Debunking the Myth of “Peace Through Strength”
Throwing an extra $150 billion at the Pentagon while gutting the State Department and USAID will likely lead to more instability
Even as President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth talk of a post-World War II record $1-trillion Pentagon budget request for fiscal year 2026, majorities in both houses of Congress are seeking a multiyear, $150-billion plus up to the department’s resources via a separate route known as reconciliation, a procedure that allows the majority to push through legislation without fear of a filibuster.
Both houses of Congress are pressing a reconciliation bill that would add that money to the Pentagon budget over 10 years, with the bulk of it being spent in the first four. The House Armed Services Committee passed the $150-billion budget boost by a 35-21 vote just yesterday, with five Democrats joining Republicans to pass the bill.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) insists the $150-billion increase is absolutely essential. “This legislation represents a generational upgrade for our nation’s defense capabilities, including historic investments in new technology,” he said. “This is about building the future of American defense, achieving peace through strength, and ultimately deterring war.”
Downgrading diplomacy
The glaring oversight in Wicker’s ode to “peace through strength” is any realistic assessment of what America needs to defend against in the coming period. If China, Iran, North Korea and other adversaries are addressed primarily through military buildups and tough talk, the end result is more likely to be arms racing and instability, not any sort of “peace” worth the name. And the Trump administration’s dismantling of the basic infrastructure of U.S. diplomacy—from decimating the U.S. Agency for International Development to severely degrading State Department bureaus that deal with democracy and human rights—will make it all the more difficult to craft a more balanced national security policy that promotes diplomacy and economic engagement first, with military instruments in a supporting role.
The president’s belief that he can run diplomacy with special envoys and his own judgment while sidelining career diplomats has its limits, the most important of which is whether he has the patience and attention to detail needed to forge sustainable agreements. Without a more balanced foreign policy tool kit, Wicker’s “peace through strength” slogan is more likely to promote increased tension and unnecessary wars than it is to ensure American security.
Dissing the troops and vets
This is no time to throw more money at a weapons manufacturing base that is already maxed out. Any additional money pumped into this system is likely to be wasted. The only beneficiaries will be weapons contractors, which would be glad to accept the new funds whether they can use them effectively or not.
Increasing weapons spending at the expense of veterans and military personnel is precisely the wrong approach. An effective military depends on well-trained, well-motivated people. Preferencing hardware over the needs of current and former members of the military is both misguided and potentially harmful to the morale of the force going forward.
While contractors are poised to get a multibillion-dollar payday, veterans and military personnel will be neglected, or worse. Only about 6 percent of the $150 billion extra proposed for the Pentagon budget would go to help military personnel. As for veterans, even before the reconciliation bill began to be debated, the administration had announced plans to cut 80,000 jobs at the Veterans Administration, which is already struggling to get benefits to former service members in a timely fashion. And since the vast majority of VA personnel are involved with providing health care, those services are likely to be harder to come by. Other blows to veterans services include moves that would reduce staffing at suicide hotlines and defund basic research relevant to their health and safety.
Bringing home the bacon
The biggest increases in the proposed reconciliation bill would go to shipbuilding ($34 billion), the president’s Golden Dome missile defense initiative ($25 billion), munitions ($21 billion), nuclear weapons ($13 billion), emerging military technology ($14 billion), and “air superiority” ($7 billion).
In short, something for everyone, if you happen to be a weapons contractor.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the two biggest categories of proposed new spending would disproportionately funnel revenue to companies in the home states of the two main proponents of the bill, the aforementioned chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker, and Alabama Republican Mike Rogers, chair of the House Armed Services Committee. HII’s Ingalls Shipbuilding employs 11,000 workers at its Pascagoula, Mississippi, facility, and Huntsville, Alabama, is known as “Rocket City” because of the large cluster of companies that build missiles and missile defense systems there. The two men also have received ample campaign funding from weapons makers. In the 2024 election cycle alone, the industry gave Rogers more than $535,000 and Wicker more than $417,000, according to OpenSecrets.org.
The main winners from increased shipbuilding funds would be Virginia (HII corporation’s Newport News Facility that builds aircraft carriers and attack submarines), Connecticut (General Dynamics’ Electric Boat ballistic missile submarine plant), and Maine (General Dynamics Bath Shipyards plant).
Funds for the administration’s extremely ambitious, ill-conceived Golden Dome missile defense system would go to such old guard contractors as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing—which already make interceptors, satellites and communications systems—as well as to emerging military tech firms such as Anduril, which has won contracts for anti-drone technology. And in a potential conflict of interest given the central role Elon Musk has played in shaping the federal budget in general and the Pentagon budget in particular, SpaceX is a frontrunner to take the lead in building the Golden Dome system, according to a recent Reuters report.
More opportunities to waste money
As Congress considers showering the Golden Dome project with taxpayer funds, members should consider that the vast majority of independent scientific experts believe that a foolproof defense system against all forms of missile attack—especially high speed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)—may be physically impossible, not to mention exorbitantly expensive. As physicist Laura Grego at the Union of Concerned Scientists has noted, “It has been long understood that defending against a sophisticated nuclear arsenal is technically and economically unfeasible.”
And allocating more money for nuclear weapons when systems like Northrop Grumman’s Sentinel ICBM are 81 percent over their original cost estimates would be throwing good money after bad.
Meanwhile, given Boeing’s dismal record of performance problems and cost overruns on both civilian airliners and defense systems like the Osprey aircraft and the KC-46 refueling tanker, accelerating spending on the company’s new F-47 combat aircraft program is not prudent.
The proposal to spend tens of billions more on shipbuilding runs in the face of the difficulty of recruiting sailors to man any new ships and the shortage of skilled workers in key sectors of the shipbuilding industry. These shortfalls cannot be rectified overnight, so the shipbuilding funds are not likely to generate new capacity in a cost efficient manner.
Given that the Pentagon and its contractor network are having a hard time spending existing funds well, Congress should think twice before sending more taxpayer money their way.
We need a smarter, more realistic defense plan grounded in a well-compensated, well-trained defense force far more than we need to give additional billions to weapons makers that are already struggling to produce affordable and capable defense systems. Until and unless we have a vigorous national debate about what our strategy should be going forward and what balance of tools are needed to carry it out, “peace through strength” will remain an empty slogan that could cause more problems than it solves.
William D. Hartung is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author, with Ben Freeman, of the forthcoming book, “The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives Us Into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home” (Bold Type Books).
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You had me at Hello. Well written, persuasive. Our military is bloated, and the Defense Budget is ridiculous.