Defense Industry-funded Think Tanks
Like the Hudson Institute, Apparently
William Hartung / Responsible Statecraft

(August 22, 2024) — America’s commitment to arm Israel and Ukraine while attempting to stockpile large quantities of weapons for a potential war with China is putting strains on America’s weapons manufacturing base, leading many influential policy makers and corporate officials to suggest measures that would super-size this nation’s already enormous military-industrial complex.

This argument is taken to the extreme in a new piece in The National Interest by Arthur Herman of the arms contractor-funded Hudson Institute, entitled “Three Cheers for the Military-Industrial Complex.” The article repeats many of the stock arguments of current advocates of higher Pentagon spending while throwing around misleading statistics and dubious assumptions along the way.

Myth number one — routinely put forward by today’s proponents of throwing more money at the Pentagon — is that the US military has somehow been neglected over the past few decades, and that therefore we need to inject hundreds of billions of dollars in additional spending into the arms sector to restore our defenses to an acceptable level. This argument has appeared in a recent report by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) on the need for a renewed policy of “peace through strength,” as well as in an analysis from a congressional commission charged with assessing the state of America’s defenses.

Both reports — as well as Herman’s article — are based on a false premise.

Pentagon’s Annual Budget Nearing $1 Trillion
The Pentagon budget is rapidly spiraling towards $1 trillion per year, one of the highest levels since World War II. And once other military-related items are taken into account — from military aid and veterans’ affairs to the nation’s vast intelligence gathering network — the figure for total national security spending is more like $1.5 trillion. This comes after a decade in which the Pentagon received well over $6 trillion, roughly the same as was spent during the 10 years that included the peaks of the Iraq and Afghan wars.

The above-mentioned numbers are mind-boggling, but the main point is that recent and proposed spending is far more than enough to defend the United States and its allies, if it is spent more wisely and managed more effectively.

The bottom line is that the Pentagon needs more spending discipline, not more spending. For example, it is the only federal agency that is unable to pass an audit, a sad state of affairs that means that the department doesn’t even have an accurate count of how much equipment or spare parts it possesses, or in some cases even where these items are being stored.

Nor, according to former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, does the Pentagon know how many private contractors it employs, although rough estimates suggest that the number is well over half a million people. These management failures waste untold billions of dollars, year in and year out.

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