This is the most expensive weapon system in US history. Just one of these F-35 fighter jets can cost more than $100 million. And here it is falling out of the sky. This specific crash was caused by a refueling mishap. But anytime one of these planes goes down, millions of taxpayer dollars are lost. US defense spending will likely top $1 trillion for the first time in 2026. And for all the money the US government spends on weapons, it still can't fix them without the companies that built them. Weapons often cost more than expected and they're routinely delivered late. The goal should be get the best equipment to

accomplish the mission at the lowest cost to taxpayers. The system that we have by design created does the exact opposite. But weapon spending wasn't always like this. So how did we get here? And why are US weapons so incredibly expensive? The first military contracts are even older than the Constitution, and concerns over just how much the country spends on weapons aren't new. Neither are attempts to put limits on spending. Let's go back to 1903. A new and experimental technology pointed to the future. Orville and Wilbur Wright made man's first four control flights in a powered airplane. And for 12 seconds, the Wright brothers proved that powered flight was

possible. 6 years later, after flying 10 miles over Fort Meyer in Virginia, the Wright brothers sold the first military plane to the US government for $30,000, about $1 million today. This leap in technology, along with investments in ship building, helped drive an avalanche of spending when the US entered World War I. The rush to build came with canceled contracts, unfinished equipment, and spending that was difficult to track. In just the first weeks of deployment in 1917, the War Department signed more than 30,000 contracts worth $7.5 billion, or nearly $200 billion today. By the end of the war, the national debt had ballooned from about $1 billion to over $20 billion.

Congress recognized the need for somebody to kind of be keeping tabs on all the increased spending that was going on, especially in defense. Congress created what is now the Government Accountability Office to scrutinize how defense dollars are being spent. Shelby Oakley is a director at the GAO. I would describe GAO as the watchdog of Congress. They'll give us a mandate to say, "Hey, please go take a look at how the Colombia class submarine program is being executed and whether or not they're on budget, cost, schedule, and

we're going to get the capabilities we expect." The same year the JO started, Congress also mandated the president provide an annual budget for review. Weapon spending was getting increasingly expensive, and Congress stepped in to curb it. But that spending was about to skyrocket. Just 11 days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, Congress passed the first war powers act, granting President Roosevelt the authority to make contracts without regard to the provisions of law. Within a month, Roosevelt started converting peacetime industries to manufacture weapons and military equipment. This, along with the Second War Powers Act, made weapons production in World War II

incredibly efficient. In this year 1942, we shall produce 60,000 planes. Next year 1943, we shall produce 75,000 tanks. Quantity over quality. And being able to kind of pivot and turn to an industrial base to fulfill those needs was something that we were able to do in World War II. So you would have car manufacturers building tanks for us. Even major players like Henry Ford. In 1941, Ford built a massive facility the size of about 61 football fields outside Detroit, modeled after the company's speedy assembly lines. It was called the Willowrun Bomber Plant, and it could turn out one new bomber every hour. For the first time, Ford's mass production technique is applied to making bombers. Streamline production

like Fords also made aircraft relatively cheap. A B7 bomber cost around $200,000 in 1944. Now, even as we talk about history, I think it'd be helpful to make comparisons to the present. That $200,000 bomber would be about $3.5 million today adjusted for inflation. And that's nowhere near the 80 to $110 million in F-35 costs, which Loheed Martin says is the most affordable option to protect US strength. we just needed a lot of planes and a lot of tanks and a lot of guns, you know, all the things. And so that kind of remained over a few decades. And then we kind of began to transition to more exquisite systems. As World War II raged on, one of the most famous weapons in US history was

being built at a top secret laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The atomic bomb redefined the limits of military weapons. Science has profoundly altered the conditions of man's life. It has extended man's freedom to make significant decisions. The Manhattan Project marked a massive undertaking. The total cost was roughly $2 billion in 1945 or about 35 billion in today's dollars. And while it wasn't the biggest expenditure in the war, it ushered in a new era of complex development and manufacturing heading into the Cold War.

The efficiency that we saw during World War II had already begun to shift. Gone were the days of Ford's speedy assembly line of bombers. By 1957, tensions with the Soviet Union were rising. Weapons in the US were getting more complex, and the USSR had successfully tested its own new weapon, the intercontinental ballistic missile, capable of traveling more than 3,500 miles with a nuclear payload. John F. Kennedy even campaigned on a so-called missile gap, the fear that the Soviet Union was outpacing the US in nuclear weapons.

They made a breakthrough in missiles, and by 1961, 2 and three, they will be outnumbering us in missiles. Well, we found out since then that there was no missile gap at all. But when spending levels start to dip below or flirt with that 5%, you know, annual growth line, that's when we start seeing what we call threat inflation. So threat inflation is a way to consciously or unconsciously amplify danger to build support for higher military budgets. The leaders of Russia tell us their only concern is the defense of their own nation. Is this so? or are they ambitious for world conquest? You see the reason why we are spending billions of dollars in defense production. That was just a bunch of rhetoric to

goose uh to goose defense spending. Wars prove pretty useful in increasing defense spending after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr. Gorbachov teared down this wall and later the election of Bill Clinton. Today, a generation raised in the shadows of the Cold War assumes new responsibilities in a world warmed by the sunshine of freedom. It seemed like things were changing. There was a period where we thought we didn't need to spend as much on defense anymore because of the Cold War being over.

Enter the Last Supper. Not this one. The Last Supper of 1993. It was essentially a secret meeting led by Defense Secretary Les Aspen and Deputy Defense Secretary William Perry with the heads of the nation's top defense contractors. It was more a message of, you know, kind of consolidate or die than, you know, go away. Officials believed that pushing contractors to consolidate could lower overhead cost and ultimately reduce the budget. By 1997, the number of major defense contractors had consolidated from 51 companies to just five. Loheed Martin, Rathon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrup Grman.

It's essentially a near monopoly situation where you only have a few companies you can go to. The companies have more bargaining power than they ideally should. Prices go up and you get a lower quality product. All those decisions that happened in the '9s have left us now with an industrial base that is very small um and very specialized. Often times what results is that there's only one or two contractors that can do what we're asking them to do. With fewer players, defense contracts became less competitive. A 2022 GAO report showed that 90% of missiles come from just three sources and tracked combat vehicles like the Abrams tank come from just one contractor, General

Dynamics. It's a similar situation with Northrrook Grumman. North of Grumman basically has a monopoly today on a nuclear weapons delivery vehicles. If they've cornered the market the way that they have, what incentive do they have to, you know, keep their cost down? Cuz it's not like another company can take over what they're doing. You might imagine that this leaves the government in a position of little leverage. So through the Cold War, weapons got more complex, moving away from the mass production efficiency of World War II. And then in the '9s, the defense contractor industry saw major consolidation. This consolidation has led to two main problems. Inefficiencies in how weapons are made and inefficiencies in how weapons are maintained.

Let's start with how they're made. To understand just how inefficient and expensive weapons manufacturing in the US can be, we can look to the F-35 again. The first development contracts for the fighter jet were commissioned in October 2001, right after the 9/11 terror attacks. The F-35 program began in earnest while the rubble at ground zero still smoldered. After 9/11, the main focus wasn't on cost, it was on capability. The F-35 was designed to do it all. collect and process data, share it across the battlefield, and replace multiple aircraft with a single system. That ambitious goal came with trade-offs.

We'd love to have this airplane today, uh, as you would expect. But, uh, but the first delivery will be 2008. That first delivery didn't actually come until 2011, 3 years after initially promised and just under 10 years after the contract was awarded. In the commercial world, if you're not getting products to market, you're not a company anymore, right? That's not the case in DoD. Delays are common across large-scale weapons programs. A 2020 GAO review of defense acquisition programs found $628 billion in cost overruns and an average delay of more than 2 years to deliver on initial capabilities. F-35s are no exception. In 2023, F-35s were delivered an average of 61 days past the deadline. In 2024, delivery delays jumped to an

average of 238 days late. The costs don't stop once a weapon system is delivered. There's the price of repairs and maintenance, also known as sustainment, which can drag on for decades. Over time, sustainment can account for about 70% of a program's total costs. In other words, building weapons is just the beginning. Keeping them running also adds up. I'm the sustainment guy right in the middle of sustainment services and support. There's many reasons in which we got to where we are today. In my opinion, Paul Sonier is an Air Force veteran and a retired Loheed Martin engineer who

worked closely on the F-35 for decades. The supply chain component of spares to keep these aircraft flying today um is the biggest cost driver. But I think what you're seeing on the F-35 is just traditional life cycle damage that needs to be addressed over time. But this all comes at added cost. And these problems aren't limited to fighter jets. Take a look at this. The literal combat ship. Pretty much nothing about that program panned out the way it was expected to. The contracts to build these ships were initially awarded to Loheed Martin in General Dynamics in 2004 and later to Austel USA with the first being

delivered in 2008. The ship was supposed to be a speedy, light, agile new vessel designed to detect mines, sink submarines, and fight off threats above the water. But once ships like the USS Freedom started to sail, mechanical failures piled up one on top of the other. Some ships spent more time in port than at sea. The problem? You're designing a system around technologies that you're not even sure are going to pan out or that are going to work. And then we start building it before the design is even complete. So, you know, it that can lead to a significant amount of rework necessary.

The literal combat ship was originally meant to cost $220 million per vessel, but ended up costing around $500 million. Things got so bad that the Navy was forced to begin retiring ships even as new ones were still being built. If you get it right early on in the development of a weapon system, that drives out cost efficiencies over time and you can preposition a lot of spares that are actually could be a waste of money because you didn't get it right. You didn't buy the right parts. There's another challenge in lowering sustainment costs which goes right back to those initial contracts. And once again, we can look to the F-35. this time to see how restrictive defense contracts can be. Contracts don't tend

to be publicly available, but a 2025 GAO report highlights that depot level maintainers may not have data rights that allow government personnel to make repairs without support from the prime contractor. Essentially, that means the US military doesn't actually own the designs of Loheed Martin's proprietary technology. So certain repairs can only be performed by the contractor and not by the military. you know, Loheed Martin owns the intellectual property right for the F-35, which means that the government can only go to Loheed Martin for uh you know, for very lucrative sustainment contracts to support the F-35. We can't operate the F-35 without Loheed Martin.

From 2018 to 2023, the GAO reported that the sustainment estimates for the F-35 increased from about $1.1 trillion to roughly $1.58 trillion. The overall lifetime cost of the program is estimated to be $2.1 trillion and 75% of that is sustainment costs. The US military plans to buy over 2,400 F-35 aircraft. There are more expensive US aircraft, but nothing this expensive at this high volume. So, is anything being done to curb military spending today? There are efforts in Congress to shift the power from contractors to the military itself to make complex repairs on weapon systems. This would in theory be cheaper and more efficient. In July 2025, Republicans and Democrats introduced the Warrior Right to Repair Act, which would

guarantee the military access to weapons systems, data, and intellectual property. The last thing our troops should be doing is waiting around for contractors who charge more for slower repairs. It's giving control back to the military, ultimately back to the American people and taxpayers that if we buy something, we should be able to fix it. US Army veteran and Congressman Pat Ryan serves on the House Armed Services Committee, which oversees the country's annual defense budget. When I was serving, I was an intelligence officer. I deeply believe if we had better software and

hardware, we would have kept alive some of my brothers and sisters in arms. Fixing the system could mean getting better equipment to troops faster and at a lower cost, but progress has been slow. Critics of right to repair legislation say it could stifle innovation and create safety risks. In December 2025, members of Congress voted to strip the right to repair provisions from the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. And reform efforts often run into a system that's difficult to change. Our program office, our United States Department of Defense, we always want to deliver the absolute best for the war fighters and the peacekeepers. Period. And because of that, it does drive up cost. So part of the problem is also intent.

The push from contractors and the DoD to build the most advanced systems possible can make them more expensive, more complex, and harder to maintain. If they don't deliver rather than giving them more money, let's charge them penalties, for example. I introduced legislation to do that in the last defense bill and it got blocked by the same sort of status quo forces. But we need to continue to push that forward. The White House is also pushing for reform. In April 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Pentagon to buy more commercial goods instead of designing custom products. And Secretary of War Pete Hexth announced changes aimed at

improving weapons procurement. The adversary I'm talking about is much closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy. At the same time, Trump has called for raising the US defense budget to $1.5 trillion in 2027. We're at a really key inflection point where you have newer, younger members of Congress pushing back and really pushing for finally some systemic change here. This is my tank crew from uh from 2007. Uh, I keep it here mostly to remind people when, you know, when policy makers in Washington decide to send young Americans overseas to fight, like this is who they send. You know, we were

basically kids. There's very few people in Washington that advocate for the 18-year-old with a rifle. There's a lot of advocates for the F-35 and for the F-47, the Colombia class ballistic missile submarine. As Trump expands military operations around the globe, new wars could burn through resources while adding billions in supplemental defense spending. In the first two days of the 2026 strikes in Iran, Pentagon officials estimate US forces used up $5.6 billion in ammunition. And as the Pentagon already prepares to spend more than a trillion dollars on defense in 2026, the debate isn't just about costs.

It's also about how that money is used and whether the system is delivering what it promises to soldiers and taxpayers. I think the debate has been set up as a binary choice. Like if you love our military and you support our troops, you've got to back this budget. And if you don't back this budget, you don't you're not a patriot. You don't support our troops. That is ridiculous. That should be a bipartisan thing. And I think we're we're we're starting to get there. Hey