Is $200 Billion Too Much to Win a War? | World News

The Trump Administration may soon ask Congress for $200 billion for the U.S. military, and on cue come the snipers: The number is too big or the Iran fight isn’t worth it. But the war is exposing pre-existing U.S. military vulnerabilities, and the President’s job is not merely restocking arsenals but preparing U.S. forces to deter the next war.It’s instructive to watch Democrats vote down a U.S. military funding bill before it even exists. “The answer is a simple no,” Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona said on social media, warning of “a long war” after all of three weeks of fighting. Rep. Ro Khanna of California offered the dorm room politics that $200 billion could “pay for free college for every American” and so much more. Both men have ambitions to be Commander in Chief—yikes.“At this point, I would oppose that supplemental of $200 billion,” Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal told CNN. Such support “could be misinterpreted as approval of the war.” Democrats don’t want to be complicit in helping America be victorious, which would help their main enemy, who is Mr. Trump.But only a couple news cycles ago Mr. Blumenthal told CNN that he worried the war would be “a setback for Ukraine. We’ve been told again and again and again, one reason that we can’t provide interceptors for the Patriot system or other munitions for Ukraine is that they’re in short supply.”Yet replenishing weapons stocks—and expanding production with urgency—is sure to be a core priority of the funding request. The Trump Pentagon is working to expand lines of crucial missiles, including bumping advanced Patriot interceptor production to 2,000 rounds a year. But the Pentagon told lawmakers last year it was $20 to $30 billion short for munitions, and that was before the Iran war.American air dominance over Iran has allowed U.S. forces to rely on cheaper munitions, but no question the U.S. has expended far more Tomahawk missiles than the Pentagon requested this year (57). Tom Karako, the missile defense ace at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said recently he is “dreading” finding out how many air defense interceptors the U.S. has fired.Stocks have long been too low for a crisis in the Taiwan Strait. A crash project to build thousands will now cost many billions more, and the priority of bulk buys should be speed, which means paying a time premium.The action in Iran has also underscored that drones are delivering a new economics of warfare, which demands cheap cruise missiles, high-power microwaves for drone defense, reusable interceptors on ships. Nobody wants to hear it, but success would mean underwriting many procurement experiments and some systems that don’t pan out.The war is also demonstrating that naval and air power are still essential in modern combat. The USS Gerald R. Ford may break a post-Vietnam record for the longest aircraft carrier deployment, which means higher maintenance bills. The U.S. for years has been burning naval readiness faster than it produces it, and ditto for the fighter and bomber fleets.That it took weeks to flow enough American forces into the region to strike even a lesser power is a warning: The U.S. military isn’t sized for a long fight with a real competitor.The Trump defense strategy acknowledges the “simultaneity problem”—the risk that an American enemy in one region exploits U.S. involvement in another. Will the supplemental start to reduce that risk by expanding ships, aircraft and personnel—all expensive?***Mr. Trump will have to make a sustained public case for the details of the request, from repairing damage to U.S. bases to refilling combat pay accounts. Too bad Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth couldn’t resist blaming Joe Biden for expending weapons in Ukraine. “These munitions are better spent in our own interests,” he said.That is substantively wrong and politically inept. America’s position in the world would be far weaker if Ukraine had collapsed. More than 20 GOP Senators supported Mr. Biden’s Ukraine request in 2024 because they understood it was in America’s interest. Mr. Trump could include support for Ukraine—buying some of Kyiv’s counter-drone hardware, for instance—and press Democrats to pass it.The U.S. isn’t meeting the 5% of GDP standard for defense that Mr. Trump demanded for NATO. This is a national liability that predates the Iran war, and $200 billion is a realistic number for starting to fix the problem, so Americans never again read headlines about insufficient missile stocks days into a war.