Billions for arms, rather than troops, won’t make us safer

The Pentagon got a whopping $150 billion increase in the budget bill passed by Congress and signed by the president July 4, That will push next year’s proposed Pentagon budget to more than $1 trillion.

- William D. Hartung, Tribune News Service

Most of that enormous amount will go to weapons manufacturers. A new report by the Quincy Institute and the Costs of War Project at Brown University found that for the period from 2020 to 2024, more than half of the Pentagon budget—54%—went to private companies. That figure has climbed considerably since the immediate post-Cold War period of the 1990s, when the contractor share was 41%.