we now have a nearly $1 Trillion defense budget with an increase of $80 billion which itself is the entire defense budget of Russia.
as a % of gdp our defense budget is at or near the lowest it's been in decades right at a time when global conflicts are going up and china is skyrocketing their defense capabilities. we should be increasing our spending by far more than a mere 80b.
It was an 8% increase. And I don’t think that counts all the additional Ukraine spending in supplementals.
And I honestly don’t even mind so much the point you’ve made recently about shifting priority to ammunition and HIMARS and such, but the F35 and B21 are just complete disasters of a program. They don’t really work, they are insanely expensive, there are multitudes of better cheaper options, and for the F35 in particular every branch got to add on their own little Christmas ornament for a different model making it even less effective and more expensive.
Also, Rand Paul had an amendment for oversight of where the material and funding was actually going in Ukraine and it went down on 90+ votes. I don’t like Rand, but there seems like plenty of places to cut or at a minimum exercise some oversight of this behemoth.
