Trump Administration Announces Plan for Annual Cuts to Military-Industrial Complex

President Donald Trump, through the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has gone to war against government waste unlike any president in modern history, but he is about to embark on his most dangerous foe of all: the military-industrial complex.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is ordering the Pentagon to brace for an 8 percent cut in military spending in each of the upcoming five years. Cuts are anticipated in the realms of missile defense, submarine acquisition, one-way attack drones, and nuclear weapon modernization. Hegseth is giving Pentagon personnel a quick deadline on Feb. 24 to give suggestions for waste that can be cut.

“The time for preparation is over — we must act urgently to revive the warrior ethos, rebuild our military, and reestablish deterrence. Our budget will resource the fighting force we need, cease unnecessary defense spending, reject excessive bureaucracy, and drive actionable reform including progress on the audit,” Hegseth said.

With an operating budget of nearly $850 billion annually, these eight percent cuts, while substantial, could hardly be considered austere. Military spending has run out of control since Sept. 11 as Pentagon bureaucrats used hysteria to turbo charge a military buildup that had long been planned by the neocons running U.S. foreign policy as fear propaganda bolstered the profits of defense contractors and other affiliated profiteering corporate interests.

As a result of the unprecedented military buildup, the Department of Defense (DOD) has a stunning 900,000 employees. The number of interests feeding at the trough of this immense military budget is staggering. These entrenched forces will not be pleased about the news of cuts and will attempt to paint this move as making the country more vulnerable to attack. It would not be surprising to see some false flags in the works as the bureaucracy works to protect itself and build a groundswell of anger against the cuts.

It is well known what happened to John F. Kennedy after he decided to bring the troops home from Vietnam. The move by the Trump administration to cut military spending is not only a prudent decision but also a brave one. There can be major consequences for coming after military power.

Trump has already earned the ire of the intelligence apparatus, and now he will have another wing of the tentacled bureaucracy that is just as powerful coming for his throat.

Beyond the consequences from the bureaucracy, Trump will also inevitably receive pushback from phony conservatives. The same conservatives, best embodied by the hypocritical Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute, who have whined about Trump not being conservative enough for refusing to worship the free market, will doggedly oppose Trump’s cuts in military spending.

Fiscal conservatives have had a blind spot for military spending for years, supporting cuts in social programs while letting militarism run wild the world over citing gains in the largely deceptive metric of gross domestic product (GDP) as a faulty excuse for bad policy.

When limited government conservatives ignore the military, it reduces their credibility in the minds of the public. It could have plausibly been argued after Sept. 11 that a military buildup was needed. For certain, it was hard for any red-blooded American not to become enraptured in the fervor following the worst terror attack on U.S. soil in history. However, it became clear that Americans were sold a bill of goods by the time Bush Jr. exploited anti-Arab sentiments to launch a war in Iraq.

Nearly 25 years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the public has grown tired of the war machine. They have watched as their family members have been sent to die for wars based on falsehoods. They have watched American heroes get put into the meat grinder in foreign hellholes only to return home and be refused jobs, be alienated from their children and forced into the streets. This has left an indelible impression in the hearts and minds of the people, and these sentiments have been ignored by the vast majority of politicians with Trump being a notable exception.

President Trump expanded the military budget in his first term to reverse the damage Obama had done in gutting the military to weaken the nation. Unfortunately, much of that buildup went to expand woke initiatives with mere scraps being handed out to needy veterans. The institutional rot in the Pentagon turned out to be worse than most could comprehend.

Coming at the Pentagon with a wrecking ball is the correct approach, but Trump must be ready to deal with the hardest pushback he has ever received in the months to come.