This Newspaper Editorial Should Be Making Pentagon Leaders Sweat |
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A striking convergence of events this week should have shaken the Pentagon’s overseers but so far hasn’t. On Wednesday, the Senate passed a $900 billion defense bill by an overwhelming 77–20 margin. A few days earlier, the New York Times devoted its entire 13-page Sunday Opinion section to argue that much of that budget is a colossal waste of money.
Titled “Overmatched: Why the U.S. Military Needs to Reinvent Itself,” the package catalogs the many ways in which the country’s war machine “is ill prepared for today’s global threats and revolutionary technologies.”
Its findings are based largely on an exclusive leak of a classified, comprehensive review of U.S. military power prepared and briefed in 2021 by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment—an analytical center that Donald Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has since eliminated. The review not only analyzed recent war games, mainly against China, but also traced “a decades-long decline in America’s ability to win a long war with a major power.”
The Times article attributes this decline—which many intelligence agencies and private defense analysts have also been following for many years—to several factors. Chief among them is the post–Cold War consolidation of more than 50 weapons manufacturers, some of them nimble competitors, into a handful of sluggish, overfed megacompanies. This trend has been matched by the calcification of the Pentagon bureaucracy supposedly monitoring the companies—and by the vested interests of legislators whose districts profit off the companies’ contracts........