But in Trump’s worldview, in which the United States should always have the biggest and best of everything (his 250-foot triumphal arch, proposed for the banks of the Potomac, is so tall it would require approval from the Federal Aviation Administration), $1 trillion is not enough.

“I have determined that, for the Good of our Country, especially in these very troubled and dangerous times, our Military Budget for the year 2027 should not be $1 Trillion Dollars, but rather $1.5 Trillion Dollars,” Trump announced on Truth Social in early January. “This will allow us to build the “Dream Military” that we have long been entitled to and, more importantly, that will keep us SAFE and SECURE, regardless of foe.”

Depending on which base number it is compared to — the $839 billion Pentagon top line just passed by Congress, the $900 billion in total defense spending, including other appropriations, or the $1 trillion figure that includes additional funds from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — the one-year increase in defense spending is either 50%, 66%, or a whopping 78%. 

Nevertheless, the eye-popping was immediately endorsed by the Republican chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.

“Exactly the kind of investment it will take to rebuild our military,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) said in their joint statement. “The previous administration resisted adequate military funding, instead settling for depleted stockpiles, aging equipment, and worsening recruitment challenges.”

The proposal also won plaudits from editorial pages as varied as the Wall Street Journal, which called the Trump proposal “a serious defense budget, at last,” while noting, “A $1.5 trillion military will cost much less than a war with China.”

The newly more Trump-friendly Washington Post editorial page also was a fan, calling $1.5 trillion for defense, “a bargain,” writing that while a 50% increase “may sound outlandish at first,” it’s “perhaps the most important step the White House can take to ensuring peace through strength.”

If Trump’s proposal has one thing going for it, it is that, historically, U.S. military commanders have lamented that even as Pentagon budgets grew over the years, they did not keep up as a percentage of the nation’s gross national product.

A $1.5 trillion defense budget would also end the hypocrisy of the United States demanding that its poorer NATO allies spend 5% of GDP on defense, while the U.S. spends just over 3%. 

Trump’s plan would put U.S. defense spending at 4.8%, which would move the U.S. from sixth place to first place among the 32 NATO allies, all of whom have pledged to meet the 5% target by 2035.

Still, getting a $500 to $600 billion-plus up in the Pentagon’s top-line budget is going to be a heavy lift even if Republicans hold on to the House and Senate after the midterm elections.

So far, criticism from Democrats has been muted, largely because Trump has provided no details on how the money would be spent or how the Pentagon would handle such a large infusion of cash. 

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who has been barnstorming the country on what he calls his “Arsenal of Freedom” tour, has been telling defense industry leaders the Pentagon won’t waste a penny.

“We’re going to spend every dime of that wisely,” Hegseth said in remarks at Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth, Texas.

“We will not squander this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rebuild our military,” Hegseth said alongside Elon Musk at the newly renamed Starbase, Texas.

“Think of what this means as our efforts to transform the department come fully online,” Hegseth said, calling the goal of a $1.5 trillion defense budget, “a historic and generational investment in American security.”

While defense contractors are salivating, anticipating that untold billions will flow into Trump’s pricy Golden Dome initiative (estimated cost: $175 billion to over $3 trillion), watchdog groups are warning that when too much money is sloshing around the Pentagon, a lot tends to spill over the sides.

“The notion of boosting defense spending by 50% in one year is loony. Even if you think it makes sense, the Pentagon lacks the capability to absorb such a tidal wave of cash so quickly,” Mark Thompson, a blogger for the Project on Government Oversight, wrote last month. “It would be buying inefficiency, warping other elements of the U.S. economy, and fattening already corpulent defense-contractor coffers.”

A year into the Golden Dome project, the Pentagon has yet to spend any of the $23 billion appropriated by Congress last summer, Politico reported this month.

Then there’s the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which published an estimate of the compounding effect of spending $1.5 trillion in fiscal 2027 over subsequent defense budgets.

Factoring in inflation, the result would be an increase in defense spending of about $5 trillion through 2035, while adding $5.8 trillion to the national debt.

Trump insists the cost can easily be covered by the “astronomical” revenue coming in from tariffs, telling Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo in January, “We’ll be taking in over $600 billion this year alone.”

Noting that the Supreme Court is weighing whether Trump may have overstepped his tariff authority, he added, “We hope we have a good decision from the Supreme Court. If we don’t, we’ll figure something else.”

Critics also worry that billions may be wasted on grandiose projects that will take so long to complete they will likely become the latest in the long list of expensive Pentagon weapons programs that over the years have been canceled due to cost overruns, technical problems, or just because they no longer are suitable for modern warfare.

Exhibit A is the Trump-class of battleships, massive ships that would be bristling with a slew of exotic next-generation weapons, including rail-guns, air defense lasers, and perhaps nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

“We’re bringing back the battleship, Trump said at a recent Cabinet meeting, inspired apparently by a 1952 documentary series about World War II naval battles. 

“Those unbelievable scenes that you see, “Victory at Sea.” You’d see these incredible ships. And I thought they were powerful,” Trump said. “But the battleships that we’re building are going to be 100 times more powerful than those beautiful works of art.”

The battleship era ended decades ago in 1992, when the Navy decommissioned the USS Missouri, and there’s a good reason the U.S. doesn’t build battleships anymore.

“The operational concept that once justified battleships has been obsolete for decades, supplanted first by aircraft carriers and now by long-range precision missiles and networked fleets,” wrote Trent Hone in War on the Rocks. “Building a modern battleship would produce a smaller, less resilient, and less lethal force than existing alternatives.”

In 1998, the Navy ditched a similar concept called the “Arsenal ship,” citing the risk of carrying so many costly missiles in one surface ship.

In an essay in Bloomberg, retired Adm. James Stavridis questioned the wisdom of putting “so much expensive weaponry and so many sailors on a single, potentially vulnerable platform.”

“A better use of precious shipbuilding assets would be to construct many low-cost, unmanned, semi-submersible platforms that could operate drone swarms launched from land, or launch land-attack missiles controlled from space,” Stavridis wrote.

Trump wants 25 of the new “big, beautiful battleships” to be the vanguard of what he’s dubbed the “Golden Fleet,” but for now, and likely for years to come, it is just an artist’s conception, and the betting among national security experts is the program will not survive the next administration.

TRUMP TARGETS RAYTHEON AS ‘LEAST RESPONSIVE’ CONTRACTOR TO DEPARTMENT OF WAR

“This ship will never sail,” wrote Mark Cancian, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It will take years to design, cost $9 billion each to build, and contravene the Navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower. 

“A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water,” Cancian predicted. 

Jamie McIntyre (@jamiejmcintyre) is the Washington Examiner‘s senior writer on national security.