WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 30: (L-R) Christian Garrett, Co-Founder, Hill & Valley Forum, Mike Waltz, U.S. National Security Advisor and Brian Schimpf, Co-Founder and CEO, Anduril Industries speak on stage during The Hill & Valley Forum 2025 at The U.S. Capitol Visitor Center on April 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for 137 Ventures/Founders Fund/Jacob Helberg )

Getty Images for 137 Ventures/Founders Fund/Jacob Helberg

Taylor Barnes of Inkstick Media has just released a new report on the state of the military economy, under the auspices of the Transition Security Project. It takes a fresh look at the longstanding assumption that Pentagon spending is a good way to develop technology, create well paying jobs, and serve as an anchor for the U.S. economy. The report offers a devastating critique of these ingrained beliefs.

It has long been known that spending on the military and weapons is the least effective way to stimulate employment. Research by Heidi Peltier for the Brown University Costs of War Project found that virtually any other expenditure of the same level of funding would create more jobs than spending on the Pentagon – infrastructure, green energy, education, public health, even a tax cut. And spending in these areas would do far more to make America safe than spending on long-range nuclear-armed missiles or President Trump’s dream of a leak proof anti-missile system, Golden Dome. Yet the administration’s proposed annual budgets for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control combined are less than $10 billion – roughly the cost of the first week of the president’s ill-conceived war on Iran. Our national priorities are out of line with the challenges we actually face.

Meanwhile, as Barnes’s new report points out, the job impacts of military spending have been diminishing over time. Direct jobs in weapons manufacturing in the United States total 1.1 million now, down from 3 million three decades ago. And the notion that most jobs in the arms industry pay well and have great benefits is also outdated. Barnes found that unionization rates at big weapons makers like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman have dropped sharply in the past two decades. And the rise of AI-driven weapons will likely exacerbate these trends, as automation of weapons design and production destroys some of the existing jobs in the weapons sector.

Barnes’s report suggests that there is a better way to make America safe while creating good jobs. She reviews past efforts at economic conversion – efforts to move from a war economy to a peace economy – and finds some promising experiments that, given sufficient financial support, could have been transformative. The key source on this is Miriam Pemberton’s essential book, Six Stops on the National Security Tour: Rethinking Warfare Economies.

The work of Barnes and Pemberton should be read by every member of Congress as they grapple with the administration’s massive, $1.5 trillion budget request for the Pentagon.