Tom Fitton Quotes

While our superpower military is stunningly effective, it is also stunningly expensive.

The Military Industrial Complex. President Eisenhower had it wrong. It’s the Military Industrial Congressional Complex.

The Pentagon cannot acquire any equipment or technology without adequate funding. And the current budget process does not allow for the development and deployment of solutions to urgent problems on the battlefield.

I have long believed there is a lot of waste in the defense budget.

Congress votes for things the military doesn't want, and planes and other weaponry that cost a lot but don't work.

The military budget is simply an enormous pork barrel of special privilege, the privileges taking the form of windfall profits, of no-risk profits and, most importantly, of enormous outlays of capital supplied by the Pentagon to arms contractors.

The administration has a disturbing pattern of behavior when it comes to budgeting not only for the ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan but also for military requirements not directly related to these conflicts.

In 1940, then-Senator Harry Truman headed up a Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. In the course of World War II, more than $15 billion in unnecessary and fraudulent defense spending was identified.

What I say is, national defense is the most important thing we do in Washington, but there's still waste in the military budget.

When you cut a half-a-trillion dollars from the defense budget, it affects almost every area in the defense budget.

It almost seems an institutional phenomenon that [military weapons] projects start with gross underestimates by both Government and the contractor.

The defense budget has become a jobs program.

The defense budget is more than a piggy bank for people who want to get busy beating swords into pork barrels.

The military system is, to a substantial extent, a method whereby the population provides a subsidy to the high technology industry.

We can always find money for what the military wants.

The military always asks for more [appropriations] than it gets.

The good news is the Pentagon is going to make some significant budget cuts. The bad news is: They want to kill a plane that's built in your district.

The ideal weapons system is built in 435 congressional districts, and it doesn't matter whether it works or not.

In the name of "reform" Congress now has its hand in virtually every aspect of military procurement.

Some members of congress have dealt so long with the military and with the defense contractors that they begin to think they are without faults.

What chiefly governs the military budget is the need to spend enormous sums of money in a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon is simply a receptacle for wasteful expenditure, just as a city dump is the receptacle for the refuse of a city.

The defense industry understands that the military budgets will continue to be cut until a new threat comes along.

In Afghanistan and Iraq [the wars], the Pentagon saw little value in making acquisitions that would be irrelevant by the time they were ready.

The Pentagon is the Poster Child for waste in Government.

President Trump recognizes that the F-35 is a very large program - the largest program in the Department of Defense. He wants to make the sure that the American taxpayer is getting the lowest possible cost on the program.