Fixing the Pentagon’s gilded fortress
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
To understand why the United States is struggling to buy and field the weapons of the future, consider the trouble it had buying the most basic weapon of the past.
In 2011 the Army decided to get its soldiers new pistols. The odyssey that followed included a 350-page list of technical specifications, years of testing and a protracted battle on Capitol Hill between competing gun makers. The Pentagon won’t complete delivery until 2027 at the earliest. The Army could have raised an infantryman from birth to within two years of enlistment age in the time it would have taken to get him a new handgun.
The story of the Pentagon’s new pistols would be funny if it didn’t point to a serious problem at the heart of America’s military. The Department of Defense has built a gilded fortress of people and processes that is slow, wasteful and married to the past. Of all the obstacles to fielding the military that America needs, the Pentagon’s bureaucracy may be the hardest to overcome.
The military’s top ranks are dominated by pilots, captains and other commanders who are disdainful of new, cheap alternatives to fighter jets, warships and tanks. The byzantine system for buying and testing weapons isolates the military from the innovative parts of the U.S. economy. Congress underwrites the dysfunction with appropriations that are designed to deliver wins for its members rather than for national security.
Fixing this requires intervention. On Capitol Hill, the Senate leaders John Thune and Chuck Schumer should insist that the U.S. military serve the nation before it serves as a local jobs program. But the biggest reformer needs to be the president.
We say this with some reservations, given President Donald Trump’s destructive approach to government and his disregard for administrative competence. That said, he has shown an eagerness to disrupt old bureaucratic habits, and the Pentagon needs disruption. Trump should fix the Defense Department’s bureaucracy and provide political top cover for members of Congress to cut programs that their constituents support.
Reforming the military is a long-term proposition, and politicians who plan to run for president in 2028 and the aides who will advise them should make Pentagon reform a central part of the policy agenda they will soon begin compiling. Bureaucracy may sound boring, but the safety of the country — and of our democratic allies in Asia and Europe — depends on the federal government getting serious about how it finances and equips our military.
The problem starts with Congress. The proposed 2026 defense budget is loaded with pork for unnecessary programs. It has more than $300 million that the Defense Department didn’t ask for to buy and upgrade Humvees. There’s $240 million for the Gray Eagle drone, the Model T of unmanned aircraft that the Army labeled “obsolete.” Then there’s over $360 million for an Apache helicopter that the Army didn’t request. As the House and Senate work toward the country’s first trillion-dollar defense budget, more than $52 billion is for things members of Congress added, unbidden, to the Pentagon’s wish list, according to the independent budget watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense.
Congress manages to make things worse when it fails to spend money, too. For much of the past 15 years, lawmakers have passed budgets months late. That hobbles Pentagon planners, delaying investments on programs the military desperately needs.
Between the pork and the budget lapses, no one can keep track of where all the money goes. The Defense Department is the only major federal agency never to get a clean bill of health from outside accountants and has failed its last seven audits in as many years.
When the bean counters can follow the money, they often find it has been wasted.
Bases that the government targeted for closure more than a decade ago remain open. The military doesn’t have an adequate way to track spare parts, so instead of using what it already has, it just orders more. The services budgeted an estimated $1 billion more than they needed for parts in 2021 alone.
Worse than the waste is the status quo all that money strengthens and supports. The U.S. military, whose budget is larger than the military budgets of the next nine countries combined, oversees about 3 million people and controls some 82% of the U.S. government’s total physical assets. A 2020 RAND study found that officers who rose to leadership tended to be risk-averse and largely trained in positions such as captains and pilots. Unsurprisingly, it also found they were more likely to promote those with similar experiences and outlooks.
That status quo command structure helps protect the labyrinthine inner workings of the Pentagon. Companies that want to sell to the military must navigate more than 2,000 pages of the Federal Acquisition Regulation. The military’s testing and approval systems can then run to a decade for new weapons systems — a lifetime in an era of rapid change. Both hurdles favor the five major defense contractors and their armies of lobbyists, lawyers and former Pentagon officials.
The result is a tendency to adapt old weapons platforms rather than develop new ones. The Army is paying the country’s largest military contractor, Lockheed Martin, $43 million to convert Blackhawk helicopters, which were designed in the Vietnam era, to allow them to carry and launch drones. Much cheaper options, like off-the-shelf drones, never see the light of day.
The final problem: The system feeds on itself. Pentagon officials and congressional staff members have long migrated to the arms industry, getting well-paid jobs as board members and senior executives. That’s especially true of those at the top. By one count, more than 80% of four-star generals and admirals who retired between 2018 and 2023 went on to work in the defense industry.
So the spending continues on programs that won’t help America win the next war — and may ensure we lose it.
The Trump administration has attacked the problem with its signature headstrong disruption. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has tried to cancel multiple outdated weapons systems — the M10 Booker light tank, the Humvee replacement, overpriced aircraft — with resolve. In May, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth slashed by half the staff of the Pentagon’s infamously slow testing office. In November, he unveiled an ambitious plan to reform the military’s approach to buying weapons.
Fixing the broken bureaucracy, however, will take more than killing programs and firing people. After cutting the Pentagon’s testing staff, Hegseth left many requirements in place. An Oct. 15 memo he wrote requiring that any Pentagon employee receive permission before engaging with Congress undercuts his attempt to reform weapons purchases by making it harder to get new programs off the ground. Congress’s 2026 spending bill, introduced after many of Driscoll’s moves, was nevertheless larded up with failing programs.
Trump should push for real change, not just the appearance of it. He should force the Pentagon to experiment with market approaches to budgeting in place of centralized planning. He should force services to place bets on startup companies that get results rather than established ones that have mastered the broken system.