Opinion
The Editorial Board
Nov. 15, 2025
To understand why the United States is struggling to buy and field the weapons of the future, consider the trouble it had buying the most basic weapon of the past.
In 2011, the Army decided to get its soldiers new pistols. The odyssey that followed included a 350-page list of technical specifications, years of testing and a protracted battle on Capitol Hill between competing gun makers. The Pentagon won’t complete delivery until 2027 at the earliest. The Army could have raised an infantryman from birth to within two years of enlistment age in the time it will have taken to get him a new handgun.
The story of the Pentagon’s new pistols would be funny if it didn’t point to a serious problem at the heart of America’s military. The Department of Defense has built a gilded fortress of people and processes that is slow, wasteful and married to the past. Of all the obstacles to fielding the military that America needs, the Pentagon’s bureaucracy may be the hardest to overcome.
The military’s top ranks are dominated by pilots, captains and other commanders who are disdainful of new, cheap alternatives to fighter jets, warships and tanks. The byzantine system for buying and testing weapons isolates the military from the innovative parts of the American economy. Congress underwrites the dysfunction with appropriations that are designed to deliver wins for its members rather than for America’s national security.
Fixing this requires intervention. On Capitol Hill, the Senate leaders John Thune and Chuck Schumer should insist that the American military serve the nation before it serves as a local jobs program. But the biggest reformer needs to be the president.
We say this with some reservations, given President Trump’s destructive approach to government and his disregard for administrative competence. That said, he has shown an eagerness to disrupt old bureaucratic habits, and the Pentagon needs disruption. Mr. Trump should fix the Defense Department’s bureaucracy and provide political top cover for members of Congress to cut programs that their constituents support.
Reforming the military is a long-term proposition, and politicians who plan to run for president in 2028 and the aides who will advise them should make Pentagon reform a central part of the policy agenda they will soon begin compiling. Bureaucracy may sound boring, but the safety of the country — and of our democratic allies in Asia and Europe — depends on the federal government getting serious about how it finances and equips our military.
The problem starts with Congress. The proposed 2026 defense budget is loaded with pork for unnecessary programs. It has more than $300 million that the Defense Department didn’t ask for to buy and upgrade Humvees. There’s $240 million for the Gray Eagle drone, the Model-T of unmanned aircraft that the Army labeled “obsolete.” Then there’s over $360 million for an Apache helicopter that the Army didn’t request. As the House and Senate work toward the country’s first trillion-dollar defense budget, over $52 billion is for things members of Congress added, unbidden, to the Pentagon’s wish list, according to the independent budget watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense.
Congress manages to make things worse when it fails to spend money, too. For much of the last 15 years, lawmakers have passed budgets months late. That hobbles Pentagon planners, delaying investments on programs the military desperately needs.
Paralyzing the Pentagon
Without a formal budget, the military
struggles to plan ahead.
Percent of the fiscal year with a formal budget
Between the pork and the budget lapses, no one can keep track of where all the money goes. The Defense Department is the only major federal agency never to get a clean bill of health from outside accountants, and has failed its last seven audits in as many years.
When the bean counters can follow the money, they often find it has been wasted.
Bases that the government targeted for closure more than a decade ago remain open. The military doesn’t have an adequate way to track spare parts, so instead of using what it already has, it just orders more. The services budgeted an estimated $1 billion more than they needed for parts in 2021 alone.
Worse than the waste is the status quo all that money strengthens and supports. The American military, whose budget is larger than those of the next nine countries combined, oversees about three million people and controls some 82 percent of the U.S. government’s total physical assets. A 2020 RAND study found that officers who rose to leadership tended to be risk-averse and largely trained in positions such as captains and pilots. Unsurprisingly, it also found they were more likely to promote those with similar experiences and outlooks.
That status quo command structure helps protect the labyrinthine inner workings of the Pentagon. Companies that want to sell to the military must navigate more than 2,000 pages of the Federal Acquisition Regulation. The military’s testing and approval systems can then run to a decade for new weapons systems, a lifetime in an era of rapid change. Both hurdles favor the five major defense contractors and their armies of lobbyists, lawyers and former Pentagon officials.
The result is a tendency to adapt old weapons platforms rather than develop new ones. The Army is paying the country’s largest military contractor, Lockheed Martin, $43 million to convert Blackhawk helicopters, which were designed in the Vietnam era, to allow them to carry and launch drones. Much cheaper options, like off-the-shelf drones, never see the light of day.
The final problem: The system feeds on itself. Pentagon officials and congressional staffers have long migrated to the arms industry, getting well-paid jobs as board members and senior executives. That’s especially true of those at the top. By one count, more than 80 percent of departing four-star generals and admirals who retired between 2018 and 2023 went on to work in the defense industry.
So the spending continues on programs that won’t help America win the next war — and may ensure we lose it.
The Trump administration has attacked the problem with its signature headstrong disruption. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has tried to cancel multiple outdated weapons systems — the M10 Booker light tank, the Humvee replacement, overpriced aircraft — with resolve. In May, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth slashed by half the staff of the Pentagon’s infamously slow testing office. In November, he unveiled an ambitious plan to reform the military’s approach to buying weapons.
Fixing the broken bureaucracy, however, will take more than killing programs and firing people. After cutting the Pentagon’s testing staff, Mr. Hegseth left many requirements in place. An Oct. 15 memo he wrote requiring that any Pentagon employee receive permission before engaging with Congress undercuts his attempt to reform weapons purchases by making it harder to get new programs off the ground. Congress’s 2026 spending bill, introduced after many of Mr. Driscoll’s moves, was nevertheless larded up with failing programs.
Mr. Trump should push for real change, not just the appearance of it. He should force the Pentagon to experiment with market approaches to budgeting in place of centralized planning. He should force services to place bets on start-up companies that get results rather than established ones that have mastered the broken system.
The president should use his political clout to force reforms through Congress. He should push to pass the Audit the Pentagon Act, which would require any Pentagon component that fails the audit to return 0.5 percent of its budget that fiscal year, followed by 1 percent for any year that follows. He should muscle through a new round of Base Realignment and Closure, the long dormant program that streamlines the closure of military bases that have outlived their usefulness. He should encourage Congress to pass Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Department of Defense Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, which would limit contractors’ influence on defense policy and create greater transparency over defense-contractor interactions.
Most of all? The president should act now to ensure the Pentagon defends the country, not itself.
Animation by Justin Metz.
Photographs by Kenny Holston/The New York Times; Wojtek Radwanski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Kenny Holston/The New York Times; Mark Peterson for The New York Times.
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
Published Dec. 10, 2025
