Chairman McConnell in The Wall Street Journal: Peace Through Strength Is Worth Paying For

WASHINGTON, D.C.
– U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense,
wrote the following op-ed
on FY26 Defense Appropriations that appears in today’s print edition of
The Wall Street Journal
.
What time is it in America? “This is a 1939 moment. Or, hopefully, a 1981 moment. A moment of mounting urgency,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently said. He is right about the gathering threats to America’s national security. But the lesson of 1939 is that fighting war is far costlier than deterring it. Defeating the Axis powers saw U.S. defense spending hit 37% of gross domestic product.
The defense budget request for fiscal 2026 from the Office of Management and Budget shows America risks forgetting this hard-won lesson. If our goal is to make this a “1981 moment”—as in the first year of the Reagan administration, when under-investment in the U.S. military was turned around—we must deliver more consistent support for defense. President Reagan’s peace-through-strength Cold War budgets allocated about twice as much as we spend now as a percentage of GDP. Today, in the face of many significant adversaries, spending more on defense is simply necessary. It must not be controversial.
I urged President Trump at the beginning of his second term to reject calls to narrow the scope of U.S. strategic interests and to invest in the armed forces and defense industrial base. Mr. Trump rightly disregarded the advice of isolationists and conducted decisive strikes against Iran while sustaining the Aukus partnership with Australia and the U.K. The president wants the best possible military for America and has set ambitious priorities such as a comprehensive missile defense, aka Golden Dome, and a shipbuilding renaissance. I have supported him in these endeavors.
But with 59 days until interim government funding runs out, it remains to be seen whether Mr. Trump’s administration and Congress will seize the opportunity provided by the Senate’s full-year defense appropriations bill for 2026 and invest accordingly.
Senior Pentagon officials have expressed a commitment to rebuilding American hard power. But others in the administration have balked at the resources required for these overdue efforts. In March, the president’s budget advisers pushed the first-ever full-year continuing resolution for defense, effectively extending President Biden’s anemic defense budget.
In June, OMB submitted a request for 2026 that would hold annual defense spending stagnant against inflation. In the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, administration officials then created budgetary chaos by pressing Congress to squeeze multiyear efforts like shipbuilding into a one-time spending measure using a process known as budget reconciliation. This complicated maneuver left critical programs on the cutting-room floor. Pentagon leaders have since acknowledged that total 2025 shortfalls after reconciliation exceed $25 billion.
Presidential priorities like Golden Dome and restoring shipbuilding are necessary to keep America safe, but they will fail without sustained long-term investment.
In recent weeks, Pentagon officials have acknowledged a $20 billion to $30 billion shortfall in critical munitions. Despite the complaints of senior administration officials about our limited production capacity, the administration’s 2026 budget request failed even to make use of that capacity to begin addressing the issue. Pentagon leaders now seem eager to support multiyear procurement to address the challenges ahead, but these plans are wishful thinking without additional funding.
By independent estimates, Golden Dome alone could cost upward of $3.5 trillion over the next 20 years, but the program is likely underfunded even this year. The president announced his selection of a sixth-generation fighter aircraft for the Air Force, the F-47, but this program is underfunded in 2026 by $500 million. Pentagon dithering over the Navy’s sixth-generation fighter, the F/A-XX, has delayed its development and led to hundreds of millions in contract-extension costs. If the department made a decision, Mr. Trump could launch a program that ensures the aircraft carrier remains America’s premier power-projection platform for decades.
The pace of military operations in the Middle East and Western Hemisphere has also exacerbated a shortfall in operations and maintenance, another consequence of the full-year continuing resolution. Combine that with the shortfall for Navy ship operations and the total operations and maintenance shortfall likely exceeds $2 billion.
These shortfalls aren’t breaking news. They are why the Senate passed, 77-20, a National Defense Authorization Act delivering $32 billion above the OMB request and on top of the money authorizers included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which I chair, worked with Pentagon leaders to build in an extra $7 billion to address urgent munitions requirements. It included nearly $8 billion to address shortfalls from reconciliation. And it addressed billions of dollars in unfunded requirements submitted by the armed services and combatant commands. To do so, we set our top line at $21.7 billion above the administration’s 2026 request.
As we look ahead to conferencing this bill with the House, Congress ought to ensure that this higher allocation is what the president signs into law. Mr. Trump’s advisers should encourage him to help Congress pass a defense appropriations bill that makes the historic investments needed to restore peace through strength.
A full-year bill capped at the OMB-requested level or another full-year continuing resolution would be devastating to the U.S. military. And it would imperil the president’s military legacy.
Mr. McConnell, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Kentucky.