'Defense hawk' trashes Trump for spending $1 trillion on 'boondoggles'

Writing for the Washington Post, a conservative "defense hawk" confessed to feeling "sticker shock" over President Donald Trump's $1.5 trillion military funding request, trashing the Pentagon for trying to spend such an outlandish amount on "funding boondoggles and sweetheart deals."

Max Boot is a Russian-American author who has in the past written about walking away from the American conservative movement after Trump's takeover of the Republican Party. In his new piece for the Post, he wrote that he has "long been in favor of more military spending," even backing the $1 trillion budget that the Pentagon reached this year. Despite that, however, even he now balks at the $1.5 trillion requested for next year.

"In inflation-adjusted terms, that 50 percent increase would result in the largest defense budget ever — exceeding even the World War II peak," Boot explained. "And this comes at a time when the federal budget deficit is at $1.8 trillion and federal debt is nearly $40 trillion. On its current trajectory, public debt as a percentage of gross domestic product in 2030 will exceed the record set in 1946."

Boot further noted that Congress has not been "rushing to rubber-stamp the staggering defense budget," with the House passing a measure that would provide $1.15 trillion, and an extra $73 billion for the Iran war. The Senate has opposed this measure, however, meaning the military budget as of October 1 will likely be the $838 billion set by a continuing resolution. This state of affairs, Boot argued, is entirely the fault of Trump's administration.

"Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has no one but himself to blame," Boot continued. "He has been contemptuous of Congress, so it’s hardly surprising that its members are not rushing to hand him a massive pot of cash. If Hegseth wants to win bipartisan support for the defense budget — something that was taken for granted in years past — he needs to start briefing Senate Democrats, not just Republicans. And he needs to do a much better job of addressing lawmakers’ concerns about controversies such as the unexplained firings of general officers, the lawless attacks on alleged drug boats, the deteriorating conditions aboard an aircraft carrier deployed to the Middle East and the failed war with Iran."

He added: "No one denies the need to replenish missile stockpiles running low because of the Iran conflict, but the very fact that the United States has used up such a large part of its missile arsenal so quickly is a damning indictment of years of defense misappropriations that long predate President Donald Trump. You would think that $1 trillion would buy enough missiles to fight China or Russia, but it turns out that we don’t even have enough to fight Iran. The Iran war also revealed that the military was woefully ill-prepared to fight an enemy equipped with low-cost drones; Iran’s drones and missiles have done serious damage to U.S. military installations in the Middle East. It’s true that the new defense budget has a lot more money for drones and drone defenses, but it also includes massive boondoggles that can’t be justified on the merits.