America Has Fought—and Fixed—Defense Contracting Before
By Yair Abramoff & Harry Seavey
March 03, 2025
Americans are by now familiar with the surreal spending stories that regularly emerge from the Pentagon. $4,361 for half-inch metal pins, netting the producer a sweet 9,400 percent excess profit. A fighter jet program that has ballooned to 2 trillion dollars in lifetime cost. Seven failed audits in a row.
Much of this can be traced to the perverse incentive structures of government defense contracting, the decrepit state of the country’s largest defense contractors, and the revolving door of the military-industrial complex, where generals beat their swords into the plowshares of lucrative weapons manufacturer board seats after retirement and get hard to work at ripping Americans off.
As the sun sets on the unipolar moment, and China rapidly modernizes its military, warnings have begun to sound in the halls of power in Washington: America’s wildly inefficient defense procurement system threatens its national security. The reality of a kinetic conflict with China’s near-peer military in the Western Pacific makes special interest-dominated military spending no longer just wasteful. Now, it’s existential.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/03/03/america_has_foughtand_fixeddefense_contracting_before_1094914.html
