After taking a wrecking ball to the Agency for International Development and freezing key activities at other key federal agencies, President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), spearheaded by Elon Musk, has turned its attention to the Department of Defense.

The legitimacy of outsourcing the power to hire and fire government employees, vacuum up confidential information, reshape federal agencies, and set the table for discussions on the national budget to an unelected tech billionaire who also happens to be a major federal contractor is questionable, to put it mildly. But until the courts or the Congress rein in the DOGE it will continue to have an outsized impact on our priorities as a nation.

Many critics of Pentagon waste have taken heart from President Trump’s assertions that if the right deal can be struck with Russia and China, the Pentagon budget can be cut in half, and that it is time to “denuclearize,” given the high cost and immense destructive power of nuclear weapons. Add to this Musk’s harsh critique of the overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft and one might assume that the Pentagon is in for its first thorough overhaul in living memory.

The DOGE has already asked for a list of probationary civilian employees at the Pentagon, some of whom are likely to be let go in the name of efficiency. Hopefully the efficiency crew will be more careful than it was at the Department of Energy, where it let go hundreds of workers – many of whom were involved in safeguarding nuclear weapons and radioactive materials – and is now scrambling to find and rehire them.

For their part, the military services are preparing lists of items they may be willing to eliminate. As one defense official told the Wall Street Journal, “People are offering up things sacrificially, hoping that will prevent more cuts.” While the Air Force refused to divulge its list, the Navy has suggested cutting certain combat ships, including the troubled Littoral Combat Ship, which Congress has tried to preserve in the face of past efforts to trim the fleet.

Meanwhile, the administration’s statements about how much can be saved are all over the map. President Trump has spoken of billions or “hundreds of billions” in cuts, while Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has set his sights considerably lower:

“Where we can find billions of dollars . . . inside the Defense Department, every dollar we save there is a dollar that goes to warfighters, and that’s good for the American people.”

The only areas Hegseth has cited for cuts so far are headquarters employees and climate-related projects – a tiny fraction of a Pentagon budget that is soaring towards $1 trillion per year. And it is unclear what he means by dollars going to warfighters – hopefully it means real support, like better pay and benefits, more training hours, or more effective weaponry. But depending how they are implemented, and over what time frame, any of those options are likely to mean a shift of Pentagon funding, not a reduction.

A genuine effort to make the Pentagon more efficient will have to go beyond trimming at the margins and cancel dysfunctional, dangerous and unnecessary weapons programs like the F-35, the new intercontinental ballistic missile, and enormously expensive and highly vulnerable aircraft carriers. And before going too far down the road of slashing the department’s civilian workforce, there should be a close look at the hundreds of thousands of contract personnel employed by the Pentagon, many of whom do jobs that could be done more cheaply and effectively by government employees. These and other key measures – like providing government contract officers with the information they need to prevent price gouging on basic items – are set out in a recent joint analysis by my organization, the Quincy Institute, in partnership with the Stimson Center and Taxpayers for Common Sense.

It is possible to go beyond efficiency narrowly defined to making major reductions in Pentagon outlays while crafting a more effective defense strategy, but that task must devolve to elected officials in Congress and the executive branch, propelled by substantial public pressure. Doing so would require abandoning hollow phrases like “peace through strength” and taking a cold hard look at which global challenges might truly require a U.S. military response, and which are better handled via smart diplomacy or stepped up efforts by U.S. allies. Part of any serious reappraisal of U.S. strategy should involve rolling back the current “cover the globe” approach, which seeks the capability to intervene anywhere in the world on short notice, backed up by hundreds of overseas military bases, large contingents of troops stationed overseas, and counterterror operations in dozens of countries.

The record of the U.S. wars of this century – which have failed to meet their objectives despite the fact that the Costs of War Project at Brown University has established that America’s post-9/11 conflicts cost trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives, and resulted in enormous physical and psychological injuries to U.S. veterans – should be all the evidence we need that a less militarized, less interventionist foreign policy is desperately needed if we are to meet the challenges of the coming decades. And many of these challenges – like climate change and pandemics – are not military in nature.

This more fundamental change in our approach to national defense will not come from the unelected bureaucrats of the DOGE, but from a vigorous national debate about what makes us safe, and what kind of society we want to build for the generations to come.