By Rich Lowry
Syndicated Columnist
Yes, we need a $1.5 trillion defense budget
Finally, the United States will follow through on its NATO commitments.
That’d be the cheeky interpretation of President Donald Trump’s announcement, via Truth Social, that he wants the U.S. defense budget to be $1.5 trillion. This would represent a stunning 50% increase over the current budget and put the U.S. right around 5% of GDP, the target level that NATO countries recently adopted at Trump’s insistence.
The details and follow-through will matter, but on its own terms, the Trump declaration is of epic significance.
Such a historic buildup would meet the moment — it’s never made sense that the U.S. would enter a period of heightened risk of great power conflict at a time when it has difficulty replenishing its missile stocks.
It would match the predilections of a president who enjoys throwing his weight around. If Trump wants to speak loudly and carry a big stick, it requires the resources to build and maintain the stick.
And it would match his vision of a world-class military. You can’t have a Golden Dome — Trump’s project for an enhanced missile defense — or a Golden Fleet — his notion of a next-generation navy — without a Golden Defense Budget.
The scale of spending contemplated here is truly astounding. A $500 billion increase would roughly match the total annual spending of all non-U.S. NATO countries. The percentage increase would be the highest since the Korean War and double the biggest annual increases of the Reagan years.
“We still talk about the Reagan buildup,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said in a speech last month, “and my kids and yours will someday talk about the Trump buildup.”
The Trump proposal would not just be a down payment on that promise, but a big step toward fulfilling it.
If our military is highly proficient –as demonstrated in the Venezuela raid — it also doesn’t have the materiel to wage a protracted major war.
Defense analyst Mackenzie Eaglin of the American Enterprise Institute has long been ringing the alarm. She recently noted that during the short Israel-Iran war, we fired 150, or one-quarter, of our THAAD missiles, exceeding our annual purchase rate by three times. In the Red Sea, the Navy fired more Tomahawks in January 2024 than it bought in all of 2023.
These shortfalls, as Eaglin points out, are especially disturbing when compared to the building capacity of our adversaries. Whereas the Russians make more than 300,000 artillery shells a month, we make only 40,000 155mm shells. “Beijing builds six naval combatant ships,” she writes, “for every 1.8 ships the U.S. builds.”
Even The New York Times — not known for beating the drums for more defense spending — devoted a splashy editorial last month to the sorry state of our military-industrial base.
In his new book, “War and Power,” scholar Phillips Payson O’Brien relates how wars between great powers are usually not won by brilliant battle plans, or by the commitment or proficiency of the troops. Rather, it is productive capacity — and the ability to degrade that of the enemy while maintaining or increasing your own — that makes the difference.
The Nazis weren’t going to win the Battle of Britain when the Brits were producing twice as many aircraft as Hitler.
On top of this, a nation needs to make shrewd choices about what it is building (the Nazis also had the wrong planes for the Battle of Britain — bombers with payloads that were too small and fighters with limited range).
The U.S. needs to make sure that it is not overinvesting in the weapons systems of the past, although a defense budget on the scale that Trump is discussing would relieve some pressure from these choices. We could very well have our traditional subs and jet fighters, and our cutting-edge drones, too.
Trump’s taste for gilding everything can be over the top. It’d be a national service, though, if he manages to make the U.S. defense budget golden.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.
(c) 2026 by King Features Synd., Inc.