This Report Should Be Setting Off Alarm Bells in the Pentagon

This Report Should Be Setting Off Alarm Bells in the Pentagon

Fred Kaplan

Fri, December 19, 2025 at 4:41 PM UTC

6 min read

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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 and who therefore want to protect their monopoly status.

The piece details two symptoms of the resulting stagnation, one large, one small. In 2020 the leadership of the U.S. Navy—which has focused these past decades on building a small number of large, overly complex, increasingly vulnerable warships—outlined a plan to buy a fleet of small warships, based on ready-made European designs. Then, the big contractors and their allies in the bureaucracy and Congress took over the project, resisted all innovations, and lapsed into the same patterns. Last month, after five years, $3.5 billion, and zero ships built, the project was canceled.

On a more mundane and thus in some ways more gasp-worthy scale, the Times detailed the Army’s plan in 2011 to get its soldiers new pistols. It should have been simple, but the officers found themselves embarking on a soul-crushing “odyssey” entailing “a 350-page list of technical specifications, years of testing, and a protracted battle on Capitol Hill between competing gun makers.” The Pentagon now estimates that the weapon will be delivered to troops in the field in 2027 “at the earliest.” It will have taken at least 16 years to develop, build, and deploy a pistol.

Meanwhile, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars in the defense budget (much of it spilled on large warships, warplanes, nuclear missiles, and other “legacy” weapons), defense industries find themselves unable to build large numbers of weapons that in wartime are used in large numbers.

For instance, in June’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the U.S. fired 30 Tomahawk cruise missiles. Each missile will cost $2 million to replace. Just one company, Raytheon, makes them, and these days, it’s unable to build new ones as fast as the military is firing them against some target or other.

Last year, the Pentagon was close to negotiating a partnership deal with a Japanese firm so the two together could make a lot more cruise missiles. Early on in the Trump administration, the deal fell apart, mainly because Raytheon, which wanted to retain sole ownership, found allies in the White House and the Pentagon who wanted to preserve the “America First” monopoly.

The same resistance is blocking co-production of ships (South Korea has more shipyards than the United States, but there’s no appetite politically to farm out shipbuilding contracts to non-American firms) and even of artillery shells. The war in Ukraine is showing a need for millions of these shells to sustain a long battle. European countries are cooperating to supply Ukrainian soldiers with these munitions, but the Pentagon is ignoring the lesson for long-term production demands.

The Times series overstates some points. Most broadly, simulated war games, such as the ones that informed the Pentagon’s Net Assessment study, are designed not so much to predict the outcome of a war as to highlight vulnerabilities, shortcomings, and imbalances so that commanders can make adjustments.

Still, the games and the study, which the Times package summarizes, emphasized a lot of shortcomings—and noted that the Pentagon is doing little to make adjustments because the bureaucracy, the defense industry, and Congress, often working in tandem, make it hard to do so.

The Times also overstates other, smaller matters. For instance, it correctly notes that China has more warships than the United States, but the firepower of the U.S. ships—the number and range of their missiles and aircraft, the training of their crews and pilots—far surpasses China’s. Then again, the United States has global missions, and it doesn’t have enough ships to fight a major war in more than one of the world’s regions at a time.

More to the point, America’s warships are vulnerable. Deploying an aircraft carrier, like the USS Gerald R. Ford, into a tense area conveys a potent message; it’s a powerful tool of “gunboat diplomacy.” But it’s questionable whether commanders would want to send it into an active war theater, especially against China, which is ready to launch swarms of accurate drones and anti-ship missiles to disable even a mighty carrier—and to turn on cyber-weapons to jam the high-tech sensors and guidance systems that make the carrier and its escort ships so powerful.

Many analysts have noted these problems for some time. A small branch of the Defense Department, called the Defense Innovations Unit, has actually been evading and overcoming many of the bureaucratic obstacles, especially in streamlining military supply chains and developing autonomous drones. Hegseth announced several reforms designed, at least on paper, to apply some of the DIU’s breakthroughs to larger weapons systems. But it’s one thing to make an announcement, another to enforce it—and the secretary of defense lacks the personnel in the Pentagon, the commitment from the White House, and the supply from Capitol Hill to get much done.

The Times’ special section was very unusual—in its devotion to a single issue, its depth of analysis, and its range of prescriptions. Newspaper editorials, of course, rarely have much impact, especially these days, when no newspaper, not even the Times, struts the stage of mass media with the august authority it once held.

Still, in this season of big budgets and a world of looming threats, this passage from the Times section is worth pondering:

It is an ancient and familiar pattern. Despite ample warnings, military and political leaders trained in one set of assumptions, tactics and weapons fail to adapt to change. … That’s where the United States risks finding itself. The Trump administration wants to increase defense spending in 2026 to more than $1 trillion. Much of that money will be squandered on capabilities that do more to magnify our weaknesses than to sharpen our strengths.

In other words, this is not just a budget story. It’s a story, and potentially a crisis, about global power—and how our own political-economic system, which has been a source of our power in the past, is confining and limiting our power in the new era.

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