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I’m old enough to remember when Republicans criticized Democrats for “throwing money at a problem.” Now here comes President Donald Trump, proposing a military budget for next year of $1.5 trillion, and most GOP lawmakers are just nodding.

If passed, this would be, even when adjusted for inflation, the United States’ largest defense budget ever—larger than the amount spent (again, adjusting for inflation) in any year during World War II, when the nation’s entire economy was geared to war.

Joe Biden was the first president who, just two years ago, nudged a military budget up against the $1 trillion mark. The world is a turbulent place, to the point where almost nobody in politics proposes cutting defense spending. But is the world so turbulent, and is our position in it so precarious, that we need to increase the budget by almost 50 percent in a single year? Nobody in the Trump administration has made the case, and it’s particularly puzzling, given that Trump’s “National Security Strategy” proposed reducing America’s security commitments abroad.

Let’s say we do need to buy a lot more weapons. Are the weapons he proposes to buy in larger quantities the sorts of weapons we need? And to clarify matters, most of this $1.5 trillion will be spent on weapons. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth touts that the budget includes a 7 percent pay hike for members of the armed forces (about twice the national inflation rate), but the total proposed cost for military personnel is just $205 billion (about 13 percent of the defense budget), which exceeds this year’s amount by only $8 billion.

By contrast, Trump and Hegseth propose boosting the budget for weapons procurement from $223 billion to $413 billion—a staggering 85 percent increase. Research and development for new weapons rise almost as steeply, from $210 billion to $344 billion—a 64 percent increase.

There is almost no precedent for such a surge.

The Pentagon has not yet released all the line items in the budget, so it’s hard to break down these figures in much detail. Some of the growth........

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