Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Photo / Demetrius Freeman, The Washington Post
In the United States, the Pentagon has unveiled how it plans to spend US$1.5 trillion ($2.5t) requested in next year’s defence budget, even as some lawmakers cautioned the massive bill is unlikely to pass a sharply divided Congress.
The nearly 50% jump in spending would fund many of President Donald Trump’s new military projects, including tens of billions for the Navy’s future “Golden Fleet” battleship and F-47 Air Force fighter jet, as well as US$18 billion for the “Golden Dome” missile defence – a multilayered protection against ballistic missiles that includes space sensors, ground-launched interceptors and radars.
But the request will face opposition. Some Republicans have voiced concern that the jaw-dropping size of the Pentagon budget will be hard to sell at home to voters without cuts to offset the spending. Democrats, meanwhile, have taken issue with many of the big-ticket items like Golden Dome and the battleship, saying they are vanity projects instead of critical defence priorities.
At present, about US$350b of the total being requested by the Trump administration is being pursued through a legislative process called reconciliation, which allows that spending to be passed by the Senate with a simple 51-vote majority. Last year, the same mechanism was used to boost the Pentagon’s requested US$890b budget to more than US$1t.
But programmes funded in this manner do not become part of the Pentagon’s base budget or Congress’ regular process, and have become highly politicised.
One Republican Senate staffer said there’s an appetite and need to boost the defence budget, but that it’s facing heartburn because of the way it is being pursued.
“There is certainly a desire to spend more on defence. How that happens is up to us, not the administration,” the staffer said, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide additional context to the budget negotiations.
The budget also earmarks nearly $75b for building up the military’s arsenal of unmanned weapon systems, including unmanned surface vessels, combat and refuelling aircraft and one-way attack drones – as well as counter-drone technology. Drones have become ubiquitous on the battlefield in Ukraine and have proven to be a significant threat to US service members, including an Iranian Shahed drone attack in Kuwait that killed six service members in the first days of the conflict.
The budget also allocates billions of dollars to replenish the arsenal of long-range strike and air defence missiles. The military’s stockpiles were already critically low before the Iran war, which has seen a significant expenditure of expensive guided weapons. For some weapons systems, the 2027 request seeks 10 to 15 times the levels of last year’s procurement.
The Navy, for example, is looking to buy 785 Tomahawk missiles next year – and almost 4000 over the next five years – but only purchased 88 in the past two years combined. The Army is asking for more than US$20b to purchase more replacement Terminal High Altitude Air Defence (THAAD) and Patriot missile interceptors, which have seen substantial burn rates in both Ukraine’s defence and in the Middle East.
Though the budget would substantially increase funding for missile replenishment, it is unclear whether firms such as Raytheon, which produces the Tomahawk and Patriot, will be able to meet the numbers sought.
“Across our industrial base, this is absolutely a challenge,” said Rear Admiral Ben Reynolds, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for the budget. “We need and expect Raytheon to invest very, very heavily now to be able to ramp up production.”
If passed, the US$1.5t budget would be the largest Pentagon request as a percentage of GDP since the Cold War. Trump announced the massive increase in January on social media, saying that it would allow the Pentagon to build “the ‘Dream Military’ that we have long been entitled to” and would meet quickly evolving threats in space, cyber and drone-based warfare.
Democrats have mostly dismissed the request as a Trump wishlist, pledging to fight the inflated budget and the cuts to domestic spending it would require.
“I don’t think it’s going anywhere,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a member of the Senate panel on defence spending, said in an interview.
Some Democrats have signalled they are open to raising the Pentagon budget – noting the US military is critically low on munitions and weapons platforms required to deter adversaries like Russia and China – but object to the President’s signature programmes.
“The reason it’s US$1.5t is there’s all this stuff that we don’t need and in some cases will not work,” said Senator Mark Kelly, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, referring to Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile defence programme.
Many Senate Republicans have rejected the idea that the surge in spending is wasteful.
“We have justified every single penny of that” request, said Senator Roger Wicker, the Armed Services Committee’s chairman.
Senator John Neely Kennedy said that Congress would take the administration’s request as a signal but not follow it line by line. “A President’s budget proposal ... is always instructive, in some cases persuasive but it is never dispositive,” he said.
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