The Bunker: Too much and never enough

This week in The Bunker: the White House says the Pentagon needs a 42% budget boost next year; SECDEF Hegseth takes time from the war in Iran to fight his Army; Trump wants to flip NATO’s mission upside down; mis-naming wars; and more.

THE BUDGET

Force-feeding the Pentagon

You can always spend more on the U.S. military. Yet even at its current trillion-dollar-a-year spending clip, the globe’s most powerful armed force is having trouble compelling Iran to surrender. That’s what President Trump demanded on Day 7 of the 5-week old war, which appears to be escalating as The Bunker goes to press.

“A whole civilization will die tonight,” Trump said April 7 as his deadline for Tehran’s capitulation drew closer. It was a sickening boast to many Americans. In their name, the president is reprehensibly pledging to wipe out a storied civilization because he doesn’t like its current leaders. Apparently, given U.S. opposition to the war he launched unilaterally, he doesn’t care too much about what Americans think, either.

Now he wants to spend $1.5 trillion on the U.S. military next year, which the White House says is 42% more than this year. Even if you believe that the U.S. military is underfunded — and The Bunker doesn’t — there is no way such an increase can be swallowed, and spent smartly, by such a huge bureaucracy in such a short time.

“A budget of this size would simply lead to greater waste of tax dollars and higher profits for defense company executives,” says Greg Williams, director of the Center for Defense Information here at the Project On Government Oversight. You know that the ghostly horsemen of the Pentagon spending apocalypse — Waste, Fraud, and Abuse — are salivating at the prospect.

At the same time, non-defense spending would take a 10% cut. “We’re fighting wars,” Trump said April 1. “We can’t take care of day care.” (Not to be pedantic, but the Pentagon runs the world’s largest network of day-care centers.)

Pentagon profligates will cite the Defense Department’s inability to bring Iran to heel as evidence that more money is needed. But more money won’t fix what’s wrong. Smart dimes go further than dumb dollars. Besides, it’s not actually the military’s fault that Tehran, so far, hasn’t been bombed into submission. The military’s default Pavlovian response is “Yes, sir!” even when given the most challenging assignment (cf., Afghanistan). The problem is the assigner.

A wise commander-in-chief chiefly in command of the facts would know air power alone can’t force a foe into line. A smart commander knows he can’t get what he wants from Iran unless he’s willing to order the 82nd Airborne & Co. to parachute into downtown Tehran and take over the country. Given that reality, he wouldn’t fire a barrage of demands at Iran in the war’s opening days — unconditionally surrendering, relinquishing its nuclear program, keeping the Strait of Hormuz open — that gives Iran a win if it refuses to go along.

But that’s precisely what Trump has done. And his resulting credibility chasm can’t be caulked with cash.

THE ARMY

Hegseth’s purge surge continues

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is the grift that keeps on giving. Last week, we wrote about his beef with reporters. This week, we’re turning to his beef with the Army brass. It’s striking that, in the middle of the war with Iran, Hegseth’s reported frustration with General Randy George, the Army chief of staff, apparently grew so intense that Hegseth forced him to resign. For the good of the nation’s biggest and oldest military service, you’d think a smart Pentagon chief could temper his ire so long as deploying Army soldiers onto Iranian soil remains on the table. But you’d be wrong.

George, a combat veteran with 38 years in uniform, is highly respected by his Army peers and others. Hegseth, who spent 19 years in the Army National Guard including tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, had what The Bunker (among others) would characterize as an undistinguished military career. He quit the service after a fellow National Guard member (you know how tight foxhole buddies can be) suggested Hegseth’s Christian nationalistic tattoos might be evidence that he posed an “insider threat.” The Army, Hegseth said, “spit me out.” He has spent his first year in office spitting out top Army officers.

The rash of cashierings has largely gone unexplained. But the latest apparently are rooted in tensions between Hegseth and the Army’s leaders. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is a likely successor if Trump throws Hegseth under an M-1 tank. Hegseth clashed with Driscoll and George over Hegseth’s decision to block the promotion of two female and two Black Army colonels to be one-star brigadier generals. Breaking with Pentagon tradition, Hegseth has intervened, for reasons that aren’t fully clear, in more than a dozen cases.

While such diktats may scramble the Pentagon’s top ranks, they don’t do as much damage to the force as Hegseth’s recent decision to derail an Army probe into the pilots of two AH-64 Apache helicopters who buzzed Trump booster Kid Rock’s Tennessee house on March 28. The service had announced it had grounded the soldiers following their unauthorized flyover pending an investigation into the incident. But hours later Hegseth aborted the inquiry. “No punishment. No investigation,” Hegseth ordered. “Carry on, patriots.”

By stripping the Army of the power to investigate, Hegseth corrodes the good order and discipline that is supposed to be at the heart of the U.S. military. Somehow, The Bunker doubts the SECDEF would have shut down the investigation if the choppers had been showboating above the New Jersey place of Trump critic Bruce Springsteen.

THE ALLIANCE

“I’m taking my bomb and going home!”

President Trump is enraptured by the prospect of his “Golden Dome for America,” which he pledges will protect the nation from all aerial threats. He gets that it’s a shield. It’s designed to defend, not attack. That’s what makes his ever-increasing criticism of NATO so confounding. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, created 77 years ago this week, declared in its founding document that its purpose was the members’ “collective defence” (the British spelling, strange given that it was signed in Washington, D.C., but we digress).

Trump has ignored its purpose in his repeated after-the-initial-attack pleas for help from NATO allies and in his threats to punish them for failing to do what NATO was never designed to do. That’s Nu Yawk chutzpah fer ya: Trigger the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz and demand that others fix it.

Hegseth concurs. “You don’t have much of an alliance if you have countries that are not willing to stand with you when you need them,” he said March 31. That’s rich coming from the military leader of the only nation that NATO has ever aided militarily. On September 12, 2001, the day after the 9/11 terror attacks, NATO invoked Article 5 — an attack on one NATO state will be treated like an attack on all of them — committing the alliance to fight terrorism.

But NATO, widely regarded as history’s greatest military alliance, isn’t good enough for Trump. He has spent years criticizing the alliance and its members, and he is threatening to abandon it (that would appear to be illegal, not that that has ever stopped him before). Having stumbled into a war armed with plenty of precision-guided bombs but no precision-guided objectives, he’s desperate for allies, now. What this war’s ringmaster wants is an on-demand, ex post facto alliance to act as streetsweepers following his elephants.

THE NAME

The Pentagon PR machine

Remember when wars used to be named after the belligerents, like the Franco-Prussian War, or the Spanish-American War? Or numbered, like World War I and World War II? Then the Pentagon jumped in (PDF). It dubbed 1989’s war with Panama Operation Just Cause (PDF), and 2001’s invasion of Afghanistan Operation Enduring Freedom. This was aspirational nomenclature, trying to hide the deadly business of war behind Madison Avenue masks of democracy and idealism.

Operation Epic Fury, the war with Iran now underway, upends that tradition. The name signals “an extreme emotional state, an anger that resists control,” James Dawes, an author of a book on the language of war, told Radio Free Europe. Beyond that, The Bunker avers, the U.S. military can’t call it “epic,” given that neither the U.S. public nor Congress (never mind U.S. allies) were consulted before it began. Without those key constituencies on board, any U.S. war, by definition, is decidedly unepic.

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

→ Wrong-to-repair

The defense industry’s fight against letting troops fix their own weapons — known as right-to-repair — is written into restrictive contracts designed to fatten contractor profits while reducing U.S. military readiness, David Roza explained April 3 at Task & Purpose.

→ Still a rough read…(PDF)

The number of U.S. service personnel who killed themselves fell by 11% between 2023 and 2024, the Pentagon reported March 31. Guns were the leading cause among those 471 suicides. “Most firearm deaths occur,” the annual assessment noted, “with a personally owned firearm.”

→ Meanwhile…

On April 2, the Pentagon reported that Defense Secretary Hegseth told base commanders to permit off-duty troops to “exercise their God-given right to keep and bear arms” while on their installations. He said he did that by signing an order letting them “carry a privately-owned firearm — with the presumption that it is necessary for personal protection.” If not necessarily for self-protection.

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