As Congress belatedly works to finalize the budget for fiscal 2025, some lawmakers are pushing to dramatically increase Pentagon spending, claiming that we need a “generational investment” to meet the national security challenges we face.

The truth is, we don’t. Rather, we need to realign our national security strategies for the challenges we face, and then fund the programs those strategies require while cutting the programs they don’t.

First, let’s dispel the myth that the U.S. military is underfunded. Clocking in at $850 billion in the last fiscal year, the U.S. military is the most well-funded fighting force on the planet. Adjusted for inflation, last year’s military spending marked a nearly 50 percent increase since the turn of the 21st Century.

Despite this astounding growth, last May, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the top Senate recipient of campaign contributions from the military industry in the 2024 election cycle and the senior most Republican on the Armed Services Committee, laid out a plan to ramp up U.S. military spending to 5 percent of GDP.