Who's Doing Pete Hegseth's WAR Shopping, Ronald Reagan's Big Bucks?
You need millions of dollars in King Crab to keep up your energy for bombing schoolgirls.
War, what is it good for? Billions and billions of dollars! Conflicts of interest? If there’s a conflict, this administration’s passel of corrupt, selfish pigs is interested! Imagine the chain-rattling laughs the war-profiteer ghosts of Dick Cheney and Rhett Butler are having at the audit-free Pentagon from the ceiling of the Lincoln Bedroom right now!
The Pentagon burned through $5.6 billion in just munitions in only the first two days of the war; it would have been literally cheaper (and surely gotten a better result) if the US bombed the country with a million one-ounce solid-gold coins, roses, and boxes of Godiva chocolates. And now, just 11 days in, the Wall Street Journal is fretting that the US is already running low on Patriot missiles and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors and could run out of munitions. Trump denies that, and says there are enough munitions for the war that is both over and also could go on forever, and maybe we’ll have boots on the ground too, why not! But the US reportedly already reached out to Ukraine last Thursday to ask for their help supplying drone missile interceptors, and Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy said Ukraine sent them and also a team of drone experts to help protect US military interests in Jordan.
Holy shit so many levels right there. Ukraine’s entire 2025 defense budget was a record $71 billion, and Russia’s was estimated to be about $149 billion. Meanwhile the US’s was $839 billion, nearly four times the both combined, representing about 40 percent of the entire military expenditure on the planet. And Trump has moaned he wants even MORE, to get up to $1.5 trillion, though he and Sec. Def. War Pete Hegseth have no idea even how to go about spending that much.
And not even two weeks into the war the US is already begging its war-torn ally for interceptor drones! Ukraine! You know, that country Trump has been gleefully threatening to abandon if they wouldn’t just go ahead and surrender some land to his buddy Putin, while also telling Putin and the world that only he could convince them to surrender (and failing). And oh look, on this one thing he finally followed through.
And yet, in spite of all that flagrant backstabbing, and Ukraine’s own desperate need for munitions to save lives at home, they came to the rescue of the US anyway. And Trump and Marco Rubio et al. are not even saying thank you. They won’t even comment on the report, and Fox News even oops-mislabeled the Ukranian drones as US-made ones in spite of a visible label on the tail.
Longtime-Iran-ally Russia has also reportedly been passing its gathered intelligence about US targets to help Iran strike. Watching the US already at the limit of its capabilities is surely not lost on Putin, or China either.
And Reuters has reported China may sell Iran anti-ship missiles that could target American aircraft carriers and destroyers. There will be no winning this war.
And so how did Big Tough Man Trump respond to these threats from the east? Why, by calling up Vladimir Putin, and then immediately announcing he was considering easing sanctions on Russian oil! You know Putin has all those Epstein files, and surely even more than the US even knows about, given that (at least) one of Epstein’s closest young-lady assistants went to Russian spy school.
And so anyway where the fuck are all those unfathomably massive piles of money going, since it is obviously not towards making enough munitions to fight a war in the Middle East that lasts longer than a week?
Here are some! Behold the boondoggle of record-breaking $93.4 BILLION fiscal-year-end dump-spending on grants and contracts at Hegseth’s Department of WAR documented by Open the Books spent in order to continue to justify the massive Department of WAR budget, some of which make Nero’s dinner parties sound like a Mennonite pie bake:
Included in this spending was $2 million on Alaskan king crab last September alone, as well as $6.9 million on lobster tail and $1 million on salmon. The Defense Department also spent nearly $140,000 on doughnuts, $124,000 on ice cream machines, $26,000 on sushi preparation tables, and a whopping $15.1 million on ribeye steak.
[…] $1.8 million on musical instruments, such as a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, a $26,000 violin, and a $21,750 custom handmade Japanese flute.
And,
The Pentagon found a way to spend more than $12,000 on fruit baskets, as well as a total of $3,160 on stickers featuring beloved children’s characters from Dora the Explorer, Frozen, and Paw Patrol. The department also spent $5.3 million on Apple devices, including purchasing 400 of the more expensive 512-gigabyte edition iPad Air M3s rather than cheaper models with less storage.
Does Pete get a Paw Patrol sticker from his third wife every time his peepee goes into the potty and not his big boy britches? Was it a rare miniature Samurai fighting flute, impervious to everything but water?
Also $225 million spent on furniture. In one month! And yes, a literal sad and wildly expensive violin to play for the masters while the prolitaristy outside beg for food, medicine and enough kopeks to buy fuel for their winter fires! Only Tolstoy could make it up.
Meanwhile, there have been eight US service member deaths during the conflict so far, and the US and Israel have continued war criming by attacking residential buildings. Iran says the bombs have killed more than 1,255 people and injured about 10,000, and 11 countries have been hit in retaliatory attacks so far.
Throw in South American regime change, Trump setting a “peacetime” record for striking in the most countries in a year (eight), and welcome to Trump World War Everybody. Oh, and now Australia says it will give missiles to the UAE and deploy a military surveillance aircraft to the Middle East and send missiles to the UAE too. Every hemisphere is getting in on this thing because of interests and alliances there, plus the US is fighting itself by proxy on two sides via Russia, holy armageddon clusterfuck!
And for all the financial advantages Russia has still not conquered Ukraine and the US still does not have air supremacy over the skies of Iran.
So what next, boots on the ground and a draft? Trump crying WAR EMERGENCY and canceling the midterms? War goes on until Putin gets his oil trade back and tells Trump he can stop? War goes on forever? That’s the thing about dictator regimes, all you can count on is that there will be lots of nasty surprises for the little people, and lots of graft, corruption and lobster for the platters of the fatcats above!
A tale as old as time.
[The Daily Beast archive link / Open the Books ]
Say it again!
I was watching a roundtable segment on TV where the mostly-French participants were discussing Europe's understandable frustration at Trump's easing the Russian sanctions, which undercuts European efforts significantly and weakens their security position, but mostly they were discussing the dumb meme propaganda that the White House has decided is the most effective way to sell this mess. The strategists were saying it was insulting to the intelligence of the American people. I mean, I'd like to hope that's so, but I think they are all overestimating the capabilities of a large swath of dumbasses.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
— President Dwight Eisenhower