The Bunker: Doing Less, with More

In The Bunker this week: The Pentagon’s new, alarmingly political National Defense Strategy pulls the U.S. back from its historic post-World War II role; how Congress makes an inefficient Defense Department even more so (yeah, hard to believe, we know); the Pentagon’s $23 billion that’s gone AWOL; and more.

THE WITHDRAWAL METHOD

More spending, less coverage

The Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy is not unlike a turtle, pulling its legs and head under its shell to dedicate itself to defense of the pond it calls the Western Hemisphere. What’s striking is how much more money the Trump administration wants to spend on its home turf while telling the rest of the world to, more or less, go it alone.

That’s the bottom line of the Defense Department’s new National Defense Strategy (NDS), a 24-page document (PDF) released without fanfare January 23. It’s fundamentally an “America First” document, shrinking and shirking the nation’s historic post-World War II role. It is abandoning the U.S.’s enlightened self-interest as a beacon of (imperfect) democracy, the pre-eminent foe of (most) tyrants and despots, and the (usually) key nation helping to ensure global stability.

Trump wants to spend $1.5 trillion on the U.S. military in 2027 — a more-than-50% hike in a single year — defending spots in its backyard that are not threatened. Greenland, the “Gulf of America,” and the Panama Canal are each cited repeatedly in the NDS. It makes clear the U.S. military should plan to scale back its role in Europe, on the Korean peninsula, and in the Middle East.

To put it in Flintstone terms, December’s White House-issued National Security Strategy is the bedrock purportedly guiding U.S. defenses. The Pentagon’s NDS is built on that White House footing and supposedly serves as the Defense Department foundation upon which the nation’s fighting forces are built. In reality, both are word salads, just with different dressings (it has ever been thus). But they offer clues into the direction of U.S. national-security thinking over the next several years, or until a new president takes over, whichever comes first.

The latest NDS lists four priorities:

• “Defend the U.S. Homeland.” (Historically, the Pentagon’s #1 job.)
• “Deter China in the Indo-Pacific Through Strength, Not Confrontation.” (Fortune Cookie alert!)
• “Increase Burden-Sharing with U.S. Allies and Partners.” (Department of Redundancy Department.)
• “Supercharge the U.S. Defense Industrial Base.” (Once you’re no longer a superpower, you’ve got to super something.)

This NDS is the most political The Bunker has ever read, and is markedly different from the last one (PDF), released by President Biden in 2022. “For too long, the U.S. Government neglected — even rejected — putting Americans and their concrete interests first,” Defense Secretary Pete “Hands-off” Hegseth writes (PDF) in his introduction. “Previous administrations squandered our military advantages and the lives, goodwill, and resources of our people in grandiose nation-building projects and self-congratulatory pledges to uphold cloud-castle abstractions like the rules-based international order.” (Hegseth apparently has a Joni Mitchell fan on his staff … wonder if they know she’s … Canadian?)

However, while the purview of the U.S. military may be shrinking, some parts of it are growing, at least when compared to that 2022 NDS. “‘President Biden’ appears only twice in the older document,” Breaking Defense noted. In the new edition, “‘President Trump’ appears 47 times.”

CONTINUING RESOLUTIONS

And congressional irresolution…

It’s too easy to blame a commander-in-chief, or the military establishment itself, for the never-ending woes besetting the U.S. armed forces. The Bunker, having spent close to a half-century watching the foibles of the U.S. national-security state up-too-close, knows this much: There is more than enough blame to go around. And too often Congress — you know, that once-co-equal branch of government that used to declare wars and balance budgets — doesn’t get the blame it deserves.

That’s largely because Congress is the caboose on the military-industrial-complex train, tinkering with budgets long after they’ve been proposed and publicized, or turning a blind eye to overseas adventures they’d just as soon leave fingerprintless.

Here’s another lawmaker legacy: Too many Pentagon weapon-production delays, their soaring costs, and assorted administrative nightmares are the result of so-called “continuing resolutions.” A CR — one of those archaic Capitol Hill phrases like “unanimous consent” and “common sense” — is a temporary funding measure Congress uses when it and the president fail to agree to an agency’s budget before the start of a new fiscal year every October 1. It’s basically a financial straitjacket that restricts how much the Defense Department, in this case, can spend, and what the Pentagon can spend it on. In 45 of the past 49 years — 92% of the time — the Pentagon has been forced to operate under CRs for part of the year, according to a January 21 report from the Government Accountability Office. In seven of the last 15 fiscal years, the Defense Department spent nearly half the year (PDF) under CR constraints.

CRs are like a systemic illness, impacting the Pentagon’s every nook and cranny. They lead to “schedule effects” — GAO-speak, generally meaning “delays” — in about half of the programs surveyed by the congressional watchdog. They leave the Pentagon unsure about the size of its current budget and restrict it from boosting production of current weapons or starting new ones. Training has to be curtailed or cancelled (PDF).

While Pentagon officials say the never-ending CRs hurt national security, they don’t know by how much. “Because the DoD did not track the impact of CRs, the impact on national security, the Defense Industrial Base, and program costs and schedules across the DoD is unknown,” Brett Mansfield, a top Pentagon auditor, said last summer.

Of course, efficiency isn’t the first word that comes to mind when thinking about running the Pentagon (fact is, it may not even be the last). But let’s face it: The nation spends too much on its military. We wouldn’t spend so much if our so-called leaders did their jobs.

SHOOTING-STAR WARS

Lawmakers seek info on Golden Dome

Congress wants to know where its — your — $23 billion went. That’s how much it pumped into Trump’s proposal to build a “Golden Dome” shield last year to protect the nation against all aerial threats. That’s only a down payment, of course, on fool’s gold that could end up costing trillions. But trying to get information from the Pentagon on where that money’s being spent is like trying to get a straight answer from the Pentagon podium these days (assuming there’s anyone standing behind it, an increasingly rare occurrence).

House and Senate appropriators said (PDF) in their defense bill released January 20 that they “support the operational objectives of Golden Dome for national security” — in other words, achieve the physical impossibility of rendering the rest of the globe’s air and space weapons impotent. But, they fretted, they’re missing basic information on the shield’s “comprehensive master deployment schedule; cost, schedule, and performance metrics; and a finalized system architecture and its components.”

Details, schmetails.

“Golden Dome is an extraordinarily complex and ambitious program, for which we should expect extraordinarily comprehensive information,” Greg Williams, the director of the Center for Defense Information here at the Project On Government Oversight, told Federal News Network. “Instead, the American people and Congress have the opposite.”

This data vacuum means Congress can’t tell if the system, designed to defeat intercontinental ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons, cruise missiles, bombers, maneuverable cruise missiles, drones, armed passenger pigeons, and a slayer to be named later, will work. Lord knows they’re trying: 2,440 companies and institutions, among the 2,463 that applied, have been approved for Golden Dome work. That’s a hit rate — on taxpayers, at least, if not in the heavens — of more than 99%.

Secrecy apparently demands that such information be kept, um, secret. “We have been quiet,” Golden Dome Director and Space Force General Michael Guetlein conceded January 23. “We need to preserve this capability to defend this nation from our adversaries.”

That, of course, suggests that it will work as promised by the president. It won’t. The sooner we learn about it, the sooner it can be brought down to Earth.

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

→ Defense Inc.

Trump’s recent criticism of how defense contractors invest their money led Rachel Cohen at Breaking Defense to dig in and find out, in four charts, on January 23.

→ Heads down!

The toilets aboard the $13 billion USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, keep breaking down, NPR’s Steve Walsh reported January 17.

→ Ads infinitum

Andrew Fedorov wonders why the nation’s capital is plastered with ads for the defense industry, in The Nation January 20.

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