Chewing the Fat About Cutting the Bloat at the Nuclear BBQ

Vacuous Pete read the US DoD FY 26 posture statement last week, explaining how the feds will spend the new trillion dollar US defense budget. The SecDef seems unaware of the idiocy, and the irony, of what he presented to Congress.

We may quibble on whether it was idiot-speak, mendacity, or simple ignorance. I’m agreeable that in Pete’s case, it could be all three.

First we have the sheer inability to identify the problem. Pete says, “The $961.6 billion budget put forward by the President reverses four years of mismanagement and underinvestment.” I’m not sure Pete has looked at Pentagon budget trends since WWII, but that budget has a long established pattern. Robert Higgs’ “ratchet effect” is clearly shown in this chart:

As Charles Hugh Smith explains, ratchet-systems produce bloat that is easy to expand and hard to reduce. “Four years of mismanagement” tells us that the DoD has no idea what is happening, what to do, and will proceed accordingly. Smith writes that over time, only the “delusionally incompetent” remain inside these systems “...[leading] to the substitution of PR and artifice for actually reducing the organization to a sustainable level, for what's required is not just a revised spreadsheet but an entirely new culture and value system.”

Point for Pete – he is good at substituting PR and artifice for the real change that is required.

Much of the latest posture statement is indeed delusional. Pete states,

The President has also been clear – we will not tolerate attacks on American vessels. To that end, we have completed a highly successful and focused campaign against the Houthis. Our message — and our goal — was clear: Stop shooting at our ships and we will stop shooting at you. I am pleased to report that the attacks on American ships have now ended.

The reason the Houthis stopped targeting our naval vessels is because we removed them from the line of fire after the loss of a few billion dollars in drones and other weapons, all without slowing the Houthis attacks on Israel-bound shipping.

Along these delusional lines, Hegseth takes credit for the diplomatic blackmail of Panama to give US vessels priority "Free and First" passage, posing this as a question of military strength. He goes on to emphasize US military protection of the border, even as border control in the US is and will remain a bureaucratic enforcement operation, not "defense" to be funded in a new way.

While he correctly wants a lean and nimble force, he ignores or is unaware that the DoD is little more than a massive jobs program for low wage earners all the way to up to retired generals and admirals, and the expensive stovepiped acquisition octopus that embraces them all, and directly attaches itself to half of every dollar spent in the Pentagon right off the top. In turn, this MIC provides back to the DoD small numbers of uber expensive offensive platforms that are impossible to efficiently maintain, both for us and for the many "allies" we pressure into buying our not-lean and not-nimble products.

Pete nods to a future "Golden Dome," innocently or ignorantly foretelling another massive overpriced stovepiped acquisition, run by contractors, that will, as in the past, deliver no effective defense – a fact we will discover 15 years and a dozen trillion dollars hence.

Pete likes lean and nimble, but we suffer one General or Flag officer for every 3,300 active duty service members, twice the ratio we had during World War II. Beta AI could do the jobs of every one of our generals today, and not a soul would notice. Hegseth's reduction of GO/FO by 20% is too few by half, and yet he offered no comparable reduction in the 900 global locations where US troops are stationed around the world.

He advocates a government-funded shipping industry, comparing the productivity of modern ships built by China (and he might also have mentioned Russia or India). Barring major acquisition reform, US subsidized shipbuilding circa 2026 will be terminally expensive and permanently technologically behind the times, a welfare scheme for the less competitive. Similarly, Hegseth advocates a next generation F-35, with a new number and name. We know what our system produces, but why doesn't Hegseth? In terms of the nuclear triad, Hegseth recognizes it is old and probably dysfunctional, but seems to have no sense of how to deal with the most important aspect of real deterrence, nor the cost of reshaping or fundamentally reducing it. I mean how many nukes does a man need? Pete has no idea.

Underlying this obscene budget request is the silent witness, the fundamental missing link – and that is the absolute and urgent necessity of blowing up entirely our current USG approach to defense. To blow the OLDTHINK out of the water, and to truly ban the bloat, we must institute zero-based budgeting from the Pentagon, and a zero-based analysis of the real requirements of a republican defense. For 60 years we have designed and funded the military of a slowly collapsing and increasingly desperate empire. We would do far better to think about and identify the real defensive needs of a constitutionally defined Republic, the one our founders presumed, and our people deserve.

That said – the idiocy is clear, and it would not be a challenge for any American to name a thousand more sterling examples of Pentagon stupidity. Oh, and Pete said the Pentagon must pass, and will pass an audit by 2028. I hope the Congressional audience laughed at that joke. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Three days after his briefing, Hegseth wakes up to find that the President was lying about diplomacy with Iran, and more interested in big beautiful nuclear war than the lean and nimble deterrent force he told Pete and the rest of the country about earlier. Oh the irony, or maybe Pete’s just a patsy. Either way, Trump colluded with Israel in last week’s surprise attack and regime decapitation, “justified” by an Iranian nuclear weapons program that Trump’s own DNI briefed Congress a few weeks earlier DID NOT EXIST. Israel’s attack was assisted in advance and in real time by US and Germany and probably other NATO forces, and passively supported by the neutered neighbors of Israel, including a former ISIS commander with significant American blood on his hands. As Trump would say, so sad. Hegseth appealed to America First as Trump voters understood it, but Trump himself clarified that he “developed” American First, and it means whatever he says it means.

When your president is a real life Humpty Dumpty and the elites openly parasitical, when your empire is collapsing under the predictable trifecta of corruption, debt, and arrogance, what can we the people expect?

I think instead of listening to Pete Hegseth, we would do better to listen to Petyr Baelish.

Sometimes when I try to understand a person’s motives, I play a little game. I assume the worst. What’s the worst reason they could possibly have for saying what they say, or doing what they do? Then I ask myself, ‘how well does that reason explain what they say and what they do?

Along those lines, I think before building great ships, the USG will facilitate an all expenses paid funeral at sea for our oldest carrier, the USS Nimitz, as it diverts post haste to the current theater of war. This event may be facilitated by Israel aching for a false flag every couple of decades, or another psychopathic ally. War will intensify, and a nuclear attack or accident will “allow” the empire of fools to justify domestic totalitarianism, and continued endless war. I’m pretty sure that Alex Karp will help out, given his view that the tech industry has “a moral duty to work with the US government,...an affirmative obligation to support the state that made its rise possible.”

There is nothing new here. The evil of the state is perennial, persistent, with a taproot to hell. Henry David Thoreau wrote – perhaps with a future Pete Hegseth in mind as he tries to “fix” the Pentagon –“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one striking at the root.” The time for hacking the branches of evil is coming to an end, perhaps an abrupt end. We must strike the root.

Photo by Adam Mills on Unsplash