Dan Grazier, Julia Gledhill & Geoff Wilson
The United States’ civilian and uniformed military leaders have created a budgetary time bomb set to explode in the next twenty years. Over the past several years, the military services have committed to a slew of new big-ticket weapon programs now in development. As these programs mature and enter production, national security spending is expected to increase to cover the costs. With weapons growing increasingly more technically complex, the ownership costs to maintain them over the long run could make an already challenging fiscal situation even worse.
To understand future trends, we can look at the growth of US defense spending over the past 50 years. In 1975, defense spending totaled $92 billion ($521 billion in 2023). By 2000, the Pentagon’s budget grew to $320 billion ($566 billion in 2023), representing a 7.41% growth in the last quarter of the 20th century.1 However, defense spending exploded in the post 9/11 era. The Biden administration recently requested $850 billion to fund the Pentagon in 2025. Adjusted for inflation, defense spending has increased more than 48% in just the first 24 years of this century.
Today, the United States spends more money on defense than it did during the peaks of the Korea, Vietnam, and Cold Wars, even after ending the longest war in our history three years ago.2
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