Last summer’s $156 billion defense spending boost through the reconciliation bill is likely “only just the beginning,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told an audience at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California on Saturday.
“We need a revived defense industrial base. We need those capabilities. We need them yesterday. And so, resource-wise, I think this room will be encouraged by what we’ll see soon. But I don’t want to get too ahead,” Hegseth said in his keynote address.
Context: U.S. defense spending has risen in recent years from $812 billion in fiscal year 2017 to $870.7 billion in fiscal year 2021 to $895.2 billion in 2025, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports from Simi Valley.
“We received a historic boost in funding last year, and believe that is only just the beginning,” the Pentagon chief said, alluding to the $156 billion boost from budget reconciliation on top of the DOD’s proposed budget for 2026. That funding will be key to “supercharging” the defense industry, which is one of the Pentagon’s four “lines of effort,” along with homeland defense, pushing allies to increase defense spending, and deterring China.
Meanwhile, the White House may ask for a second reconciliation bill next year, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought said at the defense forum. Continue reading, here. (Williams has more reporting below.)
New analysis: The lopsided cost of Operation Southern Spear means the U.S. military is sinking speedboats with a supercarrier, strategist Peter W. Singer of New America writes in an economics explainer for Defense One.
“Debates over the legality of U.S. military strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats have obscured calculations of their cost,” Singer says. But while no U.S. casualties have been reported during the Pentagon’s war on alleged drug cartel boats, the campaign is consuming far more American treasure than cartel lucre, he warns.
Consider: The Pentagon has released few details about the 23 vessels it has blown up, but one was reported to be a civilian-type 39-foot Flipper-type motorboat with four 200-horsepower engines. A new one retails on Boats.com for $400,000, but the old, open-top motorboats in the videos must cost far less. The crew of the boats have been reported as making $500 per trip.
However, “On the other side of the conflict is certainly the most expansive–and thus most expensive–military deployments in history for a counter-narcotics mission,” Singer writes. The first task force of warships deployed to the operation, which included an Amphibious assault ship and even a nuclear powered attack submarine, cost $19.8 billion to buy. They were later joined by the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford, which cost $12.9 billion to buy after $4.7 billion for research and development. Its three escorts pushed the purchase price of the Southern Spear fleet past $40 billion.
The estimates for every hour of the carrier’s operation is roughly $333,000, while each escort consumes a comparatively cheaper $9,200 per hour, Singer explains. Then there are the munitions costs, as well as personnel pay and benefits for the roughly 15,000 US service members who have been deployed so far in the operation, including 5,000 ashore in Puerto Rico and 2,200 Marines aboard ships.
At the operational level, the cost to acquire the U.S. forces for this mission is at least seven times the annual revenue of their enemy and at least 5,000 times more than what the enemy paid for the speedboats they are fighting. “At the tactical level, the numbers are even more asymmetric,” Singer says. What’s more, if U.S. forces used four munitions for each strike—“twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it,” as the Washington Post reported—that’s 320 to 1200 times the cartel’s cost.
Bottom line: “The operations in the Caribbean could soon face the same sustainability problem that surfaced in conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan,” Singer warns. “When the U.S. has to spend orders of magnitude more to neutralize a target than its foe spends to field or replace it, it enters into what businesses call a ‘losing equation’ that often adds up to failure.” There’s much more to his analysis, here.
Related reading:
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day just last year, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled the country as his regime abruptly collapsed after 13 years of civil war.
The U.S. Army just activated its new Western Hemisphere Command, which will replace Army Forces Command and eventually absorb Army North and Army South, Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported Friday.
The idea is to take FORSCOM’s mission of preparing troops for deployment and combine it with Army North’s experience in supporting civil authorities and Army South’s expertise in working with allies across the Caribbean, Central America and South America, an Army official told reporters last week.
In doing so, Gen. Andrew Poppas, who currently leads FORSCOM, will retire, and the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations, Lt. Gen. Joe Ryan, will put on a fourth star and assume command of the newly minted USAWHC, or WESTHEM for short.
The reorganization follows the recent inactivation of Army Training and Doctrine Command, which merged with Army Futures Command to form Army Transformation and Training Command, netting the Army one less four-star organization.
It also feeds into the second Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, including a forthcoming National Defense Strategy that promises to make military operations in support of domestic law enforcement a core mission. Continue reading, here.
Notable: Fort Bragg could get a bit more crowded. “Most of the civilian and military personnel now at Army North and Army South commands at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston could be headed to Fort Bragg, North Carolina,” the San Antonio Express-News reported Friday as well. “Army North currently has as many as 600 soldiers and civilian employees and Army South up to 500,” the newspaper reports, citing Army figures.
“Most of those have been told that they probably will have to move,” retired Army South commander, Maj. Gen. Freddie Valenzuela said. Read more, here.
Developing: The Navy’s frigate program is back on, sort of. Mere days after Navy Secretary John Phelan canceled the service’s yearslong delayed program, the White House greenlit a plan to design and build a frigate domestically as part of its proposed “Golden Fleet,” Secretary Phelan announced at the Reagan Forum on Saturday.
Trump “has signed off on what we are calling the Golden Fleet…We will continue to build ships that are the cornerstones of the fleet—carriers, destroyers, amphibs, submarines. But we need new ships and we need modern ships,” Phelan said, Defense One’s Lauren Williams reports from California.
Background: OMB Director Russell Vought said the decision to axe the program was driven by delays that grew from 15 percent during the first Trump administration to 85 percent during Trump’s second term. To turn that around, the government will have to “do things differently,” he said. Read more, here.
National Security Strategy reactions
NATO reax: “The late Thursday release of the White House’s National Security Strategy, a document sketching the president’s foreign policy priorities and their ideological underpinnings, landed like a grenade in Brussels,” the Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor wrote Sunday. Instead of focusing on the geopolitical challenge of Russia and China (as Trump’s first term NSS did), it took aim at Europe itself, warning against the ‘civilizational erasure’ of the continent thanks to unfettered migration and a feckless liberal establishment.” Tharoor rounds up notable social-media posts:
- Donald Tusk, prime minister of Poland: “Dear American friends, Europe is your closest ally, not your problem. And we have common enemies. At least that’s how it has been in the last 80 years. We need to stick to this, this is the only reasonable strategy of our common security. Unless something has changed.”
- Gérard Araud, who served as France’s ambassador to the United States as well as the United Nations: “…the stunning section on Europe reads like a far-right pamphlet.”
- Carl Bildt, former Swedish prime minister: “The only part of the world where the new [U.S.] security strategy sees any threat to democracy seems to be Europe. Bizarre.”
Another angle: Despite its “incoherent babble,” Trump’s NSS still contains “three valuable points,” former Bush administration official Eliot Cohen argued Friday in The Atlantic.
- First, “the United States has tended to ignore the Western Hemisphere until a crisis” erupts—e.g. the Cuban revolution or the near-collapse of Colombia.
- Second, the document “shift[s] from understanding the [African] continent primarily through the perspective of development aid to one focused on commerce,” Cohen writes.
- And lastly “on Europe, the NSS is uncomfortably in the right ballpark in pointing out the challenge of mass migration,” he argues, noting the administration “has put its finger on a real problem.” Read the rest, here.
Historian’s reax: The “Trump administration is embracing the old idea of spheres of influence in which less powerful countries are controlled by great powers, a system in place before World War II and favored now by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, among others,” which amounts to “a dramatic reworking of the foreign policy the U.S. has embraced since World War II,” Boston College’s Heather Cox Richardson wrote Friday.
Trump’s officials “have openly rejected the world based on shared values of equality and democracy for which Americans fought in World War II. In its place, they are building a world dominated by a small group of elites close to Trump, who are raking in vast amounts of money from their machinations,” Richardson warned Saturday, on the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. “Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?” she asked.
Another historian: If “the world is just a balance of power where law does not much matter, as the new National Security Strategy indicates, then it is hard to say what prevents countries attacked by the United States from resorting to any sort of violence they choose,” warns former Yale historian Tim Snyder. “For decades the United States has justified foreign invasions in the name of democracy (for better or for worse, usually for worse). Nicolás Maduro lost an election (in 2024) and stayed in power.”
“But however one adjudges past American interventions, now we are in a new situation: Trump does not even pretend to like democracy,” Snyder writes. And indeed, “there is no sign that the Trump administration is preparing for the security and economic support that a new democratic government would need.” More, here.
Additional reading:
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