Former Trump defense secretary would cut military spending in half
Mike Brest
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Former acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller said he believes the Department of Defense needs to be fundamentally overhauled to the point at which its military spending could be cut “in half,” which he added “wouldn’t be as dramatic as it sounds.”
Miller, who served in an acting capacity from November 2020 through the end of the Trump administration, wrote that the military “is too big and bloated and wasteful” in his new book, Soldier Secretary: Warnings from the Battlefield & the Pentagon about America’s Most Dangerous Enemies, which hit shelves on Tuesday.
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In his eyes, the Pentagon has spent too much time prioritizing the most sophisticated and expensive weaponry available and needs to shift its attention to quantity instead of quality.
“We need to restructure and rethink how we do our national security,” the former acting secretary said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “We’re going from an era of exquisite platinum-plated weapon systems, very few of them which lets you know, for pride or … it won the Cold War. It was the right approach. The Soviets couldn’t keep up, and we bankrupted them. Well, we’re returning to an era where it’s quantity over quality, and we still have not made that adjustment in our military.”
“So, first off, it’s a provocative statement, but we also know that the only way to get change in government is by cutting resources, and right now, we’re still in this Cold War mentality with these exquisite weapons systems,” Miller continued.
Another Miller proposal to fix the problems he sees in the department is to “create a smaller, more nimble force,” which goes with cutting spending as a whole. As a veteran of both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, he said he believes spending should reflect the fact that both have ended and should decrease to pre-war levels.
“While waiting for the outcome of the current global reordering, we can hedge with a new national security strategy that embraces low-cost, technology-enabled, forward-deployed, diplomatic intelligence and special operators to ‘sense’ the environment for threats against our national interests,” Miller wrote. “In essence, we should exchange size for stealth and speed — relying less on big weapons platform and hordes of soldiers, and more on small groups of Special Forces operators and agile, hyper-lethal strike forces.”
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Congress appropriated $858 billion for defense spending in fiscal 2023, including $817 billion for the Department of Defense, up from the $813 billion that President Joe Biden requested. The topic of defense spending has taken on new significance given the Republican Party now possesses a small majority in the House of Representatives, and a small faction of them, specifically many in the House Freedom Caucus, want to cut spending. The GOP hardliners initially held up Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) bid for speaker, which he ultimately won, but not after making concessions to the group that reportedly included spending cuts.
Republicans at large have argued that the first programs that should be cut are diversity and inclusion efforts, while there’s a split over other areas of cuts, and many members of key congressional committees believe the DOD’s funds should remain at current levels.