Dan Grazier
Members of Congress are likely to increase defense spending by $150 billion through the budget reconciliation process. When added to the Trump administration’s fiscal year 2026 Department of Defense base budget proposal, Pentagon spending will total over $1 trillion a year.
There are two factors that virtually guarantee that defense spending will never dip below that mark again.
The first is political. If a future budget proposal dips below the $1 trillion mark, there will be howls about national security cuts, and few politicians are willing to weather those attacks.
The second reason is more practical. The reconciliation boost includes development funding for a slew of new weapons programs — the F-47, Collaborative Combat Aircraft, the B-21 strategic bomber, Sentinel ballistic missiles, underwater drones, hypersonic missiles and more. The services aren’t buying these weapons yet, just paying to develop them. As expensive as they are now, they will become vastly more expensive in coming years when they go into production.
This is the beginning of a Pentagon spending “time bomb.” New programs currently entering into development will be vastly more expensive than they initially appear as they transition into the production and sustainment phases in coming years.
The American people are now dealing with the explosion of the last Pentagon spending time bomb, the one that started on Sept. 11, 2001. We now pay more on the military than at any time since the end of World War II. Even at the height of the war on terror, with American troops fighting in two separate theaters, the military wasn’t spending as much in real terms as it does now.
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