Revelations From The Pentagon’s 2027 Fiscal Year Budget Request Briefings

“NATIONAL DEFENSE MAGAZINE” By Stew Magnuson, Editor In Chief

“Where  officials from the Air Force, Navy and Army intend to spend what they called a “historic and once in a generation” $1.5 trillion budget so they will not have to make compromises between modernization and readiness. They can have it all.”

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

“The Defense Department in 2025 did not hold a big rollout for the fiscal year 2026 budget request.

This year marked a return to normalcy as the Pentagon’s acting comptroller and officials from the Air Force, Navy and Army all sat down with reporters in four separate briefings to explain where they intend to spend what they called a “historic and once in a generation” $1.5 trillion budget.

The headline: the unprecedented funding boost will allow the services to not have to make compromises between modernization and readiness. They can have it all.

The officials also noted that the budget was in the works long before the outset of Operation Epic Fury, and the war did not have any impact on the budget request. Any additional expenses would be included in a reconciliation bill. How much would be in that pot is still unknown, they said, but its passing would push the $1.5 trillion mark even higher.

Here are 10 other interesting tidbits from a day of press briefings.

• Boosting the defense industrial base was a reoccurring theme throughout the briefings. Part of that is delivering on the promise of multi-year orders. “We’re going to give them a massive order, we’re going to sustain it over time, and then we’re going to have industry put forward the money to actually invest in their facilities,” said Jules Hurst III, performing the duties of the undersecretary of war-comptroller. The caveat is if industry fails to deliver on increased production, “there will be penalties for them,” he warned.

• Since prime contractor Lockheed Martin only has so much capacity to deliver F-35 jet fighters, the budget prioritizes purchases for U.S. forces. The number slated for foreign customers will be reduced. Those numbers are to be determined.

• The budget funds a study to look at the possibility of building a fifth public shipyard and to identify possible locations.

• The Marine Corps remains committed to buying the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle while the Army’s decision in 2025 to end its procurement stands, although it might procure a few for specialized missions such as counter-drone operations, service officials said. Ironic, since it was one of the few Army-led acquisition programs that pretty much came in on time and on budget.

• The Navy is already spending $837 million in the current budget cycle on research and development for the so-called Trump-class battleship, with a goal of beginning construction in 2028. The service is seeking an additional $3.9 billion in R&D and $43.5 billion over the next five years to build the first three ships. A Navy official pushed back on the narrative of it being a “Trump vanity project” and reiterated the talking point that the service had already identified the need for a ship larger than guided-missile destroyers.

• Two recent announcements came too late for the Department of the Air Force to factor them into budget documents. The first was the un-cancellation — again — of the A-10 Thunderbolt II, better known as the Warthog, which has seen action in Operation Epic Fury. Its success there bought the venerated airframe a reprieve until at least 2030. The Space Force also finally pulled the plug on the OCX program, the ground segment for the new generation of GPS satellites. After more than 15 years of development, it came to an ignoble end. What comes next for these two programs is to be determined, an official said.

• The Air Force’s Next-Generation Aerial Refueling System is not a thing anymore. There is $13 million in the request for a new initiative called “Advanced Tanker Systems,” which will look at alternatives “to offer more options … and to make sure that our future advanced tanker systems are more resilient and can operate in contested environments,” a service official said.

• At long last, the Army’s two-decade quest to field a Bradley Fighting Vehicle replacement seems to be coming to an end, as the XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle moves out of the research-and-development account and into procurement. The budget request has $547 million for the first 19 vehicles, along with the goal of procuring a total of 326 by 2031.

• Similar to the long journey to replace the Bradley, the end is in sight for the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter replacement — formerly known as the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft. Now known as MV-75 Cheyenne II, the Army budget request of $2.1 billion for the program calls for accelerated delivery of the aircraft with a goal of equipping the first unit by 2030.

• The overall Defense Department briefing touted big investments in the Golden Dome missile defense shield. But details on how much was being spent by the individual services — particularly the Space Force and Air Force contributions — were not forthcoming, with all budget questions being referred to Golden Dome Director Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein. Missile Defense Agency budget briefings have been held in years’ past, but not this one.”

Top 10 Interesting Revelations from the Pentagon’s 2027 Fiscal Year Budget Request Briefings

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Stew Magnuson is the Editor in Chief of National Defense Magazine

The Awful Arithmetic Of Our Wars

“DEFENSE ONE” By Peter W. Singer

“The math of current battlefields remains literally orders of magnitude beyond what our budget plans to spend, our industry plans to build, our acquisitions system is able to contract, and thus what our military will deploy.”

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 “At the lowest point of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln characterized the core factor between victory and defeat as finding a general who understood the “awful arithmetic” of war. War is a contest of blood and treasure; each can, and must, ultimately be counted and measured. It has been the same for every conflict before and after. 

Yet this arithmetic is constantly changing, and never faster than right now. If the United States cannot update its calculations to properly reflect our new era, our failure will not just cost us blood and treasure, but will drive us toward defeat.

Cost imposition has long been a tenet of U.S. strategy. During the Cold War, the U.S. launched expensive programs such as stealth and Star Wars not just for their tactical value, but to send a strategic signal to the Kremlin: neither your economy nor your war machine can keep up. Gorbachev, persuaded, gave up the decades-long competition with the U.S. 

The very same concept of cost imposition was also elemental to the most celebrated operations of the past year. In Operation Spider’s Web, Ukraine used inexpensive drones, reportedly costing less than $500 each, to damage strategic bombers worth many millions of dollars, degrading Russia’s long-range strike capabilities for years to come. Similarly, in Operation Rising Lion, cheap Israeli drones took out Iranian surface-to-air missiles and radars, paving the way for the destruction of command and nuclear facilities worth tens of billions of dollars. In each, the tactical became the strategic through new operational concepts that leveraged the new math of new technologies. 

Now contrast this with our own approaches, which overwhelmingly rely on sophisticated but costly overmatch.

The most lauded U.S. operation of 2025 was Operation Midnight Hammer, our followup to Rising Lion. One estimate put its cost at $196 million, from combining B-2 bomber’s nearly $160,000 per flight hour and Tomahawk missiles’ rough price of $1.87 million apiece. (It does not count the initial purchase of the seven B-2 Bombers that cost $2.1 billion each, nor the $4.3 billion submarine that launched the missiles.) 

Perhaps it was worth spending one-fifth of a billion dollars to damage Iranian nuclear facilities, but the numbers in Operation Rough Rider—the strikes against the Houthis last spring—illustrate the problem more starkly. The Pentagon spent roughly $5 billion on munitions and operating costs to stop attacks on Red Sea shipping, which simply started back up this month.

The same awful arithmetic haunts the current operations in the Caribbean against the Venezuela-based, government-connected Cartel de los Soles. The entity was recently designated by the Trump administration as a foreign terrorist organization, as part of its argument that US forces are engaged in an “armed conflict.” The cartel was declared by the Department of Justice to be the hub of a cocaine transport network, shipping a reported street value of between $6.25 billion and $8.75 billion in drugs (the cartel gets an unknown, but clearly lesser, percentage of that overall value in actual profit). 

To battle this foe, the United States has assembled a fleet that cost at least $40 billion to buy in total. The carrier Ford alone cost $4.7 billion to develop and $12.9 billion to build. The fleet is backed by at least 83 aircraft of assorted types, including 10 F-35Bs ($109 million apiece), seven Predator drones ($33 million each), three P-8 Poseidons ($145 million per), and at least one AC-130J gunship ($165 million). To be sure, all of these assets will continue to serve long after Operation Southern Spear is wound down, but this is how we are using the investment. 

But the current cost of operations and expendables hardly tells a better story. The Ford alone costs about $8 million a day to run. The F-35s and AC-130J cost about $40,000 per flight hour; the P-8s, about $30,000; the Reapers, about $3,500.

Analysis of the strike videos on the 21 boats show that U.S. forces have fired AGM-176 Griffins ($127,333 apiece in 2019), Hellfires (running about $150,000 to $220,000) and potentially GBU-39B Small Diameter Bombs ($40,000). In some cases, they are reportedly firing four munitions per strike: “twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it.”

All this is arrayed to sink motorboats, 21 at last report. One of the boats was described by Pentagon officials as a 39-foot Flipper-type vessel with four 200-horsepower engines. New ones go for about $400,000 on Boats.com, but the old, open top motorbots in the videos are obviously well below that in cost. Their crews have been reported as making $500 per trip.

Put in comparison, the cost of the US naval fleet deployed is at least five times what the cartel makes in smuggling. The air fleet deployed costs at least another two times more.  It is roughly 5,000 times the cost of the suspected drug boats that have been destroyed. Indeed, just the cost of operating the Ford off Venezuela for a single day has still not yet equaled the maximum cost the cartel paid for the boats it has lost.

In the air, the U.S. military spent roughly 66,000 times more to buy each unmanned drone in the operation than the cartel paid each man that the unmanned drones killed. The US spent between 80 to 300 times more for each bomb or missile it has used than the cartel paid each man killed by those bombs or missiles. 

The math is arguably even worse when we’re on the defense. 

In September, a wave of 19 Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace.. The Gerbera-type drones cost as little as $10,000—so cheap that they are often used as decoys to misdirect and overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses. NATO countered with a half-billion-dollar response force of F-35s, F-16s, AWACS radar planes, and helicopters, which shot down four of the drones with $1.6-million AMRAAM missiles. 

This is a bargain compared to how challenging U.S. forces have found it to defend against Houthi forces using this same cheap tech. Our naval forces have fired a reported 120 SM-2, 80 SM-6, and 20 SM-3 missiles, costing about $2.1 million, $3.9 million, and over $9.6 million each. And this is to defend against a group operating out of the 187th-largest economy in the world, able to fire mere hundreds of drones and missiles. Our supposed pacing challenge, China, has an economy that will soon be the largest in the world and a combined national industrial and military acquisition plan to be able to fire munitions by the millions. 

Even in America’s best-laid plans for future battlefields, there is a harsh reality that is too often ignored. The math of current battlefields remains literally orders of magnitude beyond what our budget plans to spend, our industry plans to build, our acquisitions system is able to contract, and thus what our military will deploy. 

As a point of comparison, Ukraine is on pace to build, buy, and use over four million drones this year. The U.S. Army, meanwhile, aims to acquire 50,000 drones next year—about 1.25 percent of the Ukrainian total. In its most optimistic plans, it hopes to be able to acquire 1 million drones “within the next two to three years.” ​​ 

When you spend orders of magnitude more than your foe, you are in what is known as a “losing equation.” And if we don’t change this math, we will need an update to Norm Augustine’s infamous “law” of defense acquisitions. Back in 1979, Augustine calculated that if the Pentagon couldn’t curtail the cost curve of its purchasing, by 2054 we wouldn’t be able to afford a single plane. 

The 2025 version is that if we don’t master the new math of the battlefield, we won’t be able to afford to win a single battle.”

The awful arithmetic of our wars

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

P.W. Singer is Strategist at New America and the author of multiple books on technology and security, including Wired for War, Ghost Fleet, Burn-In, and LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media.

What It Means To Kill in Combat

“DEFENSE ONE” By Phil Zabriskie

“The killing a country does through its soldiers is part of its fabric and identity. The less it is examined, the less a country will know about itself, its impulses, and the impact of what it has trained and dispatched its sons and daughters to do.“

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“If a war fails to achieve its stated objectives—as Vietnam did—it can make the reasons for killing even harder to accept. Some recent vets of Iraq and Afghanistan, said the psychiatrist, are already asking, “What was it all for?”

This is not to cast troops who kill in combat as victims. They should carry the weight of what they did. But they should not be forced to carry it alone. Their leadership, from the company level all the way to the Chief of Staff, is part of every killing that’s carried out. So too are the civilian architects of these wars. And the rest of us bear some responsibility as well.

The killing a country does through its soldiers is part of its fabric and identity. The less it is examined, the less a country will know about itself, its impulses, and the impact of what it has trained and dispatched its sons and daughters to do.

A more honest conversation about what war is and what war does is a good place to start. Those who [called] for boots on the ground in Iraq, Syria, or anywhere else, should be first to have it. They should understand and explain exactly what it [means] if troops are deployed, and they should press the military to give its charges tools that not only help them kill when they should, but also how to live with the killing they’ve done later in life.

More counseling must be made available as well, as part of the broader overhaul of the VA, and steps taken to remove the stigma that still exists around seeking help for the psychological wounds of war. And no one should ask a veteran if he or she has killed anybody unless they really want to hear the answer—and are prepared to listen.”

What It Means To Kill In Combat

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Phil Zabriskie, a writer living in New York, is the author of The Kill Switch. Previously, he lived and worked throughout Asia and the Middle East, including in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The federal Commission of Fine Arts is set on Thursday to review plans for a hulking 250-foot “triumphal arch” purportedly to celebrate the #US’ 250th birthday, one of several unwelcome construction projects #Trump has conjured up in an effort to leave his garish mark on Washington.

Trump has reason to be optimistic about the fate of the review: He fired all of the panel’s members in October & replaced them with allies.

#architecture #GovernmentSpending #GovernmentWaste
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/15/us/politics/trump-dc-usa-triumphal-arch.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share