden’s Pentagon leaders apparently lack a solution is Russia’s plan to put nuclear weapons in orbit to kill our satellites on the eve of war. As this column explained on Feb. 26, without our constellations of satellites — even if a significant number are destroyed — our war-fighting ability will be thrown back to the 1960s.
Those problems are made vastly worse by the Pentagon’s poor decisions about its top-line weapons over the past 30 years.
With the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Army’s Stryker combat vehicle, the Navy’s buying more littoral combat ships and more DDG-51 destroyers, we’ve made decisions that cost too much and deliver too little.
When the F-35 was projected to cost $1 trillion over the system’s life, people — even some in Congress — were shocked. The life cycle cost of the F-35 is now over $2 trillion.
Worse still is that the F-35 is often unavailable to fly its missions. Its capability to fly and fight is only about 60% due to maintenance problems, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That abysmal reliability rate means that if you need 20 F-35s for a mission, only 12 will be able to fly.
The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps have about 630 F-35s and plan to buy about 1,800 more. When the aircraft cost is very high — about $109 million per aircraft — and its mission capability is so low, why buy more?
The Army’s Stryker combat vehicle was not brilliantly designed. It’s too big to fit in our most numerous tactical aircraft — the C-130 — and isn’t safe against rocket-propelled grenades, which are essentially a fashion accessory in the Third World. About 15 years ago, I asked the Army’s Stryker program manager why that was. All he could tell me was that we wouldn’t send Strykers where rocket-propelled grenades are present. He must have known that was nonsense when he said that.
The Navy’s decisions on the LCS and DDG-51 are just as bad. The LCS — known as the “little crappy ship” — cannot survive the combat in which it’s supposed to thrive. The Navy wants three more in 2025. The DDG-51 was designed and first built in the 1980s. The Navy has requested two more in fiscal 2025 and wants to continue to buy them at two per year through 2029. Why not buy ships that are more capable?
In a March 11 news release, the Pentagon said it plans to spend only $147.5 billion of its nearly $1 trillion budget on readiness and war-fighting capabilities in 2025.
As this column has often said, the lethality and readiness of our forces should be the only concerns of the Pentagon’s leaders. In that, they are failing in their primary duty.
Congress has been sitting by and watching all this go on. It’s all too clear that the Pentagon needs new leaders, people who haven’t bought into Mr. Biden’s “wokeness” and are serious about providing the weapons our warriors and their commanders need.
If former President Donald Trump is reelected in November, replacing the Pentagon’s leadership must be a top priority. He will need to fire a lot of generals and admirals — and civilians — who have bought into Mr. Biden’s “woke” theories and replace them with real warriors. They’re out there. You can find them if you look hard enough.
• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and contributing editor for The American Spectator.
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