A Tantrum With a Budget
Two lost wars, no objectives in Iran, and a 44 percent raise for the people who never had a plan. America doesn’t punish military failure. We promote it.
One-point-five trillion dollars. That is the size of the Pentagon’s fiscal 2027 budget request, the largest in American history: a 44 percent raise in a single year, handed to the same institution that just lost two wars back to back. If the United States were a publicly traded company, the board would have fired the entire leadership team by Tuesday. Instead, we gave them a parade and a stock-options package.
When did we last win one of these? Iraq? Twenty years, $2 trillion, more than 4,400 American dead, and the country is now functionally a satellite of Iran, the same Iran we are currently bombing. Afghanistan? Two trillion dollars, 2,400 American lives, two decades of nation-building, and the Taliban walked back into Kabul before our last C-17 cleared the runway. Civilians clung to the wheel wells. That was the highlight reel.
The official record is somehow worse than the public memory. In August 2021, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction released its eleventh Lessons Learned report, What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR-21-46-LL). The central finding was not buried in a footnote. The U.S. government, SIGAR concluded, did not understand the Afghan context, and therefore failed to tailor its efforts accordingly. Twenty years. A trillion-dollar war. And the people running it admitted, in a federal report, that they never figured out the country they were trying to rebuild.
Three years later, SIGAR’s thirteenth Lessons Learned report, Staffing the Mission: Lessons from the U.S. Reconstruction of Afghanistan, published November 2024, drove the knife deeper. American personnel deployed to Afghanistan, the inspectors found, were routinely unqualified, poorly trained, and lacked the language skills, cultural awareness, and technical expertise required for the work. Their pre-deployment training did not come close to preparing them. We sent nineteen-year-olds from Ohio to win the hearts and minds of villagers in Helmand Province whose names they could not pronounce, whose religion they had never studied, whose history they had never heard of. Two decades in, the Pentagon still could not field enough Pashto and Dari translators to staff a Walmart.
That is not a strategy. That is a tantrum with a budget.
The price of that illiteracy is now official. SIGAR’s final forensic report, released December 3, 2025, accounted for the totality of the American reconstruction effort: about $148 billion in U.S. funds across twenty years, with between $26 billion and $29.2 billion documented as wasted, defrauded, or stolen across 1,327 separate instances of malfeasance. We bought twenty cargo planes from an Italian junkyard in Sicily and shipped them to Kabul. We spent $355 million on a USAID power plant that ran at less than one percent of its rated capacity. We left behind nearly $20 billion in vehicles, weapons, and aircraft for the Taliban to inherit on its way back into the capital. The archive of failure is now sealed. SIGAR was shut down by act of Congress on January 31, 2026.
Statutory Anchor
Authorization for Use of Military Force (2001) — Public Law 107-40
Passed by Congress on September 14, 2001, in the three days following the attacks, the AUMF authorized the President to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against those who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the September 11 attacks, or who “harbored such organizations or persons.” Drafted to target al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the 2001 AUMF has been cited by four consecutive administrations to justify military operations in at least 22 countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Niger, and now Iran. It has never been repealed. It contains no expiration date.
And here we are again. Bombing Iran. Nine hundred coordinated strikes in twelve hours on February 28, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of senior commanders. His son took the throne the same day. Iranian missiles are now landing on U.S. bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. American servicemembers are dying. The “regime change” was achieved instantaneously and immaterially — we killed a man, his son inherited the chair, the resentment, and the missile codes. The Global South has aligned itself with Tehran. Our Gulf allies are quietly taking meetings with Beijing. The Strait of Hormuz is a daily question mark. The fuel pump in your truck got more expensive overnight, and Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates the war has already cost American households more than $40 billion in elevated energy prices on top of the Pentagon’s admitted $29 billion in direct operational expenses.
For what, exactly?
The Pentagon does not know. There was never a stated, achievable, measurable objective in Afghanistan. There was none in Iraq. There is none in Iran. The strategy has always been brawn: overwhelming force, superior technology, the unshakable assumption that the other side would eventually submit. They never did. They never do. Ask the British in Kabul in 1842. Ask the Soviets in 1989. Ask anyone who has ever tried to occupy a country whose language they refused to learn.
We reward failure. A teacher whose third-graders test below grade level gets fired. A general who lost a twenty-year war gets a board seat at Raytheon and a podcast deal. Failed school? Defund it. Failed bridge? Tough luck. Failed empire? Have another trillion. The same generals who botched Afghanistan are on cable news this week explaining why we should bomb Venezuela next. Their pensions do not depend on outcomes. They depend on the next contract.
When the Iran adventure goes sideways — and it will — the after-action review will say what every after-action review has said since 2001. We did not understand the local context. We did not have adequate translation capacity. We did not appreciate the cultural, religious, or tribal dynamics. The lessons of the last war were never institutionalized. Those words appear in every single SIGAR Lessons Learned report, in slightly different fonts.
The lesson America refuses to learn is not about Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Iran. The lesson is about America. We do not lose wars because we are outgunned. We have never been outgunned. We lose them because we do not take them seriously enough to think before we start them. We confuse money with strategy. We confuse firepower with policy. We confuse the size of the budget with the quality of the plan. We assume the rest of the world will eventually accept that we are the good guys because we say we are, repeatedly, at high volume, while bombing their cities.
It has not worked. It is not going to work. And one-point-five trillion dollars will not fix what is broken, because what is broken is not the budget. It is the people who keep getting promoted for breaking it.
$1.5 trillion. For what, exactly?
Dexter Dow is the founder and editor of Granite State Report, an independent New Hampshire civic journalism publication based in Northfield. He is a nonfiction author whose catalog examines American institutional failure, generational malpractice, and the political economy of perpetual war.
