This Report Should Be Setting Off Alarm Bells in the Pentagon

"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"

"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 Senate approved a $900 billion defense bill by a 77-20 margin. A major opinion package argued much of that budget is wasteful. The critique relies heavily on a leaked 2021 classified review from the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment. The review analyzed recent war games, largely focused on China, and found a decades-long decline in America's ability to win a prolonged war with a major power. Contributing factors include post–Cold War consolidation of more than 50 weapons manufacturers into a few large firms, an ossified Pentagon bureaucracy, and legislators protecting local defense-contracting interests.

Read at Slate Magazine