29.8.2026
Donald Trump And Pete Hegseth Have Officially Bankrupted The US Navy
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Dean Blundell on 2026-08-28 14:29
https://deanblundell.substack.com/p/breaking-donald-trump-and-pete-hegseth
You know a war is going great when the Pentagon starts robbing its own sailors to pay for it.
The Guardian dropped a bomb yesterday, and for once it wasn't one of ours. According to internal documents and interviews with Navy officials, contractors and defence analysts, Trump's war on Iran has driven the US military into a full-blown financial crisis. The Navy is quietly transferring funds from payroll accounts to cover combat costs. A Pentagon memo, seen by the Guardian, warns of "shortfalls in payroll" because the department has been "raiding" those accounts to keep the war machine running.
Raiding. Their word, not mine. The Pentagon is describing itself the way cops describe a guy who broke into a Best Buy.
One Navy official laid out the shell game in plain English: "The money for payroll was robbed to pay for overseas contingencies and is being backfilled by money that hasn't been spent. They are backfilling payroll so we get enough money in our paycheck."
Robbed. Backfilled. These are the words of a functioning superpower, apparently. It's the military version of paying your Visa with your Mastercard while telling your wife everything's fine.
How We Got Here
Trump launched this thing on February 28. Six months later, the scoreboard reads like a fire sale. Munitions stockpiles depleted. Iranian retaliatory strikes have wrecked strategic US bases across the Middle East. The Navy's entire 2026 budget, nearly $300 billion, was built by Congress with specific buckets for personnel, shipbuilding, weapons and day-to-day operations, and the law limits how much you can shuffle between them. So the Pentagon started shuffling anyway, in what officials charmingly call "imaginative" ways.
Pete Hegseth told Congress in April the war would cost about $25 billion. By July, his number was north of $35 billion. NBC reported that the Pentagon's internal estimate is actually $80 to $100 billion once you count repairs to wrecked bases, replacement of destroyed aircraft, and restocking the weapons they've burned through. The administration has asked Congress for $67 billion in emergency funding, and that request is currently stalled because even Republicans are getting squirmy about writing blank cheques for a war with no endgame that Americans increasingly hate.
Meanwhile, non-emergency maintenance at shore facilities has been quietly deferred. That's the polite way of saying the Navy stopped fixing things it can't afford to fix.
The Quotes Tell You Everything
Harlan Ullman, a retired naval officer who sits on the National Commission for the Future of the Navy, put it simply: "The piggy bank is broken."
Todd Harrison, a defence analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, which is about as far from a liberal think tank as you can get, says the Pentagon's silence is deliberate: "They're just not speaking publicly about it. And I suspect that is a deliberate decision of the civilian leaders in the Pentagon, starting at the secretary, that this is for political reasons, that they don't want to look like they're damaging future military readiness over a war that is becoming a political liability increasingly."
And my personal favourite, from a former military officer now working for a Navy contractor, briefed on the shortfalls, describing the state of the Navy in two words: "They're f-----."
The Guardian censored it. I wouldn't have.
The Navy's official response? A spokesman said they are "actively managing resources to meet current pay obligations on time" and working closely with Congress. Translation: the cheques haven't bounced yet, please stop asking questions.
Why This Matters
This is the party of Support The Troops literally taking money out of the accounts that pay the troops. Eighteen Americans dead, more than 430 wounded, zero oversight hearings, and now the sailors doing the actual fighting are having their payroll accounts strip mined so the guy who started this can keep it going.
The war has no clear endgame. The bases are wrecked. The weapons are spent. The money is gone. And the plan, as far as anyone can tell, is creative accounting and hoping Congress blinks before the payroll accounts hit zero.
They shot all their weapons, they trashed all their ships, they ran out of money. And the piggy bank is broken.
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Source: The Guardian, August 27, 2026
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MUCH MORE:
https://deanblundell.substack.com/p/breaking-donald-trump-and-pete-hegseth