Pete Hegseth speaks during a Senate Armed Services confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill on 14 January 2025 in Washington DC (Chen Mengtong/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images)

Pete Hegseth during his confirmation hearing at the Senate Armed Services Committee on Capitol Hill, 14 January 2025, Washington DC (Chen Mengtong/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images)

America agrees on “peace through strength”, just not what it costs

A budget battle is shaping, and perhaps not in the direction expected.

Tom Corben

21 February 20254 min read

“Peace through strength” has well and truly returned to the American political lexicon. The thing is that no one seems to agree on what that actually means in practical terms.

Donald Trump and those in his orbit made the Reagan-era motto a rhetorical cornerstone of his presidential campaign. Key appointees, including Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have been equally fond of the phrase since taking office, as have senior Republicans with interests in defence in both houses of Congress.

At face value, one might interpret that shared slogan as a sign of consensus behind an impending surge in American military spending. In reality, it has masked real and growing differences between the White House, the Pentagon and Congressional defence hawks over how to right size the defence budget.

These differences are about to spill over into a potentially messy budget battle.

The math doesn’t quite seem to add up.

Compared with efforts to gut the State Department in its first term and, more recently, to do the same to USAID, the Trump administration has given more mixed signals on where it wants to go on defence spending. Trump himself proposed both large increases and decreases within the same 48-hour period. Hegseth has spoken repeatedly of cutting Pentagon waste, but he also endorsed proposals from senior Congressional Republicans to significantly boost spending during his confirmation process.

Now, we may be getting a clearer sense of the direction. This week, Hegseth reportedly directed senior Pentagon leaders to propose eight per cent in reductions across the Department over five years beginning in the financial year 2026. Only 17 program categories would be spared the red pen, including submarine and missile production – both, naturally, of great interest to Australia.

Those “cuts”, at least for FY26, have since been recast as “reprogramming”. The Pentagon’s second-in-charge stated that next year’s defence budget would see US$50 billion moved from “wasteful” programs – including Biden-era climate and equity initiatives – towards “programs aligned with President Trump’s priorities”. That’s even more likely now that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has reportedly entered the building.

The math doesn’t quite seem to add up – eight per cent of today’s $850 billion budget amounts to closer to $70 billion – though, of course, it depends on what you’re actually counting. Still, some back-of-the-envelope working would suggest that annual cuts of eight per cent or $50 billion between now and 2030, if fully implemented, would amount to more than $300 billion in reductions over that period. These would be the largest cuts to defence spending since 2013, the sort which wreaked havoc on US military readiness and modernisation priorities. At best, “reprogramming” rather than “cutting” at that same rate would produce a flat defence budget.

Hegseth has framed these measures as faithful to Trump's “peace through strength” agenda and as essential for America to live within its fiscal and strategic means. They fly in the face of most Congressional interpretations of what that phrase means in practice.

Indeed, prominent members have spent months staking out very different positions on defence budgeting requirements. Mitch McConnell, now leading the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defence arm, has urged America to “embrace primacy” and dismissed a $900 billon budget figure as “not nearly enough” to service that objective. Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) Roger Wicker and his House of Representatives counterpart Mike Rogers have both proposed increasing defence spending to between four and five per cent of GDP by 2030, an objective that Wicker and Trump seemed to agree on only last fortnight. And both the House and the Senate Budget Committees have proposed more than $100 billion in extra defence spending as part of their respective budget reconciliation packages.

The apparent budget rift between Congress and the administration sets up an interesting showdown for later in the year, when Trump’s first budget request eventually makes its way to Capitol Hill. Congress has traditionally plussed-up defence budget requests that its members see as inadequate, and Republicans frequently (and successfully) sought to do so throughout Joe Biden’s term. But it seems that it may end up being much harder for Republicans to do the same even if they control the “trifecta” of the White House, the Senate and the House, given Trump’s evident influence over Congressional Republicans and the political costs that members fear they may face for speaking out of turn on important policy issues.

Ironically, Trump and Hegseth may find greater support for defence austerity among Democrats with national security interests, even as the party organises itself to resist the president’s broader agenda. While both sides of the aisle have long implored the Pentagon to spend more efficiently, prominent figures such as Jack Reed, the ranking member of the SASC, along with House counterpart Adam Smith, have track records of advocating for smarter, not larger, budgets, even if that means making painful trade-offs. Smith quipped only weeks ago that Musk was “making a legitimate point” in criticising the Pentagon’s fixation with expensive capability programs and its struggles to adopt rapidly emerging technologies.

Of course, this could all amount to nothing. The administration has already course-corrected on any number of policy announcements, and a sharp turn on defence spending would not be all that surprising. But such are the hazy contours of “peace through strength” in practice, that’s probably to be expected.

About the author

Tom Corben

Tom Corben is a Research Fellow in the Foreign Policy and Defence Program at the United States Studies Centre, where he works on US Indo-Pacific Strategy, regional strategic dynamics, defence industry and technology issues, and alliance modernisation trends.

Topics

Defence & security United States