The Bunker: Mixed Messaging

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: Clashes over whether a $1 trillion defense budget is enough; a new transactional U.S. policy to arm Ukraine; Pentagon R&D budget offers clues to future warfighting; and more; TEN-shun! The Bunker is now starting its summer break and will return September 3.

IS YOUR PENTAGON…

Half-empty or half-full?

It’s tough keeping track of the state of the U.S. military. You’ve got President Donald Trump hailing the attacks he recently ordered on Iran’s nuclear-development sites as proof of U.S. military prowess. And there’s more to come, he promises, pointing toward his record $1 trillion defense budget proposed for 2026. Then, you’ve got a cagey old Washington hand like Dave Deptula (PDF), a retired three-star Air Force general, saying Trump’s budget is a farce, inflated with a one-time $100 billion sugar high that won’t solve the problems of an increasingly brittle and stretched force.

No wonder taxpayers are confused.

This is Mutually-Assured-Bombast.

Trump and Deptula are playing to different audiences. “We are buying you new airplanes, brand-new, beautiful planes, redesigned planes, brand-new planes, totally stealth planes,” Trump recently told West Point’s graduating class. “We have the best tanks anywhere in the world. We’re gonna start shipbuilding again … we’re gonna have the best missiles, we already do, drones and much, much more.” The president likes being able to boast the U.S. will spend $1 trillion on its military next year, no matter where it comes from. “There’s never been a force like this, and I rebuilt it,” Trump told troops at Fort Liberty-cum-Bragg in North Carolina last month. “I gave you so much money for four years it was crazy. And we just approved our largest budget for military operations, over $1 trillion.”

“Crazy,” indeed.

But it’s not enough, Deptula counters “Despite the rhetoric of rebuilding our armed forces, President Trump’s budget is smaller than that of his predecessor,” Deptula, a top Air Force booster rocket and dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, wrote July 16 in Forbes. Despite the Iran raid, the Air Force’s “geriatric aircraft inventory” won’t be able to prevail in a war “beyond a few weeks.”

Deptula is a heat-seeking missile aimed at making sure his service gets what he sees as its fair share of the Pentagon budget. “In the 20 years after 9/11, funding for the Army and Navy was greater than the Air Force — to the tune of $1.3 trillion more for the Army and nearly $1 trillion dollars more for the Navy,” Deptula argues.

Now there’s the rub. Why is it deemed rational that the Army, Navy, and Air Force should get same-sized slices of the Pentagon budget pie, especially as threats ebb and flow, and wars wax and wane? Makes one wonder if separate military services have outlived their utility.

UKRAINE

Never has shipping been so important in a land war

So much for “America First.” After slowing, then halting, U.S. military aid to Ukraine, the Trump administration has turned the spigot back on. “In the end, you are the police agent of the whole world,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told Trump during a July 14 White House meeting. Amazingly, Trump let the comment pass unchallenged.

Shades of the late Madeleine Albright’s hubristic claim that the U.S. is the world’s “indispensable nation.”

Trump has approved sending Patriot air-defense systems and other advanced arms to Ukraine to help it battle Russia’s invasion. Vladimir Putin, by stepping up Russia’s bombing campaign against Ukraine, has pointedly frustrated Trump’s campaign pledge to end the three-year-old war within 24 hours of taking office.

Trump sees his about-face as a transactional boon for U.S. taxpayers and defense contractors: the U.S. will sell weapons Ukraine needs to U.S. allies in Europe, who will then provide them to Ukraine. “We’ve made a deal today where we are going to be sending them weapons, and they’re going to be paying for them,” he said of the NATO allies as he met with the alliance's chief July 14. “We are not buying it, but we will manufacture it.”

It’s a literal arms race: can the U.S. & Co. get more firepower to Ukraine before the Russians gain more territory and crush Kiev’s tenacity? “The Russian tactic is to get the Ukrainians to waste all their existing air-defense stocks and leave them exposed to a late summer or fall offensive,” Celeste Wallander, a Biden administration Pentagon official, told the Wall Street Journal. “If this is going to change Putin’s calculation on whether he will win, substantial deliveries would have to be carried out through the summer.”

Better late than never. The U.S. is getting a bargain letting Kiev battle Moscow (not that Ukraine had much of a choice). It may be a weird way to wage war, but if it takes welfare for weapons to make Putin stand down, it’s the right choice.

R&DT&E

Tomorrow’s U.S. military today

“Follow the money,” Deep Throat told Bob Woodward during Watergate (it happened in the movie, but not in real life). However, it is a good rule when it comes to charting where the Pentagon thinks war is heading. Each year it gives us a peek into its thinking when it unveils its annual request for developing future weapons.

Like the rest of the Pentagon budget, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s 2026 request for Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDT&E, to its friends) sets a record at $179 billion. That’s a 27% boost from this year’s $141.3 billion RDT&E total. Big winners include the nuclear triad. The Air Force’s two legs of the triad account for nearly $9 billion in RDT&E funding — $4.7 billion for Northrop’s smooth-running B-21 bomber and $4.1 billion for the company’s beleaguered Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile.

Beyond such Cold War relics, the RDT&E funding request will rely more than ever on silicon. “The bet is clear: in tomorrow’s conflicts, it won’t be platforms or materials that win, but configuration speed, modularity, and code,” Tatjana de Kerros, a defense-tech expert, wrote in Defense One. “For those building the future of defense, the signal couldn’t be clearer: this is the year the DOD began fighting with software.”

Actually, Tatjana, the DOD has been fighting with software — trying to kick, scratch, and punch it into shape — ever since it launched the software-heavy F-35 program 24 years ago.

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

→ “Please return your tray tables…

The Navy may scrap five admirals who help build its ships so it can build its ships better, Politico’s Paul McLeary and Jack Detsch reported July 16.

→ …on your rearranged Titanic deck chairs…

A Navy sub damaged when it ran into the ocean floor in 2021 is finally slated to return to service in late 2026, Joseph Trevithick reported July 15 in The War Zone.

→ …to their full upright position”

The brand-new White House Office of Shipbuilding has been moved from the National Security Council to the Office of Management and Budget (not good news for warship warriors), and its leader has jumped overboard, Breaking Defense’s Justin Katz reported July 17.

Thanks for dropping anchor at The Bunker this week. Once again, we’re away until September 3. Consider forwarding this on to a friend so they can subscribe here.