Pete Hegseth faces questions over $87.6bn additional funding for Pentagon

The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, walked into the Senate on Tuesday to defend the Trump administration’s $87.6bn supplemental funding request, facing lawmakers furious that the Israel-war-on-Iran" class="entity-link entity-event" data-entity-id="38678" data-entity-type="event">US-Israel war on Iran is costing far more than the White House has admitted.Hegseth and the chair of the joint chiefs, Gen Dan Caine, faced the Senate appropriations committee, chaired by Susan Collins of Maine, as the Pentagon said it was running low on cash to keep the fight going. Of the total request, $67.1bn of the request is earmarked specifically to keep the war effort funded.It was the pair’s first sustained public questioning since a brief ceasefire collapsed and the war roared back to life. At least two US soldiers were killed in an Iranian attack on Friday, and another died in Iraq destroying an Iranian drone, pushing the American death toll since February to 17. Nearly 100 troops have been wounded in the conflict, officials confirm, though most injuries were minor.Patty Murray, the committee’sDemocratic vice-chair, opened by demanding to know what the war had actually achieved, accusing the administration of shifting its rationale by the week. “We hear a different rationale for this war every few days,” she said, noting the justification had moved from preempting threats that “did not exist” to regime change, then to dismantling Iran’s nuclear programme and navy, and now, she said, to simply reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway that was “fully open, toll-free, before this war began”.Murray argued that Donald Trump had, “by any objective measure, failed to achieve his goals”, warning that depleted US munitions stockpiles would take years to rebuild and that the country’s global military posture had been left weaker, not stronger, by the war.Hegseth, whose testimony was interrupted by protesters a number of times, instead cast the funding request as the price of deterrence rather than admitting failure, and framed the Pentagon’s overhaul under the US president as a break from what he described as years of slow bureaucracy.“The best way to create peace is to prepare for war, to deter it,” Hegseth told the panel, arguing the department was “building a force so capable that it would be absurd for anyone to challenge it”.Hegseth said the $21bn readiness portion of the request would cover military pay, replace equipment used in recent operations and stabilize fuel shortfalls, while the $46bn capability portion would expand production of “solid rocket motors, JDAMs [Joint Direct Attack Munitions], hypersonics and counter-drone capabilities”.Without the funds, he warned, the department faced “critical shortfalls” that threaten its ability to pay troops and replenish munitions, and he cautioned that failing to fund the Pentagon at $1.5tn was “the greatest threat that our nation faces”.Some Democrats, including Chris Coons of Delaware, plan to direct criticism at Russell Vought, director of office of management and budget, who is not testifying but who earlier told US Congress that the war’s running cost was about $30bn, a figured largely believed by experts to be a severe undercount.Hegseth and Caine also face potential threats from within their own party. Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, two prominent Republicans, have both crossed the aisle to back war-powers resolutions aimed at reining in the president’s authority over the conflict, and Collins has previously voiced frustration that the administration’s strategy for the war seems to shift almost daily.House representatives have separately accused the Pentagon of stonewalling on basic figures: Betty McCollum, the top Democrat on the House defense appropriations panel, said the department has missed a deadline to detail war costs and has not disclosed how many precision munitions remain after the military burned through thousands of them in Iran.