Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is quietly begging lawmakers for even more money to plug the hole blown in his department’s accounts by Donald Trump’s war of choice on Iran.
The Pentagon is already trying to squeeze $67 billion from Congress to help replace the stockpiles it has burned through. The president promised the fighting would last just a “few weeks.” It’s now in its sixth month.
Hegseth and his team met with Republican senators on Tuesday for a closed-door briefing. Defense officials showed “candor” at that meeting about the toll the conflict has taken, and told lawmakers to expect requests for more funding on top of the amount they’ve already asked for, according to Axios. The secretary has routinely excluded Democratic lawmakers from updates on the war—and didn’t invite them to this one either.
His officials had anonymously sounded the alarm even before Tuesday’s meeting began. Strikes against Iran have used up “virtually all” of the U.S. military’s “highly accurate long-range missiles,” they told Reuters earlier in the day. The shortfall has affected “readiness for future conflicts,” and could leave America open to attack by other enemies, like China and Russia.
Hegseth’s team seems to have raised the same concerns in briefing Republican senators. “The officials gave an around-the-world threat analysis, laying out for senators how the U.S. stacks up against key adversaries—with an emphasis on China,” Axios writes.
Trump, 80, has failed to stick to any timeline for an end to the conflict he started in February. He’s occasionally said the war is “already over” and, at other times, that it could last “forever.” A temporary ceasefire he signed in June lasted just 21 days before peace talks fell apart. Washington and Tehran have returned to bombing one another with gusto in the weeks since.
The president’s diplomatic blunders have not just left the Pentagon scrambling for the cash to keep those strikes going. It’s also run them clean out of ideas on how to weaken an enemy who’s proven more resilient at almost every turn than anyone at the White House appears to have expected. “We are looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran,” as one top defense official pleaded in a frantic “crowdsourcing-style” email blast to military analysts last week, according to CNN.
The Daily Beast has contacted the Pentagon and the White House for comment on this story. Trump spokesperson Anna Kelly has previously said that “the United States Military has more than enough munitions, ammo, and stockpiles to serve all of President Trump’s strategic goals and beyond.” Hegseth’s spokesperson Sean Parnell added the Pentagon “has everything it needs to execute at the time and place of the president’s choosing.”
