Foreign Affairs: US defence spending tops $1 trillion

The United States is spending more than $1 trillion a year on defence while struggling to modernise its armed forces and expand weapons production, according to Foreign Affairs, which described the Pentagon and the US defence industry as suffering from a “trillion-dollar collapse.”

The magazine attributed the problems to slow weapons procurement, high prices and a decline in the number of defence contractors. Despite the scale of US defence spending, it said, the military has yet to fully modernise its arsenal or adapt procurement to current security challenges.

Foreign Affairs said the United States continues to trail China in areas including hypersonic weapons and missile defence, while progress toward mass-producing unmanned systems — including robotic platforms and swarms of drones — remains slow.

The magazine noted that the US defence budget is roughly three times larger than China’s. However, it said China is outpacing the United States in several key areas. By 2030, the Chinese navy is expected to have 435 vessels, compared with 297 for the US Navy, according to the publication.

China is also rapidly expanding drone production and plans to manufacture 1 million attack drones this year, Foreign Affairs said. The Pentagon, by contrast, aims to produce around 300,000 attack drones over the next several years.

The magazine stressed that the Pentagon and the US defence industry had not always been so slow and argued that the situation could be addressed through congressional action.

Among the measures it proposed were tighter oversight of the Pentagon, stronger anti-monopoly measures and the passage of legislation requiring a review of the capacity of the US defence industrial base. Foreign Affairs also called for restrictions on share buybacks and limits on executive compensation at underperforming defence contractors.

By Sabina Mammadli