2025 Department of Defense Budget Request Disarms America
The press release for the Department of Defense 2025 Budget Request told one story, a story replete with lofty, aspirational goals expressed in the usual abstract text of DOD budget requests.
Reading the text, one would think the Arsenal of Democracy 2.0 was in high gear. On the other hand, the accompanying Comptroller submissions of the different Services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Space Force) that are the official numbers from DOD told a very different story. The Service submissions do have a similar, flowery textual chapeau laid over the numbers that perhaps this time were serving as a second layer of distraction from the numbers.
The Comptroller numbers don’t lie, the topline number of the entire Department of Defense was flat, $849.8 Billion, only $7.8B more than 2024. $7.8B is a lot, but it is budget dust in DOD world.
This is less than 1% growth in the DOD budget and taking inflation into account, the number is a significant shrinkage of the DOD topline. The Comptroller numbers revealed that almost every important warfighting line item, the numbers of ships, airplanes, and missiles, went down.
The disconnect of the descriptive text from the numbers took a few days to sink in with most of the experts. Professor James Holmes said simply, the “New Defense Budget Makes No Sense”.
Navy gets sunk
The U.S. Navy is heroically serving in the Red Sea War with the Houthis (who are proxies of Iran and Iran works for China). The Houthis depend on Iran for their rockets, missiles, and drones.
The Iranian regime would not be in existence if it was not for the massive purchases of Iranian gas and oil by the Chinese, much of which is in circumvention of American sanctions.
The pallets of cash delivered by the Biden Team are large, but merely lunch money for the Iranians compared to their gas and oil revenue. In addition, the Chinese have a very large footprint of tens of thousands of advisors and trainers in Iran, larger than the American glory days of pre-1979 Iran.
The Navy is under a legal mandate to grow to 355 ships (from under 300), yet in 2025, they will only buy six ships and retire 19 (10 of them earlier than scheduled). In even DEI math, this means the Navy is shrinking.
If we had a larger Navy, we could use some of the Navy to block the flow of arms to the Houthis and would not have to play very expensive and potentially deadly badminton knocking down Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.
One item of note is that the largest percentage (34%) of the Navy’s $257.6B budget is Operations and Maintenance. O&M is what pays for fuel, food, travel, and other non-capital expenses.
This spikes when things like the Red Sea War flare up – this percentage is likely under-reporting what is going on. The Navy Comptroller is scrambling to find even more O&M and what happens (I’ve lived and seen this many times), they start pilfering from other piles in creative ways.
This means Procurement (which buys ships, planes, and missiles) and Personnel (pay and benefits) is being raided. While our Sailors have a perfect score in the Red Sea, they’re being robbed and short sheeted and will return to their Naval Bases and find them in poor condition (the pier might even be gone).
Air Force loses hundreds of aircraft
This budget took out 3x to 5x more fighters and bombers than the Air Force lost at Pearl Harbor.
The Biden Team couldn’t have done a better strafing job if the Air Force had their planes lined up wingtip to wingtip. The bloodbath was complete with 250 aircraft schwacked in a single budget submission.
32 of these are the incredible F-22s, the same ones that shot the Chinese Spy Balloon in the back as it left American airspace after it spent days over American bomber bases and missile fields. Fret not, the Air Force is buying 91 new aircraft.
As aircraft age, they become more and more expensive to maintain. This is why Air Force O&M grows relentlessly. During the first Trump term, Will Roper, a senior Air Force official proposed buying more aircraft faster and not maintaining them into perpetuity (like the 60 year old B-52).
This was essentially what was done in the 1950s and 1960s where American aerospace firms churned out multiple fighters and bombers in close to World War II numbers. His innovative idea has not been followed through with.
Yes, the F-22 is a maintenance nightmare and very expensive to operate, but the Chinese fear it. If the ballooning O&M is the issue, buy new F-22 replacements.
Kristyn Jones, performing the duties of the Under Secretary of the Air Force said the Air Force core functions remain unchanged, “air superiority, global strike, rapid global mobility…” just with an aircraft level that has dropped below 5,000. A number not seen since before World War II.
The 2025 DOD budget puts National Defense in reverse
If the Biden Team had a logical argument where mass reductions in expensive legacy platforms were being replaced by a humming defense industrial base spewing out drones, autonomous ships, missiles, and new platforms en masse, the DEI math could be accepted.
The constant excuse in the budget was the increase in Personnel costs. Not sure how these numbers could be increasing when Navy, Air Force, and Army are having a recruiting and retention crisis and are far below their authorized numbers. Maybe the increase in Personnel Budget numbers is to pay for transgendering, abortion, or illegal alien health care.
Securing the Southern Border from the ongoing invasion is job one – but simultaneously eviscerating the U.S. military only increases the likelihood of global kinetic war including nuclear exchanges with the China led Axis of Evil.
This DOD budget made no sense, and uniformed leaders and their career civilian colleagues know better, they intentionally “Milley’d” this budget. Replacing all uniformed senior personnel, senior careerists, and others is on the table after November.
