The nearly trillion-dollar US defense budget is misleading. The vast majority is locked into fixed costs like salaries, facilities, and sustaining legacy systems. The actual procurement budget for new technology is at a historic low as a percentage of GDP, constraining modernization.

A singular, massive cash infusion into the defense budget encourages buying more of today's systems, filling order books for weapons with built-in obsolescence. This approach creates a short-term 'sugar high' but fails to fund the adaptive industrial infrastructure needed for future conflicts, ultimately leading to a less capable force.

While China's submarine technology is advancing, a more immediate threat to US naval supremacy is its own industrial base. The US cannot build submarines fast enough to replace old ones, and a severe maintenance backlog keeps a third of its existing attack boats idle.

The US Defense Industrial Base is optimized for a few high-cost, technologically advanced platforms. This model fails to meet the demands of modern conflicts, which require large volumes of affordable, attritable hardware to counter tactics used by adversaries in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Debates over military budgets are often implicitly debates about the discount rate of combat power. In an era of rapid AI-driven change, power delivered in 10 years is heavily discounted. This framework favors immediate software and autonomy investments over long-term hardware programs.

After the Cold War, the US de-emphasized manufacturing, creating a massive skills gap. Today, the money exists to build more submarines, but the trained welders, machinists, and engineers do not. This human capital deficit, not budget, is the primary obstacle to scaling production.

Military and government leaders are penalized more for failing to spend their entire budget than for being inefficient. This perverse incentive system ensures all funds are used, even on unnecessary programs, to secure future funding.

When purchasing a new ship or aircraft, the initial price tag is deceptive. The 'fully burdened cost' includes long-term expenses for crewing, training, support, and maintenance. A one-time budget increase doesn't cover this tail, forcing the military to retire platforms early and resulting in no net growth of the force.

While Trump's tough stance successfully induces allies to increase defense spending, this gain in capability is offset by a catastrophic loss of trust. An alliance's strength is based on both capability and will. By making the U.S. commitment (like Article 5) conditional and unreliable, overall deterrence against adversaries like Russia is weakened, making war more likely.