(Bloomberg) -- The second Trump administration should shift investments at the Pentagon in favor of emerging technologies such as drones and hypersonic missiles, according to Vivek Ramaswamy, the former presidential candidate who has been tapped along with Elon Musk to cut wasteful spending.
Rather than the prevailing “lazy debate” about defense budgets, the appropriate question is “are we deploying the right kind of federal spending?” Ramaswamy told the Aspen Security Forum in Washington on Wednesday. He said defense spending should be evaluated by the return on investment for taxpayers.
“If you look at how much we’re actually spending on drones or hypersonic missiles, it’s actually a tiny — like a shockingly and alarmingly tiny — percentage of the Defense Department’s budget,” he said. “When in fact those are two of the kinds of investments where we ought to be spending more. But that doesn’t mean that the overall defense budget needs to be bigger.”
Dismissing a “faulty premise” equating dollars spent to levels of security, Ramaswamy said the focus should be on investments that will help the Pentagon to secure the US and deter and if necessary win wars. The Pentagon’s long-standing inability to pass an audit is “unconscionable,” he said.
Ramaswamy’s comments align with past remarks by Musk, the billionaire co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency, the advisory panel that President-elect Donald Trump created to cut unnecessary spending. Musk’s SpaceX has taken huge market share from established defense contractors in space launches, just as many startups want to do in drone technology.
Musk has criticized Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35, the world’s costliest weapons program. Last month, he wrote in a post on X that “manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway. Will just get pilots killed.” The post linked to a Bloomberg News story that detailed the jet’s reliability and security woes.
“Some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35,” he wrote.
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