Earlier this month, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood in front of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees to defend the Trump administration’s record-breaking US$1.5 trillion military budget proposal for FY2027.
According to the White House, this 66% year-over-year increase signals a renewed commitment to “defeating any adversary” and will deliver what President Trump has referred to as a “Dream Military.”
This blueprint will not pass Congress unscathed. However, the larger problem is that the Trump administration’s budget request reflects Washington’s aimless and self-defeating grand strategy.
According to its supporters, a massive military buildup will help the US deter and counter “complex [threats] across multiple theaters,” including those posed by a rising China and a resurgent Russia. Washington may also reassure its allies and partners and incentivize them to double down on recently initiated defense budget increases, in part under American impetus.
The White House proposal’s 5-7% salary increases may attenuate the Pentagon’s recruitment and retention challenges. Its massive allocations to key munitions, missile defense and other combat assets cover capabilities partially exhausted by the wars in Ukraine and Iran.
Likewise, the $65.8 billion envisioned for shipbuilding addresses a domain where the US is struggling with aging, overstretched assets and falling badly behind China. Proponents also argue that, although America’s defense budget would rise from 3% to 4.5% of GDP, that share stood at 8% in the 1960s, 6% in the 1980s and averaged 4.8% during the Cold War.
Admittedly, securing funding for this budget request will be a major challenge. The White House wants Congress to appropriate $1.15 trillion through the regular appropriations process and $350 billion through a reconciliation process that Senate Republicans can theoretically secure.
However, Congress rejected many of the government’s budgetary demands last year. Republicans are divided about spending priorities. Some of them have resented the executive’s lack of transparency about its war in Iran. Above all, many oppose its proposed social cuts, which could hurt them in the midterms.
Indeed, the White House envisions offsetting its military spending by a 10% reduction ($73 billion) in healthcare, social services, and other sectors that Trump believes states should provide. Meanwhile, Democratic gains in November would further complicate this defense buildup.
Yet the White House’s blueprint could weaken America even if only partially implemented.
First, it would negatively affect the country’s financial health. Within a decade, a $1.5 trillion military budget could add $5.8 trillion to $6.9 trillion to America’s federal debt, which currently stands at $39 trillion and would likely climb further due to soaring Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest payments.
Although supporters counter that a military buildup could stimulate the economy and revitalize America’s manufacturing, defense spending has mixed long-term growth outcomes and generates far lower employment returns than other sectors, such as education and healthcare.
Second, the Pentagon would struggle to translate skyrocketing expenditures into valuable combat capabilities, especially at scale, and risk wasting significant resources.
A massive buildup may overlook the DoD’s vulnerable supply chains, flawed procurement processes and weak industrial base and could worsen its inability to prioritize the capabilities it truly needs.
In fact, it may exacerbate mismanagement at the Pentagon, the only one of 24 agencies that has failed to pass a single audit since Congress established this requirement in 2018, and which cannot even properly undergo that process because of its failing accounting systems.
And although this buildup may hope to attract newcomers, the five corporations that dominate the US defense ecosystem would likely capture most of the benefits thanks to their existing assets, insider knowledge and lobbying power.
This would compound those companies’ conservative approach, anti-competitive practices, political influence and prioritization of shareholder returns over capital investments and R&D, thereby penalizing both innovation and long-term vision.
Third, as it compounds its pursuit of military primacy, the White House’s defense budget proposal could lead the US to repeat some of the worst strategic blunders of the post-Cold War era.
For instance, Washington may continue to assume that its security partnerships and foreign military installations are inherently valuable, rather than acknowledging that some may yield limited strategic and economic influence, entail high financial costs, incentivize allied freeriding and risk entanglement in local conflicts.
The new defense budget blueprint could entrench the prevailing assumption that military tools can solve all foreign policy issues and that America’s military can perform nearly any task beyond the battlefield.
Thus, as illustrated by the 30% cuts envisioned for the State Department and other international programs, Washington may further neglect alternative policy options, including diplomacy and development aid, in favor of coercion.
By downplaying the security concerns of great-power competitors and the need for accommodation, the US, whose proposed defense budget increase alone nearly matches the combined defense spending of China and Russia, may incentivize those states to balance even more strongly against Washington.
By glorifying the country’s superior material capabilities, the White House’s defense budget proposal could lead US leaders to overlook the deeper importance of tactical prowess, operational effectiveness and, above all, strategy.
For instance, it cultivates the same faith in technology that led Washington to wrongly surmise that it could overcome warfare’s inherent unpredictability, keep costs in blood and treasure to a minimum and master the inherently uncontrollable geographic, political, psychological, social and cultural dimensions of warfare in the recent past.
More broadly, Trump’s budget blueprint could fuel Washington’s complacency about its ability to defeat or coerce adversaries, leading to a forgetfulness that even its most celebrated victories were achieved as a late entrant and secondary combatant (e.g., World War I and II) or against small, poor, exhausted and isolated powers.
It would also forget that some American interventions (e.g., Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan) went awfully awry, largely due to a hubristic underestimation of war’s complexity and of the enemy’s commitment, skills and resilience.
Recent attempts to defeat Russia in Ukraine, to counter China’s rise in the Indo-Pacific with a military-centric strategy and to destroy Iran’s Islamic regime do not inspire optimism about the future.
Yet the White House defense budget proposal may perpetuate America’s sprawling industrial-military complex, thereby nurturing threat-inflation patterns that will heighten the strategic and political temptation to pursue foreign interventions.
Instead of envisioning a self-defeating buildup, the Trump administration should revive the prudent, restrained vision it initially promised, acknowledging the inherent limits of military power and the steep costs exacted by recent US strategic blunders on the American people.
Thomas P. Cavanna is non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and collaborating academic visitor at Lehigh University. Follow him on LinkedIn and X.