Another View: Despite a $1 trillion Pentagon budget, our veterans are being neglected

This year, for the first time, the Pentagon’s budget topped $1 trillion. We’re told this is to “support the troops.” Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. While tens of thousands of veterans are homeless and hundreds of thousands are going hungry the Pentagon is wasting billions on things like $1,500 coffee cups and $150,000 on soap dispensers.

More than half of the Defense Department’s budget goes to private companies, not to military personnel. Those Pentagon contractors spend our taxpayer dollars to help pay for things like $20 million-plus CEO salaries, more than a thousand lobbyists, and multi-billion-dollar stock buy backs that artificially inflate the value of their shares, but do nothing to actually keep Americans safe, let alone, “support the troops.”

While weapons contractor executives get rich – and buy the multi-million dollar mansions to prove it – military personnel are literally going hungry, with an estimated 25% facing food insecurity that has been exacerbated by the government shutdown. Moises Montalvo, a veteran from Nebraska, has observed that for many people returning from America’s wars “hunger happens more often than not” and many vets grapple “every day” with the choice of “cutting food to yourself so you can feed your children.”

Then there is the impact of serving in the post-9/11 wars on the lives and health of veterans. More than 7,000 service members died in America’s post-9/11 wars, and an astonishing 600,000 suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) or traumatic brain injuries (TBI).

Even worse, as documented in the film “What I Want You to Know,” many veterans don’t know why they were sent into our recent wars, and they decided early on that the conflicts were unwinnable. They further felt that their government had lied to them, and many were haunted by the things they were asked to do to other human beings in the course of fighting the wars.

As Gregory Daddis, a 26-year Army veteran and now a professor of history at Texas A&M has noted, “endless wars lead to endless veterans who are often left wondering if their efforts mattered.”

As we observe Veterans Day on Tuesday, we owe our veterans more than a perfunctory “thank you for your service.” We need to put our money where our mouth is, funding programs to make sure they and their families can acquire basic necessities, and investing more in treating post-traumatic stress disorder and other consequences of their military service.

Most importantly, we need to adopt a more restrained foreign policy that emphasizes diplomacy over the use of force, so our courageous military personnel aren’t put at risk in unnecessary wars that consume mass quantities of our tax dollars that could have been used to address other urgent national needs. We must avoid the kind of unnecessary conflicts that inflicted such widespread physical and psychological injuries inflicted on veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars.

Unfortunately, our budget priorities are moving in the wrong direction. While arms contractors cash in, over one and a half million veterans will suffer losses in food assistance and health care, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

At the same time, the president’s “Golden Dome” anti-missile program, which the vast majority of independent scientific experts agree can never provide the leak proof shield promised, could receive up to $40 billion of our tax dollars next year.

Instead of hollow words and wasteful spending, let’s work to craft policies that actually support and respect our veterans, rather than diverting huge sums to enrich contractors that too often underperform even as they receive ever higher amounts of government funding. To honor veterans, we need to change our approach to national security, and the sooner the better.

Ben Freeman and William Hartung, both of the Quincy Institute, are co-authors of the soon-to-be released book, “The Trillion Dollar War Machine.” ©2025 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.