How the Pentagon turned into the World's largest Golf Club

When it comes to US national security, you'd expect every Pentagon dollar to be directed toward defense, technology, and direct support for soldiers. The reality revealed by a report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), a document analyzed by the American press, is a hilarious one: the US military seems to be turning into the world's largest golf team rather than continuing to be the most feared global military force.

According to the GAO report, the Pentagon owns no fewer than 144 golf courses around the world, and renovating just five of them cost American taxpayers $200 million. We are not talking about modernized military bases, state-of-the-art equipment, or repaired critical infrastructure, but about perfectly mowed lawns and pits filled with white sand, maintained with money ripped from the pockets of Americans.

In these circumstances, the question becomes inevitable: is the US military preparing for war or for an exclusive sports tournament?

The reality is that, according to the GAO report, the annual budget of the Department of Defense, which reached $824.5 billion in 2024 and is approaching a trillion dollars, looks more like an inexhaustible source of waste and abuse than a guarantee of national security. While interest on the US public debt has exceeded the military budget for the first time, reaching $1.02 trillion annually, the Pentagon continues to operate without ever passing a full financial audit.

The press overseas shows that the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has tried to give signals of discipline, canceling contracts and programs worth $ 580 million for diversity and decarbonization initiatives and cutting another $ 5.1 billion initially allocated for consulting and non-essential services. Financial experts in Washington, however, argue that such measures seem like crumbs in the face of a huge mechanism that for decades has expanded its activity beyond the "lethal mission", managing everything from grocery stores and kindergartens to windmills, dried meat factories and, of course, golf courses.

In fact, Senator Tom Coburn warned as early as 2012, in a report entitled "The Department of Everything", that the Pentagon is losing focus, and today's examples confirm the American congressman's statements.

Overclassification, another scourge, makes transparency impossible, hiding fraud and waste under the pretext of security. $2.4 billion in fraud was confirmed in 2024, but the GAO warns that this is only a fraction of the true exposure. If just 1% of fraud were prevented, the Pentagon could save hundreds of millions over a decade. Instead, the agency continues to spend irrationally, especially at the end of the fiscal year, when the "use it or lose it” mentality explodes.

According to the GAO report, the Pentagon spent $79.1 billion in September 2024, but the record was reached in the last five days of last year when $33.1 billion was spent, which is more than Israel's defense budget for the entire year of 2023, which amounted to $28 billion.

The source cited mentions that this rush for unnecessary spending is coupled with a damaging legislative practice: each military branch draws up a "wish list” of unfunded priorities, which for the year 2025 totals $30.8 billion, while Congress secretly adds "budget increases” of at least $22.7 billion, without publicly assuming responsibility. Added to this are uncontrolled travel expenses, with more than 11,000 transactions made in casinos, bars, nightclubs and mobile applications, worth more than $500,000, and millions of transactions, a total of $1.2 billion, that have never been checked for fraud. Another sore point is that the Pentagon is overcharged for almost everything. According to the American press, former negotiator Shy Assad showed in May 2023 that the Pentagon was overcharged for $23.5 billion worth of weapons sent to Ukraine in February 2022. However, the GAO report also offers a grotesque example: The US Air Force paid almost $1 million more for trivial parts, of which soap dispensers were purchased with a 7.943% trade markup. Moreover, the pandemic has deepened the chaos. Thousands of military personnel fired for refusing the COVID vaccine are to be reinstated with all outstanding pay and benefits, the costs could reach hundreds of millions of dollars. In parallel, a $1 billion COVID fund intended for medical supplies was redirected to the manufacture of uniforms and aircraft parts, and tens of millions more went to Wi-Fi, paint and gym equipment.

The GAO report also shows that, beyond the US borders, American taxpayer money is even funding strategic rivals. Hundreds of millions of dollars have "contributed to China's technological advancements and military modernization,” according to an audit by a House of Representatives committee that studied spending in the Asian country. That audit shows that a professor who received at least $7.8 million from the US to research metallic hydrogen later accepted a position at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his research is being implemented by the institution that designs nuclear warheads for the Chinese government. In total, 9,000 Pentagon research projects were identified, developed in collaboration with individuals affiliated with the Chinese government.

When it comes to military equipment, the picture that emerges from the GAO report is dramatic: over 7 billion dollars in weapons were abandoned in Afghanistan, and in Ukraine 59% of the weapons sent cannot be accounted for, because they cannot be found. This is the disappearance of weapons and military equipment worth almost a billion dollars. The cited document shows that during this time the Pentagon has postponed the maintenance of military buildings, maintenance whose value amounts to 271 billion dollars. Moreover, foreign purchases of 5.2 billion dollars annually are not evaluated to see if they help or harm American industry, and 28 international agreements are renewed without due diligence. In parallel, the Pentagon receives 1.8 billion dollars for artificial intelligence, but it does not know how it will use the technology, nor which positions it will replace. And, above all, the F-35 program, the most expensive in history, will ultimately cost more than $2 trillion, even though the planes are only operational 55 percent of the time, according to the GAO report, compared to 90 percent as planned.

All of these examples are not simple one-off slippages, but signs of a systemic malaise: a financially obese, out-of-control department more concerned with luxury and domestic politics than with national defense.

In this context, President Trump's initiative to rename the Pentagon from the "Department of Defense” to the "Department of War” seems more like an act of brutal honesty than mere rhetoric. Trump said the old name "had a stronger ring” and that the US must recognize both the offensive and defensive sides of the military. Critics warn that such a label could make war more likely, but the truth is that the US has been at war almost constantly since 1945, without officially declaring one.

In conclusion, it can be said that, according to the GAO report, today the "Department of Defense” does not defend anything, but bathes in waste and luxury, while soldiers are sent into endless conflicts and the national debt suffocates the American economy. From this angle, the image of the Pentagon as a giant golf team maintained by taxpayers' money is no longer a simple irony, but a faithful description of an institution that has lost its compass.