The F-35 program has now cost American taxpayers more than $400 billion in development and procurement, and the aircraft still carries a maintenance backlog that would embarrass a regional airline. The Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship was conceived as an affordable, flexible vessel and delivered as an expensive, fragile one. The Army’s Future Combat Systems program consumed $18 billion before cancellation. These are not isolated failures. They are the predictable output of a procurement culture that has confused activity with accomplishment, and contract awards with national defense.
A republic that cannot translate its treasure into reliable capability is not strong. It is merely expensive. The central failure of American defense procurement is not a budget failure; it is a managerial failure, and until the country names it as such and demands correction, no supplemental appropriation and no new authorization will make the nation more secure.
There is a tradition of thought in American public life that insists the relationship between government spending and national readiness is not automatic. Money authorized is not money well spent. Contracts awarded are not weapons delivered. A mobilization structure that exists on paper is not a mobilization structure that works on a deadline. This tradition grew out of the experience of building, quickly and under pressure, the largest military-industrial enterprise in history, and then watching what happened when that enterprise refused to demobilize its habits of mind. The lesson drawn was not that defense spending is inherently wasteful, but that defense spending without managerial discipline is guaranteed to be wasteful. The same government that built the Interstate Highway System as a strategic asset also understood that an interstate built shoddy was a liability dressed as an accomplishment. Competence was the variable that determined which you got.
The present situation is, by most honest measures, alarming. The Department of Defense has failed its financial audit for six consecutive years. Not struggled with it. Failed it. The Pentagon manages roughly $3.8 trillion in assets, according to its own accounting, and cannot reconcile them to an auditor’s satisfaction. Meanwhile, the defense industrial base has contracted severely over the past three decades. Where the United States once had multiple competing shipyards capable of building surface combatants, it now has two. Where it once had several manufacturers capable of building a new main battle tank from scratch within a reasonable timeline, the supply chain for such an effort has atrophied to the point where any surge production would require years of preliminary reconstruction. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics collectively absorbed decades of consolidation encouraged by government policy, and the result is a small number of contractors with reduced incentives to control costs or accelerate delivery. The Pentagon’s own acquisition workforce shrank by roughly 50 percent between 1990 and 2010, gutting the institutional capacity to write enforceable contracts, evaluate technical claims, or hold prime contractors accountable for schedule.
The named enemy here is not foreign adversaries, though they are watching. The enemy is a procurement system organized around the interests of the contractors and the congressional districts that host them, rather than around the operational needs of the fighting forces. Cost-plus contracting, which reimburses a contractor for expenses plus a guaranteed margin of profit, is the structural mechanism by which this system perpetuates itself. When a contractor cannot lose money regardless of how far over budget or schedule a program runs, the contractor has no financial reason to run on budget or on schedule. The program office, staffed by officers who will rotate out in two years and who understand that their post-service employment prospects depend partly on their relationships with those same contractors, has no career incentive to apply the pressure that the contract does not require. Congress, presented with a troubled program that employs constituents in forty-three states, has every political incentive to fund the next phase rather than terminate and restart. The system produces exactly the output its incentives predict.
The prescriptions are not mysterious. First, the Pentagon must restore a serious, well-compensated, and career-protected acquisition workforce. The people who write contracts with Boeing need to be as technically capable as the people at Boeing who fulfill them. That means competitive salaries, genuine expertise, and enough institutional continuity that knowledge does not walk out the door with every personnel rotation. Second, the Defense Department should return to fixed-price development contracts for programs where the technology is sufficiently mature, accepting that this requires government engineers capable of judging maturity accurately. The Navy’s recent Virginia-class submarine contracts represent an imperfect but instructive model: fixed-price incentive structures that have produced a program running closer to cost and schedule than most of its peers. Third, Congress should legislate a meaningful termination trigger for cost and schedule breaches, one that overrides parochial pressure by requiring a supermajority to waive, and that treats program termination as the appropriate disciplinary response rather than a scandal to be avoided. Fourth, and most fundamentally, the infrastructure of the defense industrial base must be treated as a public good. The country should not depend on two shipyards. It should not depend on a single domestic producer for critical munitions components. The consolidation of the 1990s made short-term financial sense; it now represents a strategic vulnerability that no amount of procurement reform can address without physical investment in production capacity.
Public works and defense readiness are not separate questions dressed in different clothes. They are the same question: does this country maintain the physical and institutional infrastructure to do hard things under pressure? An army that cannot be equipped is not an army. A navy that cannot be sustained is not a fleet. A government that cannot audit its own books is not a government that can be trusted to spend wisely on either.
Republics have fallen before not because their enemies were too strong, but because their institutions became too corrupt and too comfortable to defend what they had built. The price of that comfort, when the bill arrives, is not paid in dollars.
Cincinnatus Steel is a contributing columnist for The Republic Standard writing on defense, infrastructure, and the obligations of competent governance.