UNSAFE AT ANY PRICE.(The Talk of the Town)

A couple of weeks ago, the Senate Appropriations Committee did something unusual: it actually said no to the Defense Department, trimming next year's requested defense budget by a small amount. In practice, the cuts will likely be quashed by Congress; as Representative Christopher Shays said, nearly a year into the war on terror, "We're at war, and I'm saying I'm not going to look military personnel in the eye and say I voted against their budget." That's understandable, but it helps explain why we have a defense budget that is over half a trillion dollars, forty per cent higher than it was in 2001. More than half the federal government's discretionary spending goes to the military, and, while a sizable chunk goes toward the fight against terrorism and the Iraq war, too much has nothing to do with the demands of a post-9/11 world.

Over the past five years, we've heard a lot about the rise of what Donald Rumsfeld likes to call "asymmetric warfare," and about the need to equip our military to fight "nontraditional" enemies. But a look at the defense budget shows that we're building a new military while still paying for the old one. Money is going into Special Operations and intelligence, but far more is being spent on high-tech weapons systems designed to fight enemies (like the Soviet Union) that no longer exist--eighty billion dollars on attack submarines, three billion apiece on new destroyers, and hundreds of billions on two different new models of jet fighter. Advocates insist that we need to be able to contest any "near peer" rival. But the U.S. has no near-peers--or, indeed, any distant peers, as we now spend more on defense than the rest of the world put together.

Not only are we buying stuff we don't need; we're buying it badly. Astonishing budget overruns are routine. The Future Combat System, for instance--designed to remake the battlefield with robot vehicles and networked communications systems--began as a ninety-billion-dollar project, then became a hundred-and-sixty-billion-dollar project, and, a recent Pentagon estimate suggests, will eventually cost three hundred billion dollars. Such inefficiency is seldom punished--the Pentagon often hands out bonuses even when companies fail to meet their targets--and is tolerated by regulators. Although government agencies have been required to produce an annual audit of their operations since the late nineties, the Defense Department's operations are so confused that it has never been able to produce a successful audit. A few years ago, the Pentagon's own Inspector General found that more than a trillion dollars in spending simply couldn't be explained.

Of course, people have been decrying Pentagon waste and inefficiency for decades. But things have got significantly worse over the past five years, because Congress and the Bush Administration have thrown so much ...