John Bolton

Well, I don't know what the terms, the specific terms they're asking for encompass.

The reports that they've said is they estimate a cost of about $2 billion a day for the war up until the present.

It sounds from what Trump and others have said that the $200 billion encompasses estimated future needs for weapons and ammunition.

I mean, in the past,

the Pentagon budgets and Congress approves what we think we need to have in our stockpiles.

And it is a fact that in Ukraine, the rate of expenditure of much of the equipment, much of the weaponry and ammunition and rockets and missiles we supplied was much faster than anticipated.

That to me is not a waste.

It's an indication of what was necessary to help sustain the Ukrainian military.

Well, I don't know the exact figures either, but the point I was trying to get to was we didn't have enough for Ukraine.

In other words, stockpiles going into the Ukraine war were inadequate.

So let's say we got back to where they were.

Now we've

got a war in Iran where the rate of expenditure of munitions is very high as well.

Clearly, we need a recalculation of what is an adequate stockpile.

If you go back to the 1990s, just as an example, after the end of the Cold War,

Pentagon planning was based on the assumption of being able to fight and win two medium-sized contingencies simultaneously.

And the hypothetical contingencies were war on the Korean Peninsula and war in the Middle East, perhaps with Iraq, perhaps with Afghanistan, but that we could fight and win two such conflicts simultaneously.

Today, we're having trouble fighting and winning one such conflict.

So budget levels are way down from what they were at the end of the Cold War.

And that's a whole different subject.