The Pentagon is spending billions on major weapons systems, but there are growing questions

Guest:	Virginia Burger
Title:	Senior defense policy analyst, Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight
Summary:	Even as defense spending rises, many investments are still going into high-cost, limited systems, raising questions about whether the U.S. is building the right mix to sustain a prolonged fight.

The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton provides expert insights on current events in the federal community. Read more interviews to keep up with daily news and analysis that affect the federal workforce. Reach out to Terry and the Federal Drive producers with feedback and story ideas at FederalDrive@federalnewsnetwork.com.

Interview transcript

Terry Gerton You have an interesting new paper out, Exquisite defense fails in practice. Let’s start at the top. Define for me what you mean when you say exquisite defense.

Virginia Burger So exquisite is a term that has been used as a label for specific systems and munitions within the U.S. military for a couple of decades now. Initially it was used as a sort of term by the establishment, by the leadership within the Pentagon as a critique of our procurement habits that were leftover from the cold war, right? Like looking into the patterns we had built on obtaining and procuring incredibly technologically dense and complex missiles that came out of needs identified during the Cold War while we were playing nuclear brinksmanship with the Soviets and all of the sort of patterns and trends that were established in military procurement and acquisition during that period. And so in the mid-2000s, there was sort of this retrospective going on saying, Okay. Are those, you know, exquisite systems, these incredibly technically complex, incredibly expensive systems, going to be what we need in the next fight? And this question was first raised by the military establishment. Not much was done within the Pentagon to address it. There were a couple initiatives, but no real credible action was taken at a scale that any civilian would be able to notice. But it became sort of a pejorative term within military policy spaces overall. And exquisite defense turned into this term of critique, saying, hey, when we buy exquisite things, we are buying things that are too expensive, too fancy. The phrase that always is sort of used in tandem with exquisite is high cost, low density, right, incredibly expensive. But not very many, right? If you look at the average cost for something, like some of these munitions that are often labeled as exquisite, one of them costs $15 million for a single bomb, right. And like that’s exquisite. It’s these huge high costs because of how technically dense they are, all of the process that has to go into developing and making them. That’s what were referring to when we say exquisite

Terry Gerton I really appreciate that articulation of the concept because the paper focuses on two particular systems, air defense systems, Patriot and THAAD. Both have been in the military inventory for decades now. You tried to make the argument that this recent operation, Operation Epic Fury, is the first time we’ve really tried to use them at any scale and we didn’t get what we paid for.

        See how leaders are modernizing cloud with confidence in a new ebook, sponsored by Pega and AWS.

Virginia Burger Exactly. I make this point that exquisite defense is something worth critiquing, especially given how Epic Fury has shown us that the Iranian strategy of throwing cheap drones, namely their Shaheed drones, at us is actually very effective. And I think we were met with a little more push back from them than maybe we anticipated with the might of the U.S. military. And so if you look at these two systems, which are the ones I pulled out specifically for their performance in Epic Fury. The Patriot system and the THAAD, they have a long history of promises and some performance, but never against a near-peer adversary like Iran. And so the reason I picked them was because they were sort of this perfect encapsulated example within Epic Fury to serve as a wider critique of our exquisite systems and our penchant for procuring exquisite systems within the U.S. Military.

Terry Gerton Where do you see the biggest gap between what they cost and what they actually deliver?

Virginia Burger So when you look at their cost versus delivery, the cost, you really have to look back over history, right? The Patriot system was first developed in the seventies. We’ve had it for an extensive amount of time. So if you look at life cycle cost, it’s almost impossible to truly conceive of it based on how expensive it is. But if you at their individual munitions today, like the PAC-3 MSE, that’s the interceptor missile that is fired out of the Patriots systems today, a single one of those is millions of dollars, and that’s just one shot. That’s not even accounting for the maintenance and upkeep of the system, the cost of the radars associated with it, right? It’s not even encompassing that. So just baseline to fire one of those at one drone is an immense cost. THAAD, similarly, their missiles are just as expensive if not more so, and we look at the cost of their radars. There’s been estimates, one of the Radars of a THAAD system in Epic Fury was taken out, and to rebuild and reconstitute that THAAD system, I’ve seen some people estimating the sort of untold cost is going to be over a billion dollars. And that’s just for one of these systems. And so if you look at the cost, it’s immense, but then you look at performance, you have to realize that these two systems have been touted by the defense industry, by their manufacturers, as the cutting edge of air defense, right? Capable of handling every air threat in today’s modern environment — I’m paraphrasing one of the, you know, phrases that one of defense companies sort of throws on in their press release every time they get a new contract for these. And the reality is they were never designed to actually handle the full spectrum of air threats. We go back to the Patriot system, which again, was first developed in the seventies, it was meant to target aircraft, not missiles. In fact, it, was a software update in the Gulf war that made it able to target missiles because they took it to the Gulf War and were like, oh no, the missile threat is what’s really the problem from the Iraqis, not aircraft. That’s what we need to handle. And so they used a software update to make it be able to attack missiles, which was never its intended purpose. And so you sort of see all these built on additions that have brought it to today. Same with the THAAD. The THAAD system, both of them only detect within a very specific altitude range for airborne threats, munitions, aircraft. The THAAD system and its initial development in the late ’90s, early 2000s, they were actually struggling to detect within the full altitude spectrum that they were initially promising, and they actually shrank it. So they now only detected very, very high altitudes where the drones aren’t. And so they can’t even detect drones. And in fact, we’ve seen, prior to Epic Fury, incidents in the Middle East where either U.S. Forces or allies who had purchased these same systems for us, flagged, hey, they didn’t detect that drone, and it got through and made a hit. So we knew that before going into Epic Fury and yet we still had these systems as the backbone of our air defense. And we saw them in one situation, a THAAD radar was taken out successfully, bringing that whole system offline. And these things have a massive range. So what else was then left at risk once that was offline? What other equipment, what other service members, allies were then put at risk because of that? Same thing with the Patriot, right? Like one thing, one part of it, one radar is taken out, suddenly it can’t fire, it can detect without that, this billion dollar system is now offline. Or if you look at the cost of, back to specifically the munitions, the defensive interceptor missiles. We fire one or two of those off to take out one drone, that’s millions of dollars to take out a $20,000 drone. Oh, but wait, that drone is part of a swarm that has 80 more. And so how many millions of dollars are we then firing? And so you have to look at those promises, what they were originally designed for with the actual current threat picture and what that cost truly has amounted to.

Terry Gerton Virginia Burger is senior defense policy analyst for the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight. Virginia, we’re at an interesting potential decision point here. The estimates are that the current operation has drawn down about 50% of the inventory of these kinds of missiles. Something will have to be bought to replace them. The current. 2027 defense budget looks like it’s trying to force a lot of money down the throat of missile providers to try to bring more missiles into inventory faster. Would you say that we’re maybe missing the boat here a little bit? Should we be buying something else?

Virginia Burger I think we should be and there certainly are indications and warnings that the military is looking for cheaper options, right? There was a call put out by the army a few weeks ago, soliciting input from defense manufacturers for low cost munitions. They plan to have an event where they will be able to come and display them, pitch them to the army and the army is the largest branch, so presumably if they like It will then be procured across several other branches as well. So there’s efforts being made and there are discussions about lower cost munitions, right? We have made our own variant of the Shaheed. We got one and reverse engineered it. And we now have one called the LUCAS drone, though it is not a program of record. It is not being procured at scale yet, but that is something that we are working with and experimenting on. So the efforts are there, but we are still procuring and still spending money on these incredibly exquisite systems. And I think what Congress needs to look at as they are considering this year’s budget and they are going through it, both in the armed service committees and appropriations, is are we getting our bang for our buck here? And is this worth pouring all of this money in? I’m not gonna make that decision for them. I am not an elected member of Congress, but if they ask me my opinion, I would say you need to be more critical and you need take a look at what these systems do in the strategies required for modern war. What did Epic Fury teach us? And how can we bring that back and consider it more fully? Because if we look at the costs that they are putting in with these new framework agreements with the defense contractors that have come out since Epic Fury, yes, they’re trying to pour more money into this and saying, oh, we’re going to make these stockpiles back faster and we’re going to be able to get these back. That is a fun headline, but the reality is it’s going to take two to seven years to fully replenish the stockpiles, right? Like that’s two for the ones that are fastest to manufacture, seven for the truly exquisite complex ones that take an immense amount of manufacturing effort and technology to create, right? And so we see these things, but the reality is it’s not going to be faster tomorrow. It’s going to faster in seven years. And then what is the cost at that point, right, because then you get into the entire discussion of deterrence and if our adversaries know we don’t have a stockpile and was this worth it? And those are all incredibly important conversations, but fundamentally we need to pay attention to the headlines that say, oh, it’s fine, we’re just going to build more and we’re going to build them faster. Well, at what cost? Building these technically advanced exquisite munitions is going to be expensive. And are we, in seven years, once we’ve just replenished all of them, going to be in the same boat that we are now, where our adversaries have tailor-made a strategy to combat us with much cheaper, much more cost-effective munitions?

Terry Gerton This seems like a classic situation that we often hear about, which is the defense acquisition program is just not nimble enough to make a sudden change based on real time information. We’ve had these programs for decades. We’ve been buying these programs for decades, we keep putting money into these programs for decades into the future. How would you like to see that process shift so that the Defense Department has more real-time flexibility to shift its focus in acquisition?

Virginia Burger I think we’ve seen some efforts over the last 18 months to try and do that, but I would actually counter and say that I want them not necessarily to reform their entire process, but to actually use the information that is being generated by their own department just outside of the defense acquisition program. We had evidence that the Patriot and THAAD systems were not appropriate for modern war. We knew that they couldn’t detect low flying munitions and low flying drones. That was already evident from incidents the year prior and before that. And in fact, if you look at the Department of Testing and Evaluation, who continue to run tests on these systems, we had multiple annual reports starting from 2019 that showed, hey, we haven’t been testing these — and this is the department itself saying we have not been testing in a realistic combat scenario. We have not actually been able to test them and make sure that they could perform at the level necessary given what we expect our adversaries to throw at us in modern combat. So I would say, yes, we should probably make some reforms so that we can move with the speed of innovation that modern combat requires. But at the same time, we had this information. And if there was just a better, more holistic approach to encompassing all of this data that we already have in reforming what we do when we decide to continue procuring the systems, we may not have been in this situation and we may have identified that hey, maybe we don’t need to sunset these entirely, but maybe we need to spend as much money on them, and maybe we divert some of that to air defense and munitions that would be more cost-effective and appropriate given the threat that we are likely going to face. We have that information, and they could have performed on it.

        Sign up for our daily newsletter so you never miss a beat on all things federal

Copyright © 2026 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.