Senator Durbin Asked the Right Question

Last week, during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense hearing reviewing the administration’s $1.5 trillion FY2027 budget request, Senator Dick Durbin said out loud what all Americans should be thinking. After pressing General Dan Caine on why Iran could still block the Strait of Hormuz after weeks of U.S. bombing, Durbin concluded: “I guess the question in my mind is - as we talk about trillion dollar plus budgets for our military, it appears that a very small budget is holding us hostage in the Straits of Hormuz (sic).”

That is the question. And nobody in either party seems to want to answer it.

The best General Caine could produce was “It’s complicated.”

This is a 7-minute read. Prefer an outline?  Click here. 

Is it really so complicated?

Actually, I’m not so sure it is. To me, the only complicated thing about it is how do you justify a 44% budget increase on top of one that is already out of control and one that is preparing for the wars of the past rather than of the future.

Let me offer a few numbers to frame the absurdity of all this.

The U.S. spent approximately $954 billion on national defense in fiscal year 2025. We spend more than the next six countries combined and roughly three times what China spends and eight times what Russia spends. Furthermore, according to The Costs of War Project, the U.S. has spent over $8 trillion on wars of choice since 9/11.

And Iran? According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Iran’s military spending was a paltry $7.9 billion in 2024. SIPRI acknowledges that this figure most likely understates the true total because Iran funnels additional funds through opaque oil revenues and off-budget channels. So, let’s quadruple it for good measure. Even at $25 billion, Iran would be spending less than 3% of what we spend. Let that sink in.

And yet here we are. After weeks of sustained bombing by the most expensive military in history Iran still retains a meaningful military capacity. The Strait of Hormuz, critical to the world’s economy, remains effectively closed. Trump seems powerless to do anything about it. Having lived through Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, this feels sadly familiar.

Apparently, Senator Durbin was thinking the same thing.

The administration cannot have it both ways.

In the early weeks of the conflict, Secretary Hegseth was crowing almost daily about the greatness of our military. Here is one of many:

“As President Trump has said, and he’s right, we have the strongest, most powerful, most lethal and most prepared military on the planet. That is true, full stop. Nobody can touch us. It’s not even close.”

In fact, it seemed that anyone who wanted to comment on the war had to first perform the ritual of praising the greatness of our military before saying anything of substance. You just had to wait it out.

Listening to all this blather, an ordinary citizen might reasonably ask: wait, if we spend more than anyone else by such a margin, shouldn’t we expect to have the best military in the world? Why is that a surprise? And by the way, if we really are so dominant, why are we worried about little Iran getting a nuclear weapon? I thought we were able to “obliterate” that capability on demand. Hmmm, maybe this is getting “complicated.”

There is another argument, of course. Let’s assume that indeed our military is the best in the world, it just is not the best at fighting small, poor countries or at prying open straits. While I might be able to understand that logic, it then begs the question “then why do we keep picking those fights?” Or, if we insist on picking them, why not build a military that can actually win them?

We are still building the army for the last war.

I doubt Secretary Hegseth has any idea what the Maginot Line was, but he should google it someday. It is increasingly clear that America’s defense establishment remains organized around large-scale land warfare, heavy armor, and expensive fixed platforms; the Maginot Line of our times. The F-35 program is now projected to exceed $2 trillion in lifecycle costs — the most expensive weapons program in U.S. history. A handful of large defense contractors dominate procurement under cost-plus contracts that reimburse all expenses and guarantee profit on top, eliminating every incentive to control costs. We maintain several hundred bases around the world that are vulnerable to drone attack. The Pentagon has failed seven consecutive financial audits. Nobody is held accountable. All this while warfare has gone asymmetric.

The result shows up in challenging arithmetic. The U.S. Navy has used a $2 million Standard Missile to intercept a $2,000 Houthi drone. A Patriot PAC-3 interceptor - designed to defeat ballistic missiles - costs $4 to $7 million per shot. Iran’s Shahed drone costs roughly $50,000. Firing a $4 million missile at a $50,000 target is an 80-to-one value mismatch and Iran can repeat that equation indefinitely. Iran and its proxies are not trying to defeat our military. They are trying to drain it. 

While I appreciate that because of the disparity in technology requirements of defensive versus offensive weapons there will never be parity, the current math nonetheless illustrates the current state of play.

Ukraine has shown us the future, and we are not paying attention.

The Center for European Policy Analysis reports that Ukraine has reduced its reliance on imported defense equipment from 54 percent in 2022 to 18 percent in 2025, with drones now accounting for a dominant share of its battlefield operations - the vast majority produced domestically. Ukrainian drone engineers routinely update and adapt systems within weeks. One soldier can now supervise dozens of autonomous platforms simultaneously.

Ukraine solved the cost problem that is bleeding us dry. Where the U.S. fires a $4 million Patriot interceptor at a cheap drone, Ukraine built a $5,000 FPV quadcopter that hunts the same target by flying directly into its propellers. The math is obvious. The lesson is available to anyone willing to learn it.

But a Carnegie Endowment paper written by Ukraine’s former defense minister identifies a structural reason the U.S. cannot easily follow: American defense contractors retain control over maintenance data, software, and diagnostics. Military units cannot modify or repair their own equipment. In Ukraine, drone operators run their own repair cells, update designs in real time, and spread innovations laterally through personal networks. In the U.S., that requires a contract amendment and a committee review. CEPA warns plainly that if the U.S. fails to integrate Ukraine’s innovations, those capabilities and the battlefield data behind them risk benefiting strategic competitors. Other countries are already at Ukraine’s door. We are not.

China, however, has been paying close attention.

While we fantasize about the Trump Class battleship, China has been building. DJI, China’s state-backed commercial drone company, holds a 90 percent share of the U.S. commercial drone market and 80 percent of the global market. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has called China the “undisputed leader in commercial drone production.”

The Heritage Foundation assessed that the U.S. currently would not win a drone war with China. Its roughly 20 drone models and hundreds of units would face China’s millions. A September 2025 report from the Center for a New American Security, based on a U.S.-China wargame, concluded that without deep stockpiles of counter-drone capability, China’s massed drone attacks could overwhelm U.S. forces in the First Island Chain and the U.S. could lose a war over Taiwan.

China has also pulled ahead in AI-enabled swarming, the ability to deploy hundreds of autonomous drones coordinated by a single operator. Defense analysts in Taiwan assessed that China has taken the lead over the U.S. in this specific category. In January 2026, the PLA demonstrated one soldier supervising 200 autonomous drones simultaneously. The U.S. has no public equivalent.

China built this advantage the same way it built its commercial dominance: state support, manufacturing scale, and an industrial base organized around the weapons of the next war rather than the last one. We built the F-35. They built the swarm.

What will $1.5 trillion get us?

This figure would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Before Congress approves it, someone should answer Senator Durbin’s question. Not with a tribute to the troops, but with an actual accounting of what we are buying, what threat it is designed to defeat, and why we keep finding ourselves outmaneuvered by adversaries who spend a fraction of what we do.

In each of these cases - Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and now Iran - the answer from both parties has been to spend more. Republicans think more is always better. Democrats are afraid to be labeled soft on defense. Can anyone remember a single legislator who seriously challenged what we get for our money?

Senator Durbin came close. And the answer, delivered by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was embarrassingly vacuous.

It really is not that complicated. We are spending too much building military monuments to our ego rather than getting serious about the future, and we are running out of time. Since Republicans will not answer the call, Democrats must have the courage to demand accountability for our defense spending while ignoring the inevitable charge that doing so means they are soft on defense.