Weapons of the Week #7: You Know What's Cool? A Trillion Dollars
The US defense budget is not quite there yet, but will be soon. Plus: the global defense ramps up, the Pope on killer AI, the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda factory, crazy rich drones, and more.
How much is a trillion dollars? That’s the question provoked by the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2025, which passed the House on Friday. Within the bipartisan consensus for massive defense budgets, there are any number of fights over priorities and culture war battles. The House bill would forbid the Defense Department from reimbursing service members for travel to obtain an abortion.1 It also “bans drag shows and other drag-related events” at military bases, removes coverage for gender-affirming healthcare, “prohibits funds to be used for certain executive orders on climate change,” “eliminate[s] all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) related offices inside the Defense Department. Failed amendments were proposed to eliminate funding for Ukraine, to stop the transfer of cluster munitions, and to condition NATO aid on higher defense spending in other member countries.
Because of the amendments, the bill passed by a narrow, nearly party-line vote of 217 to 199.2 In the Senate, the Armed Services Committee voted last week to release their version of the bill to the floor. Last year, right-wing amendments in the House NDAA were stripped out when the bill was reconciled with the Senate version. This year, Democratic Senate leaders say they expect to remove most, but not all, of the GOP amendments in the reconciled bill.
The Senate’s topline number comes in at $923.3 billion, of which $878.4 is for the Pentagon and most of the rest for the Department of Energy. Jack Reed (D-RI), the chair of the SASC, voted against advancing the bill “because it includes a funding increase that cannot be appropriated without breaking lawful spending caps.” The spending cap in question is part of the “Fiscal Responsibility Act” worked out last year between Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden.
SASC’s ranking GOP member, Roger Wicker (R-MS), successfully organized most of the committee to join him in an explicit challenge to the spending cap. This appears to be a PR stunt to draw attention to Wicker’s white paper proposing “a generational investment to revitalize our armed forces.” Wicker’s plan calls for increasing the defense share of GDP to 5%, compared to 3.5% today.
Between rising costs and the bipartisan commitment to “boxing China out,” it’s a good bet that we will see the first trillion dollar defense budget within two years. The novelty is more than nominal. Adjusted for inflation, WWII cost the US $5 trillion over 6 years. In the five years from 1981 to 1986, Reagan spent $3.2 trillion, adjusted for inflation. In either case, the yearly total was below one trillion. When Joseph Stiglitz called Iraq “the three trillion dollar war,” that was supposed to sound like a big number, not just the equivalent of three years of normal spending.
In 2016 Michael O’Hanlon—a prominent Iraq War hawk housed at Brookings—called for boosting the military budget, which to him meant “a national defense budget
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