Would You Trust Pete Hegseth With $1.5 Trillion of Your Money?

Mr. Shachtman, a contributing Opinion writer, is a longtime national security reporter.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently asked Congress for a staggering amount of money: $1.5 trillion. That’s a more than 40 percent increase from last year’s also incomprehensible Pentagon budget and the equivalent of the annual revenues of Amazon, Google’s parent company and Apple combined.

Technically, officially, Mr. Hegseth’s $1.5 trillion was a........

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