The Bunker: Rubber checks and imbalances

The Bunker, delivered to our subscribers Wednesdays at 7 a.m., is a newsletter from the desk of National Security Analyst Mark Thompson. Sign up here to receive it first thing, or check back Wednesday afternoon for the online version.

This week in The Bunker: the Pentagon’s new boss signals White House overreach and a loss of congressional guts; President Donald Trump calls for a big boost in U.S. defense spending; an IG report highlights the challenge of tracking that spending; and more.

THE MONO-STATE

Unilateralism in a democracy is a poor choice

So Pete Hegseth is now our new secretary of defense. In nearly a half-century of reporting on the Pentagon — 18 months longer than Hegseth has been alive, which doesn’t mean a whit — The Bunker has never witnessed someone with so little experience put in charge of an organization of nearly 3 million people (PDF), an annual budget of $850 billion, and the world’s deadliest arsenal. The three-legged stool envisioned by the founders — chief executive, legislators, and the judiciary — is becoming a one-legged POGO (sorry) stick, with all the stability that suggests.

I know some readers of The Bunker cheer Hegseth’s ascension, and believe this humble newsletter should join in. After all, the U.S. military has repeatedly failed when it has come to wars, weapons, and, they maintain, wokeness. “I do not have a similar biography to defense secretaries of the last 30 years,” Hegseth conceded (PDF) at his confirmation hearing. “But … we have repeatedly placed people atop the Pentagon with supposedly ‘the right credentials,’ whether they are retired generals, academics, or defense contractor executives. And where has it gotten us?”

That’s a fair point. But it doesn’t ease the questions former ace Pentagon reporter Greg Jaffe explored in the Washington Post about what drives Hegseth. Key national security issues — China, Russia, and the Pentagon’s bollixed procurement system among them — were sacrificed during Hegseth’s confirmation hearing to second-echelon issues like diversity in the ranks. When this defense secretary cites “radical leftists,” he’s talking about the Pentagon’s civilian leaders and the uniformed personnel mandated to carry out their orders — not the heirs of Lenin and Mao.

Here’s the key thing: Hegseth is now running the Pentagon because Trump liked his angry-vet act on Fox News, and the president cowed what used to be called “the world’s greatest deliberative body” into confirming an unqualified choice.

This is a bad road we’re on. It began following World War II, when Congress repeatedly washed its hands of its Constitutional duty to debate and declare — or not declare — war. That abdication of its most solemn responsibility led to the tragedies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam, and highlighted the dangers of putting too much power in the hands of a commander-in-chief.

Hegseth’s confirmation is another step down that path. “Congress is supposed to represent the country’s varied interests, down to 435 separate congressional districts. And they are different,” conservative columnist Daniel Henninger warned in the Wall Street Journal January 22. “Mr. Trump is displacing that federalism of interests with the simpler idea of a uniform national interest, defined and executed by the president.”

The same day, conservative commentator Bret Stephens tried to explain in the New York Times why the Senate didn’t insist on someone better to run the Pentagon: “In the case of Hegseth, the power of party loyalty is compounded by three additional factors: fear of Trump, the Cult of MAGA and the boomerang effect of liberal scorn.”

That is the new nuclear triad.

While the U.S. is not yet a banana republic, last week a five-sided fruit stand rose alongside the Potomac.

UPPING THE ANTE

Trump calls for steep hike in defense spending

President Trump has called on the U.S. and its NATO allies to spend 5% of their gross domestic product on their militaries. Given that the U.S. is currently spending 3.38% of its GDP (PDF) on the Pentagon, boosting that to 5% would represent a nearly 50% increase in defense spending, putting it well above $1 trillion annually (most NATO allies spend around 2%).

We’ve all heard, ad infinitum, that the U.S. spends more on defense than the next nine countries combined, yet still can’t prevail in a 20-year war with the Taliban in Afghanistan. That’s largely, as noted above, because the U.S. wades into wars without a congressional declaration. Beyond that, we keep buying the wrong weapons for the wrong wars. The Marines, for example, used the costliest weapon system ever — the F-35 fighter — to attack “Houthi weapons storage facilities” in Yemen last fall. Stationary targets operated by ragtag rebels. The warplanes took off from a multi-billion-dollar Nimitz-class carrier. Sledgehammer, meet fly.

While Trump and the GOP-dominated Congress want to increase defense spending, they don’t have the guts to propose ways to pay for it. “The massive growth in the debt burden that would result from an extreme military spending expansion would significantly increase the risks to the country’s long-term economic growth and its ability to respond to economic downturns, as well as exacerbate the potential for excessive borrowing to trigger a financial crisis,” defense-budget whiz Steven Kosiak of the Quincy Institute argues. “Such policies would do far more to damage than to enhance U.S. national security.”

Like that’s ever stopped us.

AUDIT ABOARD!

Outside help doesn’t

Congress, frustrated by a Defense Department that has — as of now — failed seven annual audits in a row, in 2018 ordered the Pentagon to hire outside firms to help clear its bookkeeping backlog. Turns out that these hired hands are having just as much trouble properly toting up the Pentagon’s books as its in-house bean-counters.

“Non-Federal auditors did not comply with Government Auditing Standards for 69% of selected audits,” the Defense Department Inspector General reported January 23. They overlooked up to $940 million in costs (PDF) on 16 audits between 2018 and 2022 that should have been scrubbed by the unnamed outsider auditors to ensure those payments were justified. In one case, an outside auditor approved $92 million in a contractor’s claimed labor costs “by verifying that the employees’ timesheets were approved,” the report drily noted (PDF).

The IG said the Pentagon’s Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) “should improve their contract oversight by reviewing the non-Federal auditors’ work.” But the DCAA said that’s not possible because contracting documents “[do] not give the DCAA COR [contracting officer’s representative] the authority or responsibility to review the non-Federal auditors’ work for compliance with Government Auditing Standards.”

Finding such bon mots buried deep in Pentagon IG reports is what gets The Bunker debunked in the morning.

WHAT WE’RE READING

Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently

→ Surprise finding!

Russia’s “inflated” fears of a space war launched by the U.S. could lead Moscow to “escalate early,” according to a RAND Corp. study commissioned by the U.S. Space Force, Theresa Hitchens reported January 23 at Breaking Defense. “RAND’s publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors,” the study notes (emphasis added).

→ Charge!

Members of the U.S. military used their government credit cards to charge more than $500,000 on mobile apps and at casinos, bars, and nightclubs in FY 2023 without raising alarm among their financial overseers, the Pentagon IG reported January 23.

→ “Avoidable mistake”

The U.S. never should have stumbled into the Cold War, David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s budget chief, wrote January 23 at Antiwar.com.

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