The Army’s contractors took billions and handed soldiers radios that die at the breach.
Here is what that looks like on the ground. A first lieutenant named Diego Gonzalez was crouched at a trench breach on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, bullets cracking past his head, when his commander, Captain Johnathon Muraski, couldn’t hear him on the radio. The chest-mounted smartphone that was supposed to keep him connected to his unit had dropped its signal. Gonzalez restarted the device and waited for it to boot while nearby soldiers relayed his messages by hand. “If I’m not hearing from him,” Muraski said afterward, “maybe he went down or something.”
That is the gear the Army is buying with your money. The program is called Next Generation Command and Control, NGC2. It runs on Starshield terminals made by SpaceX, the same satellite internet service Elon Musk sells to hikers and RV owners, now bolted onto Stryker armored vehicles, which are eight-wheeled troop carriers. More than eighty companies are piled onto the program. The Army’s budget request for fiscal year 2027 asks for about $3.8 billion. The target for fielding it across the active force, which is about 450,000 troops, is 2032.
Now, I’m just a simple man, but I ran a shop for years, and I know what happens when a supplier shows up with a shiny catalog and a delivery date three years out. You don’t sign that deal. You find out what the man needs and you make sure he gets it. The Army is signing the deal anyway, and the men who need it are the ones standing at the breach with a dead radio.
The Government Accountability Office told Congress in August that the Army hasn’t produced a detailed schedule identifying which units get what capabilities and when, and that the service has limited visibility into long-term costs. The Army says it has since developed those plans but declined to put a number on the full bill. The defense subcommittees of the Senate and House Appropriations Committees are being asked to write a check for $3.8 billion on the strength of a promise. I’ve known men who’d go upside down over a four-hundred-dollar brake job without a written estimate. This is billions, and the estimate isn’t written.
John Ferrari, a retired major general now at the American Enterprise Institute, said the obvious thing: “Six years is forever in tech world. With AI moving at incredible speed, whatever you field today will likely be obsolete in a few years.” That man wore the uniform. He’s telling you the equipment you’re paying for will be junk by the time it reaches the men who need it.
Let me tell you what the $3.8 billion is not buying. It’s not buying a soldier a radio that works at the breach. It’s not buying a smartphone that doesn’t melt in ninety-degree heat, because one issued to a reporter covering the drill overheated and died until it cooled down. It’s not buying location data accurate enough to keep one soldier from being displayed ahead of another when he’s actually behind. It’s not buying gear a private can fix in the field, because the soldiers in the drill said plainly they wouldn’t be able to repair it themselves.
What it is buying is a profit margin for SpaceX and the eighty other companies on the contract, and a voting record for every member of those defense subcommittees who can claim they supported the troops by writing a bigger check to the contractors.
Now, there are real gains in this program, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Sergeant First Class James Luce used the digital map to find a medevac landing zone in about thirty seconds instead of the couple of minutes it would have taken him to unfold a paper map in the jungle humidity. He said, “But a couple minutes, that could be life or death.” He’s right. A couple minutes can be life or death. And the man who made that call was a soldier in a country where the Army can’t keep a phone working for twenty minutes.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. Somewhere in this country tonight there’s a young woman in a recruiter’s office in a strip mall in a town not much bigger than mine, signing papers because the recruiter told her the Army has the best equipment in the world. Her mother is sitting in the waiting room. Her father drove her there. They believe the Army will take care of their girl.
And the Army, with $3.8 billion in hand and eighty contractors on the payroll, is strapping a smartphone to her chest that can’t survive a trench breach in Indonesia.
The Government Accountability Office said the Army doesn’t have a schedule. The Army said it has a plan but wouldn’t name a price. The retired general said the gear will be obsolete by the time it arrives. The soldiers said they can’t fix it when it breaks. The defense subcommittees are being asked to sign for $3.8 billion on the strength of all that.
I served in Iraq in a Third Infantry Division Abrams crew. From where I sat in the gunner’s seat, I learned something about equipment that matters: the man who uses it and the man who pays for it are never the same man, and the man who profits from it never touches it at all. SpaceX collects. The appropriators collect their voting records. And a lieutenant at a trench breach in Indonesia reboots his phone and prays his commander can hear him.
Eisenhower warned about this in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, at paragraph 24. He said we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. He also said that only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals. Sixty-five years later, the machinery is meshed, and it’s meshed with the contractors’ interests, not the soldiers’.
The trench fell, eventually. The soldiers took it with hand-relayed messages and nerve. That’s what soldiers do. They always have.
The radio still doesn’t work. And the Army has already asked the defense subcommittees for $3.8 billion for fiscal 2027.