The Bunker appears originally at the Project on Government Oversight and is republished here with permission.
Did The Bunker miss anything during our week away? Did the Strait of Hormuz re-open? Was Iran’s “nuclear dust” cleaned up by President Trump’s phantasmically lethal Endust? Just asking. Hasn’t taken long for this unsanctioned, undeclared “little excursion” to transform itself into what increasingly is looking like a “quagmire” or a “long, hard slog.” Both fit, at least for now — take your pick! Fact is, watching this harebrained war unfold in real time is excruciating, so it was good to take a break. It’s a vivid reminder that building and buying the world’s best military hardware, operated by the globe’s finest and most-highly-trained troops, is no guarantee of victory. Or even success.
It’s refreshing to focus on hardware and put most of the Pentagon’s recent personnel drama on the back burner. Sure, you can fire members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and sundry other four-stars. But who, in the middle of a war, spends time ousting the Army’s chief chaplain? Or the ombudsman of the Pentagon’s Stars and Stripes newspaper? That must mean that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is winning the war against Iran so handily that he has plenty of time to fine-tune the U.S. national-security apparatus so that it purrs like a lapdog (if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor).
Turns out that while we were away, Navy Secretary John Phelan, who sometimes spoke truth to power, was forced to walk the plank with — predictably — no explanation. He’s the latest in a never-ending series of those apparently loathed by Hegseth. Raise your hand if you’re old enough to remember when “body count” referred to the number of Viet Cong killed by U.S. troops in Vietnam, and not the number of top Pentagon officials, both military and civilian, abruptly and unceremoniously fired by Hegseth because of mysterious transgressions (lately amid the biggest U.S. war in a generation).
But back to the hardware. For every successful dream of a new military technology that ends up working as advertised, there are 100 nightmares into which U.S. taxpayers are forced to pour money with little to show for it. The challenge, of course, is to pluck the winners from the losers before the billions have been spent.
That is one of the jobs of The Bunker, a proud and long-standing member of the Military-Industrial-Critical-Complex. Like its colleagues, including the recently-late-and-already-missed Larry Korb, we cheer the successes. But we slap our foreheads over brain-dead schemes bound for what President Ronald Reagan famously called “The ash heap of history.” Alas, while the Soviet Union can collapse only once, bone-headed defense projects dedicated to producing gold-plated silver bullets for a never-sated Department of Defense remain a perpetual-motion money machine.
The Bunker takes no pride in being a DoDebbie DoDowner, but somebody’s got to do it…
Trump B.S.* *Battleship
The Trump-class battleship, a dumb idea from the get-go, is running into rough seas. According to the New York Times, Navy Secretary Phelan has been deep-sixed as a result. But it is a fitting beginning of the end of an albatross that could never fly. Or float. Nonetheless, just one day before Phelan went rudderless, the Navy said it planned to spend an incredible — which literally means unbelievable — $17 billion on Trump’s Nutso Armed Vanity Yacht (NAVY). That’s more than the Navy’s planning to spend for each of its newest aircraft carriers.
In truth, the NAVY is little more than procurement pornography. Phelan tried to build it to please a president enamored by “Victory at Sea,” a 1950s TV documentary series hailing the key role played by U.S. battleships in World War II. A cartoonish Navy depiction of the NAVY appears to show all its weapons firing simultaneously, contrary to both common sense and good seamanship (if not good sailsmanship). The apparent result of a presidential wet saltwater dream, the behemoth boat is designed to steam seas where swarms of autonomously-operated drones could likely blind it, kill it, and sink it. While the Navy has been pushing for more and smaller ships for years, Trump’s battleship would be a giant step backward toward World War II.
But last December, a toadying Navy hailed Trump’s NAVY announcement. The service declared that the Trump-class battleship “will stand as the centerpiece of the Navy’s Golden Fleet initiative and will be the first of its kind providing dominant firepower and a decisive advantage over adversaries by integrating the most advanced deep-strike weapons of today with the revolutionary systems of the years ahead.”
It encouraged those interested in learning more about the Trump-class battleship to “visit goldenfleet.navy.mil.” Originally outfitted with PR piffle, the link for several weeks has carried a different message: “Webpage currently under construction. Check back soon for updates.”
Don’t hold your breath.
Then again, clicking on the official Navy link for “The Honorable John Phelan,” the 79th secretary of the U.S. Navy, now generates a 404 Error Message: “Sorry, the page you are looking for cannot be found and might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.”
Hell of a way to run a military.
Golden Dome writ small
The Trump-class battleship would be a disaster, in the unlikely event Congress is stupid enough to fund it (but don’t rule it out!). Yet the Trump-class aerial shield known as Golden (née Iron) Dome would be even worse.
We got a couple of clues into this over the past week. On April 15, the Golden Dome’s military chief suggested that despite the dome’s mammoth budget, the Pentagon may not be able to afford the interceptors needed to kill enemy missiles in their “boost phase” shortly after launch, when they are easiest to shoot down. While the Pentagon likes to say the dome will cost $185 billion, outside estimates say its total price tag could soar to $3.6 trillion.
Given the current laws of physics (not subject to gerrymandering, filibusters, or major campaign donations), it seems that such “space-based interceptors” would be required to make the system work. In fact, a week after being inaugurated for his second term in January 2025, Trump signed an executive order in which he “ordered…at a minimum, plans for … development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercept.”
Maybe not, Mr. President. “If boost-phase intercept from space is not affordable and scalable, we will not produce it,” General Michael Guetlein said.
Two days later, on April 17, the Space Force killed the “Global Positioning System Next Generation Operational Control System.” The Defense Department scrapped this ground-based control network for GPS satellites after the Pentagon and contractor Raytheon spent more than $6 billion on it. The program had been in development since 2010, and was supposed to be ready a decade ago.
“Despite repeated collaborative approaches by the entire government and contractor team, the challenges of onboarding the system in an operationally relevant timeline proved insurmountable,” a Space Force officer said. “We discovered problems across a broad range of capability areas that would put current GPS military and civilian capabilities at risk.”
The notion that the U.S. military-industrial complex can’t build an improved GPS guidance system — but can build an infinitely more-complex Golden Dome — is delusional. Even congressional Republicans are rightly dubious.
Yet hype springs eternal. A week after Guetlein said Golden Dome’s budget might not be kitted out with space-based interceptors, his command announced that it has awarded 20 contracts worth up to $3.2 billion to 12 companies — including Raytheon — to begin developing space-based interceptors.
It's our money, folks
Simply put, the Golden Fleet and Golden Dome are little-boy, Tom Swiftian fantasies that Trump has spawned. They’re wonder weapons being suckled by his civilian Pentagon appointees (Phelan’s a billionaire and major Trump donor who never served a day in the U.S. military), nurtured by uniformed acolytes, championed by the U.S. defense industry, and funded by U.S. taxpayers. They will never deliver what they promise. But they, with their projected price tags potentially reaching into the trillions, will push the nation ever deeper into debt and closer to bankruptcy.
Speaking of which, insolvency is something Trump knows all about. After all, his casinos, hotels, and resorts filed for bankruptcy either four times (according to the president) or six (according to a more thorough accounting). Not Trump personally, mind you. “I never went bankrupt,” he has declared. But others, mostly anonymous workers, ended up paying the price for his profligacy.
Now it’s happening again. But this time around, we’re all paying.
Here's what has caught the Bunker's eye recently
Not only did Trump go to war with Iran before informing the U.S. public of its necessity, now his administration is failing to provide that same public with even a rudimentary accounting of its cost, Haider Ali Hussein Mullick, a veteran of the Pentagon inspector general’s shop, wrote in the New York Times April 26.
→ Sunk sub
Highlighting the Navy’s failure to keep its fleet shipshape, the service has decided to mothball the USS Boise, an attack submarine, after it spent more than a decade pierside awaiting a major overhaul, The War Zone’s Joseph Trevithick reported April 10.
The Pentagon’s F-35 fighter, the costliest weapons system ever, is well-suited to fight yesterday’s wars, John G. Ferrari and Dillon Prochnicki maintained April 20 in War on the Rocks.
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