The Bunker: Throwing worse money after bad

This week in The Bunker: The scent of more cash for the Pentagon rising from Capitol Hill will send the military and its contractors fighting for their share of the legislative loot; the Air Force and Navy scramble their jets pushing for, yep, more warplanes; the final nuclear-arms pact between the U.S. and Russia expires; and more.

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Spending like a drunken sailor

When the nation feels out-of-sorts, its leadership seems out-of-whack, and possible foes deemed out-of-control, the American Way is simple: spend more on the U.S. military before this fever breaks and the body politic can come to its common senses.

This pecuniary Pavlovian paroxysm is where we find ourselves now, even as the Trump administration is exiting the world stage right. The U.S. prefers to engage in self-inflicted neighborhood turf wars, rhetorical and otherwise, with Canada, Cuba, Greenland, and Venezuela. It averts its eyes from the real threat posed to Europe and beyond by a revanchist Russia, as Moscow wraps up its fourth year trying to devour next-door Ukraine. President Trump continues to let Russian President Vladimir Putin get away with murder. Washington disparages NATO, the most successful military alliance in world history, preferring, stupidly, to go it alone.

Which is why we find ourselves where we are. And that is why last week key lawmakers endorsed Trump’s call to pump, next year, an additional half-trillion dollars into this year’s already bloated and record $1 trillion defense budget. That plunder is bloody chum to those whose livelihoods depend on inflating the threats facing the nation. It’s also a sum that would be impossible to spend smartly.

Scant attention will be aimed at targeting the Pentagon’s currently engorged wallet more wisely. Nope. When you’re antsy over where your nation is headed, and how it plans to get there, it’s best to just full-steam-ahead with the cash. In coming weeks, look for armadas of analysts arguing where this extra money can best be wasted.

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Congress hints at a near-50% boost

This year Congress goosed the Pentagon budget by $150 billion outside normal channels, pushing the Defense Department’s take of the commonweal to $1 trillion. Having got away with that sleight-of-legerdemain in 2026, lawmakers are tripling down: They want to add $450 billion to the 2027 defense budget (they’re assuming Trump will propose a basically flat military budget for next year) to drive it to $1.5 trillion. The chairmen of the House and Senate armed services committees want to do that through “reconciliation,” a legislative shortcut that provides more money with less oversight.

This year’s $150 billion boost for the Pentagon marked the first time that reconciliation has been used to fund the nation’s military. The Senate can approve such measures with a simple majority vote, thereby avoiding a minority filibuster. That lets the current 53-47 Republican majority steamroll its defense-spending priorities over Democratic opposition.

“Rushing hundreds of billions of dollars through reconciliation to the least accountable agency in the federal government undermines oversight and public trust,” says Bunker boss Greg Williams here at the Project On Government Oversight. “Using reconciliation to push through an increase of this magnitude sidelines the normal defense authorization process, which, despite its flaws, has historically allowed for bipartisan debate and oversight.”

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), the House Armed Services Committee chairman, said the Pentagon plus-up is needed to pay for costly military must-haves like the Golden Dome aerial shield, new Air Force F-47 fighter jets, and Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missiles. “We have all these big-ticket items that we have to do,” Rogers told Valerie Insinna of Breaking Defense. “And you can’t do that on a trillion-dollar budget. You just can’t.” (And The Bunker can’t afford to write this newsletter from his palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice … he just can’t).

Of course, before Congress thinks about adding $450 billion more to the U.S. military’s purse, it might want to make sure the Defense Department accounts for the $150 billion extra it’s getting this year. The Pentagon has told Congress how it plans to spend $90 billion of that total but has stamped it classified.

“The Department has offered no explanation for why the spend plan was classified, even though some items included … such as barracks improvements or personnel benefit increases, are not sensitive,” 11 senators — nine Democrats and one Independent — wrote Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth February 3. “It strains credulity that all the items in the $90 billion classified spend plan are sensitive enough to warrant complete classification.”

The Pentagon also hasn’t accounted for the remaining $60 billion of that $150 billion.

First there were stealth bombers. Now there are stealth budgets.

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Dive-bombing for dollars

The Air Force is getting a new fighter. The Navy isn’t. That’s why the Navy’s top admiral called last week for jump-starting his new fighter despite a lack of proposed funding. And while new Air Force fighters and bombers are under development, that’s not sufficient given the Pentagon’s increasingly cash-rich environment. That’s why an Air Force booster group is calling for dramatically increasing production of those two new warplanes. The services have niftily divvied up threats — the Air Force relies on China; the Navy cites Iran — to warrant their wants (at least for now).

The Air Force should boost its buy of B-21 bombers from 100 to “at least” 200, and its fleet of F-47 fighters from a projected 185 to “at least” 300, a new study (PDF) from the pro-Air Force Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies says. Such hikes would not be cheap. “Rough estimates peg the total north of $100 billion” for the additional planes, Air & Space Forces Magazine said (ol’ Pentagon hands know war-tested weapons-weasel words like “rough” and “north” and “at least” lead to a final total cost double, if not triple, that sum).

The Navy planely doesn’t want to be left behind. So the service’s top officer argues the Navy needs a new F/A-XX warplane — others have their doubts — if Navy pilots are going to be able to bomb Iran targets a decade from now. “When things heated up in Iran, guess who steamed over there, right? It was the United States Navy and the [USS] Abraham Lincoln strike group,” Admiral Daryl Caudle, the chief of naval operations, said January 27. “Imagine what that looks like in 10 years from now, with a different Iran, with different capability [that] can go against the F-18 capabilities of today.” Only a new warplane like the F/A-XX outfitted with the stealth, range, electronic warfare, and capable of controlling flocks of drones from its cockpit is up to the task, Caudle said.

Pardon The Bunker’s French, but the two services are acting like cochons waddling up to the trough as more money pours into the Pentagon feedlot. Neither the Navy nor the Air Force wants to be the runt of the litter when there’s so much money being thrown at them.

MORE NUKES

Ready or not, here they come

Last week, the final arms control treaty restricting U.S. and Russia nuclear weapons ended. After more than a half-century of such limitations between the world’s two biggest atomic powers, now the nuclear gloves are off. What’s going to happen? For starters, a possible expansion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and a resumption of atomic-weapons testing. And the Pentagon will surely cite the end of the New START pact as justification for continuing to press ahead with its 10-year, $460 billion upgrade of the U.S. nuclear triad of submarine-launched missiles, land-based-ICBMs, and atomic bombers. After all, both Russia and China are modernizing their nuclear forces.

Trump spurned Putin’s call for a one-year extension of the treaty, which expired February 5. “Rather than extend ‘NEW START’ (A badly negotiated deal by the United States that, aside from everything else, is being grossly violated), we should have our Nuclear Experts work on a new, improved, and modernized Treaty that can last long into the future,” Trump posted.

Any nation’s individual nuke numbers are less important than the fact that the stability, as imperfect as it was, between Washington and Moscow has evaporated. The U.S. and Russia, after all, are home to 90% of of world’s nuclear weapons. Their black-and-white binary is going gray, with more nations sure to join the nine-member nuclear club. Likewise, doctrines, targets, and safety optimized for a bipolar world are fading away, bleeding into irrelevance. Other nations, unnerved by this new vacuum, already are considering developing their own atomic arsenals. Trump’s repeated calls for nations to beef up their own defenses could push some in that direction.

The math is simple: More nuclear weapons + more nuclear states = a greater chance for nuclear war.

MORE IS LESS

Smarter thinking is needed, instead

All this represents a grand failure of imagination, both at home and abroad, that trillions cannot buy. The U.S. finds itself at a crossroads, debating about how, and whether, to continue as a functional, representational democracy in the 21st century. Cramming cash into Pentagon coffers during these trying times, under incautious leaders, is an expensive distraction from the existential issues facing the nation.

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

Arms salesmanship

Trump signed an executive order February 6 making clear that U.S. arms sales to foreign countries will be aimed at boosting the production of weapons most important to the U.S. military and de-emphasizing their role in alliance-building or beefing up other nations’ defense-production capabilities.

“What’s up, docs?”

Hundreds of documents in the newly released Epstein files shed light on connections between the sex offender and Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm formerly led by Department of Defense Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg, René Kladzyk of the Project On Government Oversight reported February 6.

“Don’t give up the ship!”

Mark Jbeily, a U.S. naval aviator, argues in Proceedings’ February issue that U.S. Navy aircraft carriers remain vital despite increasingly serious missile threats.

Regardless of the threat, thanks for coming aboard The Bunker this week. Please share with pals so they can subscribe here.